Heart of the Swarm Balance Update – May 13, 2013

A little over a week ago, we requested your help in testing a few proposed balance tweaks for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm by playing with each change on our new Balance Test Map. After reviewing your thoughts, gathering pro player feedback, examining ladder stats, and watching lots of tournament matches, we're ready to move forward with a balance update.

Today, we’ll be implementing the following balance change for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm multiplayer:

Zerg

Spore Crawler damage increased from 15 + 15 vs. biological to 15 + 30 vs. biological
If you'd like to read more on the reasoning behind this change, feel free to check out David Kim's recent forum post, in which he provided his team's thoughts on StarCraft II balance after reviewing test map results and feedback.


As always, thank you for play testing the changes we proposed with the most recent Balance Test Map. The extensive testing and quality of feedback you've provided have allowed us to make this call, and we look forward to sharing more of our thoughts on StarCraft II balance with you in the future.

Battlenet Source


What do you Zerg players think about this?

I feel it helps only to buy time to get something else out that will be used to fight mass mutas. Infestor Fungal aim and prediction is gonna need some training heh.

wow, +30 vs bio? Isn't that sounds too drastic?

I think the difference it makes is reducing the shots to kill a muta by 1 after consideration of regen of course.

That's alot of differences if there're many spores.. lol

Getting many spores has a diminishing returns effect,

You run out of space, you spent money on drones and larvae (To rebuild the drones)

There's so much Spores you can put on one spot. Eventually he will mass enough muta that he can one shot the spores. That makes your investment very cost inefficient.

Zerg spore up by +30 !!! Better just give Zerg scourge than just up the defence.

lol
only zerg is affected, others race still maintain the same

Adding the scourge is actually a good idea. Imagine Muta/Scourge/Ling battles just like in BW, and neither zerg player goes beyond lair tech and hardly take a 3rd base.

Inasmuch as Blizzard wants SC2 to be just as epic as SCBW was, they will not add back the SCBW units, which in my opinion, is better because SC2 is a similar, but entirely different game from SCBW. And I don't want SC2 to be an SCBW clone. SC2 is already epic in its own way.

I think the spore crawler buff is actually good. Roach/Hydra vs Muta is now somewhat viable as the player who goes roach/hydra could leave 3 to 5 spores per base (plus the queen) to defend against muta harass and still mount a considerable offensive. Of course, getting a critical mass of +1 mutalisk (and proper micro) could negate the spore crawler buff.

Crunching the numbers off my head, if I could get 30 mutas with +1 attack, and properly engaging each of the spores (to take the least amount of damage possible), the mutas would take 2 volleys in 2.5 real world seconds to kill one spore. So a base with 5 spores and a queen would still take less than 20 seconds to fall.

So this change only provides you benefits in the early-mid game, around the 11 or 12 minute mark when the opponent could make around 12 mutas as soon as his spire finishes. But again, it will not deter anyone from going for any mid-game muta builds (the mutas can still be used beyond just mineral line harass).

On another note, this buff just solidifies my belief that the non-mirror match-ups (ZvT, ZvP, and TvP) are balanced.

Good change! Finally don't have to worry too much if my zerg opponent jumps tech to quick mutas!