Blizzard Developer Blog Takes A Look At Balancing  | read this item

When it comes to competitive gaming on any level, it seems that there are always imbalances in one way or another.  Well, Blizzard Lead Developer Dustin Browder is still concerned about how Starcraft 2 Zerg players are faring in the Ladder.  This should come as a sigh of relief to many Zerg players that felt the changes brought in Starcraft 2 Patch 1.1 didn’t do quite enough to bring them up to the level of the Terran and Protoss.

Browder’s concern deals with the very early rushes that still plague the Zerg.  In particular, the Reaper Rush still shows a great deal of ability of knocking out a Zerg player before they have a shot at getting setup.  Well, it looks like in the next patch we may see a severe nerfing for Reaper rushes.

• The Barracks are going to require a Supply Depot, which will impact a lot of early terran reaper pushes.
• The reaper speed upgrade will require the Factory, which is meant to weaken a lot of the early terran reaper attacks that dominate so many matches, especially in team games.

These changes effectively removes any sort of Reaper Rush. The traditional order for a Reaper Rush simply went Barracks, Tech Lab, and then Reapers and Reaper Speed concurrently. With these changes, the new order will be more like this. Supply Depot, Barracks, Tech Lab, Reapers, Factory, Reaper Speed. In the current venue of Reaper usage, this may remove the Reaper completely from common play.

While these changes are meant to blunt the Reaper rush, the Supply Depot change will certainly effect all Terran early game play. In addition to slowing any attempted Reaper Rush Considerably, it also slows the ability of a Terran player to wall off and produce defensive units. This means that defensive marines will be produced up to 30 seconds later. Which is now the main concern of Terran players.

In addition to the changes that are clearly meant for Reaper Rushes, there were some additional plans mentioned for upcoming patches.  A Roach range buff that is meant to help prevent a large Roach group from getting in their own way by allowing them to not have to create such a small attack circle to get at their targets.  A nerf to Stalkers vs Zerg Fungal Growth that will prevent them from Blinking away.  Finally, a Zerg building health boost meant to help protect tech buildings.

• We’re increasing roach range. This will allow roaches to be more effective in large groups, giving the zerg more options in the mid to end game.
• Fungal Growth will now prevent Blink, which will give zerg a way to stop endlessly Blinking stalkers which can be very challenging to deal with in large numbers.
• We’re making a number of increases to the health of zerg buildings, which will make the very vulnerable zerg technology structures more resistant to raids. We don’t expect these hit point changes to have a super significant impact on the game, but the current numbers felt way too low.

Source: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/882511

There are certainly a lot of controversial plans coming up for future patches. What do you guys think of them? How can they be improved upon?