Posted by Spooner | 181 Comments

New Starcraft 2 Beta Patch (version 0.4.0.14133)

Here are the patch notes for the next little patch hitting the Beta and I am dancing a damn jig right now in excitement. Terrans like me can finally not waste excessive time on building mandatory add-ons with the increased speed. This is monumental. There’s something wrong inherently when a tiny add-on was taking more than half the time to build as a brand new building.

Also you don’t need the Fusion Core to research Banshee’s Cloak ability. That is fucking outstanding. It never made sense to me to begin with, the Fusion Core pretty much revolves around building Battlecruisers and now I think I’m going to get a lot more play time with Banshees and not have to focus so hard on ground battles with Medivacs.

Another sexy change was the nerf bat slam to the Protoss Mothership. The THOR and Ultralisk can’t compete with the endless utility and power of the Mothership, maybe now it won’t be such a terrible terrible threat. Corruptors too are now beefed up letting Zerg have an even more wicked air-to-air (and Colossus) answer to Protoss advances.

Notes after the break!

Read More

Posted by Spooner | 8 Comments

Resurrecting the Hellion in Starcraft 2

Of all the Terran units I find that the Hellion needs the most work. That’s not to say that all Terran units need some tweaking but for the sake of this post, let’s focus on the Hellion. There have been hundreds of threads already discussing different desires for the successor of the Firebat and I know my own here might fall upon deaf ears but that doesn’t really bother me as much as the fear that this unit will be lost in the mix.

First off there are a few things that need to set straight. As it stands the Hellion can be a really fun unit and a useful unit to devastate overreaching enemy expansions. It’s relatively cheap to build and can be spawned in double time with the aid of a Reactor add-on. Against all workers, Protoss T1 units, and especially Zerglings and Hydralisks the unit shines and can cause some real damage. In the late game it’s nice to be able to send 4 or 5 of these units to an enemy outpost while my Barracks and Starport are busy trying to bulk up on Marines, Marauders, and air support – the harassment they dish out isn’t on par with pre-nerf reapers but it’s still something.

Read More