How to fix Protoss (APM sinks)

Protoss....What happened?

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Ok so I hear a lot of people have been complaining about protoss in general lately with the disgracefull HoTS "additions" and most people complain that protoss units are just too weak in general. And honestly, the more the game has been developed and the more players have improved, the truer that statement becomes. Now it should be no suprise to anyone that if we compare all 3 race's skill ceilings for their units, protoss gets short-changed, by a lot, especially against terran. Did this used to matter in the past? Not really, because everyone played so terribly that the end game skill ceilings didn't factor in. But as time has gone on, I think we have all fealt it, the true limits of units are close to being met, while the skill ceiling for others is still perfectly healthy.

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The Zealot:

The greatest overall failure of the Protoss race as far as skill ceiling goes is easily the zealot. I mean the unit literally has no function beyond A-moving and stutter stepping terran bio mitigates the damage by such a ludacrous amount early on which just disheartens players into just turtling in their base, units like the zealot are completely worthless in small numbers so why should they even try to move out and do crazy things like "attacking" early on in the game?

Overall its always been a clunky unit, simply put a gold leaguer attacking with zealots is going to be more or less as effective as a GM player attacking with zealots because of their completely binary nature. And sometimes protoss players try to micro their zealots a bit, they try to pull em back if the terran is stutter-stepping too much and the zealots are getting too far away from their main army, but guess what, when your pulling those zealots back thats the exact moment that conc shelll becomes the most god-like upgrade in the game because on that retreat to regroup your army, you are guaranteed to lose an insane amount of units for free (honestly even without conc shells I would guess).

Its hard to really pinpoint the exact area where the zealot could be repurposed/tweaked and maybe it doesn't truely need to be, maybe we just have to have certain A-move units in the game, but that certainly doesn't make it pretty.

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The Stalker:

Now in theory, the stalker would be the saving grace of the race as far as skill ceilings go and really bringing back that whole fealing of working with smaller numbers and just microing heavily to maybe create comeback scenarios through shear will power like in BW, but alas there are just too many things about this unit that are wrong so that it can't do that.

First and foremost, in PvT, the stalker is nothing more then a gimmick unit in the early game used for cheesy all ins, and becomes an incredibly clunky unit in the late game trying to kill off vikings before they kill off your even clunkier collosi (more on that later). Honestly nothing about this unit works as "meat" in this matchup because every single unit that terran has except for landed vikings kill stalkers either for cost or well beyond cost. I mean watching stalkers try to kill marauders even with really favourable outnumberings against the marauders is just painfull. And it's so called "beefy" HP/Shield count is just irrelevant when terran units kill stalkers in the blink of an eye (no pun intended).

Now lets look at PvZ, stalkers are kind of a meaty unit in this matchup which is nice in theory, except just not quite enough survivability to truely make it a brute force skill unit, and as such protoss is forced to rely on collosi most of the time which just leads to boring blob vs blob games where protoss just turtles until it feels safe enough to leave his base and....well....do stuff. And then once infestors come out, all hopes of microing the unit go up in smoke because of the anti-micro nature of fungal growth. I suppose Blizzard just wanted zerg players to be able to have fun and micro while protoss players just sit there. The biggest downfall to the fungal growth against stalkers is that protoss is put into this position where it has to just HOPE that it has so many units that it wins by brute force and not via micro, or alternatively just getting a vortex off and winning in situations where it honestly shouldn't.

How do you fix the stalker? Simple, tweak it for more of a micro intensive dps machine, like I said earlier, its "beefy" nature is irrelevant when terran units are just going to kill them near isntantly in larger numbers so why not shift some of its stats around, take off some of its HP or shields, while increasing it's dps. And as for the micro intensive part, this is where I get a little crazy on you people, we completely change blink, we make it so that it has a much shorter cooldown on it so that stalkers can use it much more and as a trade off, make it so that you can no longer blink to higher ground.

Now I know at first losing the ability to blink to high ground might seem like a gigantic blow but lets think about this, all of these plays that involve blinking stalkers to high ground tend to be nothing but abusive and cheesy in nature (blink stalker base trading in PvP anyone?), and where we lose a cheesy play, we will then be getting a much more mechanic and micro focused, skill based play in return in the form of a more fragile yet harder hitting stalker that can blink much more often to really put a lot more control into the protoss player's hands instead of just A-moving and hoping you got enough.

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The Force field:

Thats right, I'm not complaining about the sentry, just forcefields, and heres why. NO ONE LIKES THEM, even protoss players don't like them, you know why? Because in return they act like the biggest ball and chain imaginable, where protoss' gateway units had to be nerfed into the ground, it's early game prospects destroyed to compensate for their very existence. Overall I think even with just Hallucinate and Guardian Shield the sentry would be a perfectly viable unit without forcefield and it would have it's uses. But what Blizzard needs to understand, this quirky, exciting mechanic in the form of forcefield had a much higher toll then it was worth in the first place.

Simple fix, remove forcefield from the game, and buff the core stats on all of early game units accross the board so that protoss can have those "STRONG" feeling units back, staying true to it's motif as well as opening more early game strategies for protoss and making it less of a turtle fest. If Blizzard doesn't want to add to the deathball, then they need to give us a reason to not make a deathball in the first place, and that reason IS the weak nature of our early units because we have forcefield.

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Robo Units:

Simply put, to put more of a focus on early-mid game plays where protoss has the option to move out with smaller forces more consistently, the only way to really do that is to buff the basic gateway units, but with that in mind, you can't just buff the gateway units and let the robo units keep all of their power. These units, (assuming gateway units get buffed) would have to be nerfed heavily or completely redesigned.

The collosus is a mess, its the most clunky microless unit in the game and it always feels too necessary, even when you are making them knowing they will die, but such is the messy nature of the "massive" system in general I feel. Overall the collosus either should be removed or given a much more niche purpose, but honestly I can't even think of a niche purpose for this unit because it was such a one-dimensional A-move unit for equalizing terran bio DPS (among other things) and so it would probably best just to remove it and put more of a focus on gateway units for most fast-paced play.

The immortal isn't as much of a mess as the collosus, it does have some redeaming qualities but still it is in an identity crisis. It was first meant to be a tanky unit but hardened shield never really worked as inteneded and then they just made it hit like a truck from pretty far back, it just doesn't make sense, but still the fundamentals are there. I say it should have its dps lowered A LOT and in exchange give a more practical version of hardened shield to return it's tanky nature and lowering it's range a good deal, making it more of an anchoring unit then it currently is while not really buffing it but also not really nerfing it, just repurposing it.

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Changing Protoss macro systems:

Perhaps changing is the wrong word, I suppose "making a system that actually exists and has depth" would be a better way to put it. One of the most dissapointing things about protoss macro cycles is their shear ease, what most high level protoss players willl know from experience, is that with the system in place it has so little depth that really theres no big difference in overall macro from a high maters player to a high GM player with the current warp gate model, it simply put has no layers to it.

Lets take zerg, if I'm a skilled zerg player and I want to bite off more then lesser players could chew, I could make a macro hatch or two, and beyond that I could make a queen for each of these macro hatches and keep injects up on all of them where less mechanical players simply would have no chance (I'm looking at you DRG!). And say I'm terran, the shear existence of the addon system for terran productions facilities creates a certain depth to it that separates good players from bad, being able to set everything up and keep it being set up (continually making reactors and such) as well as just the overall basic nature of terran macro gives it a true edge to better players.

But alas with protoss, you simply press "W" then click the units you need, when you need them, not that you really need them THAT much because as a stated above, our gateway units just suck right now. There needs to be depth to the system, something a GM player can do that a masters simply CAN'T, and that is where my new idea for revamping warpgate comes in.

Now most say the game would be better without warpgate entirely, I honestly disagree and can offer a middle ground option that would please everyone. Lets say that the new warp gates reset after each use, what I mean by that is say you have a warpgate sitting there....

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You then click to warp in a zealot, and then the warp gate recloses into a gateway...

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And then once its done turning back intro a gateway, you then need to "Reboot" it, simply click the button again (G) and it starts turning back into a warpgate.

Heres the catch, if you have all of your warp gates selected, and some are gateways and some are in warp gate mode, when you click (G), it transforms them ALL, not just the ones that are in gateway mode, which means if you had any of them already off cooldown, in warpgate mode that were unused, and you clicked (G), it would waste its use and you would have to wait to transform it again after it went back to gateway mode.

This means that players would have to keep track of exactly which gateways they were using and how often, to make sure they didn't needlessly transform warp gates that were ready to use, before actually using them. This could even create systems where protoss players used odd hotkey setups for group smaller numbers of warp gates together to better keep track of them, or shifting the screen to look at which ones need to be rebooted. This system could add actuall depth to protoss macro.

Now I could write about how much I hate the upcoming HoTS units, but I already have in other threads and honestly its still completely speculating since its still early into the beta, but overall I think the changes I have suggested in this thread merit disscussion, even if I'm totally wrong and my ideas are stupid at least identifying the problems with the race to make better answers is better then nothing.

How to fix Protoss (APM sinks)

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