#120 – StarCast: “Awesome Death Animation”

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“Awesome Death Animation” w/ Sasquatch– Episode #120

This Episode:

• Big HotS Patch
• Beta Balance #3
• David Kim Blue Posts
• Liquid’HayprO Retires
• European WCS Finals
• GSL Round of 16
• OSL Round of 16
• Feedback

Hosts: Garrett and Kyle

StarCast is proudly sponsored by:

• Doghouse Systems.com StarCast is proudly sponsored by Doghouse Systems.com.  If you use the code StarCast or Biscuit at checkout, you will get double memory on you next Doghouse System.
• Tweaked Audio.com Go to Tweaked Audio.com for high-performance, noise-reducing ear buds.  Use our code, Starcast to get 30% off plus free shipping on your order. 
• SC2 Quote of the Day.com Daily quotes from the Starcraft 2 community. The site may suck, but the quotes are sick. Make sure to check out the quote archive, with all the quotes from your favorite Starcraft nerds!

Additional support comes from

• Starcrossed: Volume 1 available for pre-order now onIndiegogo.com. It is the first collection of comics by friend of the show and cartoonist Joel Duggan. With over 80 pages of comics and content the book is a must have for Starcrossed readers and comic fans.
  • For more information visit indiegogo.com/starcrossedvolume1
• Listener Jeffrey

Coming Up!
Episode # 121
Date: 9/27
Guest: EG_Suppy

Big HotS Patch
(bye, Warhound, for now)
PatchNotesLink
Zerg
Swarm Host
The locust’s attack range has decreased from 3 to 2.

We are decreasing the range of the swarm host’s locusts from 3 to 2 in order to slightly reduce the unit’s effectiveness while still maintaining its usefulness in a number of different situations.

Swarm hosts in the earlier stages of a game can be used by themselves, but in the later parts of the game they will need to be used in combination with units like the corruptor or infestor.

Protoss
Oracle
We have removed the oracle’s Preordain ability. (Because Preordain overlaps with Revelation)

We have added a new area of effect ability for the oracle called Phase Shield.
Targeted friendly units are shielded from harmful effects for 5 seconds.
Fungal Growth, Corruption, Contaminate, Graviton Beam, Concussive Shells, Abduct, Revelation, Vortex, and 250mm Strike Cannons – Phase Shield removes the effect and prevents units from being affected.
EMP – Phase Shield removes the anti-cloaking effect but not the damage dealt.
Neural Parasite – Phase Shield will not remove this effect but it will prevent units from being affected.

The energy upgrade has been removed.

Entomb’s duration has been reduced to 25 sec, but the health per Entomb has increased to 100.The cost per unit has changed from 150/200 to 150/150.

We were facing two issues with this ability: First – lower skilled players who didn’t react quickly would take too large an economic hit. Second – higher level players who reacted almost instantly would take too little damage from the ability. This is just a first pass at attempting to solve these two issues.

Mothership Core / Mothership
Recall will now cost 100 energy.
The mothership core will now start with 50 energy and when upgraded, energy will be set back to 50.
The range of Purifier Beam has been increased from 7 to 10.
These are simple number changes in an attempt to reach our goals for this unit: early game defense against all-in attacks, the ability to use Recall to be more offensive without having to commit completely, and giving protoss players more choices to work with in the early game.

Carrier
Has arrived.
We continue to receive a lot of feedback from both our community and professional players suggesting that the tempest is difficult to use. We agree that it’s not an easy-to-use capital ship like the carrier, and feel it could be cool to have two big air units in the protoss fleet. The carrier will be the easy-to-use, multifunctional capital ship, whereas the tempest will be a more strategic and positional unit that can’t just be blindly massed. We know how much the carrier means to everyone and think that this is a great opportunity to give the carrier another chance before making a final decision on the unit’s future.

Tempest
The attack range has been reduced from 22 to 15.The damage has changed from 30 to 30 + 20 to massive.The ranged upgrade has been removed.
Now that the carrier is back as the general capital ship option, we are adjusting the role of the tempest to be more specific.
The tempest is now a specific counter-unit against massive units. The plan for the tempest is to be a viable option in the PvZ late-game against broodlords as well as in the PvP late-game against mass colossi.

Terran
Warhound
This unit has been removed from the game.
We received a lot of feedback from both the general community along with many pro gamers that this unit was not working in its current state.  We definitely agree.  The current plan is to remove it from the beta so that we can focus testing other units.
If we locate a better design for the warhound, it will return to the beta

Reaper
We have added a new passive ability called Combat Awareness. This allows reapers to see up cliffs.
We like where the Reaper is right now with the over-all changes being made to the game. The new Combat Drugs ability allows for more reaper usage early on and this early action feels both fun to play with and fun to watch.
We’d like to try to push the usage of the reaper a bit further to see if there are even cooler options for the unit. The Battlefield Awareness ability will potentially allow reapers to be used not only for early game harassment, but throughout the game as a great scouting unit.
This is one of the experimental abilities we’d like to try as we’re still in the early stages of the beta.  Any feedback on the new Reaper as a whole will be greatly appreciated.

Hellion
Battle hellions can now be built from the Factory. It has an Armory requirement.There is a new upgrade at the Armory that will allow transformation between Battle Mode and Normal Mode.
In TvZ, battle hellions with good split micro are performing a bit too well against zergling/baneling openers. Therefore, we are adding an upgrade requirement to change modes, giving zerg players more time to make the necessary adjustments to their unit composition.
After testing this unit in the beta, we are starting to see scenarios where building only hellions, only battle hellions, or having a choice of both are all reasonable decisions. Therefore, we would like to try allowing players to build these units separately while keeping the ability to transform between modes a viable option.

Widow Mine
We have removed the Armory requirement.
We’re barely seeing any play using widow mines in the beta right now. While we are slightly afraid of bringing in a cloaked unit so early in the tech, we decided it would be cool to see how this works out at with no Armory requirement.

Beta Balance #3
Protoss

• Mothership Core
• The cost of Purify is now 100.
• The duration of Purify has been lowered to 25 seconds.
• The damage of Purify has been increased from 25 to 45.

• Oracle
• Entomb’s duration has increased to 30 seconds.
• The health of Entombed nodes has increased from 100 to 130.
• The duration of Revelation has increased from 30 to 45 seconds.
• We fixed a bug where the oracle was not correctly classified as a Psionic unit.

Terran

• Battle Hellion
• While in Battle mode, the hellion is now classified as a Biological unit.
• Widow Mine
• Splash damage has increased from 35 to 60.

David Kim Blue Posts
Widow Mines Should Cost 1 Supply:
Widow mine is a 160 damage unit that instantly 2-4 shots the strongest, latest tier units in the game. Not to mention you can build them two at a time with a 20 sec build time on each. We don’t think it’ll be a good idea to have these guys be 1 pop especially for the 200/200 supply cases.
We do agree that the Widow Mine is not at an amazing place right now, but we think fixing the unit itself to be good is a priority than just simply lowering the supply cost to 1.
We have more changes for the Widow Mine this week as well so please check them out, and please note one of our top priorities in the up coming weeks is to have the Widow Mine be a really solid unit.

Different types of Nydus Worms:
The new Nydus Worm ideas didn’t work out well in our internal testing.
They were one of our stronger units, but just didn’t make the cut for the launch of beta.
Right now, we think the changes to Zerg are in the right direction and currently have no plans to revisit these new Nydus ideas any time soon.
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Liquid’HayprO Retires
He is going back to school.  Does not say what for.  He says that, similar to Jinro, he has lost the drive to play SC2 competitively.  As with Jinro’s retirement as well HayprO wrote a moving and personal farewell to Liquid.  Good luck HayprO!
TL’s current roster _________________________________________________________________________________________

European WCS Finals
$24,000 prize pool to the victor.

Stellar production.  More eSports events need to take a note from Dreamhack.

Stephano vs Vortix
A ZvZ for the SC2 history books.  Many people, including myself, thought Stephano had this final on lockdown but Vortix played superbly and took the series to a second Best of Three.  Very impressive first set especially considering Vortix had to come back from a one game deficit.

Vortix took out Stephano’s Main in the second Game 1 right off the bat.  But Stephano managed to catch up with superior Baneling control.  Stephano took Game 1 after losing a Hatch in his Main.

The second Game 2 was a calculated victory for Stephano.  Vortix wasted too much Infestor energy on Stephano’s efficiently spread Mutas and never broke down the rocks connecting his Expo to his main which punished him greatly as Stephano’s Roaches and Infestors bore down on his main.

Blizzardreleasesexcellentgraphic showing the breakdown of "who comes from where" to determine which players go to WCS Finals in Shanghai

Only the Asia finals (Oct 13-14) are left to determine the final seeds for the world finals
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GSL Round of 16 Group A

• GSLBrackets

Rain represents with amazing storm play and a very classic style of PvT.
DRG plays close to his old self going heavy muta, but all too often skips out on infestors.

Garrett’s Pick
Seed vs Symbol, Set 2, Game 2

• Symbol’s Contaminate on Seed’ Nexxus RIGHT as the Mothership was about to spawn
• Just under 50 Spine Crawlers
• Mass Brood Lord/Corruptor vs Mothership/Carrier.  So many units to the point that the game started to lag.
• SO many nfested Terran. Blankets of Infested Terran!

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OSL Ro16 Complete

• OSLonLiquipedia
• Ro16 Day 6 Preview

Rain, PartinG, Last, Flash, Flyinh, MC, DRG and Oz move on to the Ro8.
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Appear Offline Coming Soon to Battle.Net
“In the coming months, we’re planning an update to Battle.net that will give you more control over your online presence when playing Blizzard games. Soon, World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III players will be able to select "Appear Offline" as one of their Battle.net social-status options (along with Available, Busy, and Away) for those times when they want to wander Azeroth by their lonesome, dominate the galaxy in radio silence, or slay demons in solitude. When you choose this option as your status, all of your Real ID friends, BattleTag friends, and character-level friends will see you as "Offline" in their friends list whenever you’re logged into a game.

The "Appear Offline" status option will be added to World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, and Diablo III separately in future updates for each game. For Diablo III, we expect to add the feature in a patch after 1.0.5. For World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, we expect to add the option sometime after the release of each game’s upcoming expansion.

Thanks for your continued feedback, and we’ll share more information on the availability of this new feature in the months ahead.”
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Feedback

Sandman
So I hung out with my professor for History of Media Arts today. Turns out he’s a total gamer. We were talking about new media stuff and how I got into the school for radio because of all the podcast stuff and then it came up that he plays starcraft and that he listens to starcast. So I looked at him and said "Until next time, this has been sandman…" and he freaked out.
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