Blizzard isn't done with Starcraft 2 yet, and it seems committed to big changes

New Starcraft 2 patch notes buff Zerg and nerf Protoss, with Blizzard standing firm on its dramatic starting worker change on the PTR.

Whoever at Blizzard has been left in charge of Starcraft 2 balance is continuing to firmly shake the meta with wild abandon. May's sudden, dramatic overhaul threw the RTS game into chaos, led by the most significant change to overall match pacing we've seen since the Legacy of the Void expansion launched in 2015. Fortunately, the developers with access to the PTR keys haven't walked away yet - in fact, a second set of patch notes has just arrived, and they seem committed to finding a sweet spot in this new world.

"Thank you everyone who participated and provided feedback during PTR 1," the Starcraft 2 team writes. "We have made adjustments based on your feedback and we have also updated the map pool based on community requests." The biggest and most fundamental change - the shift from 12 starting workers to just eight - remains present and correct. The balance adjustments here are designed to hone in on the new meta that change has spawned, rather than revert things back to the old ways.

Zerg gets some welcome early game buffs. The Larva spawn rate has been increased from 10.7 seconds to nine, demonstrating a continued willingness on Blizzard's part to treat nothing as sacred or immune to change. The mineral cost of Queens has been lowered from 175 to 150, and the speed of Overlords has been increased from their PTR 1 pace to give them a better chance at staying alive. Terrans, meanwhile, face a small Ghost nerf, with a reduction in both their damage and move speed.

Protoss, which saw the most dramatic redesign, has been nerfed. The Warpgate Research upgrade has been moved back from the Gateway to its original position on the Cybernetics Core, but the transformation cost of individual Gateways into Warpgates has been lowered from 50/50 to 25/25. The Shield Battery's energy is now always set to 75, rather than 100 inside Nexus fields and 50 outside them, meaning positioning matters less.

Unit warp-in time has been slowed from three seconds to four, whereas the production time boost on regular Gateways from researching Warpgates is up from 35% to 40%. That means yet more homework for Protoss players, as there's now even more to consider when deciding if and when you should transform your Gateways.

For now, Blizzard appears to be sticking with its plan to shake up the early game with the new, lower worker count. That particular move has proved somewhat divisive, I can understand why. The players who have actually stuck with the game throughout a decade of relative consistency have done so because there's a comfort to learning and implementing those strategies. It might have got me to reinstall, but should that take priority over catering to the dedicated audience that were still happily playing? I don't have a good answer.

To have the rug pulled out from under you just for the sake of change can be jarring, unless Blizzard has a plan to follow these changes up with something more dramatic. If it does, we'll probably hear about it at BlizzCon in September, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that. I will, however, get back to figuring out my new build orders.