Happy New Year everyone! We have a short update this week, but there are a few things we wanted to bring up or respond to.
Hydralisks
It’s looking like it would be good to do a small buff to Hydralisks, and a health buff seems like the first step we should try. Let’s start discussing a +10 health to hydralisks, and go from there. Let’s discuss if we should do a base Hydra health buff or an upgrade that buffs the health.
Tournaments and balance
Tournaments have started going this year, so we should look for any “absolute must” balance changes that need to happen. We definitely see the concerns such as early/mid game PvT right now, but we’d like to strike a good balance between giving players enough time to adjust to new strategies vs. stepping in to make balance changes.
Map Pool
We also noticed that there were many discussions around how we picked the maps for GSL, and wanted to clear up this misunderstanding. GSL has been picking what is right for their own map pool for a long time now, and we have no intention of forcing GSL to use specific maps including any of the ladder maps. We believe GSL is a strong partner that really knows the Korean pro scene well, and are confident that they can and will make the right calls on the map choices in order to make the GSL as awesome as possible.
And also to note, we’re not going to be carrying over the off-season maps into this season. The new maps that we announced last month will go into Season 1 in less than 2 weeks.
As we’ve discussed before, we will be going with all new community maps and cut the oldest maps from the pool before the off season pool. So the actual maps will be:
(2)ApotheosisLE
(2)NewGettysburgLE
(2)GalacticProcessLE
(2)AbyssalReefLE
(2)PaladinoTerminalLE
(2)ProximaStationLE
(4)HonorgroundsLE
We hope you enjoy the new map pool, and be sure to check out GSL today which is starting in just a few hours!
