Starcraft 2 Beta: Patch 1

The US servers were down and now they’re back up. Here are the patch notes and their changes and I have to say I’m happy with some nerfs but I’m pretty amazed that a lot of the obviously imbalanced stuff got away without so much a cursory glance.

Vikings that were already weak to begin with against air units (and being the Terrans most efficient and most mobile air defense) are being nerfed. Sure there’s a damage increase which will be very noticeable, but their armor being reduced means that a few Hydralisks alone will be able to utterly destroy any Mutalisk resistance these units would have normally provided vs. Zerg.

The reaper got nerfed and it’s about time. Reapers were damn abused even with mass Marauders (or Roaches or Stalkers) to counter them, their speed pretty much meant that unless you had a cluster of marauders at every entry point via cliffs, you were going to get some major harassment from Reapers.

I like that the Mothership has been nerfed some but with the new (Arbiter) Recall ability you’re going to have massive strike invasions so the moment you see a single Mothership it should become your top priority no matter what.

Chrono burst remains as powerful and full of cheese as ever. Way to hustle there Blizzard. But Gateways will now take longer which means I won’t be worrying about 3 Zealots pretty much nuking my base to shit right off the start. Marines just don’t stand a chance, neither do Zerglings.

StarCraft II Beta – Patch 1 (version 0.3.0.14093)

BALANCE CHANGES

• TERRAN
  • Viking
    • The armor value for this unit in Fighter Mode has decreased from 1 to 0.
    • The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).
  • Reaper
    • The damage done from D-8 Charges has decreased from 40 to 30.
    • The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8.
  • Orbital Command
    • The build time for this upgrade has decreased from 50 to 35.
• PROTOSS
  • Observer
    • Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 minerals and 150 vespene gas to 100 minerals and 100 vespene gas.
  • High Templar
    • Phase Shift: This ability has been removed from the game.
    • New ability: Feedback – Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.
  • Colossus
    • The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625.
  • Mothership
    • Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
    • Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
    • Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
    • Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
    • New ability: Mass Recall – Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.
  • Nexus
    • Chrono Boost can no longer target allies.
  • Gateway
    • The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.
• ZERG
  • Infestor
    • Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.
    • Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.
    • Neural Parasite: Functionality changed – The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target all units with this ability.
    • Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.

BUG FIXES

• Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.
• Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.
  • Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.
• The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.
• Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.