Karune has had another surge of posts on the Battle.net forums, answering questions connected to Marine Shields, Zerg Creep and Xel`Naga Watch Towers.

If life gives you an Overlord dumping his creep on your base, you blow up that Overlord.

Maxed out creep range from one Overlord is a little bigger than the range of a Pylon's power radius, and will take about 15 seconds to reach max range and generally recede within 30 seconds(subject to balance) after the Overlord is destroyed or stops unloading creep.

Nope, Overlords are immobile when they are unloading creep - and I don't think the opponent would appreciate you painting up his base with 'taunts' written in creep either...

Source Battle.net

Yup, the Marines still have upgradable shields, making a huge difference late game against more high damage units. As long as those Marines can survive that initial hit, the Medivac Dropships does an awesome job of bringing them back to full health in no time.

Source: Battle.net

The Xel'Naga Watch Towers do not grant 'detection' of cloaked units, nor does it move around like an Observer. Thus, if that pack of Dark Templars come storming into your base and you have all your probes gathered around that watch tower, it's not going to do you any good...

The Xel'Naga Watch Towers have larger sight range than Observers, but do not offer detection. I definitely wouldn't say they are inferior, as they have crucial uses throughout the game, especially in the earlier tiers. With only a SCV/probe/drone, a player can activate a watch tower, letting you know when the enemy is coming to attack you and with that. This alone, could easily change the outcome of any early skirmish battle that happens.

Source: Battle.net

The development team is still experimenting with several ways to deploy the Nydus Worm. We will hopefully go into more depth on how this process is coming along in the coming Q&As.

Source: Battle.net

cool!

This was a good post.

Shield- I am just curious as to what type of effect that it is going to have on the marines, if it will act like the ultralisk chitnous plating upgrade and boost their defense by 2, or if it's going to give them egg or larva type defense until they croak.

Overlord - pretty much what I was thinking it would be like, haven't seen any pics of the creep puke yet.

Tower- Is that the same thing that, in one of the previous videos, showed a bunch of exclamation marks in the fog of war when the enemy army was approaching their base.

I can't wait for this.

@rbingham917 - Where have you been? The marines get a shield upgrade which equips them with a riot shield that ads 15 health. The xel'naga tower is a neutral tower that reveals an area.

I have only been checking the front page. I'm not much of a forumer. sry

Yummy Yummy Creep...

Good to see that Creep actually out-stretches Pylon width (which was an obvious choice, since Pylon power is instant and easily replaceable, while Creep takes time to expand).

I wonder, would an Overseer's maximum sight be larger than a Xel'Naga Observation Tower?


-Psi

Nope, Overlords are immobile when they are unloading creep - and I don't think the opponent would appreciate you painting up his base with 'taunts' written in creep either...

Way to ruin the fun for me blizzard! :P

Watch towers - first time ive heard about it - now my scv/probe/drone scouts have somewhere else to go in early game other than enemy bases and getting killed, and i wont get rushed so unexpectedly - they're invincible right?

So Marines still have the pussy ass shields? great...

@Tom, Dude you also forgot about the medivac drop ship. Chief blue (Karune) also made some comments about it in the marine shields thread.

http://www.battle.net/forums/thread.aspx?fn=sc2-general&t=1769526&p=1&#post1769526
Scroll down :)

If the Medivac can only heal one unit a time. Then I m a bit worried about this, because they are much bigger than the old medic so having maybe 3 or more of medivacs supporting your infantry could block your view, with them flying over and healing and stuff.

Lets face it 1 medivac can't fully support 20 marines even if they heal much faster than medics. So you still need a couple of medivacs to be effective. Karune said this.

"It currently heals one unit at a time, but at a rate much, much faster than the original Medic."

I know this may be still subjected to balancing but "much, much faster" may mean close to instant healing considering the HP of Terran infantry.

The mechanism of marines surviving the initial hit to be brought back to health in no time sounds more than interesring to me...but still Spartan makes a point about how many medivacs u will be needing besides how quickly is "in no time"...Common Blizz...release a vid to strengthen our faith in the medivac...or bring that faith to a decisive end