@Evan_ said in Points of Imbalance.:
You can hear Petric talk in the video about the changes in relation to T3. GC lost the ability to trigger its claws as fast. Monkey got a cost increase in addition to bt nerf. Other units like T3 mobile arty and sniper bots were nerfed after they were found to be a bit too strong vs T3 bots.
You neglect to mention that it was a 1/19th cost increase that the ML received. It now takes 10 seconds more mass production to build if you're rushing it. Its a completely negligible nerf.
Yeah, T3 mobile arty did get a nerf... not in that patch, the actually buffed mobile arty in that patch... but much later it got a nerf. Doesn't matter though as the issue is that T4 is just better in certain circumstances. So much better that people don't bother to build significant T3 land assault bots.
Ythotha got a cost increase and had its dps shifted so if can't one shot Percies/Bricks. That's not to say these changes put them back in line with old balance, that wasn't the point. T4 IS stronger now once it gets up, that's intentional. T4s are no longer a cheese strategy but a proper unit. The video explains it better, but to say it was a sloppy patch and that there wasn't any concern or that people didn't notice changes for T3/T4 balance is just wrong.
Looks to me like the Ythota just got nerfed in general, but the nerfs were fairly slight.
Look, here's the issue with your "cheese strategy" claim. Gyle and other casters actually recorded lots of games from pre-2018 and made them publicly available. When I got through those games, I see top tier players spamming lots of T4 units. They weren't a cheese strategy, but they weren't T3 land either.
Making them a "proper unit" means that they're stepping on the role of T3 land - which I think is a terrible way to deal with them - but if everyone's dead set on making them a normal unit rather than a suckerpunch (which isn't necessarily cheese) then for god's sake, drastically increase their build times. Right now they're no less cheesey when rushed than they ever were, but in addition to being a cheesy rush unit they're also mass competitive with T3 land assault bots which causes them to replace T3 assault bots in some situations.
Even with the changes, T3 land still beats T4 mass for mass with a good formation, especially with shields.
If its rushed, you aren't going to have the T3 land to beat it. If its not rushed they'll have T3 land too. Beyond that T4 assault bots don't need to beat T3 land to be relevant. They have other major advantages. In a lot of cases you can just run a T4 assault bot by a mass of bricks or percies, and if you build enough splash units you'll be just fine when the assault bots eventually make it to your base. Your opponent will have substantially less time to react however.
And that's not considering that while your opponent makes T4 you can win much of the map with T3, if not kill his whole base. Even when the T4 gets out it's an uphill battle to retake the map since you only have one experimental that can only be in one place.
You say this, and this is great in theory, but if you read through more of this thread you'll find that I've linked several replays where pro players are indeed building token amounts of T3 land and then spamming T4 bots.
And its happening on maps that aren't popular in team game circles so the absurd idea that we shouldn't balance around maps that people actually play doesn't apply.
T3 is also helped by ACU (which is the main thing early T3 has to contend with) being nerfed in some upgrades and having Overcharge made more expensive in power and storage. Also The build time increase is not trivial and has a direct cost in how long it takes to get up an experimental. You can't spread out an exp, you can't drop it (T3 drops have actually been made stronger with the ASF/scout nerf). And so on.
Jesus man, nerfing OC means that rushed T4 bots are even more powerful... not less.
And people don't generally talk about post nerf units vs pre-nerf units because the two will never meet.
Yeah, but that's an issue, because its one of the simplest objective ways to determine how extreme a set of proposed changes are. If you test them and find that you've double the effectiveness of a unit with your changes that might be enough to convince you that what your doing might have impacts beyond what you intend.