I get that the change is really hard to imagine and it's impossible to exactly predict how it would play out. But look at it like this. As farms said, the current interaction between engineer and bomber is binary: you either kill an engi or the bomber is worthless (well technically you can make the engi waste time by forcing it to dodge, but let's disregard that). By lowering the stakes on both sides (bombers are cheap, but require 2 shots to kill) as well as introducing other choices (hoverbomb some mexes/pgens) we create many more interesting scenarios (explicitly talking about 2nd air first bomber here):
- bomber kills and engineer (devastating, but highly unlikely)
- bomber forces an engineer to dodge for a long time. To evaluate the situation you compare the lost time of the engineer to the new reduced cost of the bomber. If the bomber is cheap enough it will always be worth forcing enemy to dodge - or if it's too expensive it will never be worth. Perhaps a good balance can be found in this interaction? Also I'd like to compare this to aoe2 where feudal archers behind treeline force you to vacate that treeline even though they don't kill anything and sc2 where oracle stasis trap disables workers in mineral line for some time without damaging them. Both of these examples are more healthy imo, because there's a lot more granularity than the live/die binary of the engi.
- Bomber destroys 1-2 mexes (depending on bomber micro and enemy reaction time). Again depending on the adjusted cost of the bomber this may be made worth doing
- Bomber goes after pgens. Effectiveness depends on pgen splits
- Bomber goes after factory build platform to cancel factory production
- You simply make a second bomber with the reduced cost/buildtime and do all of the above. Note that it being 2 bombers instead of 1 bomber again creates way more possible scenarios than the binary engikill or not of the current bomber making the interaction less volatile in the process.
The rebalance would move power from the "hunting engineers" role to all the other possible use cases of the bomber. I totally agree that bombers make the game more exciting, and I also don't think they are overpowered at all. In hindsight I should've titled the thread in a way that doesn't suggest that I'm complaining about the bombers being op... mby something like "T1 bombers need a redistribution of power within the set of their use cases" would have been more apt.