Is there any race in particular that stands out in HOTS? Also, how are balance changes going to occur in HOTS?

Currently we are not at the stage of analyzing the racial balance. Instead, we are focusing on what to do with the new units that are being added. We are trying to make pro gamers recognize the potential of new units and use them more often in games. Having said that, we can't say which race is OP and which isn't. We think all new units are strong.

In WoL, Zerg seems to dominate lategame after hive tech. What are your thoughts on this and how are you going to address it? Also on the similar note, Terran's bio seems useless at the late game and the immortal/sentry all-in rush in PvZ seems really strong.


Looking at the overall tournaments, we believe that there is balance in pro-gaming level. Although we have been getting tons of feedbacks on Zerg being OP, if we take a look at last 10 major tournamets, racial distributions in players and winners are balanced. Although it may seemed that Zerg's late game is unbeatable, W/L ratio is still being balanced at 50:50. At this time we have to wait for new strategies from progamers.

Currently the most widely discussed unit is BL - Infestor combination.If the dominance is present in both ZvP and ZvT, we are willing to reduce the range the fungal growth or reduce the radius. If this is only applicable to ZvP, we are willing to buff carriers by making interceptors immune to fungal growth. However, we still think that BL-Infestor composition isn't a big deal.

Terran's Bio force are dominating in early and mid game. Considering the variety of metagame, we don't see any problem in this. In HOTS, we are going to make mech play more viable so that progamers can use both bio and mech depending on their characteristics.

Recently, the metagame demonstrated in large tournaments seem to be stable. We are speculating that this is due to players abusing certain metagame composition. What are your thoughts on this?

Yes, we are aware that this is happening but we believe that there are still variations among players. For e.g. TvZ, MKP will put more emphasis on bionic to take control of the mid to late game with micro. LG-IM's MVP will favor mechanic in this match up. However, we are aware that many players are using similar build and this issue is very difficult to touch upon in WoL. Without adding new units, we have to fix many other factors to prevent balance from collapsing. Thus we are going to address this issue in HOTS through new units.

What are your thoughts on the rising star "Startale Life"?

Balance patches should be made when a single player dominates, or single build/metagame for a particular race dominates the scene. Currently we expect Zerg to dominate. Although the stats are showing that it's not, if a particular race dominates the other races, we are willing to change some things.

The problem is with Life is that we are not sure if it's Zerg that is getting stronger or is if it is only applicable to Life.
More discussions are necessary to address this issue.

Some of the changes from WoL to HOTS does not have the "impact" that was seen when SCI original was transitioned to BW.


We believe it is impossible to change everything at once. SC1 original was not at the level of making e-sports grow and even BW needed many updates to perfect the balance.

In the early stages of SC2, the balance wasn't so bad. The developers are also trying implant small changes often instead of doing all at once. We have received several feedback indicatingthat HOTS isn't so much different from WoL. As a result, we reworked the design of many new units. For instance, widow mines are not consumable units but they do massive 160 damage. We are trying to change the metagame of HOTS to revolve around the new units.

Why does hellbat in HOTS given a biological armor? Isn't hellbat a mechanical unit?

In BW, firebats were rarely used. We only saw it once in a 100 games for example. We tried to make this unit a core part of the army. The reason why we added a biological armor is to allow hellbat to be used for two different purposes. In Thor/Tank composition, we wanted it to fight as hellion where as in bio force, we wanted it to fight as hellbat. When doing so, we realized that Hellbat could not get healed by medivacs and thus it was useless in terms of tanking. This is why we changed the armor to biological so that it can be healed by medviacs and act similar to marauders.

Another way we are currently thinking is to change the medviac so that it can heal both bio AND mechanic through different healing mechanism. Also we are thinking of preventing hellbats to change back to hellions. The change in armor types during transformation is an issue that needs more research.

There has been lot of balance talks in WoL. How are you going to address this in HOTS? Will we see new types of maps in HOTS?

To fix the balance issues, we initially started with new maps in HOTS. In the end, we think a mixture of both old maps and new maps is essential for balance. That is why we are trying to put 3 most balanced maps from WoL and 5 new maps from HOTS into the beta. It is not final, however.

Team games, especially in 4v4 ,we often see a dominance in pre-arranged team vs random team. How are you going to address this?

Regardless of the teams, the w/l ratio is still 50:50. We are looking into this, however. For instance, if we separate premade teams from random teams, the search time will increase significantly. If we mix them together, players will be stressed out but the games will start sooner. However, non-ranked system is being added, we believe that it is ok to have some stress during ranked ladder games.

Any DLC for SC2 to play SC1 campaigns?

Not bad. I will ask the developers.

Any words on global gateways system?

The battlenet will be similar to D3 where global plays are available. If it was possible, we would implant this right away in the beta. In Korea, there is law against gaming therefore we will release more information later.