Storm-Giant said:

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Okay, watched yesterday's games of SKT vs KT, indeed some nice games. Soulkey used well his SHs, flanking with the muta/ling army, but I feel FlaSh could've done a better job, fighting the locust with just hellbats isn't a good idea, imo.

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We wanted to share our thoughts and start a discussion about the Swarm Host because, like many of you, we were watching along on Saturday during Lone Star Clash 3 where there was an abnormally long ZvZ stalemate game. The potential for such with Swarm Hosts has been a consistent topic of conversation, and I assure you we’ve heard what you had to say about it. We don’t feel this type of play is healthy for the game or exciting for spectators.

Over the last few months, we’ve been internally playtesting a variety of design changes to the Swarm Host. We’ve come to believe that, in the long term, a change to overall Swarm Host design could be a good thing, but in the short term, we’d prefer to not disrupt the interesting non-stalemate Swarm Host play we currently see. Therefore, we don’t believe in removing the unit or completely redesigning to it at this time. Drastic changes to the way the Swarm Host currently works could affect the game negatively, as the unit plays a key role in various matchups.

We’ve also regularly seen feedback from players who want fewer balance changes and more time for strategies to adapt to playstyles like this one. We definitely respect that opinion, but with issues like this, we do more than just listen.

Here are the main thoughts we’re working from:
1. Of course, we don't want there to ever be 1+ hour long games that are nothing except Locusts vs. Locusts.

2. We’ve only seen this a handful of times at the highest level of play.

3. As we look down the ladder, we don’t see a significant percentage of games that last more than 25 minutes, especially in the leagues below Master.

4. This playstyle is clearly not a requirement in ZvZ, and that raises questions:
1. How much do we risk negatively impacting Zerg styles and strategies (that are also fun and entertaining to watch)?
2. Are we seeing any shift (even a very slow shift) in how players answer this playstyle?
3. How do potential changes to the unit play out?


5. Because ZvZ is a mirror matchup, it doesn’t impact balance. That means we can target any changes we might make the way we did with the Spore Crawler vs. Mutalisks.

At this point, we’re taking public our discussion about finding the best adjustments that address the issue without affecting the ZvP and ZvT matchups in negative ways.

We’re thinking along these lines:
- Revert spore buff and buff hydralisk anti-air vs. biological units only.
o With this, even if Broodlords are Abducted by Vipers, they would still be great against base Defenses.
o The Mutalisk strength in ZvZ could possibly be countered a bit better by Hydralisks.
o The effect on ZvZ would be acceptable, and the potential effects on ZvP and ZvT are minor.

- Change the Viper’s Abduct ability to make massive units immune to it.
o By making Brood Lords immune to Abduct, we’d solve the stalemate. Late game ZvZ would be mostly about who wins in the air.
o There are downsides -- Abduct is a really cool ability, and it is something Zerg needs vs. Colossi in PvZ.
o To address that, we’d consider a potential buff to Blinding Cloud so that Vipers would still be a valuable utility unit in the ZvP matchup.

As always, please remember that what we’re doing here is talking -- not yet playing publicly on a balance test map. We’d really love to hear and evaluate your thoughts on these and other changes before taking further steps. Please try to keep in mind that Swarm Hosts are needed in other places in the game (such as vs. Mech), so we don’t have an option to just remove the unit.

Thank you very much, and we’re be looking forward to your feedback.

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Change the Viper’s Abduct ability to make massive units immune to it.

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Storm-Giant said:

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Okay, I couldn't read entirely since I went to buy a pair of shoes, now that I'm back at home I can read it fully...



...AND IT'S snowING BULLsnow!! AGAIN!!

I take back what I said. Just like the Muta Wars problem we had at the beggining of HotS, instead of trying to solve the root of the problem, they change other parts of the game, and this changes will bring their own problems too, just like the spore change did

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The best fix for ZvZ is to just make the Brood Lord immune to Abduct.

Making abduct not work on Massive units would really mess with the other match-ups' endgames, it's tough as it is to deal with properly controlled sky terran and sky protoss

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RMZ1989 said:

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Not really, they just don't want to redesign the unit in the middle of expansion. I expect for them to redesign it in LotV, right now, they are making small changes that will adjust ZvZ a bit, while not affecting the other match-ups. And I don't know how did they suppose to change the Muta problem without affecting other match-ups?

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RMZ1989 said:

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I think that Hydra and Spore damage bonus swap is pretty much needed, but I don't think that it will reduce the use of Swarm Hosts at all to be honest.

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RMZ1989 said:

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On the other hand, Viper not being able to pull massive units is stupid, but not being able to pull massive Air units is something I can live with.

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