Broken Protoss

Hey, this is Corbin, and I’m excited to have the first article on this website! Today I’m going to discuss how the Protoss race in Star Craft II is broken when compared to the other two races. I would like anyone reading this to comment their ideas for solutions, just a way to get some conversation going.

So I've been a huge Blizzard fan since I can remember. I’ve been playing War Craft since my brother first showed me War Craft I: Humans and Orcs, I've been playing Diablo ever since I can remember, and I've been playing Star Craft longer than I've been playing Diablo. I have never, however, taken any time to play as Protoss, besides the campaign option in the first game. I recently played Protoss competitively for the first time on battle.net and kicked some crazy butt, and I have to say that this race is heavily broken.

There may be those that disagree with me, and that's what I'm counting on. I want to know a legitimate, well thought out argument as to why the Protoss race isn't broken. The following are my major points as to why the race needs to be nerfed, and I mean effectively (Blizzard has given them one or two weak limitations that don’t do anything to balance the race at all).

1.   Protoss Shields

A Protoss Colossus being attacked by two Vikings and
five Marines

Every Protoss unit and structure is protected by shields. Protoss shields effectively double their health, if not substantially increasing it, which is usually higher than their counterparts in other races anyways. Take, for example, each race’s basic combat unit. Zerg has a duo of Zerglings (I say duo instead of one because they are individually weak and actually hatch in pairs), Terrans have the Marine, and Protoss has the Zealot. Disregarding attack power, which is substantially higher in a Zealot anyways, a pair of zerglings has 35 hp each and each unit has 0 (+1) defense and no shields. A Marine has 45 hp (an upgrade can be bought to boost it to 55), 0 (+1) defense, and no shields. A Protoss Zealot starts with 100 hp, 1 (+1) defense, and 50 points of shields. This is without any upgrades, though just as many upgrades can be bought for Protoss units as can be bought for units of other races. This pattern is consistent with all comparisons between Protoss units and counterpart units of other races.

As if the fact that the Protoss have shields isn’t overpowered enough, the shields regenerate at a very generous rate. True, this can only happen after the unit has been out of combat for a few seconds, but Protoss speed makes it exceedingly easy to escape combat in enough time to regenerate shields or even make it back to base.

  

2.   The Warp Gate

A Gateway that has been transformed
into a Warp Gate

The Protoss’ basic unit production structure, called the Gateway, is the building that produces every single protoss unit, besides air units and the two heavy units (the immortal and the colossus). Like Terran structures and some Zerg structures, it queues up to five commands at once and completes them in the order in which they are given by the player. Training takes about as much time as units for other races and costs just a little bit extra (once again using basic combat units, Zealots cost 100 minerals and a pair of Zerglings or a single Marine costs 50 minerals. It’s twice as much but remember that Marines can attack from a range and a pair of Zerglings can double team).

All in all, the Gateway isn’t a particularly broken structure. The breaking comes in when the player inevitably decides to transform it into a Warp Gate. Before I explain what a Warp Gate does, let me explain how to go about getting one. You pay 150 minerals for a Gateway, research Warp Gate for 50 minerals and 50 gas, then wait for two minutes and click the Warp Gate button in the gateway menu. Warp Gate research is as cheap as a worker unit in terms of minerals, the cheapest item whether it be unit, structure, or research, in terms of gas, and takes average time to complete, considering how beneficial the research is. From the second you finish the initial research, you can turn a Gateway into a Warp Gate without any cost at all besides the ten second wait. Even at this point, a Warp Gate can be turned back into a Gateway immediately with, again, absolutely no cost and a ten second wait. It’s already a teensy tiny bit broken in its own right and I haven’t even explained what it does.

The Warp Gate allows you to build new units at any point on the map that is powered by a Warp Prism or a Pylon. Training a unit from a Warp Gate clear across the map has absolutely no penalty, resource cost, or drawback of any kind. After the first unit, the upgrade has entirely paid for itself. The unit in question is completed almost in only five seconds and only one unit per Warp Gate can be queued at any given time before the structure has to cool down. This works for any unit available from the Gateway (pretty much every Protoss ground unit besides Immortals and Colossi, this includes the indefinitely cloaked Dark Templar with an unrealistically high damage rate for such a convenient unit) and none of the units cost any more than they would from the Gateway. Neither does the act of actually building them on the site. Essentially, you have a ground unit production structure that can build almost universally strong and useful units on any point of the map, provided that spot has a power supply, which isn’t difficult by any means, considering the fact that the pylon is the cheapest structure and quickest build for that entire race.

3.   Probes

A Protoss Probe

The Protoss worker units, known as Probes, cost 50 minerals, 0 gas, and only take 17 seconds to train. That is not a criticism, as these statistics apply to every single worker unit in the game. What breaks Probes for the Protoss is how they build. A Zerg Drone, more often than not, must sacrifice itself to become a structure. This makes that structure effectively cost 50 minerals more than its listed price. A Terran SCV has to stay on a structure and can take no other action until the structure is completed or canceled. The Protoss Probe can set up a build site instantaneously and then go about other things while the structure builds itself. Given enough resources, a probe could start building every available structure within a second and let them take care of themselves. The brokenness is self explanatory. Other races either have to temporarily or permanently give up a worker unit to build any given structure.

4.   Void Rays

The Protoss air unit known as the Void Ray is already powerful just because it's an air unit, never mind that it's an air unit that can attack air and ground units (a feat only shared by the Zerg Mutalisk and the Terran Battlecruiser. I don't count vikings because they have to transform into an air unit to attack air and transform into a ground unit to attack ground, which takes time and uses a different type of weapon for each form). These facts alone do not make it a broken unit. What breaks the unit is the fact that the longer one void ray attacks a unit, the stronger its damage rate becomes, of course meaning that if you mass up a bunch of void rays (who already have decent damage rate to begin with), your opponent might as well not even play. Great for a lazy player who wants to climb the ladder, but not so great for any player looking to play a challenge or a challenging race.

5.   Photon Cannons

An active Protoss Photon Cannon

Whereas the Zerg have two different defensive structures, one that can only attack ground units and one that can only attack air units and is a detector, and Terrans have an air defense structure and a ground/air defense structure that must first be loaded up with individual combat units before it can do anything but sit tight and soak up fire, the Protoss have only one defensive structure: the Photon Cannon. The Photon Cannon can attack both air and ground units, unlike Zerg defensive structures, and it can do so without having to build additional units to power it, unlike the Terran Bunker. The easiest way to get a Photon Cannon off your back is to destroy any Pylons that could be powering it, though there could be many and Photon Cannons can easily cut an army down to size before the army destroys all of the necessary Pylons.

6.   Protoss Cloaking

Two cloaked Protoss Dark Templars

My final grievance with the Protoss race's brokenness is their cloaking abilities. Zerg and Terran have to research methods for hiding their units. Zerg, fortunately for them, can just research burrow once and then any Zerg unit with the ability can do so indefinitely. Terrans have to research cloaking for Banshees, though not for ghosts, but remaining cloaked will drain energy from either unit. The cloaked unit will eventually become revealed. This is a fairly good balancing mechanism for Terran cloaking units. Protoss units with the ability to cloak, however, are warped in cloaked, stay cloaked indefinitely, and do not lose energy for being cloaked. They don’t even have the option to not be cloaked. Additionally, the unit called a Mothership can cloak any units nearby just by being there, even if the units can't normally cloak.  The ability is passive, meaning it doesn’t have to be activated, the ability doesn’t use up any energy at all, doesn’t need to be researched, doesn’t have a limit to how many units can be cloaked, and can cloak air units and ground units, as well as any friendly structure. The units being cloaked don’t even have to have a cloaking ability to begin with.

These are the reasons why I was disappointed with the Protoss race even when I was doing so well with them. I decided that the race was extensively broken. Blizzard does, however, put into effect three apparent balancing mechanisms to try and nerf the race a bit. None of them work and it would seem that some of these are Blizzard’s efforts to actually nerf the nerfs instead of nerfing the breaks in the race.

1.   Limiting Protoss Regenerative Properties

Protoss units and structures cannot replenish hp in any way, shape, or form. Probes can’t repair structures or mechanical units, units can’t regenerate health naturally, and the Protoss have no healing class units. This is a measure taken to nerf the Protoss to make up for their shields, but due to the fact that the shields are substantial, regenerate generously, and can’t be disabled, the measure was taken in vain by Blizzard.

2.   Power Limitations

Protoss structures can only be built where power is supplied by a Warp Prism or a Pylon. A Pylon also serves as the player’s supply source, so the player is likely to build many of them all over their base anyways, and a Warp Prism is essentially an airborne Pylon that can move around and has a smaller radius for powering structures or warping in units. Though a structure that is powered by either of these will immediately deactivate once power is cut off, many structures are powered by three or four Pylons just because of the number the player is required to build to have enough supply for an army. This, and the fact that Pylons are cheap and quick to build, as well as having shields, makes this an ineffective limitation on the Protoss.

3.   Warp Gate Limitations

I know what you’re thinking- “Ah, so the Warpt Gate does have limitations, making it not so broken after all.” Think again. The Warp Gate has three limitations

·         Fog of War

·         Power Supply

·         Cooldown

Let us start with the most pointless limitation on the Warp Gate, fog of war. The fog of war is a useful and clever mechanic used in almost every Real Time Strategy game to limit a players’ sight. It works by showing only basic terrain and terrain previously seen by a given players units when that area is not within the visual radius of a friendly structure or unit. This forces a player to scout out areas they want to explore, to have to look for an enemy base instead of immediately knowing where their opponent is, and to have to spy on an enemy to know what kinds of structures and units that player is building. It is a key factor in developing strategies, and Blizzard actually states one of the Warp Gate’s limitations as being that it cannot warp any unit into an area covered by the fog of War. This limitation is rendered useless by the fact that the only places a Warp Gate can warp to are areas covered by a Pylon or Warp Prism’s power grid, an area that is without exception within a unit or structure’s visual radius and in no way covered by fog of war.

That brings us to the second limitation of the Warp Gate, the limitation shared by all Protoss structures- power supply. A Warp Gate cannot function if it doesn’t have a power supply but, as I mentioned earlier, it is more than likely powered by several well defended power sources that are easy to rebuild and, again, have a generous shield regeneration rate.

The third and most limiting mechanic on the Warp Gate is its cooldown. After warping in a unit from an individual Warp Gate, that individual Warp Gate has a cooldown period that varies from unit to unit but is always substantially shorter than the time it takes to train that unit at a Gateway. The longest possible cooldown period is 30 seconds and that period is for the High Templar, which takes 55 seconds to train at a Gateway. The cooldown does nothing to balance a Warp Gate against a Gateway or any other unit producing structure.

So there you have it, the Protoss race is clearly broken all over the place, which is a shame since it is actually an entertaining race to play and is used frequently in every league on Battle.net. All credit for pictures used in the article should go to Liquipedia at www.teamliquid.com, The best source for Blizzard game information on the internet.