EPTAt the lower levels, burrow play is much more viable. But playing against really good players, its too much of a risk to burrow and hope they dont scan/move obs over.
[D] Burrow, Roaches, and Claws. - Page 3
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ZomgTossRush
United States1041 Posts
At the lower levels, burrow play is much more viable. But playing against really good players, its too much of a risk to burrow and hope they dont scan/move obs over. | ||
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Sixes
Canada1123 Posts
On September 06 2010 04:14 ZaaaaaM wrote: All those upgrades make you commit to roaches, which are easily hard countered, even if they have 1 ob or raven burrow is instantly useless aswell. (in the way mystic used em) Having used burrowed tunneling roaches with success in several games recently I would like to dispell this myth. Say you are against a toss player. He has colossi and the usual gateway mix (and an observer). You have roach hydra ling (heavy on the roaches, with the appropriate upgrades). If you move in with the roaches then burrow most of them, move under, the protoss player is either forced to move back (getting very hurt by the hydras and lings and whatever roaches you don't burrow) or he has to keep shooting what is up because units won't auto target the burrowed roaches (and clicking them is near impossible under your own units). As a consequence you can get under his army and pop up to snipe colossi. If he runs the colossi away (frequent reaction) just pop up and kill the stalkers/zealots (which are now stuck between roaches and the rest of your army). The other rather simple thing to do is have an overseer around and snipe the observer. Remember as well that roach regen is very very fast with the claws so you can actually tank like crazy while burrowed. | ||
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bobartig
40 Posts
1) It gets HARD HARD HARD countered by detection units, Sure, roaches are tough buggers and can take many more hits when they're regening 15 hp/sec. However, Opponent doesn't need incredible dps kill off roaches when they're not attacking back at all. The regen basically nullifies about 1 zealot's worth of damage, or about 1.3 stalkers. So take the ChiTa/Mystic game. If ChiTa had detection, and it was 15 stalkers against 15 burrowed roaches, the end result is basically like 10-12 stalkers wailing on your 15 burrowed roaches instead of 15. It's not good enough. You still lose roaches, which end up being free kills for your opponent. 2) In large ranged combats, damage is not distributed enough to make it well worth the burrow. In a big ranged battle with, say, 25 roaches and a pile of stalkers and zeals, less than half of them end up taking damage at any given time, usually like 1/3-1/4. Burrowing all roaches allows you to heal up those roach (lets say 4-6 roaches worth of HP), but at a cost of 100% of your damage output. Turning off your damage hose for 5-10 seconds allows your opponent to push across the map. Positional advantages in Starcraft can mean everything, and giving your opponent that time to advance or reposition, even against a foe they cannot see, can often spell death. Now, there's the whack-a-mole crazy-micro idea where you burrow ONLY the hurt roaches, move them somewhere, then pop them back up. You really need to segregate them out of the main control group because it's impossible to tell whose burrowed and whose not from the console. This is doubly hard because there's no single command to "add unit to control x, and remove from control y" so moving a single unit would require you to: hit control group 1 click hurt roach hit R shift+2 (optional, issue move command) double click unburrowed roaches shift+1 You literally have less than one second to pull that off during a fire fight because you need to the damage taking roaches constantly. That is extremely precise 400+ APM with no command spamming. Not even 17 year old koreans could pull that off. Bonus Reason: Against ranged units with sufficiently high DPS, the time spent burrow/unburrowing actually is long enough to just lose out. Even with fully-healed roaches, you are still losing roaches between volleys. Stalkers don't quite deal enough DPS to lose lots to this, but Marauders, Hydras, and most definitely Immortals do. Roach burrow is entirely nullified against these units because you can't efficiently trade even with the burrowed heal rate. For these reasons, I would argue that roach burrow is not underused at all. It's used a decent % of the time it would be appropriate, which is not that often. | ||
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Tazza
Korea (South)1678 Posts
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Makino
Brazil11 Posts
I dont have the skills to do it because im rather new to serious rts game, so if anyone good is willing to try and share comments i will be glad. | ||
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Mindspider
91 Posts
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emc
United States3088 Posts
But really, the roach burrow move only really works once until your opponent gets smart and counters it and then all the money spent on the research is basically wasted. If anything, you better be damn sure you are going to win, or your probably going to lose immediately after losing your roaches. Against good players, it's only cute to use burrow move because of how much it costs and how easily it can be countered. | ||
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Ziggitz
United States340 Posts
I usually get them to counter a zealot and colossi heavy protoss army. They don't do very good dps to the stalkers or colossi but they form a protective barrier between the hydras and the zealots and colossi and their dps on zealots is cost effective. To keep them alive for longer you can burrow and unburrow them to get the enemy to keep switching targets, spreading out the damage a bit. They're cheap with high hit points and only the stalkers are doing their marginal bonus damage to them. The reason you rarely see them is because you need the upgrades and creep to make them worthwhile. Creep takes time, which is sped up by overlord puke at lair tech, all 3 upgrades are lair tech, the upgrades cost 350/350 total to use a 75/25 unit. Assuming you get enough to make the upgrades cost effective that's pretty much your first 12 hydras worth of gas gone, which means you could be getting wrecked by banshees, void rays or mutas. If you get those hydras or mutas and don't get the roaches right away, most protoss and terran midgame units hardcounter the roaches leaving a select few situations where you really want them. To get good use out of them I normally have burrow already researched, when I spot whatever unit combo I can do well against with roaches I start researching glial reconstitution and then use my 2 to 3 hatcheries and pump out a good 10 - 14 right away sometimes 20 if I've been running well and I have surplus larva. I normally favor hydras over mutas so I at least have some upgrades up for them already. | ||
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KiaL.Kiwi
Germany210 Posts
Proper upgraded Roaches on the other hand are able to go toe to toe against a Gateway/Robotics composition a lot longer. Sure - once we're talking about a 150 supply stalker/collossi ball of death things change, but I've found myself able to put huge amounts of pressure on P in the midgame, allowing me to expand/tech further and/or keep his amount of units at a manageable size. They are also a lot more mobile than Hydras, who are just painful to play off creep. Roaches suffer against early Blinkstalkers, but aside from that they get countered a lot softer once they get all their upgrades than many people seem to believe - I pretty regularly beat P who thought their Stalkers+3Immortals or Stalkers+3Collossi should beat pure Roaches and overestimate themselves (1600+, just to fight the claim that they are completly horrible ^.-) Concerning ZvT: Yes they are basically a worthless lategame unit and it hurts to put gas into their upgrades - but they are at the same time the only unit that's able to stall pure mech long enough to get to tier 3. I'm still not sure about burrow though - it's neat to trade units against an agressive T, but nearly useless against anywhone who plays defensive and just waits for their critical amount of thors : / | ||
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