In early January we’ll be taking down the StarCraft II Community APIs to ensure compliance with the new data-protection regulations going into effect at that time. We understand how valuable these APIs are to our community and know this will impact many of the websites and tools the community uses. We’re investigating our options for restoring these APIs and will provide an update on our status by the end of January.

RT @CarBotAnimation: StarCrafts Finale Trailer [watch the full episode this saturday] https://t.co/wA8yGQEKQY

Hey everyone,

It’s been a few weeks since the 2019 post-BlizzCon changes went live, and before the year comes to a close, we’d like to take some time to review the changes we’ve made and the resulting games we’ve seen so far. Some notable tournaments we’ve been paying attention to include Nation Wars, WESG qualifiers, and of course, HomeStory Cup XX.

One of the hot topics of 2019 was the Nydus Worm, and based on the games we’ve seen so far, we feel pretty good about its level of use and its effectiveness when used. Nydus and Nydus/Swarm Host usage has generally decreased in ZvP, which we believe is caused by both changes to the Nydus Worm and the map pool. And when Nydus Worms are used in the matchup, we feel a lot better about the new level of difficulty by which Protoss has to fight them. Meanwhile, while we’re seeing less direct Nydus aggression in ZvT, we do see increased Nydus/Swarm Host usage, which we attribute to a spike in the popularity of mech play.

Another popular topic of discussion in 2019 was the strength of Infestor/Brood Lord and the resulting passive endgames it caused. With the changes made to both these units in the post-BlizCon patch, we believe the late-games that we see are a lot more dynamic, and small decisions in the late-game feel more impactful to the end result of the game.

In general, when it comes to balance, especially late-game balance, we believe it’ll take quite a bit more time before we can come to any definitive conclusions. Not only are sample sizes small, the styles players are using are more divergent from each other than usual, reflective of a meta after a big patch. For now, our focus is on the end-game dynamics of each matchup with special focus on units that we changed recently including the Liberator, Thor, Lurker, and Infestor. With that said, we’d like to make two design-motivated adjustments.

Adept

• Resonating Glaives upgrade effects reverted. The Resonating Glaives upgrade will now increase the attack speed of Adepts by 45%.

We tried a new version of the Resonated Glaives upgrade with the goals of moving it away from the front-line pusher and emphasizing the coolness of the Shade Projection ability. However, it ran into some oddities in practice. For example, in the heat of battle, it took away from the interesting mind-game of whether the Shade would be canceled, because the Adept user is so highly incentivized to finish their Shade. It also created awkward scenarios where Adept users are encouraged to Shade onto themselves in the middle of a fight. For these reasons, we’d like to revert this change to the Adept.

Infestor

• Microbial Shroud radius increased from 3 to 3.5
• Microbial Shroud energy cost reduced from 100 to 75.
• Removed the Hive research requirement from Microbial Shroud.

As a general rule, we try to tune new skills and abilities to be on the strong side when we initially introduce them to promote experimentation. With Microbial Shroud, we probably didn’t go far enough, leading to its low use in tournament games. The changes introduced here are geared towards increasing accessibility and moderating the effectiveness of enemy area-of-effect abilities against Shrouds.

Both changes should go live with an upcoming update on Tuesday, December 17, PST. Let us know what you think on any community site, thanks for your feedback, and happy holidays!

-StarCraft II Team

Co-op Mission Update – December 16th, 2019

Hello all! We hope you’ve been enjoying Mengsk, his endless Troopers, powerful Royal Guard, and overall questionable war tactics. Whether Mengsk is your commander or choice or not, we have another surprise for you: the final Co-op commander revamp consisting of changes to Tychus, Zeratul, Stetmann, and even Mengsk. Because we wanted to get this update out before the holidays and very soon after Mengsk, we’ll be forgoing our traditional multi-week update format in favor of a more concise summary of planned changes. Here’s what you can expect soon in an upcoming patch:

Tychus

Tychus’ changes will focus on improving some of his lesser used outlaws: Blaze, Lt. Nikara, and Vega. We’ll also be taking a look at Medivac Pickup as we believe it provides too much instantaneous free healing, allow Tychus to be a bit more responsive than we liked and crowding out options like Lt. Nikara.

Zeratul

For Zertaul, we believe his Legendary Legions and Tesseract Cannons are too powerful for their respective costs. At the same time, we’d like to take stock of all the Artifact powers to ensure that they’re more competitive with each other across each tier.

Stetmann

One piece of feedback we’ve received about Stetmann is how overly transformative Super Gary is as an upgrade. As such, we’d like to improve Gary relative to Super Gary such that players will be incentivized to spend more of their time as Gary. We’ll also be taking further steps to lower the potency of Mecha Roaches while increasing the power and usability of Mecha Battlecarrier Lords.

Mengsk

For Mengsk, we’re going to be looking to tweak both his starting economy and the Imperial Support he gains when his Troopers are Indoctrinated as both trend higher than intended. We’ll also continue to implement bug fixes and tweaks to his more underused units and abilities.

Brutal+

After reviewing feedback, we’ll be lowering the difficulty of Brutal+ across the board with the exception of Brutal+6. In addition, Brutal+1 through +4 will now be capped at 3 mutators each, and you’ll generally be more likely to get fewer mutators overall.

And with that, we want to wish everyone happy holidays and especially happy Co-Oping!

Kevin Dong
Lead Co-op Designer

To reiterate, it’s a server issue and the server team is working the problem. As far as we know it’s only impacting Americas region right now, which means if you log in to another region temporarily, you should be able to get in.

RT @StarcraftWinter: ARGUING WITH MYSELF LIVE - NEW PATCH! https://t.co/6Cnky5QWKA https://t.co/w4mSFSXRHh

RT @Blizzard_Ent: Get a jump start on #BlackFriday and save on some of your favorite #Blizzard https://t.co/hJ55RfDsOC games! Don't miss ou…

Looks like there is an intermittent server issue where it’s not reading the correct version number. It’s being worked on right now.

We just deployed 1.23.2.6926 to address a couple of issues with the chat window (auto scroll and copy text).

The emperor calls on you to serve. Conscript your troopers, command the elite Royal Guard, and rain destruction on… https://t.co/SFAKyZzwLr

Patch 4.11.0 is now live in NA! •Commander Arcturus Mengsk •New co-op difficulty: Brutal+ •Versus Balance Update •… https://t.co/fmvXH1eBZW

As the leader of the Sons of Korhal, Arcturus Mengsk brought about the destruction of the Terran Confederacy and went on to hold the Terran Dominion within his cold-hearted grasp. As a co-op commander, Mengsk radiates an intimidating, tyrannical atmosphere to enforce his will with total impunity.

There is a login issue affecting many Blizzard games in EU at the moment. It’s being worked on, and will hopefully be resolved soon.

twitter.com Blizzard CS EU (BlizzardCSEU_EN) We're currently investigating an issue affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. #BlizzCS 7:42 AM - 26 Nov 2019 136 23

Looks like these are read errors (files not found). Have you tried scan & repair? Or reinstalling the game?

We’ve just released patch 1.23.2.6920 which reverts the web browser we use to power our remastered UI to the previous version. This should fix the performance degradation and blank UI panels occurring for a small portion of players. Please note that in future we will need to upgrade this again, for compliance reasons. We’ll be reaching out to some of those affected to see if we can test with them privately before we attempt this again, assuming we are not able to reproduce the issue internally.

As always, thanks for your patience and support!

RT @DarkHorseDirect: Yes, Commander? We are excited to announce that the StarCraft Terran Battlecruiser Ship now glows-in-the-dark! Weapons…

Glad to hear some of the problems were resolved with yesterday’s patch.

To reiterate what Matt wrote yesterday, if you are experiencing unresponsive or blank UI in the game menus (e.g. chat screen, game search screen), please contact us:

[email protected]

We have not been able to reproduce this issue internally yet, so (long term at least) the only way we’ll be able to improve the situation for those impacted players is if you reach out to us.

So far, very few people have contacted us about this issue, which may mean it’s impacting a very small number of players.

Even if we were to rollback our browser library, we must at some point in the near future upgrade this for security compliance reasons. So a rollback is only kicking the can down the road.

We may take this option - but even if we do, we’ll still need community help to identify the PC configurations that are causing the issue.

And thanks to Szinkler for helping us run down the corrupt file issue.

Greetings,

Thank you so much to all of those of have reached out with quality feedback and data! It is very much appreciated.

We’ve just released Hotfix Patch 1.23.2.6912

Fixes:

• A file related to cloud storage has become corrupt for some users, which manifests as hitching/stuttering every 30 seconds in the menus and in-game. We’ve implemented a fix that will automatically correct the corrupted file. Depending on the extent of the corruption, it may take some time (minutes) to correct the issue in the background. Although performance in the menus may continue to be affected while the game repairs the file, in-game performance should not be impacted any longer. After the client closes you may see an upload box, you’ll have to manually hit ok.
• After which the hitching that is being reported every 40 seconds or so should be resolved.
• Infinite redownloading of custom maps
• Fix for save file overwriting.

Investigating:

• Blank panels.
• General Performance issues.

If you’ve experienced either of these and can help, please email me at [email protected].

Attaching your browser logs will help: using explorer: %LocalAppData%\Battle.net\BlizzardBrowser

Regarding multiple Blizzard Browsers

• Web browsers power our Remastered UI panels. In this patch, we’ve upgraded the browser version we’re using. It’s not unexpected to have many browser processes running - you’ll notice that Chrome does the same thing for each browser tab. So you can think of each browser process as a browser tab. We keep a bunch of them active simultaneously to improve performance.

Thank you for your patience.

Greetings,

If you are experiencing missing text, and performance degradation with your UI can you please send us your logs? [email protected]

Windows
{WINDOWS_DRIVE}:\Users{USER}\AppData\Local\Battle.net\BlizzardBrowser\Logs\

or using explorer:
%LocalAppData%\Battle.net\BlizzardBrowser

macOS
~/Library/Application Support/BlizzardBrowser/Logs/

We appreciate your support and patience.

best,
Matt