Throughout Heart of the Swarm Blizzard took a more laid-back approach to balancing, hoping beyond hope that the Starcraft 2 community will eventually figure out how to counter each other and create a sort of equilibrium. Unfortunately for everyone, the result of this little experiment was a metagame where each match took well over 30 minutes as players huddled in their respective bases, afraid to leave until they had their perfect deathball at the ready.

Thankfully, Blizzard's balancing approach in Legacy of the Void seems to be much more hands-on as they have just announced an absolute ton of new changes coming to the test realms. And best of all, they've taken the time and effort to demonstrate what each of these changes is going to result in, as well as what the intended goal is.

You can read all about these various adjustments by heading over to the Blizzard blog, but to me as a Protoss player there is one little addition that stands far above the rest - the Dark Templars can now be upgraded with blink:

"We first want to mention that this is a highly experimental change, and we admittedly have a low degree of confidence of it making it into the live game. We also want to point out that we clearly don’t want to buff Dark Templars at the stage which they first enter the game, so we’re introducing an upgrade that will come into play after a Dark Templar Shrine has been completed for some time.

With that said, we’d like to add an ability with the goal of seeing if player skill using Dark Templars can be emphasized, even after the point when detection becomes more widely available.

New Ability: Shadow Stride

• Allows the Dark Templar to teleport a short distance.

• Research from Dark Shrine.

150/150 cost.

121 research time.

• Cooldown of 21 seconds.

• Creates a visible smoke-effect upon being cast."

Do keep in mind, however, that all of these changes are still highly experimental, and as such they might not make it to the live servers in this shape and form, or even at all. As for the release date, the current plan is for this set of balance adjustments to appear right after the tournament season ends in November, so there should be plenty of time to test out the various "new" units and see what exactly breaks.

Either way, this is some exciting stuff and hopefully the sort of boost Starcraft 2 needs in order to return to the spotlight once more.