Bêta : Legacy of the Void
David Kim, Senior Game Designer chez Blizzard et responsable entre autres de l'équilibrage sur Starcraft II et sur la future extension de Legacy of the Void, s'est exprimé sur les dernières évolutions prévues dans le jeu, sur les retours qu'elles avaient suscités dans la communauté et l'évolution vers laquelle elles tendent.
Afin d'y voir plus clair au milieu de tous ces changements réguliers sur la bêta, YoGo vous propose son analyse en vidéo de tous les sujets abordés par David Kim dans son dernier message qu'on a pu retrouvé partiellement dans le patch de la dernière mise à jour déployée ce samedi 17 octobtre.
Debrief : Patch du 17 octobre & Community Feedback 16 octobre (Source)
Cette semaine plusieurs points sont abordés :
- Le jeu semble être bien équilibré, à l'heure actuelle, et les prochaines modifications d'équilibrages vont devenir de moins en moins importantes. Toutefois, il est possible que des changements majeurs soient nécessaires, puisque pour l'instant, les joueurs professionnels ne sont pas totalement investis sur l'extension.
- Le Porte-nefs suite à ses changements est devenu très puissant, voire trop puissant pour la majorité des joueurs. Un retour à un temps de construction plus long est envisagé pour diminuer les compositions avec trop de Porte-nefs, et laisser le temps aux adversaires de s'adapter.
- Un bug permet au Disrupteur de se déplacer pendant que son attaque est toujours active. Il sera corrigé pour tester la force du Disrupteur dans la bêta après ses changements.
- La seconde baisse des points de vie de l'Adepte associé avec les changements de Transfert semblent être un peu trop forts, et une phase de test est nécessaire pour s'en assurer avant d'envisager un retour en arrière.
- Le Cyclone, malgré les changements apportés ne semble pas être réapparu. Pour le rendre viable, Blizzard envisagerait d'augmenter ses dégâts quand l'unité ennemie est ciblée, tout en diminuant ses points de vie. Cela serait effectué pour transformer l'unité en quelque chose nécessitant beaucoup de micro et amusante à jouer.
- La capacité Parasite Neural de l'Infestateur est très peu jouée, et beaucoup de joueurs s'en étaient plaints, demandant même son retrait. Blizzard a augmenté la portée du sort à 9 pour la rendre de nouveau viable contre les compositions Turtle, mais ce changement n'a pas rendu la capacité plus jouée. Toutefois, avant de faire un autre changement, Blizzard souhaite attendre que les joueurs testent réellement cette nouvelle portée.
David Kim sur Mise à jour sur les retours de la Communauté (Source)
Hello everyone, let's get right into this week's update!
Beta in general
The game seems to be at a decent place now in terms of balance across all the skill levels currently within the beta. Our internal data is looking to be nearing 50% in all matchups of all skill levels, and looking at the feedback coming in both from the community side and the pro level side, the number of potential issues that we need to balance patch has greatly reduced as well.
It’s pretty clear that we’re slowing down on number of issues that come up in the beta, and we feel that having less and less things to tweak in game from week to week is definitely a good thing since we’re around 1 month away from release. We also reached out to various pro players regarding the small list of changes, and the general consensus we heard back was that the state of the game is pretty good right now + the small number of things we’re looking at for the next balance update looks to be in a good direction.
However, we’d like to point out once more that there will be a high chance that balance isn’t quite there yet at the pro level. Highest level pros generally don’t play in the beta as we’ve seen in both LotV and HotS betas, and we’ll just need to react accordingly post ship as potential issues come up. Although the balance at skill levels outside of the pro level is looking very good right now, we wanted to iterate that we’ll be paying very close attention to the pro level right after the game releases as professional gamers start playing the game for real.
Cyclone
The Cyclone isn’t quite there yet even after the last patch, so we’ve been exploring various potential changes. Where we are at currently that we want to roll out to beta is higher damage on lock on and lower health on Cyclone themselves. Instead of having Cyclones as all round units, we’re having a lot more success with them as intense micro units that can potentially have big wins when lock on and the fast movement speed are used effectively. Please let us know your thoughts on these changes once the changes go to beta tomorrow.
Infestor
We heard your feedback on wanting to hear thoughts on where we think Neural Parasite stands. Like you guys pointed out, we have discussed/explored replacing this ability, but due to the fantasy of having a mind control ability like this being such a cool factor, we were unable to locate an ability that feels just as powerful. Our current thought is that having changed the range back to 9 should have helped it see more play.
Theoretically, the ability should be a lot more powerful now since only siege ranged units can reach the Infestor, but because players haven’t really given the ability a serious try yet during the beta, we don’t quite know exactly where it stands. For example, if it’s the case that players just haven’t tried the unit (which looks to be the case right now), we don’t want to overbuff it. On the flip side, if it had been fully tested, and needs further buffs, we can make according changes.
A balance change such as this one, existing unit/existing ability numbers tuning, doesn’t necessarily have to be completely figured out during beta, and your call of focusing on more critical things such as new units, new abilities, new econ system, macro mechanics etc. does feel like it was the correct thing to do. We don’t think getting the numbers just right for this ability is one of the most critically important things we needed to solve during the beta, and we can work on this going forward even in the live game as well.
The other spells we belive are in a good place. Fungal Growth is situationally extremely powerful right now especially in combination with other abilities/units such as Blinding Cloud, the new Viper AoE damage ability, Banelings, Ultralisks, etc.
The main goal for the Infestor is not to have the unit see play in every single game of every matchup, but we want this caster to be powerful in specific strategies or scenarios.
Carrier
We definitely hear your feedback on the new ability making Carriers very powerful in the late game, especially from the higher level players currently in the beta as well as from the KR community. While we do agree that Carriers do look powerful, we’d like to see if we can push this type of late game strength on Protoss a little bit without overreacting with heavy nerfs. Like you guys point out, we believe the new strength of Carriers come from 3 areas: being able to not lose the DPS as each Carrier falls due to the launch Interceptor ability, faster build time of Carriers in LotV that allows players to have a smaller window of weakness before Carriers are massed, and interceptor leashing changes.
We believe the first is the biggest contributing factor, since full DPS of all Carriers remain in combat for a long duration. And the third is arguably a buff and a nerf depending on what the Carrier is trying to do. Therefore, we’d like to revert the build time reduction change we did to Carriers for now, so that Carriers remain nearly as powerful as they are, but it is more of a risk to mass Carriers for Protoss players.
Disruptor issues
We’d like to fix the bugs that allow the Disruptors to be moved while the damaging shot is active asap, because it could get in the way of beta testing this unit properly.
Adept
This unit is another area that we’re keeping close tabs on, but we don’t have immediate balance changes for in tomorrow’s balance update. It’s initially looking like nerfing their health a second time in combination with the warp in nerfs may not have been necessary. We’ll be looking to tune up the stats on the Adept a bit if need be, so please give us your feedback and thoughts on the Adept as well.
The current plan is to release another balance update tomorrow even though we only have a few changes because there aren’t as many issues as before, we don’t have a lot of time remaining with the beta, and we’d like to really focus down on fine tuning the game as best as we can before release. Thank you for your help as always, and please continue to play as many games of beta as possible so that we can work together towards a great release of LotV.
