@@emkalina Except that BW tank vs tank wars had dynamics to break the stalemates. Mass drops, BCs, defense matrix, even ghosts if you were a more casual player. In a swarm host mirror you kind of had to keep your swarm hosts stuck in place and firing even if it was just getting canceled out
Very impressive that the Raven managed to stay off this list entirely despite being the backbone of some of the most hated, abusive Terran strategies over the years.
I'm assuming Grant went off of some kind of series of polls from over the years. Maybe the Raven just managed to slip by under the radar of another more hated unit.
@Appletank8 seeker missile spam is not a problem in pro game but anti armor missile is. Remember that time it have 30 damage with immediately hit and ridiculous aoe range. 20+ raven can easily kill entire protoss fleet with no issue.
Terran commonality: Got too good at everything attack and defense Zerg commonality: Drags the game down to a crawl Protoss commonality: Unit designed to be good at one thing turns out to be good and Blizzard didn't see it coming somehow.
@@soldier22881 Eh, the issue is that SC2 was balanced around much higher mobility and an emphasis on worker harassment, while BW was not. In terms of overall balance by win rates, SC2 was often better than Brood War, with brood war balance shifting more heavily depending on the maps - a lot of what keeps Brood War "balanced" is just that the mechanical limitations in the game make it so much harder to play near perfectly, so player skill gaps show through more clearly, and defenses are a lot harder to break because units are dumb and don't do what you want consistently unless you have the APM to issue new commands to units doing dumb things consistently. There aren't many things in brood war that can run into your mineral line and delete everything, and the only common ones are storm or reaver drops, which are expensive and come out much later than most of what's around in SC2, while also being less reliable and easier to stop, because shuttles are nowhere near as good as warp prisms or medivacs. Though ZvZ in Brood War has always been worse than SC2 ZvZ. ZvZ in Brood War is described as a knife-fight in a phone booth for a reason.
@soldier22881 I think a lot of the balance struggles for SC2 come with just how good pathing AI became. BW, you could get away with shit being OP as fuck because it couldn't make it's way up a ramp or would get stuck on other units. That never happened with 2.
@@soldier22881 I'm not too familiar with BW, but at least from SC2 it seems like a lot of units are just not healthy for the game (disruptors, widow mines, banelings, swarm hosts, etc.)
@@mlemmage8449 yes this you hit the nail on the head, and it goes further back, wings of liberty biggest problem was fungal growth and broodlords, zerg just dominated the game, then it was voidrays you could easily build up their attack with pylons. BW the devs thought thing through, is it fun to use and play against? wings of liberty their main push was for esports, game balance took a back seat and it shows. The biggest thing to ruin sc2 was the "live service" aspect as well, because so many games are poorly balanced in live service games because the strategy is to quickly release a game and then patch any bugs/balances later
That's not factual, the time to kill is substantially lower in SC2 thanks to the DPS from massive clumping together and firing at the same time and the devastating counter splash as a result. Your whole army can get vaporized in 5 seconds, which didn't happen in SC1
Honestly, and maybe it's just me, but I would often play 2v2/3v3/4v4 for a game or two to warm up my fingers before I played 1v1 ranked and I didn't even think about what my teammates were doing. This probably hinges a lot on me being a masters/low GM player but I just did weird strategies and when my teammates left it was actually a blessing in a way. You basically get 3x the income of a normal player so I just drop down like 10 barracks or 15 gateways and get 200 supply army in 30 seconds and roll over the enemy.
@@IqmasterDaNinja i think he either meant longest map or you have to account for the whole series which was a best of 3, so there must be at least one additional game in mana vs firecake increasing their total match time even further.
When you brought up the Disruptor it made me remember that era when their balls exploded as soon as they touched something so protoss would get 10 disruptors and engaging into them became completely impossible (also disruptor tennis in PvP). That definitely would've been a candidate for whatever year it was.
TBF, the Reaver also technically works the same way and explodes on impact, though I guess the radius is a bit smaller, and it's very hard to control more than like, 4 at the same time. I do recall people who were fast enough could sacrifice something cheap like a Zergling or Marine to eat the Disrupter shot.
@@nightmareTomekThey did exactly that and it was op. Then they nerfed it's damage so it couldn't even kill a roach and it sucked. The current disruptor is easily the most balanced.
You know, listening to the MotherShip's core description, I thought it wasn't that bad, sure it's powerful but surely it cost a lot to make both in supplies and minerals. Than I learnt that it was an early game unit, and I shivered. Very cool unit, dear god I am glad it's gone.
i feel like they couldve done something similar to the queen where the mothership core needs power fields to move faster (they did something like this in co-op with stetmann's Gary, specifically in the second prestige)
@@SenyiKimmowouldn't stop anything tbh cause Protoss can just plop down a pylon before doing whatever they were doing It's basically just the current warp gate restrictions with extra steps
@@anvietanh6723 the problem would be that they'd have to move the mothership core there from wherever they decided to start warping it in. it'd cost a ridiculous amount of minerals to create a path from one base to the other (which fun fact is why zerg creep spread in brood war sucks), and you'd otherwise need to proxy a nexus to get any mileage out of it without it taking an eternity
The fact that 2010's unit is the sentry and not the old pre supply depot reaper is a tragedy, seeing a finished bunker with a reaper in it before a gateway/pool is halfway done was ridiculous and was like 80% of early terran strats.
5:21 - RIP Kabosu, the famous Doge, that unfortunately passed away earlier this year. Great video and happy to know that Doge™ is still alive and kicking on the internet
I feel like the Raven deserves the mention here. Maybe go through many of it's hated variations with autoturrets and stuff, and the pinnacle of game design in 2018ish, when anti armor missiles were fast and dealt damage and the mass Dorito dust missile meta used to instantly delete air armies.
when blizzard traded the 10 years timed life on auto turrets for a shorter time+high damage it was crazy to the point that thing was removed, then brought back if i recall correctly
Honestly very baffling they didn't just change the missile damage to a DoT, it'd make spam straight up useless. It worked for Transfusion, Parasitic Bomb, Fungal (kinda)
idk modern SC2 but for all my time playing they had at least a few obvious downsides - namely being a really expensive spellcaster that required decent micro. They were never like Carriers where eventually you'd A-move them, they could get pretty fragile. I know that at some points they were pretty damn strong, but no more than say... a bunch of High Templars. Capable of ending games but hey, what isn't.
@@51gunner The main difference is that Storms can't stack. I can try putting 10 Strom's simultaneously on a Carrier but I'm only going to do about 90 damage. The old Raven missile stacked. It was only 30 damage, but more missiles meant more damage in that moment. Manage to build up to 10 Ravens, and you could theoretically do over 300 damage in the blink of an eye.
I loved the barely-keeping-it-together tone of this whole video. Especially when talking about the widow mine, you can tell that Grant has been hurt by them. As a fellow Protoss player, I too have been brought to my lowest by that terror. All I need is to hear that PTSD inducing burrow sound and I'm a broken man...
You know what's worse, though? In the mod where you can play SC1 vs SC2, the sound the spider mines make. OMG. I had never seen them before (not an SC1 player) and that sound is already phobic.
Honorable mentions: The cyclone, which got reworked twice, being able to kill you while kiting you or just kill you in the first terran push. the liberator, also known as "this mineral line is lava". mass oracles, just lasering down your mineral lines and buildings while revealing your whole army. lurkers, which just kill your whole army, even if you have detection. They just have more range, aoe and their shots cant be baited by a big frontline, since they kill just everything in a straigt line. And the last, but most frustrating thing: warp prims after the pickup range buff. basically giving every protoss ground unit the blink ability which high ground vision and allowing the units to restore their cooldown while in a safe prism, always ensuring you have to fight the immortal's barrier every time you see it, no matter how low it might seem and when you finally almost got it, it just gets blinked out of your screen.
I definitely think historically some of the most problematic units have been the ones that just vaporize everything when they work -- even if they're balanced by being difficult to use, they could result in some very swingy matches that don't feel very good to play at average levels where people make mistakes constantly.
What a throwback of a video. Thanks for it. As a diehard Terran player, I've always hated how much it felt that Zerg always had an answer to everything, even the things they were supposed to be weak at or that P/T were told to "capitalize on" to win.
As someone who doesn't have the time to play StarCraft anymore but absolutely loves the game to my core, I love videos like this. Relevant content, interesting factoids, and summarization of development; great for anyone like me who wants to stay in the know but can't play the game. I do remember some of these eras and I hope the game continues to get balanced so that it retains as much of a fanbase as it can. May creative & talented players keep the meta interesting by discovering methods to circumvent imbalance!
About Mana versus Fircecake game being longest match of any competitive game... Not even close. Dota 2 match between Cloud 9 and ScaryFaceZ lasted for 3 hours 20 minutes 34 seconds. No idea if this one is longest example but that's one e-sport match from top of my head that I know about ;)
Nice video, takes me back. I remember right when HoS came out watching WhiteRa vs. some Terran who basically only had widow mines and could not lose. I eventually stopped watching SC due to the swarm host, and it was interesting to hear about the logistical complaints around the unit for tournament scheduling.
Actually in 2010 right from the get go when starcraft 2 was just launched, the reapers had their anti-building satchel charge (used in the campaign) in multiplayer as well, so that was incredibly overpowered for that limited time before it got removed, as mass reapers just easily eliminated anything else any faction could defend with in the early game.
Yup, reaper shows up in your base and its guns are great at picking off workers and zerglings/zealots, and then it blows up your pylons/depots and maybe a couple other buildings for good measure.
I love these retrospective vids, someone I used to play with made the '7 years of bw in 7 minutes' video (title might be off a bit) that covered every patch the game had.. would be awesome if someone did a version like this that tied it into pro meta (obviously not as many balance shifts as sc2 that changed the game, but covering historical metas is always a fun topic imo) Great vid! Hindsight is 20/20, but I'm glad I stuck with BW and didn't have to experience these balance adjustments 😵
I still posit that the AOE on both the widow mine and the EMP, NEED a maximum damamge threshold. meaning, no matter how many units get caught in the blast, it won't have a potentially infinite damage splash, but rather a big number which gets distributed. Shields in large groups would still take a beating, energies would still be depleted, but no longer would it be 100% to 0% instantly. Same with the widow mine, it can keep its bigger AOE, just no more instantly sublimating a large group of units instantaneously.
EMP has always been a fun one just based on that. Instant shield removal, be it probe or Mothership. Would've thought they'd have made it a static, say 100 to 200 shield damage or something over the years, but naah. Archon deleter goes BRRR.
9:00 on a complete sidenote, it's sad that that's blizzard's way to balance, they try 2 or 3 times and if it doesn't work they just remove it, like 6v6 OW, Momma core, Hercules & Infested T.
Well.. I'm not knowledgeable enough about those specific examples to comment on them to know if this applies to them, but in general sometimes just removing something really is the only solution - some units simply can't be made into something fun no matter how you tweak the numbers. The problem comes when a unit actually is pretty balanced statistically, but still results in games that aren't fun to play - what do you do in those situations? If you make the unit weaker then that's basically the same thing as removing it because it actually is pretty statistically balanced already.. but if you leave it as is, then the game still won't be fun to play even if it is balanced. Sometimes the design of a unit just makes it fundamentally not fun and can't really be fixed with any amount of tweaking numbers.
@@asdfqwerty14587 The solution would be to redesign the unit, not just balance. Major changes that completely change how the unit needs to be played. Unfortunately Blizzard rarely came up with any fun unit designs, any patch at all needed 10x longer than it should have. The dev team probably talked in circles in the meeting room.
@@nightmareTomek If you're completely redesigning a unit. then is that really any different from just removing it and adding a completely different unit instead? If I said "the mothership core wasn't removed, it was just redesigned into a shield battery" would that really change anything?
Man, looks like a lot of issues. I really hate how Terran got Terror Drones, Cryocopters, and we're able to freeze things from orbit causing them to be one-shot while you just sit there watching as half your army is suddenly gone like what the heck! Yeah, such a problem...
The teammate comment really got to me because I watched all the friends that I got into SC2 back in '10 leave for LoL and it really did seem like it was because there was no one to blame when you lose a 1v1 match other than yourself.
I was really surprised that you made a vid like this but i really enjoyed it! You got a talent for narrating something/explaining it in fun ways. Good editing too
In my first and only competitive starcraft 2 match, i went up against a terran player who used the incredibly nuanced strategy of turning the ground into a carpet of widow mines. It was about as amusing as that one time my dog got explosive diarrhea.
@@Shmandalf Lel i was Master 2013, idk how the meta is now. But back then sh1t was everywhere and i remember plenty of Progames like scarlett or jaedong having a very very hard time with terrans that were mastering widowmine play.
A good 2023/2024 honorable mention would be the ridiculous new Cyclone. It's been nerfed into a more reasonable (probably useless?) state since the chance, but that thing dominated TvT, and became the new "single unit to grandmaster" strategy that stumped players of all skill levels with its ease-of-use and difficulty-of-defense for its brief time in the spotlight.
eerm... rather 2013: widow mine 2014: widow mine 2015: widow mine 2016: widow mine 2017: widow mine 2018: widow mine 2019: widow mine 2020: widow mine 2021: widow mine 2022: widow mine 2023: widow mine 2024: widow mine FIFY. I was complaining about how unfun the unit is since Heart of the Swarm beta and never changed my mind. As random race and WM user myself.
That feel when i quit because of Swarmhost(Zerg bro) era, played different games for years, came back only to have the first game with 999999 widow mines blowing up on my face. Yea...fck that, uninstalled that shit again right there.
7:06 WAIT! That's what that unit is? I don't play StarCraft but I've watched a lot of it here and on other channels. I didn't know the names of many of the units CarBot depicted, but I did recognize nearly all of them, except, frustratingly, not that one! I'll have to go watch the series again with my new found knowledge and appreciate it even more 😂
If you ask me, uploading a tierlist of the most hated units in sc2 right after the tournament ended is the true IMBA strat. (Also the finals were awesome congrats clem!)
@@fmlAllthetime Its true, terran has a unit which protoss can litterly do nothing against, so just play the game without 50 percent of your hp, you cant use templars to drain since the ghosts have higher range, cant hit them because once again higher range then almost anything protoss has, and a funny abillity which 1 shots any zerg unit!! so balanced
@@Xyz360li that’s still crazy , 4 shot a ultra lisk which is like 300 , 200 for half the price , and 1/3 of supply if we do same cost it’s 2 ghosts vs 1 ultra lisk which is a 2 shot , and if we judge by supply it’s basically a 1 shot since it’s 3 ghosts vs 1 ultra
Great pick for the end video, I saw that Parting vs. Maru blind and it was great. For those curious, search up 2020 GSL S3 Code S RO16 Group C, around 1 hour 46 minutes in if you're impatient, for the most surprising nuke of all time.
Surprised the Reaper didn't make the list. The way they popped structures got a looot of hate. Sentries did get a damage nerf, and I think massive units breaking forcefield was added later too.
Reapers are also one of the few units on the roster that forced mapmakers to rethink how they design their maps, like with making most of main-base highground walls non-jumpable.
There is a lesson here that Blizzard seems to be missing; constantly tweaking "balance" will kill the game eventually. Because you can't actually achieve true balance, nor should you want to (SC was groundbreaking because it had 3 races that _each played differently_ compared to other 90s RTS titles). There's a reason people STILL play SC:BW, and it isn't just nostalgia. Sometimes those imperfections make the game fun
No matter what you give to protoss, they will proxy this shit, they will. And i am talking as a protoss player myself, both in bw and sc2. Protoss will try to proxy everything.
Given how weak they are compared to other races, that's the only rational option. Zerg and Terran can get an much better economy and useful troops than Toss if left unchecked.
@@vectrom21 yea, and toss rebuilts army a lot longer. Zerg can lose a fight and pop off defence force right away, terran, can pop of marine ball fast as hell. Toss cant pop such a goog options quickly.
My best SC2 buddy is a proxy everything Protoss. Against him, I suddenly scout like a master, because I have to. If only I could do it against other players! -- But the thing is, against him I know if I live seven minutes I will win. (It used to be 5 but his macro has in fact improved.) This is not, alas, the case with other Protoss, who tend to storm my hydras into a pathetic puddle.
@@vectrom21 protoss weak? maybe nowadays, idk I stopped playing in 2018. From 2010 to 2018 protoss was absolutely not a weak race. It had points of vulnerability but it was not weak by any regard. Forcefields were good, psi storm was op, DTs were often times easy wins in games with low econ or weird base situations. I could go on.
Blizzard was always biased against Terrran. Any time something slipped into the game, which was actually fun and effective, they bent over backwards to remove it again. Your whole Terran army vanishing in the time span of switching to base and building a depot? Totally okay! Terran has mules! Even a perfect Terran macro not enough to keep up with the other races, thus making it a necessity to "cause damage" early on. But how, if P gets chrono boost for free and Terran even has to interrupt worker production while converting to an Orbital Command? 150 Minerals paid - P invests it in another gateway while saturating their mineral line double speed. And hey - Blink is done before Stim pack in most Terran builds. So let's show what cheese and 4 gate all in looks like to those stupid Terrans. And no problem - we will still have a 4 base and 75 workers by the 7min mark, while Terran sits on 1 base and 30 workers. But no problem - Terran's got mules! Then you finally had some protoss a-move stopping power with widow mines (they even had detection built in at some point) and of course, the poor Protoss needed divine interventation... And all that has not changed yet. Terran starts on the back foot and then has to play better than the other races to get lucky. In WOL you had timings like "pre-colossus". But whenever such timings seemed to work - the game got changed, so they work no more. All the while Terrans had to become turtling bunker-repair specialists. Oh - and the WOL reaper had a fun upgrade which could demolish buildings really fast. I still wait to see it re-introduced as a fusion core upgrade... Late game Reaper play! That would rock - but as it would be fun, no way they would do something like that...
I mean literally yeah. Terran did get fucked over with a lot of things but mules in SOOOOOOOOO many games were saving graces and largely because they had to be to offset those losses. The issue became though that if you as the terran were harassing your opponent and they were harassing you and you both lost lets say 30-40 workers... you would just drop a bunch of mules and that income loss was irrelevant meanwhile your opponent is rebuilding workers slowly if they are protoss, not as much of a problem for zerg but still. Mules cost energy which is free, rebuilding workers costs a lot when you lose 30-40 at 50 minerals each. 30 workers is 1500 minerals.
The writing on this channel is amazing! I'd love to hear some Factorio commentary in this style. Also, Grant seems to be good at puzzles, so he do good at that game😅
I go back every once in awhile and watch some homestory cup clips and state of the game clips. Funniest most uplifting guy to ever exist in esports if you ask me.
I remember one GSL where near the end of the ladder, Blizzard patched the Ultralisks to have splash damage. But the splash damage was not centered around them, but their target. So, the zerg rushed to get ultras and then just steam rolled everything. And the opponent was terran, who would try and repair their structures only for the structures to kill their own workers. It was hotfixed within a day or so, but ultras were gloriously overpoweredly broken for that little time.
Lol, I've thought the same. Early WoL balancing was so slow to respond, I think a lot of people were just turned off the game after a while. Marines and tanks were crazy strong for a while too (remember when tanks did 50 fucking damage?)
@@Appletank8 That was done because Tanks were always intended to be the main anti-armor unit of Terran. Originally they did 70 flat damage like in BW (and still do in campaign) but then it was found that the improved AI meant that siege lines did not waste shots so they evaporated anything not an Immortal, which invalidated Tanks because nothing could do more than 10 damage to them with their old shield ability. So the flat damage was reduced and the intended anti-armor role was done via the bonus to armored damage. Of course Tanks were rarely used because Mech was missing its main frontline unit and so Terran basically just became bio outside of TvT where it was marine/tank.
@@TankHunter678 I meant, what they are now isn't that far off from what BW is right now, outside better targeting. sc2: 40 (+30 vs armored) bw: 70/52.5/35 - Large/Med/Small The oldest patch i could find had siege mode do a flat 60 against everything which was definitely way too high, but it was soon nerfed to 35(+15) for several years until finally buffed to roughly where it is today in 2016.
The thing is that the ghost has always been a good unit in my opinion. You can use it to uncloak invisible units in a pinch, in deals a lot of damage to bio units but you have to wait a couple of seconds, you can both take away the energie of spellcasters and protoss shields and nuke things. I am not a good player of sc2 but even I can do some things with the ghost.
Ghosts were also a pain even during 2012, like bruh just build Ghosts instead of crying about how Marines don't solve everything again. But P being admittedly screwed over was bad that time, could've juist helped them out instead of lobotomizing the Infestor back then. Then again T is very special to Blizzard anyway.
What a ride, I've been here for all of it including the swarmhost battles that lasted hours, I remember at one point when a match with stephano had gone for longer than 1 hour I had to call a friend to hear if he was also seeing this, it was the first time I had seen an SC2 championship match go for longer than 40 minutes. As a zerg player/enthusiast I must say that I always abhorred the ghost, a good autoattack so it can defend itself from mid tier light units like mutas or hydras, a snipe that makes any medium or large unit totally irrelevant, a long range energy killer that messes up casters and kills shields, a lot of health and practically perma stealth as long as you micromanage, as the games go for longer you suddenly have an upgraded marine, and we all know how balanced the MMM combo is; the main part about the ghost and terran in general against zerg for me is how irrelevant high tier units are during the times they aren't horribly overpowered, it always hurt me a little to see a small group of ghosts delete an entire maxed out zerg army of ultralisks in less than 3 seconds.
Best idea for an SC2 video I've seen in ages!! RIP InControL ❤ Also, 2010... Reapers were SOOOO awful to play against 😂 As were Void Rays, once you got fully charged on rocks (crap maps, so bad) you basically won. Never losing full charge was so damn broken.
To me it's the ghost, although me and my platinum league opponents aren't good enough to abuse it, it makes the professionnal games I watch way less entertaining.
One of the most memorable moments from the Void Ray era was when there was a GSL PvP and they both went Void Ray shield battery. Very stupid. Very fun :)
Terran if Stim and shield are auto from beginning. Nothing beats 4rack marine rush until gm anyways, and if they were more op, nothing will ever beat four rack marine rush
Campaign protoss are absurd. Like campaign zerg are scary, but take away your hero and they really only gain utility. Campaign protoss are all upstatted and have new skills. And then there's the adept to make anything not broken, broken. Spinlots would negate earlygame harass long enough to get the adepts up and it's GG once a vanguard hits the field.
Just taking a guess before I watch the video. Let's see how I do: 2010: Mules 2011: Mules (maybe mothership towards the end of it, honorable mention to sentry that got a ton of people salty at this time). 2012: Broodlord 2013: Hellbats and Widow Mines (then Swarm Host) 2014: Swarm Host 2015: 75% of 2015 it was still Swarm Host, late 2015 was Adepts. 2016: Tankivacs 2017: Oracles Maybe? I stopped following it as closely.
This is pretty cool... Enjoyed he hell out of this video. Also... The only thing I would say is MAYBE a bit IMBA, is Cyclones. BUT... ONLY in the right hands. Which is what makes it a bit more fair.
26.50-26.55 damn you! i thought that was 12 hours since the upload! i was so excited for today, only to find out that the even already ended yesterday!
I wish cyberathletes like Clem, Serral or Hero would start playing Coop Heroes on the tournaments, it would be so much fun! However, the only rule would be that you cannot play the same commander twice. If everything is OP, then it is somehow would be balanced 😂
One thing to mention was the 4 minute DT drop into the enemy base Its a specific protoss build that if you can pull it off and the enemy doesn't have any way to detect it works but the pros did it and then people came up with ways to deal with it But it still wrecks havoc in ladder matches
Widow mines made me quit SC2. I don't know how they ever thought having such a cheap and low tech unit with splash damage that wipes out workers (except not Terran workers) and single target one-shot against many units and could also cloak was a good idea. It was just ridiculous.
yeah me 2 i left 2013 because of this crap. It destroyed my passion for stacraft forever. I could go with everything but not something that i have to bring so many things on the table to solve the problem that someone forgot placing it even there...
The obvious fix to the mothership core is to make it only function in pylon fields, unable to leave them and instantly destroyed if the fiels it is in is destroyed. There you go, now it can't leave the base
Sounds nice and good but in practice that would be a horrible design. You would need a pylon chain literally from base to base for it to get around and with your rules if the pylon died you would lose it which would make zero sense. Why would the pylon decide if it is destroyed? It's created from the Nexus.
In other news: People still hate Queens, Disruptors, Widow Mines, Carriers, Vipers, Swarm Hosts, Ghosts, and Adepts...
Also, Ravens definitely belong somewhere on this list, or at least an honorable mention. Whatever year had the mass ravens meta was not a good one.
Ghosts are a unit that probably should deserve an honorable mention at multiple points on this list, just as they got at the end. I don't think they are or ever will be the *most* hated unit, but they're certainly up there, especially with how they've ended up as sort of a catch-all for Terran. Anything Protoss being a problem? EMP. Anything Zerg? Snipe, and also, the only "counter" to ghosts for Zerg is the infestor, which is also countered by the ghost... Protoss "counters" ghosts with disruptors and blink stalker focus fire, but that only works when those units are viable, and if a game goes long enough, Protoss can be forced off of them due to the power of skyterran. Ironically with the Swarm Host, I think the original basic design was better than what we have now. The problem was that the duration of locusts was WAY too long - they had an effective range of ~45-65 (depending on creep), after their upgrade that increased the duration of locusts from 15 to 25. That's about 5x longer than a siege tank... If they'd just balanced the unit with a more reasonable effective locust range , perhaps with a literal leash range, like carriers/disruptors have, and/or a shorter duration with a reasonable cooldown of a bit shorter than the duration (or with no duration at all and a respawn timer if they had a leash range), they could have been more reasonably rebalanced into their original intended role of a defense/siege unit, with a range that actually allows the opponent to do something to them. A resource cost on locusts also could have been a potential solution to the problem. Now, they're a niche harass unit, because they instead decided to rebalance them by adding a long cooldown, but letting locusts fly, massively buffing their damage, and making the swarmhosts cheaper. They're still basically only used vs Protoss or mech Terran, and when they're in the game, it's still a crapshow, except now they either win the game by sniping bases/chipping away at the enemy army repeatedly before the opponent can mass up the army needed to attack, or the opponent hits a timing before the swarmhosts can deal much damage and wins, because swarmhosts are extremely weak as part of the army.
I feel so vindicated about the widow mine! I stopped playing SC2 because of them. I was a diamond 3 protoss (a race with its own problems, I know). The unit is a mixture of basically every mechanic which is punishing and taxing to play against.
I was straight-up thinking recently, "Man, I'd really love Grant to go over the history of SC2's meta, he seems really knowledgeable and it's super fascinating" and then this drops right on cue
Regarding the Swarm Host, then 2 hours certainly isn’t the longest professional game in any esport. Dota had an infamous game last a whopping 3 hours and 20 minutes back in 2015.
Wait.. did grant just say the Swarmhost Locusts did NOT ALOT OF DAMAGE? These fucking things melted EVERYTHING on the ground, where relatively tanky and endless...
The only IMBA in the game as far as I've seen recently, is swarm host nydus. Get vision (overseer / changeling), spawn a wormy, violently eject 20-30 swarm hosts, pop back into your dearly beloved wormy, lose nothing, gain everything. If the worm is up, you're taking attrition. If you kill the worm, I hope you see the single marine that isn't moving with your army. If you kill a swarm host, somehow, you still lost oodles and caboodles more than the zerg did. The only counter to it is air units, which if you don't already have some, you're dead. Reach the zerg base for a basetrade, and marvel at the 50+ spore cannons with Queens scurrying around.
![BRASIL vs. URUGUAY [1-1] | RESUMEN | ELIMINATORIAS SUDAMERICANAS | FECHA 12](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-hWBAuxF1eY/mqdefault.jpg)
That swarm host mirror looks like one of the most miserable experiences possible in SC2
That meta almost killed this game. It was horrible to play or watch
I think sc1 had somethibg similar in tank wars in tvt
I only knew swarm host mirror from Carbot. I had no idea something like that really happened.
@@kacperdrabikowski5074 Grant didn't exaggerate that you could literally go to the store and miss nothing in that meta.
@@emkalina Except that BW tank vs tank wars had dynamics to break the stalemates. Mass drops, BCs, defense matrix, even ghosts if you were a more casual player. In a swarm host mirror you kind of had to keep your swarm hosts stuck in place and firing even if it was just getting canceled out
Very impressive that the Raven managed to stay off this list entirely despite being the backbone of some of the most hated, abusive Terran strategies over the years.
yea wasn't Seeker missile spam a thing back then? Somewhat similar issue to Fungal in AoE spam that hard to avoid.
I'm assuming Grant went off of some kind of series of polls from over the years. Maybe the Raven just managed to slip by under the radar of another more hated unit.
@Appletank8 seeker missile spam is not a problem in pro game but anti armor missile is. Remember that time it have 30 damage with immediately hit and ridiculous aoe range.
20+ raven can easily kill entire protoss fleet with no issue.
@@Draeckon Ironic, since raven is a detector
@@kyosukearashi3523 Welllll, 20+ raven is a huge investment, especially because of how gas heavy they are, that is a fleet of it's own.
3:11 "So began the Reign of the Mules. Get it? It's a pun because-"
Mules have reins?
"-they fall from the sky."
Well that too.
Bravo, now it's a double pun 🤣😂
Terran commonality: Got too good at everything attack and defense
Zerg commonality: Drags the game down to a crawl
Protoss commonality: Unit designed to be good at one thing turns out to be good and Blizzard didn't see it coming somehow.
brood war era blizzard > sc2 era blizzard. so much balance done wrong in sc2 and it shows. brood war wasnt perfect but it was much nicer
@@soldier22881 Eh, the issue is that SC2 was balanced around much higher mobility and an emphasis on worker harassment, while BW was not. In terms of overall balance by win rates, SC2 was often better than Brood War, with brood war balance shifting more heavily depending on the maps - a lot of what keeps Brood War "balanced" is just that the mechanical limitations in the game make it so much harder to play near perfectly, so player skill gaps show through more clearly, and defenses are a lot harder to break because units are dumb and don't do what you want consistently unless you have the APM to issue new commands to units doing dumb things consistently.
There aren't many things in brood war that can run into your mineral line and delete everything, and the only common ones are storm or reaver drops, which are expensive and come out much later than most of what's around in SC2, while also being less reliable and easier to stop, because shuttles are nowhere near as good as warp prisms or medivacs.
Though ZvZ in Brood War has always been worse than SC2 ZvZ. ZvZ in Brood War is described as a knife-fight in a phone booth for a reason.
@soldier22881 I think a lot of the balance struggles for SC2 come with just how good pathing AI became. BW, you could get away with shit being OP as fuck because it couldn't make it's way up a ramp or would get stuck on other units. That never happened with 2.
@@soldier22881 I'm not too familiar with BW, but at least from SC2 it seems like a lot of units are just not healthy for the game (disruptors, widow mines, banelings, swarm hosts, etc.)
@@mlemmage8449 yes this you hit the nail on the head, and it goes further back, wings of liberty biggest problem was fungal growth and broodlords, zerg just dominated the game, then it was voidrays you could easily build up their attack with pylons.
BW the devs thought thing through, is it fun to use and play against? wings of liberty their main push was for esports, game balance took a back seat and it shows. The biggest thing to ruin sc2 was the "live service" aspect as well, because so many games are poorly balanced in live service games because the strategy is to quickly release a game and then patch any bugs/balances later
Fun video. I do think the reaper deserves an honorable mention for 2010 when 3 reapers could kill ANY structure in 6 seconds or less.
Yeah the zealot of the terran
And the warhound (I think that's what it was called. came out in heart of the swarm). People hated that unit (people not using it, anyway).
@@BrokePencil He started the video noting it was only units that made it to live, warhound was just beta.
Yeah. Also the planetary fortress and BC buff
Broodwar: Everything is so overpowered it somehow balances out
"when everyone's super, no one is"
Except the scout
That's not factual, the time to kill is substantially lower in SC2 thanks to the DPS from massive clumping together and firing at the same time and the devastating counter splash as a result. Your whole army can get vaporized in 5 seconds, which didn't happen in SC1
Broodwar is what happens when your card house collapses but somehow lands as a different, better card house.
@@vumasster Scouts are actually good units they just cost way too much
"You don't have teammates to blame when you lose."
Me who only plays co-op and 3v3 AI skirmish: huh?
It's an important strat to write "teammates are noobs, GG" in all chat when you lose any team game!
Here, hold my lvl 3 p0 karax
Honestly, and maybe it's just me, but I would often play 2v2/3v3/4v4 for a game or two to warm up my fingers before I played 1v1 ranked and I didn't even think about what my teammates were doing. This probably hinges a lot on me being a masters/low GM player but I just did weird strategies and when my teammates left it was actually a blessing in a way. You basically get 3x the income of a normal player so I just drop down like 10 barracks or 15 gateways and get 200 supply army in 30 seconds and roll over the enemy.
@@YuYuYuna_
The feels when i misplay early game in Co-Op and my teammate leaves only for me to inherit their income and super-macro to victory.
The title seemed like a perfect fit for eSportsStoryTeller - I was honestly surprised to hear the dulcet tones of GGG.
I tend to forget he actually plays multiplayer
Me too, I though I clicked on the wrong video for a sec
Another one
He has his own list i believe.
Mana vs Firecake wasn't actually the longest, Zhugeliang vs Lillekanin lasted 3 hours. How do I know? I watched it. ALL OF IT. I still shudder.
There are also multiple professional Dota 2 matches that have gone for 3 hours. Not sure where Grant got the factoid from, it may just be outdated?
You're absolutely correct! Bad 2 AM scripting strikes again
@@IqmasterDaNinja C9vs SFZ I`ve watched it twice.
@@IqmasterDaNinja i think he either meant longest map or you have to account for the whole series which was a best of 3, so there must be at least one additional game in mana vs firecake increasing their total match time even further.
Why would you put yourself through such a thing?
2:35 u realize
most of that army
was halluc
No it wasn't? Just 5 void rays. Which was still enough, don't get me wrong, but most of that army was still the stalkers and colossus.
!@#$ off
@@donbionicle It's a reference to what the Protoss player said to Idra after he ragequit that specific game
@@TheBoleynLegacy Well that makes a lot more sense, nevermind me!
just sayin
u werent loss
When you brought up the Disruptor it made me remember that era when their balls exploded as soon as they touched something so protoss would get 10 disruptors and engaging into them became completely impossible (also disruptor tennis in PvP). That definitely would've been a candidate for whatever year it was.
That is more intuitive lol
I feel like you need to fine tune stats instead of making it explode in 200 seconds fixed
Think so, too, making it explode on impact would have felt good, if they would have nerfed the AoE beforehand.
Oh hey, just like mine!
TBF, the Reaver also technically works the same way and explodes on impact, though I guess the radius is a bit smaller, and it's very hard to control more than like, 4 at the same time. I do recall people who were fast enough could sacrifice something cheap like a Zergling or Marine to eat the Disrupter shot.
@@nightmareTomekThey did exactly that and it was op. Then they nerfed it's damage so it couldn't even kill a roach and it sucked. The current disruptor is easily the most balanced.
You know, listening to the MotherShip's core description, I thought it wasn't that bad, sure it's powerful but surely it cost a lot to make both in supplies and minerals.
Than I learnt that it was an early game unit, and I shivered.
Very cool unit, dear god I am glad it's gone.
i feel like they couldve done something similar to the queen where the mothership core needs power fields to move faster (they did something like this in co-op with stetmann's Gary, specifically in the second prestige)
@@SenyiKimmowouldn't stop anything tbh cause Protoss can just plop down a pylon before doing whatever they were doing
It's basically just the current warp gate restrictions with extra steps
@@anvietanh6723 Except, it need 50 minutes to fly across from main base Nexus to where ever your proxy pylon is.
@@anvietanh6723 the problem would be that they'd have to move the mothership core there from wherever they decided to start warping it in. it'd cost a ridiculous amount of minerals to create a path from one base to the other (which fun fact is why zerg creep spread in brood war sucks), and you'd otherwise need to proxy a nexus to get any mileage out of it without it taking an eternity
@@SenyiKimmo Or heck, needing to stay within X distance of a Nexus to use most of its abilities, until unlocking an upgrade in the Fleet Beacon.
The fact that 2010's unit is the sentry and not the old pre supply depot reaper is a tragedy, seeing a finished bunker with a reaper in it before a gateway/pool is halfway done was ridiculous and was like 80% of early terran strats.
back when reapers had the super ultra 'your buildings are gone now' grenades too
See, the reason Grant doesn't have a 136% chance of winning is that he forgot to add Kurt Angle to the mix.
He probably added perc angle
But if he adds Kurt Angle to the mix, his chances of winning drastic go down.
@@211Serum BUT I'M A GENETIC FREAK, AND I'M NOT NORMAL.
The numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster.
Everyone knows you can only get a winrate up to 50%, because you win or you don’t
5:21 - RIP Kabosu, the famous Doge, that unfortunately passed away earlier this year.
Great video and happy to know that Doge™ is still alive and kicking on the internet
She will never be forgotten!
"You can just send depo dave and his brothers into the grinder", sick reference
This aged like fine milk 26:45
Can someone elaborate please? I haven’t touch SC2 in a long time now
I feel like the Raven deserves the mention here. Maybe go through many of it's hated variations with autoturrets and stuff, and the pinnacle of game design in 2018ish, when anti armor missiles were fast and dealt damage and the mass Dorito dust missile meta used to instantly delete air armies.
when blizzard traded the 10 years timed life on auto turrets for a shorter time+high damage it was crazy to the point that thing was removed, then brought back if i recall correctly
Honestly very baffling they didn't just change the missile damage to a DoT, it'd make spam straight up useless. It worked for Transfusion, Parasitic Bomb, Fungal (kinda)
@@Appletank8 Oh right parabomb used to stack. Muta vs muta was (not) fun to watch back them lmao.
idk modern SC2 but for all my time playing they had at least a few obvious downsides - namely being a really expensive spellcaster that required decent micro. They were never like Carriers where eventually you'd A-move them, they could get pretty fragile.
I know that at some points they were pretty damn strong, but no more than say... a bunch of High Templars. Capable of ending games but hey, what isn't.
@@51gunner The main difference is that Storms can't stack. I can try putting 10 Strom's simultaneously on a Carrier but I'm only going to do about 90 damage.
The old Raven missile stacked. It was only 30 damage, but more missiles meant more damage in that moment. Manage to build up to 10 Ravens, and you could theoretically do over 300 damage in the blink of an eye.
The random memes have me rolling here, even more than the commentary, which is fantastic!
I loved the barely-keeping-it-together tone of this whole video. Especially when talking about the widow mine, you can tell that Grant has been hurt by them. As a fellow Protoss player, I too have been brought to my lowest by that terror. All I need is to hear that PTSD inducing burrow sound and I'm a broken man...
You know what's worse, though? In the mod where you can play SC1 vs SC2, the sound the spider mines make. OMG. I had never seen them before (not an SC1 player) and that sound is already phobic.
Honorable mentions: The cyclone, which got reworked twice, being able to kill you while kiting you or just kill you in the first terran push. the liberator, also known as "this mineral line is lava". mass oracles, just lasering down your mineral lines and buildings while revealing your whole army. lurkers, which just kill your whole army, even if you have detection. They just have more range, aoe and their shots cant be baited by a big frontline, since they kill just everything in a straigt line. And the last, but most frustrating thing: warp prims after the pickup range buff. basically giving every protoss ground unit the blink ability which high ground vision and allowing the units to restore their cooldown while in a safe prism, always ensuring you have to fight the immortal's barrier every time you see it, no matter how low it might seem and when you finally almost got it, it just gets blinked out of your screen.
Yeah, oracles and cyclones were straight menaces
I definitely think historically some of the most problematic units have been the ones that just vaporize everything when they work -- even if they're balanced by being difficult to use, they could result in some very swingy matches that don't feel very good to play at average levels where people make mistakes constantly.
What a throwback of a video. Thanks for it. As a diehard Terran player, I've always hated how much it felt that Zerg always had an answer to everything, even the things they were supposed to be weak at or that P/T were told to "capitalize on" to win.
As someone who doesn't have the time to play StarCraft anymore but absolutely loves the game to my core, I love videos like this. Relevant content, interesting factoids, and summarization of development; great for anyone like me who wants to stay in the know but can't play the game. I do remember some of these eras and I hope the game continues to get balanced so that it retains as much of a fanbase as it can. May creative & talented players keep the meta interesting by discovering methods to circumvent imbalance!
About Mana versus Fircecake game being longest match of any competitive game... Not even close. Dota 2 match between Cloud 9 and ScaryFaceZ lasted for 3 hours 20 minutes 34 seconds. No idea if this one is longest example but that's one e-sport match from top of my head that I know about ;)
and thats how korean dota 2 never caught on
Nice video, takes me back. I remember right when HoS came out watching WhiteRa vs. some Terran who basically only had widow mines and could not lose. I eventually stopped watching SC due to the swarm host, and it was interesting to hear about the logistical complaints around the unit for tournament scheduling.
Actually in 2010 right from the get go when starcraft 2 was just launched, the reapers had their anti-building satchel charge (used in the campaign) in multiplayer as well, so that was incredibly overpowered for that limited time before it got removed, as mass reapers just easily eliminated anything else any faction could defend with in the early game.
Yup, reaper shows up in your base and its guns are great at picking off workers and zerglings/zealots, and then it blows up your pylons/depots and maybe a couple other buildings for good measure.
I love these retrospective vids, someone I used to play with made the '7 years of bw in 7 minutes' video (title might be off a bit) that covered every patch the game had.. would be awesome if someone did a version like this that tied it into pro meta (obviously not as many balance shifts as sc2 that changed the game, but covering historical metas is always a fun topic imo)
Great vid! Hindsight is 20/20, but I'm glad I stuck with BW and didn't have to experience these balance adjustments 😵
I still posit that the AOE on both the widow mine and the EMP, NEED a maximum damamge threshold. meaning, no matter how many units get caught in the blast, it won't have a potentially infinite damage splash, but rather a big number which gets distributed. Shields in large groups would still take a beating, energies would still be depleted, but no longer would it be 100% to 0% instantly. Same with the widow mine, it can keep its bigger AOE, just no more instantly sublimating a large group of units instantaneously.
Applying a DOT effect instead of everything on hit can also help prevent Spamming from being as useful.
EMP has always been a fun one just based on that. Instant shield removal, be it probe or Mothership.
Would've thought they'd have made it a static, say 100 to 200 shield damage or something over the years, but naah.
Archon deleter goes BRRR.
@@GafferPerkele in bw yes, but modern emp is 100 shield/energy
Widowmine is still a thing? i quit 2013 because of this sh1t
yeah good idea bring Same dmg threshold from WC3 to these busted EMP
9:20 Well, this explains why I NOPEd so hard out of watching SC2 tournaments and went back to BroodWar scene back in 2014.
9:00 on a complete sidenote, it's sad that that's blizzard's way to balance, they try 2 or 3 times and if it doesn't work they just remove it, like 6v6 OW, Momma core, Hercules & Infested T.
Isn't 6v6 coming back?
Well.. I'm not knowledgeable enough about those specific examples to comment on them to know if this applies to them, but in general sometimes just removing something really is the only solution - some units simply can't be made into something fun no matter how you tweak the numbers. The problem comes when a unit actually is pretty balanced statistically, but still results in games that aren't fun to play - what do you do in those situations? If you make the unit weaker then that's basically the same thing as removing it because it actually is pretty statistically balanced already.. but if you leave it as is, then the game still won't be fun to play even if it is balanced. Sometimes the design of a unit just makes it fundamentally not fun and can't really be fixed with any amount of tweaking numbers.
didn't blizzard recently said that OW is going back to 6v6?
@@asdfqwerty14587 The solution would be to redesign the unit, not just balance. Major changes that completely change how the unit needs to be played.
Unfortunately Blizzard rarely came up with any fun unit designs, any patch at all needed 10x longer than it should have. The dev team probably talked in circles in the meeting room.
@@nightmareTomek If you're completely redesigning a unit. then is that really any different from just removing it and adding a completely different unit instead? If I said "the mothership core wasn't removed, it was just redesigned into a shield battery" would that really change anything?
Man, looks like a lot of issues. I really hate how Terran got Terror Drones, Cryocopters, and we're able to freeze things from orbit causing them to be one-shot while you just sit there watching as half your army is suddenly gone like what the heck!
Yeah, such a problem...
The teammate comment really got to me because I watched all the friends that I got into SC2 back in '10 leave for LoL and it really did seem like it was because there was no one to blame when you lose a 1v1 match other than yourself.
I was really surprised that you made a vid like this but i really enjoyed it! You got a talent for narrating something/explaining it in fun ways. Good editing too
In my first and only competitive starcraft 2 match, i went up against a terran player who used the incredibly nuanced strategy of turning the ground into a carpet of widow mines. It was about as amusing as that one time my dog got explosive diarrhea.
You start seeing them less once you're out of Bronze/Silver, but I've had matches like that too in the lower metal leagues lol
@@Shmandalf yeah sure, lets ask serral how often he is seeing WM playing against clem :)
@@Shmandalf not true at all lol. I play in diamond/masters and you still see them plenty.
@@Shmandalf Lel i was Master 2013, idk how the meta is now. But back then sh1t was everywhere and i remember plenty of Progames like scarlett or jaedong having a very very hard time with terrans that were mastering widowmine play.
A good 2023/2024 honorable mention would be the ridiculous new Cyclone. It's been nerfed into a more reasonable (probably useless?) state since the chance, but that thing dominated TvT, and became the new "single unit to grandmaster" strategy that stumped players of all skill levels with its ease-of-use and difficulty-of-defense for its brief time in the spotlight.
good vid!
honorable mentions:
the reaper 2016
lurker
ultras with 8 armor
6:00 Destiny really cut off all answers in this debate.
2020: widow mine
2021: widow mine
2022: widow mine
2023: widow mine
2024: widow mine
2025: ...probably widow mine.
eerm... rather
2013: widow mine
2014: widow mine
2015: widow mine
2016: widow mine
2017: widow mine
2018: widow mine
2019: widow mine
2020: widow mine
2021: widow mine
2022: widow mine
2023: widow mine
2024: widow mine
FIFY. I was complaining about how unfun the unit is since Heart of the Swarm beta and never changed my mind. As random race and WM user myself.
That feel when i quit because of Swarmhost(Zerg bro) era, played different games for years, came back only to have the first game with 999999 widow mines blowing up on my face.
Yea...fck that, uninstalled that shit again right there.
@@tyranidswarmlord9722 xD I have the same feeling about once a year.
LOL nobody is arguing against your comment, but it has been downvoted to oblivion. Terrans know widowmine is bs but they don't want it to go away.
7:06 WAIT! That's what that unit is? I don't play StarCraft but I've watched a lot of it here and on other channels. I didn't know the names of many of the units CarBot depicted, but I did recognize nearly all of them, except, frustratingly, not that one! I'll have to go watch the series again with my new found knowledge and appreciate it even more 😂
Long Live carbot animations
10:26 Actually, in march 2015 a competetive match of Dota 2(c9 vs SFZ) lasted for over 3 hours 20 minutes.
If you ask me, uploading a tierlist of the most hated units in sc2 right after the tournament ended is the true IMBA strat. (Also the finals were awesome congrats clem!)
30 ghosts per army, so balanced nerf protoss, took so much skill for clem to win
The first reply to OP is so fuckin ridiculous
@@fmlAllthetime Its true, terran has a unit which protoss can litterly do nothing against, so just play the game without 50 percent of your hp, you cant use templars to drain since the ghosts have higher range, cant hit them because once again higher range then almost anything protoss has, and a funny abillity which 1 shots any zerg unit!! so balanced
@@madhat2569can I believe 3 shot broodlords, 4 ultralisk
@@Xyz360li that’s still crazy , 4 shot a ultra lisk which is like 300 , 200 for half the price , and 1/3 of supply if we do same cost it’s 2 ghosts vs 1 ultra lisk which is a 2 shot , and if we judge by supply it’s basically a 1 shot since it’s 3 ghosts vs 1 ultra
Aww, man. Seeing that reference to InControl made me sad, I watched that guy do a dnd stream with Jesse Cox 'till he died. :/
Seeing these old memes really reminds me of how old this game is, Jesus.
Wings of Liberty had parody songs based on Justin Bieber and Rebecca Black 💀
Great pick for the end video, I saw that Parting vs. Maru blind and it was great. For those curious, search up 2020 GSL S3 Code S RO16 Group C, around 1 hour 46 minutes in if you're impatient, for the most surprising nuke of all time.
Surprised the Reaper didn't make the list. The way they popped structures got a looot of hate.
Sentries did get a damage nerf, and I think massive units breaking forcefield was added later too.
Reapers are also one of the few units on the roster that forced mapmakers to rethink how they design their maps, like with making most of main-base highground walls non-jumpable.
There is a lesson here that Blizzard seems to be missing; constantly tweaking "balance" will kill the game eventually. Because you can't actually achieve true balance, nor should you want to (SC was groundbreaking because it had 3 races that _each played differently_ compared to other 90s RTS titles). There's a reason people STILL play SC:BW, and it isn't just nostalgia. Sometimes those imperfections make the game fun
No matter what you give to protoss, they will proxy this shit, they will. And i am talking as a protoss player myself, both in bw and sc2. Protoss will try to proxy everything.
Given how weak they are compared to other races, that's the only rational option. Zerg and Terran can get an much better economy and useful troops than Toss if left unchecked.
@@vectrom21 yea, and toss rebuilts army a lot longer. Zerg can lose a fight and pop off defence force right away, terran, can pop of marine ball fast as hell. Toss cant pop such a goog options quickly.
My best SC2 buddy is a proxy everything Protoss. Against him, I suddenly scout like a master, because I have to. If only I could do it against other players! -- But the thing is, against him I know if I live seven minutes I will win. (It used to be 5 but his macro has in fact improved.) This is not, alas, the case with other Protoss, who tend to storm my hydras into a pathetic puddle.
@@vectrom21 protoss weak? maybe nowadays, idk I stopped playing in 2018. From 2010 to 2018 protoss was absolutely not a weak race. It had points of vulnerability but it was not weak by any regard. Forcefields were good, psi storm was op, DTs were often times easy wins in games with low econ or weird base situations. I could go on.
Blizzard was always biased against Terrran. Any time something slipped into the game, which was actually fun and effective, they bent over backwards to remove it again.
Your whole Terran army vanishing in the time span of switching to base and building a depot? Totally okay! Terran has mules!
Even a perfect Terran macro not enough to keep up with the other races, thus making it a necessity to "cause damage" early on. But how, if P gets chrono boost for free and Terran even has to interrupt worker production while converting to an Orbital Command? 150 Minerals paid - P invests it in another gateway while saturating their mineral line double speed.
And hey - Blink is done before Stim pack in most Terran builds. So let's show what cheese and 4 gate all in looks like to those stupid Terrans. And no problem - we will still have a 4 base and 75 workers by the 7min mark, while Terran sits on 1 base and 30 workers. But no problem - Terran's got mules!
Then you finally had some protoss a-move stopping power with widow mines (they even had detection built in at some point) and of course, the poor Protoss needed divine interventation...
And all that has not changed yet. Terran starts on the back foot and then has to play better than the other races to get lucky. In WOL you had timings like "pre-colossus". But whenever such timings seemed to work - the game got changed, so they work no more. All the while Terrans had to become turtling bunker-repair specialists.
Oh - and the WOL reaper had a fun upgrade which could demolish buildings really fast. I still wait to see it re-introduced as a fusion core upgrade... Late game Reaper play! That would rock - but as it would be fun, no way they would do something like that...
I mean literally yeah. Terran did get fucked over with a lot of things but mules in SOOOOOOOOO many games were saving graces and largely because they had to be to offset those losses. The issue became though that if you as the terran were harassing your opponent and they were harassing you and you both lost lets say 30-40 workers... you would just drop a bunch of mules and that income loss was irrelevant meanwhile your opponent is rebuilding workers slowly if they are protoss, not as much of a problem for zerg but still. Mules cost energy which is free, rebuilding workers costs a lot when you lose 30-40 at 50 minerals each. 30 workers is 1500 minerals.
Ey, a new grant video. Guess it's time to get some lunch and popcorn.
Fancy seeing you here lmao
@@Bishop5466 Whaaaaa, stalker alert! Haha. What a small world
Great video, dude! I've casually played since 2011 but didn't know a lot of this information, other than that swarm hosts were an absolute nuisance.
I'm so glad someone else acknowledged that Destiny got his start with Starcraft
Why?
I used to watch all his sc2 streams before he became a weirdo
I got into politics years ago and then heard of Destiny. My mind was first like "Wait, Destiny as in the filthy zerg main? THAT destiny?
He is a loser
The writing on this channel is amazing! I'd love to hear some Factorio commentary in this style.
Also, Grant seems to be good at puzzles, so he do good at that game😅
Seeing Incontrolls name brought back memories, and reminded me he passed away y-y
Makes me big sad. I played against him in one of his last warhammer tournaments. What a dude he was
I go back every once in awhile and watch some homestory cup clips and state of the game clips. Funniest most uplifting guy to ever exist in esports if you ask me.
I cried a surprising number of times after I learned about his death. Dude was actually so much fun.
I remember one GSL where near the end of the ladder, Blizzard patched the Ultralisks to have splash damage. But the splash damage was not centered around them, but their target.
So, the zerg rushed to get ultras and then just steam rolled everything. And the opponent was terran, who would try and repair their structures only for the structures to kill their own workers.
It was hotfixed within a day or so, but ultras were gloriously overpoweredly broken for that little time.
I firmly believe Broodlord Infestor is the reason why League of Legends exploded in popularity!!
Thanks, Blizzard. In the words of Angry Joe, You done f&&&ed it up.
Lol, I've thought the same. Early WoL balancing was so slow to respond, I think a lot of people were just turned off the game after a while. Marines and tanks were crazy strong for a while too (remember when tanks did 50 fucking damage?)
@@dankwarmouse6248 Don't tanks now do 40 (+30 vs armored) in siege mode now?
@@Appletank8 That was done because Tanks were always intended to be the main anti-armor unit of Terran. Originally they did 70 flat damage like in BW (and still do in campaign) but then it was found that the improved AI meant that siege lines did not waste shots so they evaporated anything not an Immortal, which invalidated Tanks because nothing could do more than 10 damage to them with their old shield ability. So the flat damage was reduced and the intended anti-armor role was done via the bonus to armored damage.
Of course Tanks were rarely used because Mech was missing its main frontline unit and so Terran basically just became bio outside of TvT where it was marine/tank.
@@TankHunter678 I meant, what they are now isn't that far off from what BW is right now, outside better targeting.
sc2: 40 (+30 vs armored)
bw: 70/52.5/35 - Large/Med/Small
The oldest patch i could find had siege mode do a flat 60 against everything which was definitely way too high, but it was soon nerfed to 35(+15) for several years until finally buffed to roughly where it is today in 2016.
Loving the constant content, keep posting!
Clems 24 ghosts and $400,000 would like a word…..
I really appreciate this video, Grant. Thanks for the good memories. God I love Starcraft.
It would be very funny if the rest of the interns at Blizzard saw Grant's video and decided to give SC2 a new big "very balanced none-IMBA" patch.
Don't get your hopes up on Blizzard. Corporate greed has corrupted them to enrich Kotick's lavishly personal assets.
The thing is that the ghost has always been a good unit in my opinion. You can use it to uncloak invisible units in a pinch, in deals a lot of damage to bio units but you have to wait a couple of seconds, you can both take away the energie of spellcasters and protoss shields and nuke things. I am not a good player of sc2 but even I can do some things with the ghost.
Ghosts were also a pain even during 2012, like bruh just build Ghosts instead of crying about how Marines don't solve everything again.
But P being admittedly screwed over was bad that time, could've juist helped them out instead of lobotomizing the Infestor back then.
Then again T is very special to Blizzard anyway.
11:22 "When does the venue close". By one of the swarm host players.
What a ride, I've been here for all of it including the swarmhost battles that lasted hours, I remember at one point when a match with stephano had gone for longer than 1 hour I had to call a friend to hear if he was also seeing this, it was the first time I had seen an SC2 championship match go for longer than 40 minutes.
As a zerg player/enthusiast I must say that I always abhorred the ghost, a good autoattack so it can defend itself from mid tier light units like mutas or hydras, a snipe that makes any medium or large unit totally irrelevant, a long range energy killer that messes up casters and kills shields, a lot of health and practically perma stealth as long as you micromanage, as the games go for longer you suddenly have an upgraded marine, and we all know how balanced the MMM combo is; the main part about the ghost and terran in general against zerg for me is how irrelevant high tier units are during the times they aren't horribly overpowered, it always hurt me a little to see a small group of ghosts delete an entire maxed out zerg army of ultralisks in less than 3 seconds.
1998-2024: Corsair.
Best idea for an SC2 video I've seen in ages!!
RIP InControL ❤
Also, 2010... Reapers were SOOOO awful to play against 😂 As were Void Rays, once you got fully charged on rocks (crap maps, so bad) you basically won. Never losing full charge was so damn broken.
To me it's the ghost, although me and my platinum league opponents aren't good enough to abuse it, it makes the professionnal games I watch way less entertaining.
That was quite fun to watch!
Thanks for the video!
One of the most memorable moments from the Void Ray era was when there was a GSL PvP and they both went Void Ray shield battery. Very stupid. Very fun :)
Loved this video! Would love to see more Starcraft history videos from you. Cheers!
Question: which faction would be strongest if all units, upgrades/evolutions and variants were allowed?
Terran if Stim and shield are auto from beginning. Nothing beats 4rack marine rush until gm anyways, and if they were more op, nothing will ever beat four rack marine rush
@@irrationalpie2323idk, I feel like attack speed raptor lings could be a valid counter, especially with double drones
Zerg. Why? One word: Raptor.
Campaign protoss are absurd. Like campaign zerg are scary, but take away your hero and they really only gain utility.
Campaign protoss are all upstatted and have new skills. And then there's the adept to make anything not broken, broken. Spinlots would negate earlygame harass long enough to get the adepts up and it's GG once a vanguard hits the field.
@@irrationalpie2323 Tho if it wasn't automatically there right from the start and required researching... Prolly wouldn't be that good.
Just taking a guess before I watch the video. Let's see how I do:
2010: Mules
2011: Mules (maybe mothership towards the end of it, honorable mention to sentry that got a ton of people salty at this time).
2012: Broodlord
2013: Hellbats and Widow Mines (then Swarm Host)
2014: Swarm Host
2015: 75% of 2015 it was still Swarm Host, late 2015 was Adepts.
2016: Tankivacs
2017: Oracles Maybe? I stopped following it as closely.
Eh not bad so far!! Fuck I was GOING to say Infestor in 2012. Dammit, only myself to blame.
rare pvp video! woo!
This is pretty cool... Enjoyed he hell out of this video.
Also... The only thing I would say is MAYBE a bit IMBA, is Cyclones. BUT... ONLY in the right hands. Which is what makes it a bit more fair.
The worst I've seen must be the seeker missile raven meta. 30-40 ravens is a very balanced late game comp.
26.50-26.55 damn you! i thought that was 12 hours since the upload! i was so excited for today, only to find out that the even already ended yesterday!
En taro iNcontroL.
He's ranting about Stim to Fenix in the sky, rip
this is such a good idea for a video, never watched this guys content but had to watch this
I don't play PvP, but it's still interesting to learn new things about the game. From what I know, PvP balance usually go against fun units.
I'm really happy about these comprehensive videos. They are a boon to the whole community!
Great video. The archon toilet in the early days can't be forgotten though.
I wish cyberathletes like Clem, Serral or Hero would start playing Coop Heroes on the tournaments, it would be so much fun! However, the only rule would be that you cannot play the same commander twice. If everything is OP, then it is somehow would be balanced 😂
One thing to mention was the 4 minute DT drop into the enemy base
Its a specific protoss build that if you can pull it off and the enemy doesn't have any way to detect it works but the pros did it and then people came up with ways to deal with it
But it still wrecks havoc in ladder matches
0:20 I did not expect to hear 146% reference on this channel!
isn't that russian meme about poll results summed
@@sakesaurus It is
Widow mines made me quit SC2. I don't know how they ever thought having such a cheap and low tech unit with splash damage that wipes out workers (except not Terran workers) and single target one-shot against many units and could also cloak was a good idea. It was just ridiculous.
yeah me 2 i left 2013 because of this crap. It destroyed my passion for stacraft forever.
I could go with everything but not something that i have to bring so many things on the table to solve the problem that someone forgot placing it even there...
The obvious fix to the mothership core is to make it only function in pylon fields, unable to leave them and instantly destroyed if the fiels it is in is destroyed. There you go, now it can't leave the base
You can probably just do the same thing as Queens and disable their abilities + slow them way down outside a power field.
Sounds nice and good but in practice that would be a horrible design. You would need a pylon chain literally from base to base for it to get around and with your rules if the pylon died you would lose it which would make zero sense. Why would the pylon decide if it is destroyed? It's created from the Nexus.
"of any competitive game"
there was an online Diplomacy tournament final that lasted for IRL years I think
In other news: People still hate Queens, Disruptors, Widow Mines, Carriers, Vipers, Swarm Hosts, Ghosts, and Adepts...
Also, Ravens definitely belong somewhere on this list, or at least an honorable mention. Whatever year had the mass ravens meta was not a good one.
Ghosts are a unit that probably should deserve an honorable mention at multiple points on this list, just as they got at the end. I don't think they are or ever will be the *most* hated unit, but they're certainly up there, especially with how they've ended up as sort of a catch-all for Terran. Anything Protoss being a problem? EMP. Anything Zerg? Snipe, and also, the only "counter" to ghosts for Zerg is the infestor, which is also countered by the ghost... Protoss "counters" ghosts with disruptors and blink stalker focus fire, but that only works when those units are viable, and if a game goes long enough, Protoss can be forced off of them due to the power of skyterran.
Ironically with the Swarm Host, I think the original basic design was better than what we have now. The problem was that the duration of locusts was WAY too long - they had an effective range of ~45-65 (depending on creep), after their upgrade that increased the duration of locusts from 15 to 25. That's about 5x longer than a siege tank...
If they'd just balanced the unit with a more reasonable effective locust range , perhaps with a literal leash range, like carriers/disruptors have, and/or a shorter duration with a reasonable cooldown of a bit shorter than the duration (or with no duration at all and a respawn timer if they had a leash range), they could have been more reasonably rebalanced into their original intended role of a defense/siege unit, with a range that actually allows the opponent to do something to them. A resource cost on locusts also could have been a potential solution to the problem.
Now, they're a niche harass unit, because they instead decided to rebalance them by adding a long cooldown, but letting locusts fly, massively buffing their damage, and making the swarmhosts cheaper. They're still basically only used vs Protoss or mech Terran, and when they're in the game, it's still a crapshow, except now they either win the game by sniping bases/chipping away at the enemy army repeatedly before the opponent can mass up the army needed to attack, or the opponent hits a timing before the swarmhosts can deal much damage and wins, because swarmhosts are extremely weak as part of the army.
Adepts? Naaah
I feel so vindicated about the widow mine! I stopped playing SC2 because of them. I was a diamond 3 protoss (a race with its own problems, I know). The unit is a mixture of basically every mechanic which is punishing and taxing to play against.
Uploaded 30s ago, Lets go!
I was straight-up thinking recently, "Man, I'd really love Grant to go over the history of SC2's meta, he seems really knowledgeable and it's super fascinating" and then this drops right on cue
Regarding the Swarm Host, then 2 hours certainly isn’t the longest professional game in any esport. Dota had an infamous game last a whopping 3 hours and 20 minutes back in 2015.
It is funny grant cites rhe infestor as a do everything unit....meanwhile the modern ghost exists
"dropping mules harder than comcast drops my internet" 😂 its sad that it is SOOOO true on both sides
That bit about the queens reminds me of the Hydralisk bit you did at GDQ, Grant 😂
Wait.. did grant just say the Swarmhost Locusts did NOT ALOT OF DAMAGE? These fucking things melted EVERYTHING on the ground, where relatively tanky and endless...
"But I was too lazy to find a clip for it" Top tier honesty.
What happended at 26:56 again?
Just a nuke, isn't it?
Maru started casting a nuke and thought Parting would surely kill the ghost.
Parting did not kill the ghost…
@@sergeyk9060that nuke was so devastating that for a second I thought it was TvT
26:54 Parting's protoss wins because Maru's Vikings group control was disastrously ill-timed, and so got "self-Nuked" entirely out of the Game!
😅😂🤣
Quite interesting to look back and see some of the insanity of previous years, and, crappy jokes notwithstanding, overall was a solid video.
so destiny ha been toxic for over a decade
why am i not surprised
The only IMBA in the game as far as I've seen recently, is swarm host nydus. Get vision (overseer / changeling), spawn a wormy, violently eject 20-30 swarm hosts, pop back into your dearly beloved wormy, lose nothing, gain everything. If the worm is up, you're taking attrition. If you kill the worm, I hope you see the single marine that isn't moving with your army. If you kill a swarm host, somehow, you still lost oodles and caboodles more than the zerg did.
The only counter to it is air units, which if you don't already have some, you're dead. Reach the zerg base for a basetrade, and marvel at the 50+ spore cannons with Queens scurrying around.