Blizzard Reiterates: Mothership being crappy is a-ok

[MuppZA]

When blizzard showed of the moma ship for the first time it had some real cool ability, but during time they removed the planet cracker, the time bomb, the black hole and the warp to another pylon, so what does it have now! xD at least give one of them ability's back 2 it! sure cloak field are great but the unit is so slow so your army will get ahead,

Scrap it and replace with Arbiter!

[DemolitionSquid]

If the Mothership's abilities cost 50 energy instead of 100, THEN it might be worth getting.

[Twilice]

it's the fighting capabilities that suck.

[flak4321]

Is the MS crappy? To an extent, yes. I can't speak to the upper levels being a bronze (soon to go silver ), but I can say it is quite useful at the lower levels, second among Toss air to the Void Ray. Carriers and Phoenixes are only good in masses of 6+, 10+ for Phoenixes in non-harass situations (which are very few). Carriers' best weapons are the multiple targets the Interceptors create. DPS is not as good as SC1.

MS cloaking makes it very difficult to target what actually needs to be targetted, especially in team games where one player fast techs to MS and the other masses voids or blinkers or something. The cost is more prohibitive in a 1v1, but the cloak can be a game changer, especially when the enemy is mostly air, w/ MS and snipes your mobile detectors with regularity and impunity as they move through your base. You almost always have to kill the MS first, which wastes much of your army, leaving you open to a quick turnaround of the now uncloaked army. Cloaked voids and Thors are unstoppable.

Microing your army with an MS is almost too easy also. Simply send your MS on its way with your army on follow, with your trigger finger ready to micro your forces at a moment's notice. Once in battle, attack with everything but the MS, setting it to follow the slowest unit type in your army (ex. for 1v1: carriers or immortals) and not moving too fast otherwise. The only units an MS is truly vulnerable to are Voids, Vikings and BCs (with Yamato only; w/o Yam can get dicey depending on what the MS is cloaking). Mutas can be difficult as well. Vortex is helpful here.

Recall is very much the same as SC1, or would be if the MS was a little faster. Besides, a proxy pylon or 2 or a few warp prisms are equally efficient, so this ability is not a good fit.

This does not, however, apply as easily to the upper levels of competition because (a) armies need to be replenished more often, increasing the resource strain of the MS's cost, and (b) the amount of stuff being micro'd and macro'd at diamond and platinum and gold vastly exceeds that of the bronzes and silvers, so an MS could be an apm sink akin to how spawn larvae was initially viewed.

All of that said, having watched many castings of many SC1 tournament games (thanks to Husky and HD and youtube in general), I must admit the MS seems much less used than any SC1 unit that ever went unused. It has utility, but there is just enough downside to sway many of us away from it.

To those who say they want the MS to have an attack spell: the arbiter never had an attack spell, and it's attack would make the current Phoenix attack seem palatable by comparison. Vortex is essentially a larger scale stasis field (in terms of # of affected units) with a different mechanic and artwork.

All in all, the MS is flawed, but not useless.

[senervo]

i would instantly love the ability to hallucinate MS's...
that'd be the protoss equivalent of lift-off buildings and hilarious damage-sinkers...

alas... balance stuff and the damn speed and all...

[ooZer0]

The MS is in a fairly sorry state atm and doesn't really serve any purpose outside of VERY niche rolls. Personally, there are two changes that I would love to see, then it might be worth while to get in a longer game if you already had it in mind to get Carriers...

Make it as fast as a Carrier. Does it really need to move as slowly as an un-upgraded Overlord? Carriers are slow enough as it is, but they Ferrari's compared to MS. Recall is a potent weapon if used right... but even then 1.25 movement speed is hardly gonna make Recall drops dangerous, at least not more so then a Nydus Worm...

Change Vortex to Stasis Field. I mean really... its just a pathetic ability. What was cool about stasis is that you can cut a guys army in half, kill half, then after a bit of time, kill the other half. It was a perfect army splitter, or at least a way to delay timing pushes. Vortex is a pitiful rip off, because it allows new units to get "stasised" after the initial cast. If half your army gets vortexed... you just walk the other half into the vortex and for 10 seconds your army is now invulnerable. If Vortex had a longer duration, or only pulled in the units it hits on cast, then it would be an acceptable ability. As it is now, its just a sad hollow shell of a skill...

[Norfindel]

Just made my post in the BN2 forums:

The unit is a huge waste of resources. Vortex is interesting and can be used to break into a base, but that's it. The unit is 400m 400g and guaranteed to die without doing much else.

It should at least be very resistant to damage and move at a decent speed. I don't care about the attack.

But seriously, they could just put the Arbiter back in. At least it moved at a decent speed, so you could micro it, and you could build more than one, so you could have a spare if one died, and could cast a lot more than with this single useless Mothership. Oh, and the Arbiter was used in pro games back in the time, so they actually traded a pro-grade unit for one unusable at high play levels.

[dustinbrowder]

a bit more speed would be nice.

[MuppZA]

What about if you could crono boost the mother ship to make it travel 50% faster? It does come from the nexus so why not! Or be able to bye a upgrade for improved speed?

[Norfindel]

What about if you could crono boost the mother ship to make it travel 50% faster? It does come from the nexus so why not! Or be able to bye a upgrade for improved speed?

It must go faster, and that's all. It's movement speed is retarded. Also, it's already expensive and slow to build.
The Arbiter wasn't broken with the speed it had. Is it too much to ask for the Mothership to move at that speed? It's too slow to even try to move it around your army, so that it doesn't dies so easily. An Arbiter would have more chances of survival, and they had half the amount of HP.

Hell, i would prefer for the unit to have fast movement, and be constantly revealed in the minimap to ""compensate"".

I hate how they shit their pants so much about changing anything. They didn't take their chance when in beta, so do it now! But no, i suppose they're going to wait for the expansions, even if that's really the same. Unless the expansions have a beta on their own, they would be realeasing all the changes "in the wild".