David Kim has already, like a week later, posted a mea culpa of sorts on the balance patch, with his usual level of comic understatement:
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/17084688554
Quote:
Currently we’re not seeing much new Swarm Host usage. We see two potential reasons for this: The Swarm Host isn’t effective enough in its current state or players haven’t figured out the best use cases with them yet. The answer is probably a mix of both factors, and we’re hoping to see more Zerg games in all matchups in order to drill down on the correct course of action here.
Gee, I wonder why
Quote:
From the initial feedback and games that we’ve seen, Zerg seem slightly weaker than before. While we don’t have enough examples or the time to make this conclusion, we wonder if acting a bit sooner in this specific case might be better for the game. To be clear, this doesn’t mean we’ll just go in and patch right away. We’ll still go through the standard procedures of discussing potential changes, testing the changes on balance test maps, and iterating on them until we find good changes. The main difference is that we would be going into the first balance test map much sooner than we normally would have after a balance patch.
LOL, you think??
General translation: "****, ****, we really ****ed up, what do we do now??"
Their initial ideas are to potentially buff roach burrow speed (doesn't really sound like it would help against mech) and to revisit the swarm host changes in a number of ways:
- increase SH effectiveness
- decrease cost and/or supply
- increase cooldown between locust waves even more (to keep mass SH from being viable as a core army composition after the buffs above)
Seems like he's generally missing the point. You can make the new swarm hosts into the micro-intensive harassment units Blizzard wants, get Zergs to use them how Blizzard wants, and it still won't change the fact that Terran mech will build up to a deathball that Zerg cannot kill.