Official TBA StarCraft II Thread

[Sinitron]

[spoiler]still, you'd expect them to like... not just hand it over to him or whatever

where did his armor go?[/spoiler]

[rtil]

now here's a good queen of blades

[sev]

[spoiler]when jim is announced dead, they show his armor with a bullet through the visor - how would he get it back for the final mission?[/spoiler]

[spoiler]in the news broadcast it was clearly photoshopped![/spoiler]

[sev]

also [spoiler]izsha is cute[/spoiler] just saiyan

[psi43]

also [spoiler]izsha is cute[/spoiler] just saiyan

Agreed, totally. I really hope that rtil feels like drawing her sometime in the future, cause I think the way she looks match his drawing style quite well.

Oh and I don't think that you need to put the existence of Izsha into spoiler tags, since she's being mentioned in books and was on screenshots/videos that were released prior to HotS.

Anyways, I created a group called TheBackAlleys on SC II:HotS, which I think is also accessible via WoL.
The purpose of that group would basically just be to have a group chat to discuss shit and more importantly, to play together. The first use of that group will probably occur during that little HotS party that is planned for the weekend.

To join, click the "Groups and Clans" button (to the right of the button for your friendlist), click on "Find" and search for TheBackAlleys. When I created the group, I put it to private but realized that I can only invite people who are currently online, so for the time being (until everyone joined), it'll be public.
As of now, Sinister, Crabarms and I are in the group.
I offered Horst to join the group as well, as a friend of TBA, and he said yes. Then he went offline. I'll be adding him later on.

TLDR;
I made a TheBackAlleys group on Starcraft II. It's public, so just go and search for it and join.

ps. rtil, if you want me to transfer the owner status to you, feel free to ask and I'll be happy to do that.

[Crabarms]

[spoiler]I find it aggravating how often Izsha puts  tentacle to her shoulder every time she is talking.
[/spoiler]


major spoilers do not read.
[spoiler]

I was laughing at the part where Kerrigan busts out Raynor, it was just silly. Then the cliche fire at the wall and then Raynors like I'm through with you.
Really hate how obsessive Raynor has become.

On the last mission now, got Kerrigan to 70, not too bad to do the objectives on brutal just annoying finding a good time to do them without getting base overrun.
Can't stand Jim in this mission.


Spawn leviathan is pretty fun, didn't care too much for drop pods. Apocalypse is pretty boring and reminds me of a slightly larger nuke.
[/spoiler]

Pretty good expansion and do not regret buying it.

[psi43]

jor spoilers do not read.
[spoiler]

I was laughing at the part where Kerrigan busts out Raynor, it was just silly. Then the cliche fire at the wall and then Raynors like I'm through with you.
Really hate how obsessive Raynor has become.

On the last mission now, got Kerrigan to 70, not too bad to do the objectives on brutal just annoying finding a good time to do them without getting base overrun.
Can't stand Jim in this mission.


Spawn leviathan is pretty fun, didn't care too much for drop pods. Apocalypse is pretty boring and reminds me of a slightly larger nuke.
[/spoiler]

Pretty good expansion and do not regret buying it.

[spoiler]The shooting at the wall thing actually has a somewhat solid explanation. Raynor is angry at that point and he knows what Kerrigan is capable of doing as the queen of blades, he wants to kill her to stop her entire charade and save the universe from her, but at the same time he knows that the universe wouldn't be safe without her (from WoL), which leads to him firing the gun in blind anger anyways.
I agree that it's cliché but if you look beneath it and try to understand it correctly, it's not an unreasonable way to act in my opinion.

Regarding her Apocalypse skill, it sucks. It's not nearly as effective as either the drop-pods or the leviathan.
[/spoiler]

[rtil]

jor spoilers do not read.
[spoiler]

I was laughing at the part where Kerrigan busts out Raynor, it was just silly. Then the cliche fire at the wall and then Raynors like I'm through with you.
Really hate how obsessive Raynor has become.

On the last mission now, got Kerrigan to 70, not too bad to do the objectives on brutal just annoying finding a good time to do them without getting base overrun.
Can't stand Jim in this mission.


Spawn leviathan is pretty fun, didn't care too much for drop pods. Apocalypse is pretty boring and reminds me of a slightly larger nuke.
[/spoiler]

Pretty good expansion and do not regret buying it.

[spoiler]The shooting at the wall thing actually has a somewhat solid explanation. Raynor is angry at that point and he knows what Kerrigan is capable of doing as the queen of blades, he wants to kill her to stop her entire charade and save the universe from her, but at the same time he knows that the universe wouldn't be safe without her (from WoL), which leads to him firing the gun in blind anger anyways.
I agree that it's cliché but if you look beneath it and try to understand it correctly, it's not an unreasonable way to act in my opinion.

Regarding her Apocalypse skill, it sucks. It's not nearly as effective as either the drop-pods or the leviathan.
[/spoiler]

just beat the campaign on brutal tonight.
[spoiler]also i would imagine  that jim is most upset at the fact he spent a lot of time and effort using the artifact to bring sarah back to her human form, only to lose her weeks later, hang out in a prison cell for a while only to see her again back as the queen of blades. it's like he did all that for nothing, and she was always destined to be the queen of blades no matter what he did. i'm sure he will go back to being a raging alcoholic.

i was glad to not see a lot of raynor in this expansion. i enjoyed playing as kerrigan and the story was a lot darker than the first which i liked. my favorite moment was definitely the fight with narud and kerrigan. you could really tell that kerrigan is so angry at the fact that she has lost her chance at ever having a normal life, and it's all arcturus' fault.

i'd like to know what exactly she did to arcturus when she killed him. it seemed like she maybe had used her psionic power to make him feel the pain of all her memories or something, right before he died. i actually thought that maybe she would make him live in some kind of state of permanent suffering , until he exploded.

so now we wait for LotV, and dark voice didn't say a damn thing during HotS. curious.

overall i really enjoyed the campaign, i liked it better than WoL. they touched on a few things i hoped they would. and my most abused unit goes to roachling spawning roaches. the roachlings confused the hell out of the AI and i loved it. and kerrigan's unit AoE buff ability was awesome, as well as spawning leviathans.[/spoiler]

[psi43]

jor spoilers do not read.
[spoiler]

I was laughing at the part where Kerrigan busts out Raynor, it was just silly. Then the cliche fire at the wall and then Raynors like I'm through with you.
Really hate how obsessive Raynor has become.

On the last mission now, got Kerrigan to 70, not too bad to do the objectives on brutal just annoying finding a good time to do them without getting base overrun.
Can't stand Jim in this mission.


Spawn leviathan is pretty fun, didn't care too much for drop pods. Apocalypse is pretty boring and reminds me of a slightly larger nuke.
[/spoiler]

Pretty good expansion and do not regret buying it.

[spoiler]The shooting at the wall thing actually has a somewhat solid explanation. Raynor is angry at that point and he knows what Kerrigan is capable of doing as the queen of blades, he wants to kill her to stop her entire charade and save the universe from her, but at the same time he knows that the universe wouldn't be safe without her (from WoL), which leads to him firing the gun in blind anger anyways.
I agree that it's cliché but if you look beneath it and try to understand it correctly, it's not an unreasonable way to act in my opinion.

Regarding her Apocalypse skill, it sucks. It's not nearly as effective as either the drop-pods or the leviathan.
[/spoiler]

just beat the campaign on brutal tonight.
[spoiler]also i would imagine  that jim is most upset at the fact he spent a lot of time and effort using the artifact to bring sarah back to her human form, only to lose her weeks later, hang out in a prison cell for a while only to see her again back as the queen of blades. it's like he did all that for nothing, and she was always destined to be the queen of blades no matter what he did. i'm sure he will go back to being a raging alcoholic.

i was glad to not see a lot of raynor in this expansion. i enjoyed playing as kerrigan and the story was a lot darker than the first which i liked. my favorite moment was definitely the fight with narud and kerrigan. you could really tell that kerrigan is so angry at the fact that she has lost her chance at ever having a normal life, and it's all arcturus' fault.

i'd like to know what exactly she did to arcturus when she killed him. it seemed like she maybe had used her psionic power to make him feel the pain of all her memories or something, right before he died. i actually thought that maybe she would make him live in some kind of state of permanent suffering , until he exploded.

so now we wait for LotV, and dark voice didn't say a damn thing during HotS. curious.

overall i really enjoyed the campaign, i liked it better than WoL. they touched on a few things i hoped they would. and my most abused unit goes to roachling spawning roaches. the roachlings confused the hell out of the AI and i loved it. and kerrigan's unit AoE buff ability was awesome, as well as spawning leviathans.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]
Oh yeah, seeing Kerrigan having turned back into the Queen of Blades (on a visual level only though) probably made Jim flip the shit. To him, seeing her like that again means that everything he did - like killing his best friend Tychus - was for nothing.
He probably doesn't understand that Kerrigan once again looks like the Queen of Blades and is as powerful (or more powerful) as she used to be. I'd assume that he doesn't even realize that Kerrigan may be the Queen of Blades again, but is still Kerrigan inside and in full control.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but yeah, the campaign is a lot darker. Not just in comparison to Wings of Liberty but also in comparison to a lot of other games (not even just limited to RTS games). If you look at the big picture of the campaign, what the goal is from the very beginning up to the very end, you'll notice that it's all about getting your revenge on Mengsk. Now while the whole "getting revenge" theme is a well explored concept in games nowadays, HotS does it differently. Kerrigan isn't the kind of character that tries to do good. She doesn't give two shits about who she's stepping on until the last 2 missions. She's not necessarily an anti-hero either, because she is the one who has been wronged and although she wants to kill Mengsk for mainly her own, selfish reasons, going after Mengsk would still make sense even with no plans of revenge at all. Simply because Mengsk is exploiting everything to his will.

But yeah, in short, I haven't seen any other game ever that invokes this weird sort of incentive to engage the player into moving the story along. Let's face it, all in all, Sarah is a damaged person (and has been since her childhood), but you still sympathize with her, as well as understanding her actions.
I personally haven't found myself disagreeing with any action Sarah took throughout the campaign, they were reasonably laid out.

As for her killing Megsk, I'm assuming that it was a nicely animated version of the Kinetic Blast. It's pretty much her key-move attack in Heart of the Swarm I guess. Since it wasn't explained at all, I doubt it would've been something cooler than a simple Kinetic Blast. Oh and of course, using Kinetic Blast on the battlefield makes your enemies pop like der inflatable Führer, much like Mengsk did.
But it definitely looked cool.

What you say about the dark voice not having any screen-time in Heart of the Swarm is true. I've been wondering about that as well, until I realized that "The Voice" wasn't even in Wings of Liberty's timeline. The voice was only there in the future mission where the Protoss say "aw man we shouldn't have sacked Kerrigan".
What I am assuming is that Dr.Nurad prepared for the return of the dark voice in the facility where you end up fighting him. He even tells you about something that has awakened. I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure that that's when the Dark Voice enters the universe.

But yeah, as I said before, I also enjoyed the HotS campaign a lot more than the one of Wings of Liberty. It was more straight forward, all missions working towards 2 big goals (1. Revenge on Mengsk, 2. Creating a new collective Swarm that will eventually be run by Zagara in the future).

While some of the missions were quite story-breaking for me* - more-so than in Wings of Liberty I may add - they were still more enjoyable gameplay-wise than the WoL missions.

(*The best example is the mission with General Warfield. Warfield is supposed to be a great strategist who has been able to win battles that were deemed to be lost causes. He won them because he was able to heavily outplay the opponent. In the mission where you're invading the Fortress on Char through the bone yard canal or what it was though.. "Send a huge battlecruiser.. oh it was destroyed.. send another one! Also destroyed? Hm. Third time's the charm.. uh.. well apparently not, also kaput.. send another one!" bla bla bla.
The notion that this great general who won many battles through strategy would send 7 (was it 7?) big ships down the same tunnel again and again, watching them being destroyed and not changing his tactics in the slightest, until he can hear Zerglings head-butting his front door. I'm not sure about everyone else, but it just didn't sit well with me. There should have been at least some variations each time, that would've made that Warfield character they built up during WoL look less like a tool.
That being said, the mission itself was still fun to play on a gameplay level. )

[/spoiler]

[rtil]

i didn't find anything about the missions to be inconsistent with the plot. missions have to be linear for gameplay reasons. if you look at other missions like you did with that one, you'd quickly find that most of your enemies are not all that intelligent - there are things they could have done differently to make your job much harder or even impossible. for example, in the mission where [spoiler] the protoss are trying to send the ships to aiur to alert their people [/spoiler], the go in a straight line directly towards them every time. now i know the map didn't accomodate for this, but it easily could have .. why didn't they go around, or stay as far away from the swarm until they knew they could advance? why did they barely send any escorts with the first few ships, even on brutal? these ships were invaluable to their plans, yet they constantly sent them basically right over your own turf every single time. then their final master super op grand strategy was two send not one, but two at a time, and one had a mothership.

it's not really fair to look at gameplay and criticize it for not fitting in nicely with how it might play out in a cinematic or a book. because first and foremost, the missions have to be fun. you can use your imagination to fill in the gaps.

[cipher]

i didn't get why you didn't just destroying the things they were trying to fly into to begin with

[rtil]

kerrigan explained why they couldn't do that at the beginning. [spoiler] if they were destroyed, aiur would be alerted to their destruction, know something was wrong, and come to their aid. the whole point was to keep aiur in the dark about what was going on on the planet[/spoiler]

[cipher]

oh

[Sinitron]

[spoiler]alerting aiur would probably benefit the zerg as they overran it years ago, it was shakuras and the 'golden fleet' they wanted to keep unaware[/spoiler]

[Sinitron]

but lets be serious now, hasn't anyone who bothers reading this thread played through the campaign already anyway?

[rtil]

i suppose

[Sinitron]

[sev]

he also nuked his own mules twice. hilariously he still won that series 3-1

[zwimmy]

LMFAO

[rtil]

i like how the nuke threw around that ultralisk carcass