Thanksgiving Ladder Blog

Danglars

United States12133 Posts

November 26 2015 02:16 GMT

Ladder Blog

Or How To Fail Repeatedly And Have Fun Trying

I'm returning for Starcraft II for LOTV, after having years of fun on WoL and HotS. Deepest runs were masters in 2010/2011, diamond later on as college ended, job began, and my interest waned. I'm playing Terran, trying for fast expand builds every matchup, with an emphasis on aggressive midgames if all goes well.

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The messy start of jotting them down to remember later

I started off with a couple warmup ranked games while watching Polt in-between the matches. Okay he's doing reaper expand every matchup. He's generally doing 20 CC 21 Depot 22 Rax 24 Fact for a very defensive posture. Early cyclone against Terran & Protoss for defense, early stim in general. Drops at all stages.

TvP goes into liberator support to the normal bio mine comp. TvZ uhh pretty much the same, but early siege tank for roach/ravager defense. TvT extremely aggressive with drops since siege tanks can be micro'd with medivacs nowadays. Okay, this looks fun, sweet!

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Oh god TvP and that prism adept harass! I never thought I'd miss the days when it was oracles almost every game but man life is tough. I generally lose if I try dropping early. He splits his 8 adepts between main and natural and I don't have enough bio at home to mitigate the eco damage. Variations I've seen are chronoing out the adept attack speed upgrade, and extremely fast adept drops (ala Trap on KR ladder ~70% PvT winrate). I'm not extremely fond on waiting for two added rounds of units before going out dropping, but maybe I'll be forced to do it unless I figure something else out this week. All comments welcome.

So I took a look at KR GM ladder builds ...
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Wait, can all of these TvPs save one be a onebase marine/widowmine/liberator allin? Are all the TvTs reaper/hellion? Verrrrry helpful.

TvT is just goodness. So many viable strategies, only a few losses against aggressive mass reaper/mass reaper + hellion/mass reaper. The aggression with tankvacs is simply fun. It's simply a more enjoyable matchup than HotS for me. Even playing against turtlemech feels great because of the speed I can mass expand and transition air while he's busy mining out three bases.

I struggle some in TvZ microing against roach/ravager on attacks and defense WHILE keeping up the macro. My APM is still low and I need to kick the habit AGAIN of staring at heavily micro'd zerg engagements like I had to back when I first started.

But what's chatting about ladder without the funny rages/chats/out-of-left-field-nonsense?
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Well, when you trade a lot of DT worker kills for losing your natural, you'll be behind against the terran if you don't macro during said DT harass, silly

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Accidentally scout proxied council (adept) at 10 minutes? Check.
Build turret after killing his entire army & most eco? Check. (When behind, Dark Shrine!)
Clearly maphacks.