This "Holding off the Void Ray" replay that you link is such a bad one. That Protoss lost at least two, maybe 3 void rays due to awful control. He easily could've gotten you in a lot of trouble, or maybe even beaten you, early.
I don't think this is strong enough to hold off an early void ray harass against a top player. That guy had awful control and didn't know how to use void rays at all (not abusing range vs marines, not getting the beam charged up.....
I'l'l try this opening with my terran partner in a bit, he'll try to mix it up a little with this every once in a while. Looks like a really weak opening to any sort of early aggression, especially void rays. Most of these players didn't play the way they normally do, in my opinion.
Would like to see less selectively picked replays, too.
Well, I'm not sure what you think the build is, and is not capable of, but I can say with certainty that I wasn't super selective with these. I could upload many, many replays showing this off against a wide variety of players not listed here (Nony, Antimage, Capoach, Katari, etc.)
I would feel comfortable saying it works roughly 85% of the time, and that the losses are due to human error or just stupidity (missing a turret, mismicro, bad ralley, etc).
I had the honor of talking to Masq yesterday night on my stream and I myself have been looking for a new TvP strategy. In comes Masq and he talks about "Hey wazzup Trump. You should try this out."
I'm like: "who is this guy?"
But anyways, Masq executes this build exactly against White-Ra as casted by HDStarcraft at
and I as a terran player who's built several marauders and marines in my lifetime of course was absolutely shocked to the brutal effectiveness of a "simple" build. Maybe the title is correct that this is "The Best" TvP opener. I believe that I have been executing a worse version of this build in two different ways:
A) early aggression with marauders pre-expand (thus making my economy not as good as masq's, and my marauders don't do anything early) B) an early expansion roughly the same time as masq but I go for ghosts too quickly. The ghosts don't do as well early game it turns out.
Now unfortunately the replays no longer work so I figure I should ask The Man himself.
1) What do you do against a Void Ray opener? I would assume pumping marines instead w/stim pack should be good. Do you also turret?
2) What do you do against someone who would go Colossus? I would assume pumping out vikings but it may be possible to bust them before then as well.
3) Do you only put 2 scvs on your first refinery? And then 2 scvs on your second refinery? I -think- I noticed this in that replay
Pretty sure this is the build that I will be doing come retail in my TvP for a long time to come.
This was a pretty common TvP opener at the end of beta. As a P player, I found that poking with a couple stalkers to force defense, rushing a void ray, researching blink during void ray harrass, and starting expo during void ray-blink stalker attack is incredibly effective. This strategy works because it forces early bunkers at the front, then hits the back with the void ray (ideally pick off tech labs to prevent stim research and marauder production), and finally uses the void as an efficient spotter for blink. I was undefeated in about 5 games against this opening in the last couple days of beta.