[D] PvZ: Stargate/TC => DT => HT Build

1. Playing passively against good zerg will result in defeat.

So what makes high level PvZ games different than lower level PvZ games? Conceptually, it’s very simple: good zergs know how to punish protoss players that play passively by leveraging their inherent macroeconomic advantage. A basic tenet of StarCraft II (or most any other RTS), is that resources invested into your economy today means that there will be more money available for bigger, more powerful armies tomorrow. As you know, zergs build all of their units, including workers, from a common larvae pool. Unlike terran and protoss, whose potential worker production is predominantly a function of how many nexii or command centers they have, a zerg’s potential drone production is a function of available larvae. Basically, a zerg can dedicate all of his unit production capacity drones, whereas terrans and protosses cannot. A good comparison to the zerg’s drone production capacity would be a protoss player that could build probes out of his nexus, gateways, stargates, and robotics facilities. Because the zerg can crank out drones so much faster than a protoss, the zerg can make an initial investment of larvae and minerals into drone production early on to quickly create a superior economy to the protoss player. The zerg player can then turn this economy advantage into a superior army that the protoss cannot beat. This is the primary reason why passive play fails. A protoss player must put pressure upon the zerg in order to win.

Guess what? There’s a second problem with playing passively. Zerg can endlessly accumulate larvae while they endlessly accumulate resources. What this means is that if you sit in your base for too long and let the zerg get a 200/200 army, he’ll amass so much larvae that he can instantly rebuild his army after any battle. A protoss simply cannot match that production.

Most protoss players understand these concepts well enough and apply them in the early game by opening against zerg with some kind of early gateway pressure. However, most of those protoss players fail to apply those principles as they transition out of the gateway pressure and tech straight to tier 3: colossi or templar. Getting either of these techs online is very time-consuming and resource-intensive, which gives the zerg a very large window to either attack you or expand his economic advantage. The principle purpose of this guide is to show protoss players how to minimize this window by squeezing a little more juice out of the protoss’s tier 2 tech and by using dark templar.

2. Zerg tech switches can result in instant defeat for ill-prepared protoss players.

Aside from granting zerg the macroeconomic advantage in worker production, the larvae mechanic also enables zerg to tech switch far more easily than either terrans or protoss. So you just killed off that pesky hydra/roach army with your zealot/stalker/sentry/colossus force. Great! Now ultra/ling and corruptors are flying up your ass and you don’t have a proper force to deal with it. Not so great! Zerg tech switches can be absolutely brutal because they often come with no warning. You won’t know what the zerg is building often times until his army shows up at your front door. Protoss has two ways to mitigate this danger.

First, aggressive protoss play can “force” the zerg down certain tech paths, making his force composition predictable. For example, aggressive 2-gate openings will force either massed speedlings, roaches, or banelings, thereby delaying lair tech units and faster expansions. Getting a stargate and building phoenixes will discourage the zerg from building mutalisks and force him to build hydralisks.

However, even aggressive protoss play can’t entirely dictate what the zerg builds. To further mitigate the risk of losing due to a tech switch, the protoss player should build a force that can deal with anything that the zerg throws at him. Fortunately, the protoss player has such an option, which will be discussed below.

3. Spire tech is the most effective and deadly ZvP tech.

Massed mutalisks create huge problems for protoss players. Good zerg players will use the mutalisks to keep an ill-prepared protoss player trapped in his base, giving the zerg unlimited map control, which he will then use to take bases and establish an insurmountable economic lead. Let’s face it: protoss ground-based anti-air sucks. Period. Stalkers simply don’t do enough damage against air units, and they are not mobile enough to keep up with mutalisks, even with blink, when you’re ready to expand beyond your natural. Phoenixes are the only, consistently effective answer to mutalisks that protoss has for reestablishing map control. This threat of mutalisks is one of the primary reasons why this guide advocates building a stargate as the first tech building after a core. By creating an early phoenix force, the protoss player can effectively raise the opportunity cost that the zerg faces in transitioning into spire. In other words, the zerg needs a larger air force than he otherwise might need to effectively the protoss. This dynamic effectively discourages spire tech altogether.

4. Protoss units are at their best in smaller engagements.

This may be the most overlooked characteristic of the protoss arsenal. Because of the general crappiness of stalkers and sentries in terms of raw damage output, and because of the diminishing effectiveness of melee units (zealots) in combat against larger and larger masses of ranged units, the protoss army is not as effective in 200/200 combat as either terrans or zerg. Colossi and storm help level the playing field, but the core gateway units that will form the backbone of the protoss army are very weak in large-scale combat by themselves. This fact two has important implications. First, a protoss player NEEDS either storm or colossi to compete against large zerg ground armies. Second, all other things being equal (like equal production and economy), army trading to reduce the size of each player’s army is a good outcome for the protoss. While 20 zealots will not do well against 20 hydralisks, 10 zealots will absolutely murder 10 hydralisks. The chargelot, in particular, is the king of the late game when the initial large armies have been destroyed. This dynamic further lends to the effectiveness of aggressive PvZ play.

5. Protoss is the map control king of StarCraft 2.

Leveraging warp in, proxy pylons, warp prisms, fairly mobile gateway troops, and very fast stargate units, protoss has all of the tools necessary by the late game to establish and command map control. The warp prism, in particular, may be the most important late game protoss unit. Sneaky warp prism usage can absolutely shut down an opposing player’s late game economy by attacking and harassing expansions. Yes, zerg are pretty fast on their creep highways, but even they cannot compete with the ability to instantly build units in any psi field. This hyper-mobility from warp in arguably makes protoss the strongest late game race. To fully leverage warp in, this guide advocates a strategy that emphasizes gateway units over robotics facility units.

6. Feedback makes it incredibly difficult for a zerg to maintain detection over a battlefield.

This one is self-explanatory. Zerg’s only mobile detection are overseers, and they have energy. They are big, fat, ripe targets for feedback sniping. Once the overseers are gone, the zerg has no detection, giving your dark templar free reign to rape face.

Q: What inspired this build?
A: I developed the build backwards. While playing against a friend, I stumbled onto the effectiveness of using dark templar while sniping overseers with feedback. From there, it was just a matter of figuring out how to get to the point where you can field the tier 3 army described above. More importantly, I hate 4-gating and refuse to play that way in any matchup other than PvP (where I have no choice sometimes). This build, unlikely 4-gating, is inherently badass and fun to use.

Q: Where are the colossi?
A: Honestly, I don’t like colossi that much for the same reason that many other players don’t like them: they’re boring. More importantly, however, I think that colossi are too easy to counter at higher levels of play. Zerg have gotten very good at exploiting the time that it takes to build 3-4 colossi to get a huge economic advantage. Also, zerg are very good at getting enough corruptors to absolutely shut down colossi. For these reasons alone, I prefer high templar and storm tech.

Q: Can zerg counter this?
A: I’m rated at about 1050 in diamond league. Once I get into tier 2, I basically never lose to zerg when I use this build. I think part of the problem is that most zerg haven’t seen this type of build before (all they see is stupid 4-gate play or colossus-centric stuff) so they don’t know how to respond.

Q: Do infestors counter this?
A: There are a couple of games included in the replays where the zerg gets infestors. The infestors don’t really make a difference.

Q: Won't roaches counter this?
A: Not necessarily. Roaches will give anything that is zealot/chargelot reliant a lot of problems. However, you can easily adjust your composition to deal with roaches by adding some sentries, stalkers, immortal, and/or void rays. All of these are readily available units that you can build on the fly.

Q: Won’t the zerg be able to kill you before you get high templar if he brings multiple overseers?
A: I don’t think so. Each overseer is a very large investment. Think about it this way: for every overseer that the zerg builds, he will have 2 less hydralisks in his army. Thus, 3 overseers roughly equals 6 hydralisks. That’s a very significant investment. Specifically, it’s an investment that a zerg will not make unless he knows that there are dark templar on the field. Even if the zerg does build those three overseers, he will have a significantly smaller hydralisk force. This means that your chargelots will be more effective against his ground forces (see principal #5 above). In short, early dark templar, when combined with phoenixes and chargelots, create a very ugly mid-game Catch-22 for the zerg.

Q: So what are you going to do when zerg learn to burn all of the mana on their overseers?
A: I’ll counter by either getting faster blink on my stalkers, increasing my phoenix count, or adding a void ray or two to burn down the overseers faster.

Q: Your Tier 1 discussion sucks because....
A: As I explicitly state in the discussion of the build, what happens at Tier 1 isn't important. This build is about the Tier 2 and Tier 3 transitions. These transitions are triggered once you secure your expansion. How you get to that point is up to you. I included my 2-gate opening as a preferred method of getting the expansion up. If you think that you have something better, go for it. I personally don't believe that there is a 1-size fits all Tier 1 build order PvZ. FE, 2-gating, and 1-gate core all have their uses depending upon the map and proximity between bases.

Q: When should I get my robotics facility?
A: I usually forego the robotics facility until after I have templar tech online. Observers aren’t that critical in PvZ when you already have phoenixes. The phoenixes can scout what the zerg is doing. You only need observers if you think that the zerg is looking to abuse burrowed/tunneling roaches. That said, it is nice to have observers to kill off creep tumors.

Q: I can't make this build work!!!
A: Yes, this can be a difficult build to use. Anything that involves phoenixes requires practice and finesse. Keep trying it and you'll eventually get the hang of it.

Q: You don’t even have phoenixes in half of your replays!!!!
A: Yeah, those are my earlier games when I was still tinkering with the build and focusing upon getting storm out faster. However, I included those replays anyway because they have good late-game demonstrations of how the build operates at tier 3 (sans phoenix, of course).

Q: Dude, the zergs in your replays suck....
A: Unless you’re like 1100+ Diamond, the zergs that you’re playing aren’t much better (I’m sitting at about 1050 right now). That said, I reviewed all of the replays and noticed that I fairly consistently had more workers than my zerg opponents. The two-gate opening, in particular, often resulted in me having a nearly 10 worker lead early on. Nevertheless, the point of this isn’t to highlight how good (or crappy) of a player I am. The point is to showcase a very strong PvZ build. Because, in MOST of the battles, the army sizes were fairly similar (I had trouble keeping my minerals down at times), you have a good opportunity to see how effective the build is. Besides, I want players who are better than me to take the ideas from this post and expand upon them. That's the whole point of this post.

Q: [From Joe Zerg Player] I hate you for posting this.
A: Hey, let’s focus the hate on terrans.

(This is a particularly good demonstration of PvZ late game with this build. Look at how useless the ultras are.)


(More dead ultras)




(Let's add some void rays.)