Is Protoss too strong in SC2?

On May 26 2019 01:46 sugarmuffinpuff wrote:
I suck at starcraft, but I liked Artosis and NoRegret's recent episodes of "In Depth" where they talked about protoss all-ins, and specifically immortal/warp prism play. They stay fairly objective about it, and aren't overly "balance-whiney". Definitely a good thing to watch if you care about this sort of stuff.

On May 26 2019 04:31 Dedraterllaerau wrote:
What exactly do you think you are going to accomplish with these kinds of polls?

With TL's news headlines like "Protoss dominate Super Tournament, RO8 bracket set" or "PartinG advances, Protoss lock in half of Code S RO16 spots"

Should not the focus be on all the players that advanced instead of what race they play?

As the biggest portal for foreign SC content you are a big part of shaping our community, and your best idea of contributing to this is putting more gasoline on the fire for all those toxic "PROTOSSED" balance spamming whiners you see everywhere from twitch chat to in-game SC2?

How about giving the Protoss players who have in fact played brilliantly recently some credit, instead of making them feel like they are carried by imbalance.

Start showing some professional behavior instead of taking these passive aggressive pokes at professional players choice of in game race, it is after all how they make a living.

On May 26 2019 04:31 Dedraterllaerau wrote:
What exactly do you think you are going to accomplish with these kinds of polls?

With TL's news headlines like "Protoss dominate Super Tournament, RO8 bracket set" or "PartinG advances, Protoss lock in half of Code S RO16 spots"

Should not the focus be on all the players that advanced instead of what race they play?

As the biggest portal for foreign SC content you are a big part of shaping our community, and your best idea of contributing to this is putting more gasoline on the fire for all those toxic "PROTOSSED" balance spamming whiners you see everywhere from twitch chat to in-game SC2?

How about giving the Protoss players who have in fact played brilliantly recently some credit, instead of making them feel like they are carried by imbalance.

Start showing some professional behavior instead of taking these passive aggressive pokes at professional players choice of in game race, it is after all how they make a living.

On May 26 2019 04:31 Dedraterllaerau wrote:
What exactly do you think you are going to accomplish with these kinds of polls?

With TL's news headlines like "Protoss dominate Super Tournament, RO8 bracket set" or "PartinG advances, Protoss lock in half of Code S RO16 spots"

Should not the focus be on all the players that advanced instead of what race they play?

As the biggest portal for foreign SC content you are a big part of shaping our community, and your best idea of contributing to this is putting more gasoline on the fire for all those toxic "PROTOSSED" balance spamming whiners you see everywhere from twitch chat to in-game SC2?

How about giving the Protoss players who have in fact played brilliantly recently some credit, instead of making them feel like they are carried by imbalance.

Start showing some professional behavior instead of taking these passive aggressive pokes at professional players choice of in game race, it is after all how they make a living.

On May 27 2019 16:28 sertman wrote:


You said it yourself - this is how they make a living. If a race is too strong, it takes money out of the pockets of players who are practicing hard with other races.

You can see by the poll results that there is a significant amount of the TL community believes Protoss is too strong. It's not the job of this website to protect the feelings of players who are playing a race that is seeing a different kind of widespread success than we are used to seeing at the professional level. It is the job of a news organization to report the facts. The facts are, Protoss dominated Super Tournament with 7 Protosses in the Ro8. The facts are, in the current season of GSL there were 8 protosses in the Ro16 with at the time of this posting, 3 of the 4 have advanced to the Ro8. And now the facts are that there is a significant perception in every single space for SC2 discussion - whether it's reddit, here, or twitch chat - that Protoss is too strong. Here's a newsflash - you're advocating for unprofessional, biased journalism if you are seriously arguing that TL should ignore the elephant in the room by not addressing the current massive success of Protosses in top Korean tournaments. Yes, Maru won 4 GSLs in a row - but it's not like those four GSLs were open season for Terrans the same way it currently is for Protosses.

You seem more upset that TL's news and polls fuel toxic behavior than it is being factually accurate. I think you should just suck it up and realize that all those people screaming P R O T O S S E D in the current meta have a point, even if they haven't had a good point in other metas. The only way this can get worse is if Blizzard does nothing - not if TL and other places enforce what is by now a delusional balance ideal where nobody can acknowledge or talk about certain races having far more success than others in the top leagues in the world.

On May 27 2019 21:41 Dedraterllaerau wrote:
The fact that you think this poll is relevant and that the people spamming PROTOSSED has any clue about the current state of the game pretty much sums up what limited understanding you have of the game.

I'll do you a favor and help you learn how to asses possible balance issues, and also make you understand the difference between "fun gameplay" and "balance".

1. Koreans have always had a lot of talented Protoss players for many years, and you consistently see the same names. Just like Europe has had many talented Zerg players over the years. This is one thing you have to take into consideration.

2. The amount of full-time PRO players is not that high for SC2 so you have a small sample size.

3. SC2 is sadly an extremely volatile game so at a high level with players executing simple builds very efficiently, "build order wins" sometimes see the lesser player beat the better player especially in shorter series ( just look at Neeb vs Volt WCS good example). This also adds to the randomness of how a tournament could shape up.

4. There has been only one, now most likely 2 heavily protoss represented tournaments in Korea. You add to this how the META has been shifting and these things need to stabilize before you start even considering balance changes.
Again small sample size, not enough time for players to adapt.

5. Winrates, not alarming whatsoever as of yet.

6. Is X race doing the same build over and over across the board with near 100% win rate (LOTV release Adepts good example) Or an unstoppable unit composition? Currently not the case.


Now add all these factors into your calculation and ask yourself is it too soon?


You tell me it's their job to report FACTS. Sure they reported facts. But it's also about what news writers put emphasis on, the way they write it and timing. And if it's called for.

You have to understand the scary part here is if Blizzard starts listening to 1000s of unknowledgeable viewers/players whining screams of imbalance and just does anything to make the community happy, you won't get a near balanced game ever.


Now from my perspective, TL is adding to this process which is not helpful at all for the game or the community in the long run. So like I said it is really unprofessional behavior of TL.

On May 28 2019 00:08 sertman wrote:


You are incredibly patronizing when it's not warranted, and it makes me think that you're just projecting a lot of your emotions onto this conversation. Yes, this poll gives the P R O T O S S E D crowd in Twitch Chat some validity. You're going to have to get a grip and get over it.

1.) Since when dude? You said yourself that in 4.) that there have only been 2 recent tournaments (read: the last two) where we've seen this extremity of Protoss success, and it's not like a bunch of T/Z have left and a bunch of P returned. It's actually that basically every Protoss in Korea is succeeding right now - MC was literally the only notable Protoss to not qualify for GSL this season.

2.) The sample size thing is a cop-out. People were saying that during BL/Infestor too.

3.) The Super Tournament was a Bo5 for all rounds.

4.) Already addressed

5.) Winrates outside of top Koreans are generally meaningless, especially considering that one of the things that makes PvZ especially difficult right now are warp prism immortal micro, which only the top players can do with the kind of extreme efficiency that GSL Protosses are achieving. No matter how you cut it, watching two immortals in a prism hold off 20+ roaches *looks* ridiculous, unfair, and overpowered.

6.) Except the reason that people are really frustrated with Protoss, especially pro Zergs, is that they have a huge variety of really strong builds that make appropriately reacting to them basically impossible. Many Protoss losses come from egregious mistakes on their end like losing a warp prism during a 2 base push or something.

I'm not arguing here in the essentialness of Protoss being too strong right now. What I'm saying is that watching Protoss right now *looks* and *feels* overpowered. Look at Parting's recent GSL games. Game 3 against Gumiho, Gumi makes the rather small mistake of mismanaging his orbital energy - it straight up loses him the game. Is there a similar mistake that Protoss can make that insta-loses them the game vs Terran? Is there a chrono that they can miss or something? That feels bad to watch - Gumi played really well up until that point, but he makes one mistake and the game ends, when Protoss does not have that same margin of error. Game 2 against soO - soO makes the rather small mistake of not having a drone in the way to block a single pylon in his natural against a gateway first opening. From that one tiny micro mistake, he insta loses - Parting gets down 4 pylons (which soO had no way of stopping the final three), a cannon + robo and an immortal down with a shield battery. One unit absolutely destroyed anything that soO could make from that point. That just feels bad to watch. It doesn't feel like Protoss is in a situation right now where one mistake and they outright lose the game the way that Terrans and Zergs are at present in that matchup.

So no, it's not too soon. The community, as you can see by this poll, feels very strongly that something needs to change. If you want to talk about hurting the scene, think about how many people stop watching because they don't feel like they're watching a fair fight. Do you think I watched the Super Tournament past the round of 8? Do you think I'm really tuning into watching 8 Protosses in the GSL? I watched Group B and witnessed three of the most brutal Protossings I've seen recently in professional play - games that just straight up felt unfair to watch. I left feeling pretty upset for soO and Gumiho and I highly doubt I'll tune into future GSL games if that's going to be how I feel after watching them.

It's journalistic malpractice to not put an emphasis on the recent total domination of Protoss in Korea. You are projecting toxicity onto TL when that's all coming from inside your own head. If you truly believe that all races are totally balanced and fair to play, "Protoss dominate GSL Super Tournament" shouldn't bother you. But because you associate any mention of racial success as toxic, you perceive it as toxic. There needs to be a place for there to be mature discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each race in the meta. Shutting down discussion completely only pushes that discussion to places such as Reddit, which is just a circlejerk/counter-circlejerk mess of a place to discuss this, and Twitch Chat, which is not remotely constructive.

You say that Blizzard shouldn't be listening to 1000s of bad players - except practically every single professional Terran and Zerg right now has said they feel Protoss is strong. soO was so tilted from his match against Parting he was talking about it after he beat Gumiho. Elazer straight up said that PvZ is imbalanced in an interview. "But they're just biased", you'll say. So are you dude. The reality of the Protoss Defense Squad is that you've constructed this talking point based bubble where every non-Protoss pro is biased, every fan is just upset about the games that THEY are losing, and the sample size is always too small and nothing should ever change. That's how we got BL/Infestor for way too long, and that's how people lose money even though they're working hard just because they couldn't play a perfect game against a race that doesn't need to.

So no, I think that your advocation of sugarcoating and censorship does a lot more harm than good. It's not TL's responsibility how Twitch Chat responds to their articles as long as they are not straight up lying, just like it's not a sportswriter's responsibility how fans react to articles that are critical of a player or a coach. The reality is that it's Blizzard's responsibility to not just make a game that's balanced and fair, but to make a game that FEELS balanced and fair. Right now, we can disagree all day on whether they're doing the first thing, but it's clear they are failing at the second thing.

On May 27 2019 09:53 ZigguratOfUr wrote:
lmao. If a regular user opened a thread like this it would get closed, but I guess everything goes for the poll forum.

On May 28 2019 15:21 FataLe wrote:

pretty much this. seems to be an irresponsible trend going. but ofc, your house..

On May 28 2019 00:08 sertman wrote:


You are incredibly patronizing when it's not warranted, and it makes me think that you're just projecting a lot of your emotions onto this conversation. Yes, this poll gives the P R O T O S S E D crowd in Twitch Chat some validity. You're going to have to get a grip and get over it.

1.) Since when dude? You said yourself that in 4.) that there have only been 2 recent tournaments (read: the last two) where we've seen this extremity of Protoss success, and it's not like a bunch of T/Z have left and a bunch of P returned. It's actually that basically every Protoss in Korea is succeeding right now - MC was literally the only notable Protoss to not qualify for GSL this season.

2.) The sample size thing is a cop-out. People were saying that during BL/Infestor too.

3.) The Super Tournament was a Bo5 for all rounds.

4.) Already addressed

5.) Winrates outside of top Koreans are generally meaningless, especially considering that one of the things that makes PvZ especially difficult right now are warp prism immortal micro, which only the top players can do with the kind of extreme efficiency that GSL Protosses are achieving. No matter how you cut it, watching two immortals in a prism hold off 20+ roaches *looks* ridiculous, unfair, and overpowered.

6.) Except the reason that people are really frustrated with Protoss, especially pro Zergs, is that they have a huge variety of really strong builds that make appropriately reacting to them basically impossible. Many Protoss losses come from egregious mistakes on their end like losing a warp prism during a 2 base push or something.

I'm not arguing here in the essentialness of Protoss being too strong right now. What I'm saying is that watching Protoss right now *looks* and *feels* overpowered. Look at Parting's recent GSL games. Game 3 against Gumiho, Gumi makes the rather small mistake of mismanaging his orbital energy - it straight up loses him the game. Is there a similar mistake that Protoss can make that insta-loses them the game vs Terran? Is there a chrono that they can miss or something? That feels bad to watch - Gumi played really well up until that point, but he makes one mistake and the game ends, when Protoss does not have that same margin of error. Game 2 against soO - soO makes the rather small mistake of not having a drone in the way to block a single pylon in his natural against a gateway first opening. From that one tiny micro mistake, he insta loses - Parting gets down 4 pylons (which soO had no way of stopping the final three), a cannon + robo and an immortal down with a shield battery. One unit absolutely destroyed anything that soO could make from that point. That just feels bad to watch. It doesn't feel like Protoss is in a situation right now where one mistake and they outright lose the game the way that Terrans and Zergs are at present in that matchup.

So no, it's not too soon. The community, as you can see by this poll, feels very strongly that something needs to change. If you want to talk about hurting the scene, think about how many people stop watching because they don't feel like they're watching a fair fight. Do you think I watched the Super Tournament past the round of 8? Do you think I'm really tuning into watching 8 Protosses in the GSL? I watched Group B and witnessed three of the most brutal Protossings I've seen recently in professional play - games that just straight up felt unfair to watch. I left feeling pretty upset for soO and Gumiho and I highly doubt I'll tune into future GSL games if that's going to be how I feel after watching them.

It's journalistic malpractice to not put an emphasis on the recent total domination of Protoss in Korea. You are projecting toxicity onto TL when that's all coming from inside your own head. If you truly believe that all races are totally balanced and fair to play, "Protoss dominate GSL Super Tournament" shouldn't bother you. But because you associate any mention of racial success as toxic, you perceive it as toxic. There needs to be a place for there to be mature discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each race in the meta. Shutting down discussion completely only pushes that discussion to places such as Reddit, which is just a circlejerk/counter-circlejerk mess of a place to discuss this, and Twitch Chat, which is not remotely constructive.

You say that Blizzard shouldn't be listening to 1000s of bad players - except practically every single professional Terran and Zerg right now has said they feel Protoss is strong. soO was so tilted from his match against Parting he was talking about it after he beat Gumiho. Elazer straight up said that PvZ is imbalanced in an interview. "But they're just biased", you'll say. So are you dude. The reality of the Protoss Defense Squad is that you've constructed this talking point based bubble where every non-Protoss pro is biased, every fan is just upset about the games that THEY are losing, and the sample size is always too small and nothing should ever change. That's how we got BL/Infestor for way too long, and that's how people lose money even though they're working hard just because they couldn't play a perfect game against a race that doesn't need to.

So no, I think that your advocation of sugarcoating and censorship does a lot more harm than good. It's not TL's responsibility how Twitch Chat responds to their articles as long as they are not straight up lying, just like it's not a sportswriter's responsibility how fans react to articles that are critical of a player or a coach. The reality is that it's Blizzard's responsibility to not just make a game that's balanced and fair, but to make a game that FEELS balanced and fair. Right now, we can disagree all day on whether they're doing the first thing, but it's clear they are failing at the second thing.

On May 28 2019 18:41 Dedraterllaerau wrote:


Done discussing this with you, you are using vague statements or outright lies as arguments waste of my time.

On May 29 2019 06:57 Psychonian wrote:
So, I know that I already made a post in this thread, but it wasn't really anything substantial. However, I'm watching the episode of In-depth where artosis and noregret go over the emergence of immortal pushes, and I'm kind of reconsidering my Yes vote on this poll.

Watching this episode, the recent dominance of Protoss in Korean tournaments appears to be a combination of two things.

The first thing is a problem that has been around for years: a severe lack of top level Korean terrans. I don't need to talk too much about this, this is a problem that has been discussed over and over and over again.

A lack of Korean terrans, though, will make any shift in the PvZ matchup much, much more noticeable in terms of results than any other. In the In-Depth episode, Jake and Dan talk about how the meta in PvZ has been largely static for a very long time. The matchup has largely been Stargate-based since the end of the KeSPA era, and perhaps even longer. I bring up the end of the KeSPA era because that seemed to be kind of when this issue of a lack of top Korean terrans came into play.

So since then, the PvZ matchup has been, for the most part, static. This era of Immortal-Sentry all ins is really the first time since 2016 that the matchup has made a significant shift in meta. However, since this new meta *is* so very new, Zergs have yet to adapt to it, leading to Protoss doing well against Zerg currently, and the lack of top Korean terrans simply makes this more obvious to the casual observer.

TL;DR: I think it's just a meta shift, and will likely sort itself out as Zergs learn to adapt to the new meta of Immortal based builds.

Quick edit: This does, of course, bring back up a remaining problem of the lack of top Korean terrans. However, I feel that that's a problem that will be much more difficult to solve.

On May 30 2019 06:01 machinus wrote:
All these protoss fanboys are going to have some explaining to do when Blizzard balances the game and confirms that Protoss needed a nerf.

On May 30 2019 11:02 machinus wrote:
What do balance changes prove? That the game was imbalanced...is this a joke or what

On May 30 2019 22:09 BlueStar wrote:

It only proves that Blizzard didn't know what they were doing when they did the previous balance changes.

On June 01 2019 04:08 sertman wrote:
I think that the Warp Prism in its current state is comically overpowered in the hands of a top Protoss. It can pick up units instantly from a mile away, fast-warp-in infinite units, power buildings, juggle without delay, etc. It's no longer impressive that someone can juggle 2 immortals to kill like 20 roaches, it's expected and now just way too frustrating to watch. I think that a single nerf to any of the things I mentioned would help balance at the higher levels.

Also, weird idea, but what about immortal speed? What if they were as fast as say, a reaver or a queen off creep? It'd slow down pushes that are incredibly strong right now, require protosses to do actual prism micro in battles, make proxy robo kind of silly, and overall make it a higher skill unit to use.

On June 01 2019 04:08 sertman wrote:
I think that the Warp Prism in its current state is comically overpowered in the hands of a top Protoss. It can pick up units instantly from a mile away, fast-warp-in infinite units, power buildings, juggle without delay, etc. It's no longer impressive that someone can juggle 2 immortals to kill like 20 roaches, it's expected and now just way too frustrating to watch. I think that a single nerf to any of the things I mentioned would help balance at the higher levels.

Also, weird idea, but what about immortal speed? What if they were as fast as say, a reaver or a queen off creep? It'd slow down pushes that are incredibly strong right now, require protosses to do actual prism micro in battles, make proxy robo kind of silly, and overall make it a higher skill unit to use.

On June 01 2019 10:06 contv wrote:


Comically overpowered sounds about right.

What's especially hilarious is that, pickup range coupled with instant pickup and immediate fire upon drop down, means that an immortal is effectively able to continuously teleport around with zero/minimal impact on its damage output.

A nerf to pickup range would not affect the majority of Protoss players, who don't possess the level of micro required to truly abuse immortal/prism like we are seeing in the GSL (and top international tournaments). It is a far more reasonable nerf than something like changing warp gate cooldowns to offset the prism's absurd overpoweredness.

On June 01 2019 04:08 sertman wrote:
I think that the Warp Prism in its current state is comically overpowered in the hands of a top Protoss. It can pick up units instantly from a mile away, fast-warp-in infinite units, power buildings, juggle without delay, etc.

On June 01 2019 23:18 Charoisaur wrote:
No - There are just more strong Protoss players in korea.

On May 26 2019 04:31 Dedraterllaerau wrote:
What exactly do you think you are going to accomplish with these kinds of polls?

With TL's news headlines like "Protoss dominate Super Tournament, RO8 bracket set" or "PartinG advances, Protoss lock in half of Code S RO16 spots"

Should not the focus be on all the players that advanced instead of what race they play?

As the biggest portal for foreign SC content you are a big part of shaping our community, and your best idea of contributing to this is putting more gasoline on the fire for all those toxic "PROTOSSED" balance spamming whiners you see everywhere from twitch chat to in-game SC2?

How about giving the Protoss players who have in fact played brilliantly recently some credit, instead of making them feel like they are carried by imbalance.

Start showing some professional behavior instead of taking these passive aggressive pokes at professional players choice of in game race, it is after all how they make a living.

On May 26 2019 04:31 Dedraterllaerau wrote:
What exactly do you think you are going to accomplish with these kinds of polls?

With TL's news headlines like "Protoss dominate Super Tournament, RO8 bracket set" or "PartinG advances, Protoss lock in half of Code S RO16 spots"

Should not the focus be on all the players that advanced instead of what race they play?

As the biggest portal for foreign SC content you are a big part of shaping our community, and your best idea of contributing to this is putting more gasoline on the fire for all those toxic "PROTOSSED" balance spamming whiners you see everywhere from twitch chat to in-game SC2?

How about giving the Protoss players who have in fact played brilliantly recently some credit, instead of making them feel like they are carried by imbalance.

Start showing some professional behavior instead of taking these passive aggressive pokes at professional players choice of in game race, it is after all how they make a living.

On June 09 2019 15:05 RenSC2 wrote:
I honestly feel bad for protoss players. For the entirety of SC2, protoss players have had a hard time separating themselves from the pack with the possible exception of MC way back in the day (and he was very high-risk, hit-or-miss back then). The race has always had issues in design where there are always a good sized group of players that can do the current preferred strategy extremely efficiently. Then it's up to the zerg or terran opponent to play perfectly to beat it. Back in early WoL it was the 4 gate, then colossus death balls. Now it's immortal pushes.

I'd still say a perfect Terran beats a perfect protoss. Usually that's Maru. However, it seems like there are a whole bunch of Protosses that can beat even the top Terrans or Zergs right now. I don't think it's just that a bunch of talented players all picked protoss and not very many talented players picked terran or zerg. That seems crazy with the history of high profile SC1 and early SC2 terrans in Korea.

Protoss needs a re-work. It needs more emphasis on fragile, hard to use units and less emphasis on pure power units. I don't necessarily think Protoss needs a nerf, but I do think they need their power shifted.