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Don't get me wrong. Sentries are friggin' awesome. Better players than me can use them to great effect. oGsMC can use a bunch of high-energy sentries to annihilate terran fortifications. Other people can just stand within their base with a bunch of sentries to keep out the enemy until they have cool tech, or something to just stomp the opposing army with.
That's pretty cool and all, and good for them. But I hate that playstyle from the deepest darkest place of my SC Soul. Protoss should not need to wait a whole 255 game seconds (approximate time to warp-gates) before possibly being able to put any aggression on the enemy. Nor should they need to spend absurd amounts of gas to make a unit that doesn't really attack, but really just delays enemy aggression.
And while I could probably rage all day and say "Sentries suck!" over and over, I'm going to outline the logic that I think is what has lead to sentry-dependent playstyle being so prominent.
- Good Logical step: I need units! I get myself a gateway.
- Bad Logical step: Holy crap, zealots by themselves are going to get murdered. I need to get myself ranged units FAST. Time to get gas, so I can use the cyber core as soon as it's up.
- Painted-into-a-corner Logical step: oh snap, all I have is one gateway and one cyber core. I need more gas for sentries to keep me safe!
One other point of mis-logic surrounding sentries that I can't really stand is the idea of, "make sentries to spend gas and save minerals so you can save up for an expansion!". What if you didn't have that gas to begin with? What if it was already minerals, and you didn't need to buy all these snowglobes for the sake of keeping your money down?
I guess this is pretty much me rambling at this point, so I'll leave with a question to the greater community.
Why don't protoss ever 2-gate-core anymore?
Why is the only thing anyone ever does 1-gate-core? All I can see that it does is get you a slightly faster warp-gate (by like, 2 food), but it forces you to spend such ridiculous amounts of gas on sentries just to stay alive.
Granted, I am a pretty low level player (mid-gold), but I swear: Gate-Gate-Gas-Core-Gas. It has been pretty damn sexy in my experience, and there's no need for any twitch-response force fields.
 
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Thank you for youre point of view.
User was warned for this post
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Any time you get 3rax'd, how do you defend without sentries? I mean I hate sentries just as much as you, so I try to do without them too. And I fail 90% of the time, no matter how many damn gates I build.
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2 gate core gives what benefit exactly?
Faster zealots? They're useless without sentries. Faster stalkers? No gas for sentries which are essential for defending 1 base pushes. Faster sentries? You can't get 250 gas that quickly (+50 for warpgate research) off of one geyser.
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I've seen 2 gate core used in PvPs to feign a 2gate zealot push.
Therefore forcing the opponent to usually get a second gate or at least chrono out some zealots.
Then you just chrono multiple stalkers and can get pretty nice pressure in.
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What the hell?
Are you annoyed you can't put any pressure on your opponent early on? Seriously? Welcome to the world of zergs. Not that I'm complaining, I'm a defensive player.
2 sentries kind of early can easily stall long enough for more stuff to get out and defend, zealots are excellent at killing lings vZ.
Blizzard killed the 2gate with the increased zealot build time.
3rax pushes are scary, but really saying you need "twitch" force fields to hold them seems over the top. You can hardly call watching your ramp and placing a force field there every once in a while a hard task. Just use hotkeys to macro up. The 3rax lives on a fragile timing window as the first collosus completely destroys it.
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I 2 gate core against Terran and Zerg, imo you only need 30 second faster warp gates if you are 4 gating, not against Protoss though because one stalker can kill 213143541545125 zealots (sadly since someone will take that seriously, an exaggeration)
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Sentries are awesome. That's why I'm not understanding your post.
And I don't understand what you mean by they don't really attack? It does 9 damage? It costs as much as a Marine plus gas you wouldn't have used anyways, does more damage, can Force Field and Guardian Shield.
Also, instead of thinking about just saving minerals for an expansion, think about the savings for Gateways, Pylons, and GASP! Probes.
Just watch how Nony plays. There's even a video of Sen joking around how imba Sentries are (he plays Zerg just in case you didn't know).
I don't play Toss that much but in the rare cases that I do, my build is 90% of the time 4 Gate with Sentries to boot. Great crowd control early on, and let's you actually build 4 Gates without being all in-ish. The only thing I have trouble with is all Marauders (which is rare since everyone usually throws in Marines) and Roaches, but you can just avoid those and stall with Force Fields until you get Stalkers (in which case, they will lose if they invest too heavily in those). In the meantime, it let's you expand pretty fast as well.
The biggest factor with Sentries is the ability to pick and choose battles, which leads into all types of other advantages.
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Did you see  KiWiKaKi vs  SLush last night? FF the nat, walk into main, FF ramp, kill main, make phoenix, win.
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What matchup are you talking about? PvT and PvP zealots will get kited forever without support. And I don't think anyone is getting sentries because they can use the extra minerals to get an expansion; rather, they're getting sentries because they're the best protoss unit and an expansion is the natural way to spend the leftover minerals from a sentry-heavy army.
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Your rant doesn't make much sense to me.
You seem to realize yourself Protoss doesn't NEED sentries to move out. In fact, you can build a zealot whilst warping your core and go pressure when your first stalker pops. You can go double gate core and use double stalker pressure. You can delay the core and chronoboost out zealots from 1 or 2 gates and pressure with that.
I don't see how the fact that 1 gate core is more prevalent than those styles is related to sentries? People get a fast cybercore so they can get fast warpgates and ranged units. They get stalkers when they want to hide tech or be aggressive and they build sentries when they want to expand or build additional gateways.
PS. I do hate sentries though, because they're sissy units that need to hide behind forcefields. Zealots at least die with pride.
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Sentries are powerful, and they're very good to produce early so you can build up energy. And in particular, having one Sentry is extremely powerful if you can keep it alive; a single Sentry can deploy Guardian Shield and/or a few key forcefields to win you the game.
Mass Sentries is a much shiftier business. The cost of allowing yourself mass Forcefield (or mass Hallucination) is that you must drop lots of spells every time you fight, or your fragile, expensive, low-DPS Sentry-ridden army will be demolished. It can be powerful, but it can also suck - it's a twitchy, not-very-mobile way to play.
I agree that protoss gateway openings (rather than fast-Warpgate openings) feel under-explored. That said, a Warpgate is significantly better than a Chronoboosted gateway; hence the rush to Warpgates. If you're not planning to lay serious pressure before six minutes, there's no reason to use gateways (except the one you're required to build) rather than speeding into Warpgates.
The other reason for 1 gate core Warpgate is that Protoss can't deny scouting against a good opponent without a Stalker, or at least a Sentry. A 1 gate core Warpgate chrono Stalker (once) chrono Warpgate (twice) opening could follow up with almost anything. Yes, the opponent can check whether you have one geyser or two, your probe count, and your nexus energy, but he can't see how many gateways you plan to have, what tech path you'll pursue (if any), or anything of that sort. He knows you won't attack him much before six minutes, but that's all he knows.
By contrast, 2 gate core and gate core gate both reveal their hand rather quickly to the opponent. In exchange, you get the ability to perform aggression before warp tech. It's a reasonable way to open, but there are certainly drawbacks.
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On February 18 2011 07:00 Turbovolver wrote:
Any time you get 3rax'd, how do you defend without sentries? I mean I hate sentries just as much as you, so I try to do without them too. And I fail 90% of the time, no matter how many damn gates I build.
Like I said, I'm not exactly in the top tier of players. I haven't laddered in forever; I've actually just been practicing in YABOT, since all my friends are zergs, but the computer kind of sucks. While I can hold off YABOT's version of a 3-rax stim push (even when botching things miserably), I really doubt that the computer is as strong as a properly executed version.
The key to what I'm talking about, however, is that the 2nd gateway is built before your 1st is completed. I tried going gate-core-gate once against a zerg friend of mine, and I got steamrolled so hard. It is nowhere near enough to actually put on early pressure.
Hopefully that helps clarify what I mean? I don't know. D:
EDIT: I just did a 2-person YABOT game on XNC, with a friend doing the 3-rax stim rush. He arrived with 15 marines with stim, and I had 5 zealots, 5 stalkers, warp-gate complete, an observer halfway done, and 2 more probes than he had SCVs. Neither of us played perfectly, but still.
On February 18 2011 07:01 Backpack wrote:
2 gate core gives what benefit exactly?
Faster zealots? They're useless without sentries. Faster stalkers? No gas for sentries which are essential for defending 1 base pushes. Faster sentries? You can't get 250 gas that quickly (+50 for warpgate research) off of one geyser.
All of those questions are "do you get to unit X faster?" The obvious answer is no. That's not the point. The point is to sacrifice early tech in order to get early production capacity. The strategic exchange is basically, "I want more stuff, faster. In order to do so, I get the fancy stuff slightly later."
I also disagree that zealots are useless without sentries. They're useless without ranged attackers, yes, but zealots force the enemy to run like hell, letting stalkers deal much more damage than they ever would be able to alone, especially when Terran uses marauders.
What this means is that if you can delay your stalkers until the instant they are needed, then you will have a ridiculously beefy defending army.
When done relatively mediocre-ly (i.e. the first time I tried it out successfully), 2-gate-core at 5:40 has:
- 27 probes
- 4 zealots
- 2 stalkers
- 40/42 food total
- 2 running gas geysers
- 2 gateways ready to start another production cycle
- 420/120 in the bank, ready to expand or throw down gates for more pressure. (you could probably take away 200 of those minerals, just 'cause 40/42 is as good as supply-blocked
One of the most important things is that you can still start warp-gate at 5:25, for a 4-gate arriving at 7:45 (-10n seconds, where n is the amount of chronoboosts you devote to warp-tech). The difference is you'll have a much more powerful first-wave.
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wow, I was not expecting this many responses. so to clarify:
- I totally agree that sentries are awesome. They're incredibly powerful tools when used correctly.
- The inability to put pressure on the opponent isn't the only thing I'm talking about. My main issue is that all of the discussion of Protoss that I ever see is, "defend with tech", where zerg and terran are seen as having the more versatile option of "defending with units". This basically makes a situation where you declare, "I am going to be passive until I get warp-tech out, and I am going to invest tons of gas into sentries that could otherwise get me something more useful, like colossus, stargates, upgrades, anything.
I realize it's a weird complaint to have. I'm not complaining that something's imba-imba-imba. I'm not complaining that I don't know how to beat a strategy. I'm really just wondering why every Protoss I see is stuck being so sentry dependent, when zealot/stalker is ridiculously potent, and leaves your gas for more late-game purposes.
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On February 18 2011 09:21 WinterNightz wrote:When done relatively mediocre-ly (i.e. the first time I tried it out successfully), 2-gate-core at 5:40 has: - 27 probes
- 4 zealots
- 2 stalkers
- 40/42 food total
- 2 running gas geysers
- 2 gateways ready to start another production cycle
- 420/120 in the bank, ready to expand or throw down gates for more pressure. (you could probably take away 200 of those minerals, just 'cause 40/42 is as good as supply-blocked
One of the most important things is that you can still start warp-gate at 5:25, for a 4-gate arriving at 7:45 (-10n seconds, where n is the amount of chronoboosts you devote to warp-tech). The difference is you'll have a much more powerful first-wave.
I'm sure I don't need to tell you this but this dies to a plain ol 4gate. IMO the only gategatecore that's worth doing is the double stalker pressure stuff in say PvZ and I haven't really seen that lately in pro replays/don't use it myself so I don't know if it's still viable.
The reason Protosses in general are sentry-dependent rather than zealot/stalker dependent is because FF looks almost imbalanced when used correctly, and Guardian Shield is really good too. Even Hallucinate is handy. It's good. That's why people do it. 1gas 4gates with 1 or 0 sentries exist, even outside of PvP, but there's a reason they aren't as popular s other builds.
Just one more addendum: as people have already said, protoss have plenty of pressure and attack opportunities. 2gate and 3gate expand can straight up kill greedy FEs in PvT, or at least the CC, and there's plenty of other things you can do. Try doing early pressure with your first zealot on steppes. It can definitely do real damage.
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Fine, sentries hate you too. Bam.
But more seriously, just don't make them if you dont want to. Especially at your level its not really gonna hold you back too much.
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EPT
