It’s a big year for StarCraft II as Blizzard works to reorganize the competitive esports scene. Of course, updates never stop, and StarCraft II players still have plenty of patches on their way.
The latest of those is the patch released today, 4.11.4, which adds a hefty amount of bug fixes, as well as general tweaks and improvements, to the title. There’s quite a bit to it, so we’ll try to hit the most important things here. You can check out the full patch notes here if this tl;dr seems insufficient.
In general, we have a handful of microtransactions made up of cosmetic skins. All previous War Chest skin set bundles are now available for purchase in the Featured section, with four chests available for each race. War Chest 5’s “Classic” unit skins, including the Marine, Hydralisk, and Zealot, are also now up for grabs. Included in War Chest 5 is the Terran Tyrador units, the Zerg Cerberus units, and the Protoss Ihan units.
Other than that, the patch is primarily balance tweaks. There’s a massive number of changes coming to the co-op missions, with changes to Abathur, Alarak, Fenix, Han & Horner, Karax, Kerrigan, Mengsk, Nova, Stukov, Swann, Vorazun, Zagara, and Zeratul all coming in. Most of these are small changes, like decreasing the cost of Zeratul’s Tesseract Cannon or increasing the selection priority of Nova’s Spec Ops Ghost.
A bug has also been fixed to solve an issue that was enabling chat and custom map publishing on accounts that did not meet the requirements to use such features. Additionally, the following changes are coming to the Versus mode:
- Fixed an issue where an Adept’s Phase Shift ability could improperly cancel a Phoenix’s Graviton Beam
- Fixed Battlecruisers failing to fire their weapon when issued a queued Yamato Cannon command
- Fixed issues where enemy Lurkers would fail to attack after being targeted with Neural Parasite
- Fixed an issue where Neural Parasite would interrupt Yamato Cannon if used on a Battlecruiser
- Ultralisks will again receive speed buffs in Acceleration Zones
- Fixed the minerals at the main base of Ephemeron LE so that the closest mineral nodes have higher values than the farther mineral nodes
- New flying versions of Inhibitor and Acceleration Zone Generators
The bulk of the changes are certainly focused on the Co-op missions with 49 changes coming in total. Blizzard will undoubtedly be adding more and more changes as the year goes on, with a constant focus on balance almost always being key. We’ll likely see more changes to the Versus mode as the months go on, but for now, it’s great to see them targetting issues that many may not even have noticed.
