BlizzCon 2011: Blizzard Announces Big Things for Diablo, World of Warcraft, and StarCraft

BlizzCon 2011: Heart of the Swarm & DOTA

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm
Heart of the Swarm the next expansion pack for StarCraft II was also announced looks like a real game changer. This expansion continues the Wings of Liberty story line but focuses on Kerrigan, the former Queen of Blades. In campaign mode, you basically play the Zerg race and will need to complete about 20 missions which will help you learn how to play in multiplayer mode. This is where the real changes take place and we cant wait to see how players will respond to the new units and abilities that Heart of the Swarm is going to offer.

Here is the new trailer that was released during BlizzCon 2010:

Protoss

• Tempest The carrier is out for Protoss and this new capital ship is the replacement which features AOE Anti-air and a standard ground attack. Four of these ships destroyed a huge pack of mutalisks in the demo.

• Oracle This new unit is a harassment unit which can entomb or block things from being used. The demo showed mine fields being entomb denying SCVs from mining minerals. It can also be used to block structures from functioning like missile turrets or factories.

• Replicant This new unit can transform itself into any non-massive unit such as a Siege Tank or an Infestor. We expect to see Protoss use this unit a lot in upcoming tournaments.

Terran

• Shredder This new Terran unit has no attack in mobile form but can do area-effect-damage to both ground and air units in stationary mode. Mainly used to control the battle field, it could also be used to protect a Terrans base while attacking. The one down sized to this unit is that the weapon shuts down if a friendly unit goes into its field.

• Warhound This new unit is basically a scaled down Thor. Since it is smaller it moves faster, but lost a lot of damage and range compared to the Thor.

• Thor (Modified) This is the original Thor on a bigger scale, more hit points and more damage. The Thor lost its anti-air capability for a siege-tank like mode which can also do a lot of damage. The one drawback is that you can only have one of these.

Zerg

• Viper This new flying unit for Zerg has three abilities, Blinding Cloud, Abduct and Ocular Parasite. Blinding Cloud temporarily reduces the attack range of all enemy ground units. Abduct can physically pull an enemy unit to the Vipers location. The demo should a Viper pulling a Colossus to its location so the ground units could destroy it. Ocular Parasite allows a friendly non-massive unit to become detector by melding its eye stalk to that unit.

• Swarm Host is a slow moving ground unit that can burrow and spawn a continuous stream of Locusts that attack enemy units. This is like a Terran Siege Tank except that this unit cannot attack while mobile.

StarCraft II: DOTA
DOTA is a new official custom game for StarCraft II inspired by Defense of the Ancients custom map for Warcraft III. This team based competitive game allows players to pick a hero and fight as a team against other players. We got a chance to play this game and even though we didn’t know what we were doing, we still ended up doing pretty good. This game seems to be mix between World of Warcrafts battlegrounds, Warcraft III play style and some StarCraft II units thrown in for good measure. Our team lost the game, but the experience made us want to go back home a play the current version of DOTA.