GitHub - stared/sc2-balance-timeline: All StarCraft 2 balance updates visualized

Never perfect. Perfection goal that changes. Never stops moving. Can chase, cannot catch. — Abathur (hear it)

StarCraft 2 is one of the most balanced games ever - thanks to Blizzard’s pursuit of perfection. It has been over 15 years since the release of Wings of Liberty and over 10 years since the last installment, Legacy of the Void. Yet, balance updates continue to appear, changing how the game plays.

Visual history of StarCraft II multiplayer balance changes (2010–present), by Piotr Migdał.

Live Demo

• All unit changes
• View by race
• Select an era
• View history of balance changes by year
• Changes characterized as:
  • buffs (anything that makes a unit stronger)
  • nerfs (anything that makes a unit weaker)
  • mixed (well, anything that is a double-edged blade)

If it glows, it is clickable. It should also work on mobile.

Data visualization with D3.js, data extraction with LLM (Gemini 3 Pro).

I decided on a unit-first view. So upgrades and similar changes are attributed to the unit. For the same reason, summoned units are assigned to their parent - Locusts to Swarm Host, Infested Terrans to Infestor, Broodlings to Brood Lord (even though they also appear with destroyed Zerg buildings), etc.

Data comes from Blizzard StarCraft II, with a lot of supplemental stuff from Liquipedia (patch list, links to unit pages, and validation checks).

It is a visualization of all balance changes from StarCraft II history.

As of now, there are 49 balance patches.

I only show patches that affect multiplayer balance - excluding all changes for campaign, co-op, bug fixes, and other adjustments which are not directly for typical ranked games.

Also, I didn't include balance for pre-release tests, as they were too rapid, more like a creative process of unit design than something actually released. Also - for some of these changes, original pages might be unavailable. Though, if there is significant demand, I may consider adding beta changes.

There are around 39 beta patches:

• WoL Beta: 0.3.0 - 0.20.0
• HotS Beta: Updates #1-15
• LotV Beta: 2.5.0 - 2.5.5

Pre-LotV patches use "Blizzard Time" (1.4× faster than real time); LotV switched to real-time display, explaining apparent numeric jumps like Stimpack research going from 170s to 121s without a balance patch.

"Game speed altered to match that of real time" in LotV beta preview

No-one lives forever - and it is also true for websites (see my stance on that - if it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown). 15 years is a lot.

Here we get cute graphics from Carbot Animations showing that some patch is no longer aviable.

Most processing happens within Python. The pipeline is as follows:

JSON list of patches → HTML from Blizzard → Parse with LLMs → Validate → JSON → D3

For parsing, LLMs are essential. I first tried typical scripts, but over so many years the Blizzard page structure changed repeatedly. Using classical scraping scripts didn't scale well.

Manual input would work... but it is also why only now I started this project (the idea was old).

I use Gemini 3 Pro via OpenRouter (tested Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2, Gemini 3 Flash — Gemini 3 Pro seems to work the best for this data).

As side note, see my blog post AI for coding is still playing Go, not StarCraft.

For running vis, you need pnpm:

cd visualization
pnpm install
pnpm dev

For parsing and building data, you need Python with uv.

Copy .env.example to .env and add your OPENROUTER_API_KEY.

uv sync
uv run python sc2patches/pipeline/1_download.py
uv run python sc2patches/pipeline/2_parse.py
uv run python sc2patches/pipeline/3_validate.py
uv run python sc2patches/pipeline/4_export_for_viz.py

Most of the development was done with Claude Code and Opus 4.5. This project was "pure vibe coding" - while Opus 4.5 was excellent at execution, Gemini 3 Pro was essential for insights, cleaner code, and Playwright skills.

A key challenge was that LLMs do not know D3.js nearly as well as React. The D3.js transition parts were tricky, often requiring manual intervention.

See my blog post praising Claude Code + Gemini.

├── sc2patches/        # Python package
│   ├── pipeline/      # Main scripts
│   ├── core/          # Library code
│   └── tools/         # Utility scripts
├── data/              # Source URLs, processed JSON
└── visualization/     # Frontend package

MIT by Piotr Migdał - processing code and data viz

StarCraft II and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Unit icons are assets of Blizzard.

I am grateful to Jasmine Otto for valuable feedback on an early draft.