On May 14 2011 08:00 Saechiis wrote:
So, please tell me, what is the use of having Strike Cannons as a spell in the game?
Surely the only use of a 500 damage stun spell is to pick off high profile enemy units with significant HP? And since the spell can't hit air, only a few units fit that bill, namely:
Thors, Ultralisks, Colossus, Immortal, Archon.
In TvT Thors are rarely built and definitely not en masse. Since the only use of Strike Cannons would be to counter your opponents's Thors, it is never seen in this MU.
Thors's Strike Cannons were used in TvZ for a while to counter Ultralisks since they conveniently one-shotted them. Blizzard decided to make Ultralisks unstunnable for this reason making Strike Cannons a worthless upgrade since it does about the same DPS as a normal shooting Thor.
In TvP Thors were barely seen until Blizzard removed their energy and made Strike Cannons a cooldown ability. NOT because Strike Cannons were suddenly OP, but because you could actually make a high-tech unit that wasn't countered by HT's. The fact that Toss has 3 units that can be Strike Cannon'ed nicely was only a plus.
Ofcourse when some Terrans jumped to the occassion and started massing Thors with Strike Cannons, Blizzard felt that mass Thors wasn't what they wanted to see and they reverted them back to having energy, making them once again useless in this MU. The reason being that Toss can go HT without having to worry whether it counters your composition; storm, feedback and archons are always at least decent against any composition Terran can throw at it now. With the range of Strike cannons vs Feedback it's literally impossible to get the spell off before getting fedback, especially since it takes 2 seconds for the Thor to initiate it's firing animation.
We're left to conclude that the Thor is stuck with a spell that is useless in all matchups and that actually makes the unit itself unviable in TvP. As, admittedly, not an expert in game-design, I'd say that removing the Strike Cannons spell along with the Thors's energy would fix alot of problems. Without Strike Cannons, immortals do a fine job at countering them, whilst giving the Terran a tech-unit that is good against templar tech. It makes multiple tech paths viable and gives TvP some variation from Bio vs AoE. Limiting possibilities is just bad design, especially when you're doing it to keep a useless spell in the game.
All in all, reading Blizzard's explanation Mali__Slon posted, I think they're just being stupid. They acknowledge Thors weren't OP but they just don't like the aesthetics of mass Thors? Really? Who decided he wanted MASSIVE units in the game? So massive that the Thor has already been recuced in size twice and currently still hinders vision? No problem guys! We'll just do the same thing we did with the reaper. Instead of taking responsiblity for the fact that we spent the entire development of the game coming up with ridiculous units and spells instead of thinking about their role and purpose, we're just going to make those units useless and pat ourselves on the back for being pro at balancing.
I also heavily diagree with Blizzard's idea of "we're going to shape the way the game gets played online". Seriously, how lame is it to just patch out new playstyles because it's not what you wanted competetive play to look like? Let's pretend Protoss finds an effective way to go mass Archon and they patched it saying, "yeah, we don't like mass Archon, it should be more of a fancy additional unit". What bullshit is that? How is it any fun to explore the game when Blizzard patches out any viable compositions that they hadn't envisioned?
Apparently the only thing Blizzard wants is mass bio with air support in TvP, how boring is that? Really feel like Blizzard has forgotten what a fun game looks like, mech is almost always a hundred times more interesting to watch.than mass bio kiting some gateway units into a deciding "hope my Vikings kiill his Colossi fast enough" - 200/200 clash where one player simply wins.