This means the script should be all set in stone, and a big step is underway. Still no news on when the Beta that was announced will be coming out (My guess is late February or mid Spring) though.

At any rate, hope you all had a good Holiday season. We’ll get a new poll up soon. Until then, have fun!

Our Poll of September asked about Heart of The Swarm units as well, and came up with some neat results. We had a tie between New, New and Old, and Old was close too. New units are obviously favored since people are looking forward to trying new things with each race.

The Poll of the Month asks about the new units.

General

- “Audio Fade” under Sound Options has been renamed to Game Volume During Alerts. Its tooltips have also been changed for clarification.
- The fade-in for game sound during alerts changed from .5 seconds to 2 seconds.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed a truncation on specific resolution if the current and maximum supplies are 3 digits.
- Fixed an issue which prevented footprint from being edited in the Footprint Editor.
- Fixed an issue that caused the game to have missing icons and images on low end graphics cards.

Balance

PROTOSS

Forge

- The cost of Upgrade Shields Level 1 has been decreased to 150/150, down from 200/200
- The cost of Upgrade Shields Level 2 has been decreased to 225/225, down from 300/300
- The cost of Upgrade Shields Level 3 has been decreased to 300/300, down from 400/400
- The cost of Upgrade Ground Weapons Level 2 has been decreased to 150/150, down from 175/175
- The cost of Upgrade Ground Weapons Level 3 has been decreased to 200/200, down from 250/250
- The cost of Upgrade Ground Armor Level 2 has been decreased to 150/150, down from 175/175
- The cost of Upgrade Ground Armor Level 3 has been decreased to 200/200, down from 250/250

TERRAN

Ghost

- EMP radius has been decreased from 2 to 1.5

They also have released a new trailer for the game showing off a number of awesome cutscenes and showing the new units mentioned in the previous post in action.

You can watch the trailer below.

There’s also a new trailer for the Blizzard Custom Map, Blizzard DoTA below.

Protoss

- The Nexus is given a new ability called Arc Shield, which grants bonus armor to itself and a Photon Cannon like weapon temporarily. This seems to be primarily to give them a counter against early aggression and cheese.

- The Nexus also gains Mass Recall, which works just like the Mothership’s, allowing the Nexus to instantly warp units in the target area to the Nexus.

- The Carrier and Mothership seem to be removed.

New Units

Tempest

A powerful anti air unit using a splash attack, and with a weak anti ground attack.

Oracle

Ability based harassment unit. It’s Entomb command causes the target Mineral field to not be harvested from temporarily. It’s Preordain ability causes the targeted enemy building to show the units or upgrades it is warping in or researching. And finally, it’s Phase Shift causes a building to temporarily be invulnerable, but cannot operate and will also deny any tech tree paths it grants.

Replicant

Can morph into any non massive unit for any of the races, allowing for quick tactical units to be placed on the field.

Terran

Race Changes

- The Reaper no longer has a second attack to quickly take out enemy buildings, but instead will gain life regeneration.

-  Battlecruisers will be able to gain a new upgrade that gives them a temporary boost in movement speed.

- Hellions are able to transform into a fighter mode that deals cleave like damage which is more effective against upgraded biological units such as Charge-Zealots and Speed-Lings.

- Thors are now changed so that you can only have one at a time. It is however a much more powerful Thor, with plenty more HP and a strong new anti ground attack. It does however lose its anti air weapon.

- Ghost’s Cloak is now changed so that it is no longer able to be turned off and on within a moments notice. It instead can be used for a specified amount of time and if used strategically can help save Energy.

New Units

Shredder

A new unit that will deal Area of Effect damage to all enemies nearby, but disables itself if a friendly unit is in range.

Warhound

A Goliath like unit that has a powerful anti air weapon. It’s anti ground weapon is weak, but is somewhat effective against armored units.

Zerg

Race Changes

- The Corruptor loses its Corruption ability and gains a Siphon, which damages the targeted building dealing damage and gives resources to the Zerg player.

- Ultralisks gain a Burrow Charge like ability, allowing them to close in on enemies from underground easily.

- Hydralisks gain a new upgrade to move faster when not on creep.

- Banelings can now move while burrowed, allowing better ambush attacks on enemies.

- The Overseer is removed from the game.

New Units

Viper

The Viper is a new support unit that has 3 new abilities. Blinding Cloud acts like the Defiler’s Dark Swarm, causes all units in the Cloud’s area to only be able to attack at melee range. Abduct allows the Viper to pull the target unit to the location of the Viper, allowing you to drag enemies into dangerous areas. They also gain a one per Viper ability called Ocular Parasite, which acts like Parasite from the original granting permanent shared vision of the target enemy unit.

Swarm Host

Has no attack when above ground, but when Burrowed releases Locusts, a small new unit that acts as a Broodling to pound on enemies and force them to get detection before being overrun.

They announced a new WoW expansion (big surprise), details on Diablo III’s Collector’s edition, and more important for us, details on a couple of new units from Heart of The Swarm.

The two new campaign units detailed are the Viper, a aerial spell caster with 3 new abilities and a presumed Detection passive ability. While I do not have the details on the other two abilities, one of them is Ocular Parasite. It is assumed to be the same Parasite ability used by the Queen in the original game, giving players shared vision of the targeted enemy unit.

The second unit is the Swarm Host, a unit that is only effective when burrowed (like the Lurker) that continuously spawns weak units to wear down an enemy’s defense and keep them pinned down.

It has also been announced that the Overseer will be cut from HoTS’s Multiplayer unit roster for the Zerg, being replaced by the previously mentioned Viper unit as the Zerg Detector.

The site is a little late on the last two patch notes. I will get those posted up today or tomorrow.

Enjoy the nice day!

First off, at the Gamescon 2011 event in Europe next month, Blizzard plans to have a playable version of Heart of The Swarm there for gamers to try out. We’re betting it will be about the same progress as last time we got word on things or maybe a couple more missions.

There has also been a new gameplay video for the two campaign missions found on the web.

For Wings of Liberty, we will be seeing new maps on the ladder soon as Ladder Season 2 comes to a close. The leagues are already locked, but you can still try to boost your MMR (Matchmaking Rating) or get to the top of your division. The ladder reset will be coming (along with the usual temporary downtime for the online servers) on Tuesday, July 26th. With the new ladder season, North America will now be linked with Latin America, increasing the player pool.

As for our polls, here are the results from last time. Almost the same amount of people buying the regular game will be buying the Collector’s Edition which is surprising.

The newest poll asks about the new campaign style for Heart of The Swarm. Some people like the decision of having Kerrigan as a hero unit that stays with you, while others prefer the regular style of solely focusing on your army to accomplish objectives.

The new poll will run until September since it started late.

Personally I’m really looking forward to the different evolutions of your units. Sounds like you should be able to have a lot of fun with these.

We’re looking forward to 2011 as Wings of Liberty’s content grows (maps and an upcoming content patch) and Heart of The Swarm looms at the last part of the year.

Speaking of content from Wings of Liberty, our last poll asked what you guys thought about the maps that are on Battle.net right now.

People do seem impressed with the quality at least. And that speaks a lot to how much the community has been able to do with the full editor over the last 5 months.

And we hope you have fun with StarCraft again this year as well!