StarCraft 2 Heart Of The Swarm Release Date: March 12 Approaches As Blizzard Addresses Balance Issues In Beta

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is less than a week away, and in a recent post on Battle.net, Blizzard addressed some of the strategy concerns that came about in the game's public beta.

The public beta ended on March 1, and many in the community were not satisfied that Blizzard had fixed all of the issues that had arisen. However, Blizzard is reporting that while it is happy about the overall balance in the game, it's aware of some of the more controversial strategies.

For example, many players believe the use of Medivacs with the Ignite Afterburners upgrade is too difficult to counter. Blizzard though says that learning to defend against new techniques is more difficult than learning to use them.

"Our general thinking on new units and abilities is that using them will always be learned faster than defending against them for obvious reasons," the studio stated. However, "Because we're already seeing some players defend against the new Medivacs extremely well, we definitely want to wait on this feedback to really make sure that it is in fact overpowered before making a change."

A second strategy that raised some concerns was the strength of Protoss air units and their splash damage, especially against the Zerg. While they admit it is a valid strategy, Blizzard is not seeing a balance issue at the pro level. Additionally, while a lot of Protoss players were trying it, "the success rate doesn't seem high enough for us to deem it overpowered."

Blizzard thanked the players who participated in the beta, and promised that it would be keeping a close eye on the game to check for potential imbalances.

"We're always on the lookout for changes in how the game is played, and we track the community's concerns as they come up so that we can adjust our views accordingly," said Blizzard. "We realize that just like with Wings of Liberty, not every player is going to take the game seriously until it goes live, and we'll have to continue to tune Heart of the Swarm after release."

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm will be released March 12.