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So it wasn't too long ago that I posted that I was coming back to SC2 after a 4 month absence due to playing League of Legends. Unfortunately, some RL problems got in the way, and it hasn't been till around last week that I got to be able to really start playing again. My big wake up call to practice was when I was playing some scrimmage games with my friends who were far worse then me when I left, who now beat me.
It wasn't just that I lost either, it was that I just felt my play was shit. I'm sure everyone reading this now does. Your macro feels sloppy, you engage in stupid situations, your minerals climb, you don't make bases in time, you try goofy builds because you're not confident in your old ones, etc etc. I worked over the week on improving and shaking the rust off my game, so I could beat them again. I challenged them all to a rematch today, and I beat all of them. :D
Unfortunately for my development as a Protoss player however, I watched the HotS unit previews and looked at one of the compilations of unit data from Reddit. As a lot of people, I hate the design of the new units. Lets go over them:
Replicator:
I think build time will be a huge deal here, but I don't see myself using this gimmicky unit at all. Even then, thinking hard, I can see only situations in PvT. I can copy one or two ghosts so I can land those EMPs on their sorry asses, or I can copy some siege tanks. In the siege tanks case, my chargelots are going to be taking a LOT of extra damage. In the first case, I don't see how a feedback range buff of 1 couldn't replace this entire scenario. Overall, I hate hate hate hate the whole idea of this unit, it just straight up does not feel like a Protoss unit.
Oracle:
Now this unit is interesting to me, but it lacks something I think is very important for a raider, being able to kill workers. Mr. Browder said something like there are 55 ways to kill a worker, but thankfully, the Oracle is not one of them. Why is that a happy thing to the Protosses out there? All I can think of is the countless times mutas go in to my unprotected mineral lines, or a line of hellions. All my workers are pretty much as good as dead if I don't control it properly. What happens here? You can't farm those minerals for a while, unless you have a small force to kill the shields. And that's the kicker, the shield is destructible, and can "easily be shaken off aby a small force of units." Overall, it's a slight annoyance to people who don't know how to counter it.
Tempest:
My poor mothership  . I actually used her in games, and she's a very powerful unit in very endgame situations. Not because of her power or whatever, but against Zergs especially, you could really punish the fact that most of them only build one overseer. I can't say it wasn't funny to blink my stalkers in, kill the overseer, and promptly win while we morphs another. On to the actual unit, the tempest. While I was impressed by their results in the gameplay footage, I feel they're going to fill where the carrier was, and only be used in VERY specific situations that will never even happen after their introduction. Basically, that's is only Mass mutas, which no intelligent Zerg will try on release because of the introduction of this unit. It seems like a unit that takes a long to build, for no reason. All I can say is that it will probably acquire dust, very similarly to the carrier.
This had been bothering me the entire weekend, and the final tip of the hat was that my friend, who constantly jokes about how Protoss is OP, said he would switch to Protoss if I switched to Terran. So now I'm a Terran player, starting over the game with a new race. I've been looking over the current meta tonight, and it seems like in TvZ you try to eventually go for a Marine + Tank + Medvac Composition by end game with a few ghosts here and there. For the other matchups, I have no freaking clue, does anyone want to give me some good ideas?
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TvP - Marine, Marauder, Medivac, Ghost would be standard can get tanks but kind of useless unless there are a bunch of them and the Toss only goes stalker but you should be able to figure out TvP pretty quick it doesnt really get interesting.
TvT - Go for a bunch of tanks and vikings with some hellions or marines make sure you have air superiority and get a good position on the enemy and you win easy.
TvZ - All you need to do is make a bunch of marines with some seige tanks with stim and medivacs and you win do annoying drops and make a ring of turrets and you win as long as you can keep you base/tanks/medivacs alive and get a large number of them and remember MARINES ARE EXPENDABLE ALWAYS. Its much cheaper to lose 15-20 marines than it is to lose 2-3 tanks
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Disclaimer: GML Protoss, Mid Masters (~1k) Terran
TvP basically comes down to MMM with either Vikings or Ghosts, depending on which route the Protoss is going - if you've gone Vikings first, then adding Ghosts after you've estabilshed the third base is mandatory.
TvP isn't really about which units you build but really more about what you make out of them - dropping a lot, spreading out the protoss and hitting key points when he's not paying attention are the most important parts of playing the match-up as a terran ^^
Mech in TvP is doable but in my opinion far inferior to bioplay when the Protoss has seen it before and knows how to handle it - so in my opinion stick with solid bioplay in TvP, eventually start off with a build like 2Rax expand (1 with Techlab, 1 with Reactor to apply some pressure while grabbing your own natural) and go from there.
TvZ is - as you mentioned - oriented around Marines, Medivacs and Tanks with Thors for Base Defense and Ghosts for lategame "support" (Support as in sniping whole armies into the ground) - if Ghosts aren't your cup of tea then you have to keep an eye out for your opponents greater spire, so you can get enough vikings out to stomp his Brood Lords.
Common openers are either two hellion expand where you use the hellions to keep map control while taking your expansion or the infamous 2rax, which applies some pressure while you are expanding. There are more defensive openers like Siege Expand, but I wouldn't recommend that as long as you are able to execute above openers without sacrifing all your macro ^^
TvZ is really micro intensive for the terran, the most important things in this match-up is applying pressure, keeping up in expansions and not dying to banelings or muta harrass.
TvT currently has three styles to offer - pure mech (Hellion/Tank for Ground Control and Thors for Air Control with added in Vikings as soon as the opponent starts to get Battlecruisers), biomech (Which mostly means Marine/Tank) or pure Bio (as liked by Polt).
The basic flow of the game most of the time is to use your initial composition to claim as much of the map as possible (Assuming that you cannot kill your opponent) to get enough gasses to support the airswitch to Viking/Battlecruiser with the recent addition of the raven for either PDDs or Heat-Seeker-Missiles against clumps of Vikings.
Openers range from Siege Expands over cloaked Banshees to a simple 2Rax.
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I remember when WoL came out thinking that Hellions where crap. Even after testing them, they just seemed to die to everything. Even with infernal pre-igniter their damage was horrible. Can we STFU about HotS units?
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I'm not really woe-ing and the sky is falling or anything, and I am genuinely curious and even excited to see what the new units do to the game and how they change match-ups, but I will agree that some of the units just seem gimicky, or just terrible.
The corrupter and reaper changes seem like a "well, we need to keep something so we have something to remove later, and we don't have anything at the moment to put in there at the moment anyway" Frankly though, the reaper could be flat removed and I dont think it would change anything. The corrupter is just meh.
The tempest is worthless, in my opinion. The game is supposedly balanced around GM and pro level play, and the tempest is being brought in to deal with massive flocks of mutalisks, because apparently protoss have no way to deal with large flocks of mutalisks in the late game, and it's really highlighting a bit problem i have with blizzard's design. "We're going to make a unit, to LITERALLY deal with one issue in one match up with numbers that frankly aren't even accurate in a 1v1 game we say we balance the game around, that really isn't an issue anyway. And when it does crop up, usually has some pretty blatant fixes or things that should have happened earlier to prevent it from happening. We feel that straight counter units are a much better route for game design though, despite making things very rock/paper/scissor-y." And when zerg just say, "okay well, we'll make 15 mutas instead and fly them around in groups of 7 and 8 and use them to harrass, or just have a lot more awareness and control on the future and keep our group of 26ish (which is a bit lower than 40-60 that you're claiming is a common problem), and...what are you going to do with it now? fly it into our base and kill our overlords that we had to bring back because you kept hitting them with phoenixes when we spread them out?...okay"
just, ajkwejfa;sjefkl;jawrefkjlawfkljafkl;j.
The other units like the viper and oracle just feel gimmicky to me or just OP and then will be nerfed because they're OP because they have abilities that are just...completely unable to be in the game but still be "balancable".
The hero-thor seems like a batshit stupid idea. I can try to vocalize my dislike for the Tempest and how much from a gameplay and design perspective it just seems like an awful idea, but the Thor literally leaves me unable to vocalize my thoughts.
It just seriously makes me wonder if blizzard is actually remotely in touch with the game that they're designing, and, given their complete absence in e-sports so far, i genuinely doubt that they are, and that makes me sad. not worried at all, because starcraft will be fine, unless they truly make it all just gimmicky and rock/paper/scissors, but still, fine. itll be fine.
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On October 24 2011 16:05 GiygaS wrote:
All I can think of is the countless times mutas go in to my unprotected mineral lines
Even if your mineral lines ARE protected, when the muta cloud comes... There's not much you can do.
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EPT
