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The original was posted on /r/starcraft by /u/madumlao on 2024-12-02 07:35:58+00:00.
The hydralisk lunge is a great ability for the game. It makes hydras feel more dynamic. It allows them to catch drops or overly forward medivacs. It gives micro opportunities for offensive players, and repositioning ability for defensive players. In none of the recent games where it appeared did hydras appear overpowered or abusive - it was often underused but it would lead to interesting situations.
Most often the hydralisk lunge only came into play for 3 things:
- dodging storms / splash
- retreating after a poke
- catching vulnerable units without support
all of which make the game more exciting to both watch and play.
I 100% understand why the balance council would be very conservative before putting a new ability in. It takes time to hash these out, and who knows if it turns out to be imbalanced after all. But after having played this a few times and watched a couple tournaments where they are in, it should be obvious now that there is no reason to fear for this ability being imbalanced or broken in any way.
Because of this, I think it absolutely makes sense for the balance council to reconsider the hive tech lock on the lunge ability.
First of all, hydras are already a massively time-locked unit. They are lair tech, and need at least 2 upgrades before you can even start fielding them. Often hydras are just skipped until lurker tech is viable. Lunge being locked behind hive is extremely unfortunate. No other unit requires this many upgrades to see their full potential.
Second, hydras are already an economy-locked unit. It is usually not feasible to play hydras before 3 bases saturation. But often you would want 4 bases to keep up with production. That is already carrier-grade economy. Due to how zerg economy works, the gas requirement is a major issue to producing a lot of hydras. Therefore most Z will be significantly ling heavy as opposed to hydra heavy in hydralisk compositions.
Third, hydras are also a map-control dependent unit. Hydras by themselves do not fare well outside of creep and without the appropriate support. You would typically need to get to a favorable game state before you can even viably deploy hydras offensively.
Because of the above, we often saw hydras deployed very late in the game, after hive would already have been ready anyways. At minimum, the hive tech requirement for lunge is just redundant gatekeeping. But more disappointingly, the dynamic game that lunge would have created is just hard denied by the number of requirements before you can start using hydras. I do not believe this is the intention, and I think the game would be much healthier if hydras were more accessible to be deployed.
What can be done about the above? First of all, council needs to re-evaluate the reasons why hydras are gated so hard. With zerg early game economy suffering after the queen nerf, and many viable offensive options for T it is helpful to revisit if the reasons for gating hydras still hold true in 2024.
Blizzard multiple times split, and then merged, and then split again the hydralisk "muscular augments" upgrade to control how soon hydralisks come into play. In HotS, it is a total of 250/250 and 142 seconds to get both upgrades. In 3.8.0, the fastest hydra patch, there was a single upgrade 150/150 at 71 seconds. The current state, not counting lunge, is in between both: 175/175 and 114 seconds to get both.
The upgrades were basically tweaks to the hydra push timings. There is basically no point to getting hydras until you have at least muscular augments, although you probably need at both. They are not catching drops, they are not repelling edge-of-creep pushes, they are not standing or taking tactical fights without them. They cannot be used in a defensive capacity due to the economic position.
Two points stand out here:
If Zerg is supposed to be moving away from queens as a defensive tool, is there an actual defensible reason why they cannot have hydras available earlier? This includes rethinking the timing or number of hydralisk upgrades needed.
If Balance Council wants to encourage more dynamic, ground-based styles, shouldn't movement tools like lunge be available earlier and with less gating?
Some possibilities to consider. Obviously, I am not saying put all of the below in, but to seriously consider the impact of one or some combination of them for the game.
Remove or recombine some hydra upgrades
Grooved spines which gives +1 range is primarily useful for targetting drops and air support units. Does this need to be a separate upgrade at all?
Muscular augments is primarily useful for moving hydras off creep as offensive tools. But so is lunge. Does Nanomuscular Swell need to be a separate upgrade than Muscular Augments at all?
Rethink the purpose of some upgrades
Muscular augments increases the overall movement speed of hydras both on and off-creep. Did the on-creep speed really need any gating at all? hydra speed is already limited by creep before muscular augments and Z does not currently have mobile mid-game anti-air. why not let hydras have their full creep speed out the gate, and muscular augments only affects off-creep speed?
Just move Lunge to Lair tech
Given the number of gates before hydras are even useful, it is questionable if hive tech needs to be one of them. If lunge is lair tech, some edge-of-creep situations may be more defensible.
Have a weaker lunge out of the gate
Alternatively, lunge might just be a less effective base hydra ability. It might be shorter range, it might have a longer cooldown, it might make the hydralisks pant for a couple seconds after it wears off. Lunge would prevent hydras from being completely useless upon immediate production without giving them their full late game power, if that was the issue being avoided.
The hive tech upgrade therefore, would just used to increase the lunge distance or recovery.
it should of course go without saying that earlier offensive hydras are a bigger problem for protoss than terran. thus do use due diligence and engage with toss pros for feedback
and lastly, the color of lunge looks very much like the trails from microbial shroud. Please do something about the visual representation to increase the readability of the unit.
