[2023] What is the favourite SC2 unit of this team of developers?

From a design perspective, I have two favorites for two different reasons. It's a total coincidence that they're both Zerg units. Please don't read too much into it!

I wasn't on the team during the initial development of WoL, but the Baneling must have been a very controversial unit. In general, I think there's this idea that people don't like using suicide units; it just doesn't follow the common RTS fantasy of building up the most powerful army possible over time. (For similar reasons, Zagara was thought to be a very risky Co-op Commander.) And yes, I know Scourge were a thing in SC1, but the Baneling was designed to be a core unit in SC2, something players are supposed to interact with in nearly every game.

Though there's certainly some controversy about this unit, especially recently, I think overall, this unit turned out beautifully and certainly exceeded my expectations. After all, it's a key component of one of the most beloved interactions in SC2, 4M(Marine, Marauder, Mine, Medivac) vs Mutalisk/Zergling/Baneling.

The Baneling is cool for a lot of reasons. It's got a cool visual design that pops: "green means danger. Avoid this!" And the fact that it rolls instead of walks after an upgrade is wonderful flavor. It doesn't have complicated abilities, which means that both the play and counterplay surrounding them is intuitive and often involves changing up how your units and army moves. It's also a unit that allows players from both sides to show tons of skill.

But what I love most about it is that while it's a volatile unit, each individual explosion is generally not game-ending. That is, for both players and viewers, each individual Baneling is a tense but exciting "oh sh*t" moment, but individual Banelings are generally not game-ending, which means you can have hundreds of these moments in any given game. For similar reasons, I'm particularly drawn to units like Spider Mines or Widow Mines.

Another one of my favorites is the Ravager for two reasons:

1. It was a LotV that was created in order to target some matchup-specific problems, and it did so wonderfully.
2. It did a great job of breaking death-balls, and prevent deathballs on the Zerg side.

First, let's get Force Fields out of the way. Throughout the history of SC2, Force Fields were one of the most complained about interactions. They felt frustrating to deal with since there was limited counterplay outside of "hope your opponent messes up". On the other side, Protoss players felt obliged to Force Field well, because the game was balanced around competent Fore Fields. In addition, Force Fields really played into the deathball nature of Protoss. Because of how Force Fields work, large armies involving Sentries were stronger as one ball rather than split up as two separate balls. And when you made a large Protoss army, you were necessarily encouraged to make a ton of Sentries, which means less gas to tech up, which means 3-base Collosi all-ins. The introduction of Ravagers did well to combat all of that.

A less talked about effect of Ravagers was that they got rid of the mass Roach meta in ZvZ. In both WoL and HotS, unless Mutalisks were involved, many ZvZ games devolved into mass Roach. Ravagers were an accessible unit that broke up these Roach balls as well, and let us get into the dynamic ZvZ mid and late-games we have now.

Ravagers themselves are also not conducive to being massed in a deathball themselves. They have a relatively large unit radius and middling range, which are two anti-deathball traits. And their Corrosive Bile ability decreases in effectiveness as the number of Ravagers increases. Very often, when you get up to the 20 Ravager number, you won't even be able to use all your Biles.

From a design perspective, to identify problems, design targeted solutions to those problem, and then have those targeted solutions work without overly disturbing other parts of the game is the dream, and I think the Ravager is one of the most successful units ever added to the game.