Starcraft – Do the three races of starcraft 2 HOTS model rock paper scissors

starcraft-2

Each race has distinct differences with infantry and air. Is there such a model that makes one race superior over another? An example would be Terran is better than Zerg which is better than Protoss which beats Terran again.

If you grew up playing Pokemon, this is similar to the type of Pokemon you start out with, fire, water, grass. To apply it to Starcraft 2, we may consider a firebat to be "fire", a zergling to be "grass" and a zealot to be "water". Firebats might win against zerglings, zerglings would be able to swarm zealots, and zealots would just out damage the firebat…

In your experience of the game, have you seen this to exist?

Best Answer

For the moment, the "OP" units (though not game breaking) seem to be the Hellbats and the Tempest. I really feel that it's because they are new and people haven't found a good way to fight them yet (for the same reason voidray collossus was "OP" until zerg found out about fungal growth).

Starcraft 2 is made to be a competitive game, so all races have to be able to play against all races. Blizzard wants most unit in each race arsenal to have a role in most matchups. That is why the changed the reapers in HoTS, that is why the hydras got buffed and that is why the voidrays got changed too.

tldr; no, nothing is game breaking otherwise sc2 would be boring. Blizzard said the mathchups win/loss were pretty close in pro matches in a statement last week about game balance. They know about skytoss but they want to wait before doing any changes.

EDIT: I saw in the comments of the question that sources were asked, so i started doing some ressearch to help with my claims.

Charts of the win/loss: http://www.sc2charts.net/en/edb

Intwerview with Dustin Browder by Frodan: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=382616

race distribution:http://www.sc2ranks.com/stats/league/all/1/all/0/0/0

IAMA with blizz dev team: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/8983614/Reddit_AMA_Full_Transcript-3_6_2013

balance report just before HoTS release: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/8896362/Situation_Report_Heart_of_the_Swarm_Balance-3_4_2013

These are the stats I could find for now.

The race distribution is in WoL because Sc2 ranks have not updated their database with enough HoTS players for it to be reliable for now. Like it has been said in the comments, the balance of the races is a lot about skills (which is why it is so hard to do a perfect balance).

When you lose a game, check the replay, how many workers did you have, what were your upgrades, what was the angle of attack, did your opponent hide expos or tech, etc.