StarCraft II

Heart of the Swarm Balance Update -- February 4, 2014

Heart of the Swarm Balance Update -- February 4, 2014

Last week, we requested your help with testing a few potential balance changes for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm multiplayer by playing with each change on our latest balance test map. After reviewing community and pro player feedback, we’re ready to move forward with a balance update that includes changes for Protoss and Terran. 


Today, we’ll be making the following balance changes for Heart of the Swam multiplayer:

Protoss

  • Mothership Core
    • Time Warp energy cost increased from 75 to 100.

Terran

  • Ghost
    • Ghost starting energy increased from 50 to 75.
    • The Moebius Reactor upgrade has been removed from the Ghost Academy.

Those of you who are interested in the StarCraft II Balance Team’s reasoning behind these changes can check out David Kim’s recent forum post to learn more. We’ll also be publishing a new iteration of the balance test map next week and you can go here to get a preview of what we might be testing next.


In addition to the balance changes above, today’s update also brings a slight modification to the 1v1 ladder map Daedalus Point. We heard your feedback that the size of ramps leading in to natural expansion locations made it a little too difficult to secure a natural base against early aggression. Our analysis of tournament data matched community feedback and we wanted resolve this issue before World Championship Series Premier League competition begins. In order to do so, we slightly reduced the width of natural ramps on Daedalus Point and already published the new version of the map to Battle.net.


As always, thank you for play testing the changes we proposed with the most recent balance test map. We look forward to sharing a new iteration of the test map with you next week and hope you’ll continue to share your constructive feedback with us for the next set of proposed changes.

Next Article

Featured News