StarCraft II

Balance Update - August 13, 2020

Blizzard Entertainment

Update on August 20: balance changes below have been reflected to the live Versus now.

Hey everyone,

Last week we released a community update talking about our thoughts on the state of the game as well as some proposed changes along with our reasoning. As it was released a few hours after the patch notes themselves, we suspect some may have missed these notes, and we urge everyone to check them out before continuing. With that in mind, here are some small adjustments we’d like to make to our initial proposals.

Baneling

Previously Proposed Change:

  • Baneling weapon damage changed from 18 (+17 vs light) to 15 (+20 vs light).

New Change:

  • Baneling weapon damage changed from 18 (+17 vs light) to 16 (+19 vs light).

This tweak achieves most of what we were going for in PvZ while, at the same time, preserving the interaction between unupgraded Banelings in ZvZ.

Void Ray

Previously Proposed Change:

  • Flux Vanes movement speed increased from 4.65 to 5.11.

One of the core thoughts we expressed from our last update was as follows:

“…what we hear from many top Protoss players is that the late game unit interactions between the two races are not inherently lopsided, especially after changes to Feedback. (In fact, there are players from both sides who believe it is Protoss favored.) Rather, there’s an agreement that the primary problem with late game is the difficulty of getting there on equal footing with the Zerg…”

As our primary goal of this patch is to improve interactions surrounding mid game PvZ, we’d like to further focus our Void Ray changes around those that are targeted towards that stage of the game and thus will be removing the additional increase to movement speed we had initially planned with the Flux Vanes upgrade.

Conclusion

By the time this blog goes up, these changes will have been updated on the Balance Test Mod for players to practice on. Barring bug fixes, these will be the final changes reflected in the next balance patch, which is currently scheduled to be released next week.

Below is the complete list of changes:

Zerg

  • Baneling
    • Baneling weapon damage changed from 18 (+17 vs light) to 16 (+19 vs light).

Protoss

  • Oracle
    • Revelation duration increased from 15 seconds to 20 seconds.
  • Void Ray
    • Cost decreased from 250/150 to 200/150.
    • Void Ray build time decreased from 43 to 37 seconds.
    • Movement speed increased from 3.5 to 3.85.
  • Carrier
    • Interceptors belonging to a Carrier that has been Neural Parasited will no longer draw aggression from units belonging to the Carrier’s original owner.
  • Tempest
    • New upgrade found on the Fleet Beacon: Tectonic Destabilizers
      • Effect: Improves the Tempest's Resonance Coil to deal +40 damage vs structures.
      • Cost: 150/150.
      • Research time: 100 seconds.