I'm sad. Seriously. The Mothership in Starcraft 2 is the god unit for the Protoss, and the only unit that when it comes out, everyone oohs and ahhs. Even commentators that have seen thousands of pro games see the tech pattern develop during a pro game and wonder "wait, what in the world?" and about mess their pants in excitement when the Mothership starts production.
Example of what I'm talking about (Fast forward to around 8:15):
So, here you have a single unit in your game that causes so much excitement even among people that have seen basically everything within the game. Breaking it out is intense, requires a skillful player and watching it go to work is nothing short of a pleasure.
In terms of fairness, the Mothership takes forever to research, tons of resources to build, and requires a skilled player to play out of his mind in order to make it work well because of how handicapped they are by spending time/money on the Mothership itself instead of other army units.
As you might have seen, a pro Protoss player named KiwiKaki was the ambassador of the Mothership coming into competitive play in Starcraft 2. And he didn't just make it work, he made people look silly with it. His desired strategy was ultimately dubbed the Archon Toilet, in which he'd throw down a vortex on the enemy army, wait for them to run their entire army inside, throw in a few Archons and the enemy army would come out only as debris and entrails, while suffering little or no casualties.
Bringing out a Mothership in competitive play is the single-most exciting play in Starcraft 2, and trumps anything anybody else does, by far. It's rare, and only a few players in the world on the highest tier make the Mothership work.
So what does Blizzard to about it in a recent patch? They kill her! Yes, that's right! This footage you see will be the last of the Mothership being put to use on a pro level, only because the patch will make the Mothership virtually worthless. They are making the vortex a tool in which whatever units that run in there will now have an immense advantage while coming out of the vortex because they will be immune to damage but still able to attack. How does this help the Protoss player now? Maybe marginally, but it's certainly not worth the investment anymore. Goodbye Mothership. Goodbye excitement and something working well that is totally unexpected. Goodbye variety. And goodbye to my favorite pro player's signature build.
They deemed that the Archon Toilet is too powerful, but you know what, (surprise surprise) I disagree. The Archon Toilet is too powerful if the enemy is dumb and reacts to a Mothership incorrectly.
Here's the wrong way to react (fast forward to 16:30.. and yes, this is KiwiKaki breaking this out on an unsuspecting enemy, even though it's listed as AtheneWins, a friend's account):
What the Zerg player does is over-extend his most powerful units, they get vortexed, and he decides "hey, instead of fighting without my most powerful units, I'll just run into the vortex and fight when everybody pops out!". Wrong. As you can see, his army gets butchered. He loses his entire army in less than a second.
Is it powerful? Yes. But is it too powerful? Well, no! He reacted the exact wrong way you want to react to a situation like that, and he paid the price. How is that any different to reacting incorrectly to any other situation? One devastating, wrong reaction (especially at the highest tech in the game) should end the game if the two players are of high skill. I don't see how this is an exception to that rule, or a build that is supposedly so overpowered that it'll never lose when more people start to use it.
The correct way to react to the Mothership is:
1 - Scout. It's obvious that the way to win most games is to scout what your opponent is doing, and react accordingly. If you see a 1 Stargate, a Fleet Beacon coming up, and you don't see a large ground army around the 12 minute mark, what else are they going to get? Build strong anti-air and put as much pressure on the Protoss player as possible to hopefully break them down before the Mothership pops out. He's already spent a ridiculous amount of resources working on that Mothership, and the Mothership build time is really long. If you're not actively scouting and not making use of the information you get, it's your own dumb fault if you get owned by it.
2 - Play smart. If you see a Mothership floating around, you can bet there's an army underneath it. If you can't deal with a potential vortex, flee. Make units that will deal with the Mothership (Viking, Corrupter) and make her waste the vortex on units that really won't do much in the main fight anyway. If they've spent that much on a Mothership, they'll have an inferior ground army to what you should have. And if their army is better than yours, guess whose fault that is!? YOURS!
3 - Don't run into the vortex. Seriously, you have to be an idiot to do so. Cut your losses, rebuild and defend appropriately. Running your entire army in there puts you at risk of storms, colossus, archons and terrible positioning.
I've even seen other pro players break out the Mothership and actually lost because of it. I've done it myself. It's a hard unit to control, which is what makes KiwiKaki's use of it so good. I've even seen people battle KiwiKaki to a standstill with a Mothership on the field for almost an hour, then make a mistake and lose the game.
It's not as if once a Mothership is on the field, it's game over. And the situation needs to be right to pull a Mothership out. You need to be experiencing little or no pressure, have a great rush distance and get off to a great start. Mind games are often going on between the two players and only if the opponent reacts the way the Protoss player wants them to will he start teching to a Mothership.
After the patch, the Mothership's greatest use will be gone. The vortex will, at best, be an offensive ability or some weird way to cancel out any positioning advantage an enemy army might have had. But without her greatest skill, would you rather have that almost 3 minutes and 1000/1000 resource investment to use on army units, or a retarded arbiter knockoff? The answer is obvious.
In summary, boo! Bring the Mothership back!
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