So when Starcraft2 was released I chose the zerg race because it was my favorite in BW. I wasn’t any good I just played comp stomps and UMS games. After maybe a month I reached my goal of getting diamond and slowly stopped playing Starcraft and began moving back into HoN which I played with a group of friends.
Recently they have almost quit playing and are going back to other games (WoW and Runescape actually) so it’s time for me to get back in the game and earn my way into Masters League. During the last few months I still followed the professional Star scene and heard that my orc hero Grubby had begun playing and had selected protoss. Since my diamond skills have evaporated I decided I would follow suit and become a brotoss as well.
I began messing around with it today and I was totally lost and honestly I don’t really want to ladder yet because I think I’ll get discouraged getting rolled over and over and eventually being demoted. Maybe I should just mess around in team games to learn timings? I’m just a little confused what I should start focusing on and looking for some advice from anyone that has been through a race swap.
Also if any of you other protoss have advice or know a specific day9 or something that really helped you out let me know!
Check out parts 4, 5, 6 and 7 for a solid pvt build.
For pvz, 3gate expand into 4gate into robo or two is probably the most popular standard build right now, Incontrol does it all the time and very well, just grab a few of his pvz replays.
Pvp is probably the least comfortable match-up centered heavily on 4-gate, solid probe scouting early game is essential in my opinion to decide what build you should go. I've been trying to use 2gate robo but I don't really have an idea if it's optimal at all. If you play at lower level 9 probe scout is useful to see any crap like cannon rushes coming.
I'm not sure what you mean by learning "timings" in team games. You definitely won't learn any strategical aspects of any race in team games, and mechanics like chrono boost and warp-in don't take much to get used to. Jump straight into ladder if you ask me.
Any time you get that Zerg itch to inject larva, check the energy on your Nexus instead and spend as necessary.
Biggest mistake you can make switching from Zerg to Protoss is to treat Warpgates as On-Demand production, like with Larva. They aren't. They're just backwards production buildings with an interesting Rally system.
I'm not switching from Zerg, but I've been playing a lot of protoss lately (2800 master zerg) on a smurf. In PvZ, I'm not used to mid-game scouting yet and I've lost to quite a few all-ins that I know as a zerg player should be terrible. It's much easier as protoss to have just a few really worked-out build orders. Here's my take so far on each of the match-ups (I have pretty good mechanics so even with poor understanding of the protoss MUs I'm still high diamond).
PvT: Keep your scouting probe alive as long as you can and scout the gas to see the gas timing (basically if it's done before the rax is done or at the same time). These imply slightly different tech openings, but are not a guarantee. Try to time your probe to delay the placement of the second building a little bit. You can get away with 1 gate expand against anything that's not an early pressure build in my experience and just add a robo and 2 more gateways ASAP. If you're in close air position you probably want to get a faster robo though as it can let you harass with drops and also scout their base faster (this is becoming popular and I think it's pretty good.
PvZ: Like I said, I'm pretty bad on the protoss side of it because it seems like most zergs at my protoss level don't play the way I do (what they do is bad, but I'm not punishing it right), but the major things they shouldn't be able to deny you are gas timing and expansion timing. There are some early roach builds you need to be careful of. It's worth doing some work to know the difference between a 12 pool and a 14 pool in terms of when they go down. If you see pool and a slightly delayed gas this could mean early roaches, but not necessarily.
PvP: There are actually a lot of pretty stupid possibilities in this MU, 4-gate is probably the standard. If you go 13 gate it should be pretty easy to see their gate timing when you scout (if it's way ahead of you, it's a 10 gate). There are some 10-gate builds that aren't designed just to 4-gate, but you can basically assume a 4-gate once you see a couple of chrono boosts on the wg research. There are a few 3-gate builds that can get out a lot of stalkers and WG pretty quickly if you need to be able to defend. Anyways, your success or failure in this MU is going to come down to 1) crispness of execution (i.e. gateway right at 150 minerals, cyber right after gw, chronos right on time) and 2) micro (in a lot of battles the key is not letting your stalkers get too many hits from zealots, if they are, chances are you're losing)
EPT
