EPTProgression was actually appreciably fast enough (though I stuck on 2v2 for too long), the first season I was D, the second I was D+ and the third (just as SC2 beta was coming out), I should have been C-. The days as I was going over 2700+ points on iccup were right before finals and term paper due dates, so when I was playing I was super stressed out and nervous, so I ended up playing really well as I was clicking the hell out of everything. I hit 2950 points a couple hours before the final, and then after the final I slept for 14 hours and the first thing I did when I woke up was boot up BW.
Christ that was dumb, I was so groggy and tired after sleeping so long that I couldn't play at all. I ended losing something like 15 games in a row. By the time I won a game, I was already back down to D. At that point, SC2 was out so I just went, "screw BW, too hard."
The thing is, I went into BW with a full understanding of how hard the game is. I also knew that I would be for a very long time, a relatively low apm player (I was never good at typing fast, even). As such, I picked a lot of bad habits that would have soon stopped my progression past C-. For instance, large army control: I didn't hotkey my army. Yeah, I put my muta stack as 1, and I kept some lings hotkeyed in case I needed to engage in the middle of the map. Yeah, 4-8 were hatcheries and I used that to macro. But when I attacked, I just clicked all over my rally points and a-moved to the opponent's base. I got to D+ because I would start timing the groups I was sending, so I would send the slow units first, and I would time it so that the army from one base would arrive at the same time as the other. To dodge storms, I would just box select the hydras under fire and move them back, no hotkeys involved. My late game was terrible: the larger these armies got, the more I would have to select manually from my rally points. Since I always would rush ultras, my defiler use was extremely subpar.
Then, when I switched, the first thing I noticed about 1v1 in SC2 that it was honest to god, a joke compared to the level I was playing even at D+ (though I never did avoid Korean hours). I had no clue how the game worked compared to the established standards of bw, so every game I winged it, and won because I had more apm at even in low diamond. I just hey, this game is super easy, and just messed around. Once I started actually losing (at the time though, it was mostly to 4 gate), I just went and did team games to mess around in--I'm like #120 in NA random 3v3 whoo.
Recently, however, I went back and played a handful of bw games and was surprised to learn, while my game sense had gone to absolute shit, I was still able to do everything that I used to be able to do. My apm was around the same. So I went and took a couple ladder games seriously, and now I'm at the wonderfully mediocre level of 1100 diamond, and the games I'm winning are because my opponents are doing stupid shit and making huge mistakes, because 1100 diamond players are pretty terrible. I'm at the point though, that sometime soon I'm going to have to stop messing around and work on my fundamentals.
Anyway, so finally arriving at the point, I've decided to stick with sc2 seriously, and that means I have to correct a lot of my bad habits, like using the fact that I was a low apm player as an excuse. So there's a couple things I would like some opinions on.
1)I need to stop playing on this laggy old laptop. I've decided to get parts online for a desktop that I can get someone to assemble, but any recommendations for a keyboard/mouse?
2)Hotkeys. I'm really used to having 1-3 to keep important units on hand, and even more so in sc2 where large army control isn't actually a hard skill to learn. I kept hatcheries from 4-8 (with 0 my initial scouting overlord, and nothing usually for 9). If I put a second hatch in my main or nat, then I add it to 4 or 5, and sometimes I get lazy and hotkey my third, fourth, and fifth bases all to 6, but I like keeping it seperate. This means I don't have queens hotkeyed. This is actually fine: though doing a lot of rushes for team games has made my micro pretty decent, I'm very macro oriented and hit most of my injects just by going 4-4 on the hatchery and selecting it. Keeping all my hatches separate also lets me see the progress bar for the injects.
The question is, what do you think I should do? The current method currently works for me, but it's pretty inefficient. Should I just work on being able to be quick enough that I can just keep doing what I'm doing? I've tried putting my main at 5 and moving everything else up one, and hotkeying all my queens at 4, but I've been doing main hatch = 4 for so long it's going to take a while to adjust. Putting away 3 really seems unreasonable.
3) Spellcasters. I don't use them often. I'm pretty sure I've lost some zvts I should have won because I never got infestors. And well, I don't know how to use them, how to micro them, how to hotkey them relative to my army. I haven't got an internal timing where I would transition into them, because if I get that extra gas, my reaction is usually just go to hive tech instead. How should I practice incorporating infestor play, both in terms of actually getting them in a game and learning how to use fungal growth and neural parasite? This applies to overseers as well, using changlings and so on just seems like an apm sink that I don't usually have to spare.
As a (pretty long) side note, I made a strategy forum thread a bit back on the zvz build (it's that instead spending 250 min and 100 gas on a queen and ling speed as soon as your pool finishes, getting a lair and a spine crawler) I use. The general response in the thread was people figuring that they could break it using whatever they usually do without actually thinking about it in action. Of course, that just made me want to make it actually viable. I don't have a practice partner, so if you have any idea about a couple things, it would really help me in beating the build out.
First of all, the normal build consists of throwing down 4 spines while your lair is building as your only defense. 4 well positioned spines withstands the majority of busts (4 with a 5th and 6th building withstands almost all of them), but naturally that's weak to a hatch first build. Mutas will be out by the time a roach push builds up that can take 4 spines easily. The response to a hatch first build, I've found, is building a hatch at my expansion instead of three spines. So far, I haven't faced an opponent that went all-in aggression on a hatch first build though, so it'd be really nice if some one could verify whether 2 spines (or 1 spine at both main/nat) can withstand an aggressive 14 hatch or 14 pool/15 hatch, or whether I would need more to hold.
Secondly, 10 broodlords rape hydra/infestor or hydra/infestor/roach. So far, people responding that composition to my lair-before-queen into mutas, will do an initial push, in which I control well and wipe out with banelings, or I control poorly and get fungaled and lose. Crushing that first push, though, gives me enough time (since hydras are so expensive to build up and move off creep) to rush to greater spire and make 10 broodlords by the time a second push comes around (sacking a third also gives you more time). The question is, at what approximate hydra count/infestor count to do zerg players feel comfortable doing that first push against a mutaling zerg? If I could figure that out, it'd be easier to see if I could rush greater spire before the first push comes, or whether I should stick with trying to coordinate 3 groups of banelings running into his ball so they don't all get fungaled.
