Hello and welcome to the second part of my HotS Zerg Review. I do realize that Heart of the Swarm has been out for a couple of weeks now and many people have been playing it but I also know that there are people who haven’t picked up the game just yet or haven’t really had much time to play, and as I’ve said in the previous articles, this is for you! The point of these is to familiarize new players to the game with the new units and changes which have been made with Heart of the Swarm. If you would like to read the first part of my Zerg review, click here. This second article will deal much more with the changes made to the race as the first one dealt with the new units.

So with the release of Heart of the Swarm, Zerg has receive a significant number of changes that have created much discussion within the community. The first and possibly most radical change was the nerf to the Infestor. Everyone agreed that at the end of Wings of Liberty, the Brood Lord/Infestor composition was not only overpowered but made for incredibly stagnant and boring games. It essentially forced Protoss into ridiculous 2 base all ins to have any chance at winning, which again makes for boring gameplay. It simply boiled down to: will Protoss attack with a seemingly unbeatable army or wait for 20 minutes until Zerg has an unbeatable army… it made no sense. With that in mind, Blizzard really wanted to change the way the Infestor worked, and they have done so.

(DRG knows)

The nerfs come in the form of scaling back the power of Fungal Growth and Infested Terrans. Fungal Growth was changed into a projectile with a speed of 15. Essentially, what this means is that players can now literally see a “fungal” flying through the air and are able to dodge it if they react in time. Many have considered this nerf to be so significant that they have completely discounted the utility of the Infestor. I am not one of those people. While I do find it to be a very serious power reduction, I feel like it still has a strong place in the Zerg composition. The second nerf to the Infestor was made to Infested Terrans. The health of an Infested Terran Egg has been reduced to 70, meaning that 1 Psi Storm has to ability to destroy any Infested Terran Eggs under it, this has helped Protoss deal with them significantly. The other, and perhaps more serious nerf is that Infested Terrans armor and attack no longer scales with Zerg upgrades. This means that, in the late game, Infested Terrans don’t serve as much of a purpose since they simply can’t compete in the battle of upgrades.

Along with the Infestor, probably the other biggest change to the Zerg race was the improvement made to Hydralisks. People have been waiting for this one for some time. In Wings of Liberty, in most cases, Hydralisks were useless because even though they dealt a pretty significant amount of DPS they were never really able to actually do it because of how slow they moved, usually dying before they could get a volley off, especially when facing Colossus. With that in mind, the Muscular Augments upgrade has been added to the Hydralisk Den. The upgrade requires a Lair and increases the movement speed of Hydralisks off creep by 25%. This has created a pretty immense boost in the utility of the unit which is now able to contribute so much more during battles. So much so that Hydralisks are created in almost every matchup and the strength of the Roach/Hydra composition has increased greatly.

They idea with this upgrade is simple. Hydras were dead weight. But Blizzard still saw a place for the unit, so rather than scrap it entirely, they found a way to make it actually fit into the game, and in my opinion, did a great job with this one.

Mutalisks have also had some major changes which have also reshaped the ZvZ matchup which has almost exclusively become Mutalisk wars since the release of HotS. I don’t know if Blizzard has any plans to fix this or even if it needs fixing. Perhaps it will be a meta game change with a rebirth of Infestors, who knows. Regardless, the already very speedy Mutalisk has received a speed boost in Heart of the Swarm, having its speed increased from 3.75 to 4. As a slight point of reference, they are no faster than slow lings on creep which have a speed of 3.83. The other change to Mutalisks which has a lot more to do with their increased usage is the new passive ability granted to them known as “Tissue Regeneration”. This passive increased the health generation of Mutalisks to 1, meaning Mutalisks have a greatly increased utility as even seriously damaged ones can simply wait for a few seconds and come back into battle fully recharged. It’s an interesting change and one that I’m not entirely sure was necessary. However, that isn’t really the point. It does grant the unit and the player much more flexibility which is always a plus.

(Basically every ZvZ)

Other changes to Zerg were only slight tweaks, however, do have a fairly significant impact on various matchups.

Spore Crawlers no longer require an Evolution Chamber. This has made dealing with early Banshee or Dark Templar harassment much easier since even if it goes unscouted can still be dealt with in a relatively quick manner. I’m still undecided as to whether or not this has been a positive change for the game but it certainly does have its merits. It is the only form of detection which doesn’t require Lair tech. An interesting decisions and likely one to stay around.

Burrow and Pneumatized Carapace upgrades now only require Hatchery tech. I think these are some interesting changes and come for good reason. Most of the Zerg changes come at Lair tech or later, so, it would seem that in an effort to make Lair not so dependent, Blizzard allowed for some new build diversity to come out at Hatchery tech. It also allows for scouting of a Lair to reveal slightly more information. After watching a large number of HotS games I think these changes are pretty exciting and definitely good for the game and it will certainly be interesting to see how players adapt with them over the course of the game!

There you have it. These are pretty much all of the major changes to Zerg with Heart of the Swarm. Again, I feel that Blizzard has done an excellent job in raising the skill ceiling of the game and providing for much more exciting gameplay. Only time will tell whether or not these changes will make as strong of an impact as they have in the short term, but I am always watching and waiting to find out.