Widow mine

The widow mine is a factory-built terran-designed explosive device. It's a suicidal unit that can attack ground and air units. It can be built from a reactor-attached factory.

The widow mine burrows and waits for enemy units to approach. It then emerges, attaching itself to a unit. It explodes immediately. The blast does not damage other widow mines. Widow mines are better suited to taking out large, powerful units as opposed to masses of weaker ones, at least in regards to cost effectiveness.

It takes 2 seconds to burrow, enough for the enemy to try to destroy it before activated. The targeted unit can be detached from the group to avoid more casualties.

The ability is autocast and can be turned on or off in both activated and deactivated modes.

Widow mines do not operate well in conjunction with siege tanks&mdash;if a widow mine attatches itself to a unit and that unit is killed before detonation, the widow mine is destroyed as well.

Abilities
Unstable Payload is an autocast ability that automatically activates when a widow mine is burrowed, and cannot be turned off unless the widow mine unborrows. This ability causes the widow mine to fire a missile at a target within 5, and it autoacquires cloaked units as well as Hallucinations, s and locusts. The widow mine then spends 40 seconds rearming.

Development
During development, widow mines used the same wireframe and icon as the shredder. These were replaced by unique art by the beta.

Dustin Browder has expressed concerns about the balance of the widow mine, namely its cost effectiveness and how it sacrifices itself to destroy the enemy. The optimum price point may be difficult to find in his mind.

During the beta, the armory requirement was removed.