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Hello Plexa, I am about a 1.4k ish diamond zerg player, and I find myself most comfortable in ZvP.
What I generally like to do is FE, defend any pressure with roaches, then tech to lair getting hydras, hydra range, roach speed, range attack +1, and push out before colossus or colossus range finishes. Usually, I can pump a very large number of roach/hydra, and I will have a set of lings to bait forcefields. I find this is very effective against a 1base protoss, and even if they have 1 or 2 colossus out, my force can snipe them out and overrun them.
In your opinion, what are the weaknesses/strengths of this kind of zerg 2 base roach/hydra push?
I think it's safe against 4gate, 5gate all-ins, Phoenix play, void rays, and if they forge FE, the attack usually hits just about when their economy kicks in.
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Hmm making sure I stay ahead on upgrades is having some nice dividends. PvZ is still hard on many maps though 
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On November 14 2010 14:30 achacttn wrote:
Hello Plexa, I am about a 1.4k ish diamond zerg player, and I find myself most comfortable in ZvP.
What I generally like to do is FE, defend any pressure with roaches, then tech to lair getting hydras, hydra range, roach speed, range attack +1, and push out before colossus or colossus range finishes. Usually, I can pump a very large number of roach/hydra, and I will have a set of lings to bait forcefields. I find this is very effective against a 1base protoss, and even if they have 1 or 2 colossus out, my force can snipe them out and overrun them.
In your opinion, what are the weaknesses/strengths of this kind of zerg 2 base roach/hydra push?
I think it's safe against 4gate, 5gate all-ins, Phoenix play, void rays, and if they forge FE, the attack usually hits just about when their economy kicks in.
I'm not plexa.
2 base hydra push is pretty scary for protoss in general. Gateway units suck so they're going to turtle. It should hit just as they get their first colossus without range. Expect cannons and a lot of FF's. Just don't go overboard with your attack and expand again when your attack and you'll most likely win economically in the end.
What i've been doing recently is a 3 immortal push with a lot of sentries. It puts a lot of pressure on the zerg as well as forcing hydras/other tech. From my experience, zergs can't just make a lot of lings against immortals because of the sentries or roaches because of immortals. Fast hydras from the zerg is what beats me at that. However, I would already have colossus on the way to kill zerg later after I have expanded.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On November 14 2010 08:01 sjschmidt93 wrote:
I'm just waiting for the day where a giant ball of archons will make your opponent shit his pants (like ultras do now). I think they one-shot lings with +3, right?
Also, what's the best way to merge archons? Everything in this game is smart except merging archons. I wish it'd pick the two lowest mana ones and morph but they don't.
Archons are beastly units. They one shot lings without upgrades always, but if lings have +1 armour then you need +1 attack and then you'll always one shot them again. Seeing as you should be upgrading anyway, most times you'll merge archons and they'll kill tons of crap.
Best way to merge archons is manually select them. Being a former BW player means that this is not a problem at all  it just takes practice is all.
On November 14 2010 08:41 Deltawolf wrote:Thank you, Plexa! Every time I'm in desperate need of Protoss, you post right when I need you most Always enjoy your very intelligent and neatly summarized posts. I thought I was the only one having trouble mid/late game with Protoss especially with all these Blizzard numbers saying Protoss is stomping people.... Protoss is stomping people.... just with timing pushes. There isn't a Protoss alive that will be able to beat Idra in a macro game since. I dont know how blizzard is going to patch this mess up if you weaken Protoss early game any more Terran will destroy them every game...
On November 14 2010 09:41 4kmonk wrote:
PvT and PvP guides, I feel, would have to be structured much differently. PvT and PvP are both heavily based on build order battles where is PvZ is much more linear with just a slight divergence between ground zerg vs muta/ling.
You are correct. PvT/PvP after the early game are incredibly simplistic at the moment. Early game is where all the trouble is...
On November 14 2010 10:47 blahman3344 wrote:
Wow! This was a very informative guide, Plexa! Thanks for putting your effort into making this, I will be sure to make good use of it (when I start playing SC2...heh...).
Just a question, though. Wouldn't it be convenient to put down 2 stargates in most cases? Chances are if you make it to the late game, all you need to do is put down a fleet beacon and start pumping VRs, or is it more so a question of "If I make it, but I don't use it, then it was a wasted investment"? 2 Stargates that you're not using equates to 300 gas that you've wasted. So yea, I would avoid doing that. If you're incorporating SG units into your army (like voids) then that's a different story.
On November 14 2010 13:46 Yukidasu wrote:Awesome guide, thanks a lot. Very helpful as a random player, for both sides. I wonder if the solution to having too many minerals is to take several expansions for gas only, expecting to lose some of them. Will have to try it out once I've worked out how to do everything else .
Possibly! Who knows! We'll see how things develop over time.
On November 14 2010 14:30 achacttn wrote:
Hello Plexa, I am about a 1.4k ish diamond zerg player, and I find myself most comfortable in ZvP.
What I generally like to do is FE, defend any pressure with roaches, then tech to lair getting hydras, hydra range, roach speed, range attack +1, and push out before colossus or colossus range finishes. Usually, I can pump a very large number of roach/hydra, and I will have a set of lings to bait forcefields. I find this is very effective against a 1base protoss, and even if they have 1 or 2 colossus out, my force can snipe them out and overrun them.
In your opinion, what are the weaknesses/strengths of this kind of zerg 2 base roach/hydra push?
I think it's safe against 4gate, 5gate all-ins, Phoenix play, void rays, and if they forge FE, the attack usually hits just about when their economy kicks in. It's a style which crushes pressure, that's for sure. Most of the advice I've laid out in this guide is the complete wrong way to play against that style, it's just not that common on the ladder from what I see though. From a Protoss perspective, I need sentries and cannons and as long as I defend your attack I should be in the lead. It's kinda like a semi-all in timing push, but I think it's pretty versatile overall.
Cannons and Forcefield while stalling for Colossus is the best reaction to this imo. Storm won't be done in time  but the Protoss does need to know this push is coming so he can put down cannons accordingly. Gauging the army strength with Hallucination is necessary so you don't over commit to defence. I can't stress just how important good forcefields are against this push, they are completely necessary to cut the army up into bits and let the cannons do their thing. Once the Protoss is able to get 2 Colossus out he should be safe.
It's a tough build to hold, that's for sure!
On November 14 2010 14:59 EtherealDeath wrote:Hmm making sure I stay ahead on upgrades is having some nice dividends. PvZ is still hard on many maps though Yes. I have blistering and scrap thumbed down because they are actually impossible to win pvz on without cheese.
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Why there is not more post like this in TL oh why.
I've made a post in the general forum trying to say that this should be the kind of thing that is in the liquipedia (not only because quality, but especially because the format, because the holistyc approuch) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=168851
Not seeming to have to much success but i have to try it, i really would love a static state of the art of the matchup like this in a static place and upgraded every few weeks x(.
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Oh and if the PvT and PvP would be THAT simple..please write it man! xP
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On November 14 2010 18:47 evilK wrote: Why there is not more post like this in TL oh why. I've made a post in the general forum trying to say that this should be the kind of thing that is in the liquipedia (not only because quality, but especially because the format, because the holistyc approuch) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=168851 Not seeming to have to much success but i have to try it, i really would love a static state of the art of the matchup like this in a static place and upgraded every few weeks x(.
This has already been converted into Liquipedia
Draco vs Dalailamer is an example of a typical PvZ. Identifying the mistakes that draco makes in this game should help your own understanding of the matchup tenfold.
Sorrow vs Orz is an excellent example of a number of these principles - hallu scouting, pressure, good FF use etc.
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I'm a 1.4k diamond Protoss, and I've been trying out archons against Mutaling and just played a game where I ended up doing a lot of things you mentioned in this post, some by accident. I scouted the Zerg not expanding and getting a very early roach warren and gas, so I got a forge and one cannon after 1 or 2 gates, but no pressure came so I started 1 attack. When the mutas came, they caught me completely by surprise and I barely had enough stalkers to deter them. With my expansion up, I started teching to HT's while holding off the mutas. Unwisely, the Zerg wasn't trying to outexpand me, so maybe this isn't the best example. He also threw his ball of 30 mutas into my army and got absolutely destroyed by the archons; that was basically game. However I should have gotten hallucination to scout the mutas-I always forget about it.
The key points of this game were getting early upgrades (which happened completely by accident) and getting archons. After 1 attack I got 1 armor, then 2 attack, then 1 shield for the archons, and ended up leading the zerg in upgrades.
As Plexa said, and I agree: Archons are great against zerglings, great against mutalisks (but not great for holding off harass), but they're also pretty good against ultralisks. I haven't tested it in the unit tester, but I just did the math and archons will take more hits from ultralisks: 18 to an immortal's 16. Both units benefit from the shield upgrade, of course, but temps can also be used for storm.
The great thing about archons vs. mutas is that the zerg can't do anything about it. Focus fire and a-move are equally ineffective, and magic box is actually worse! (I'm pretty sure I was doing it right...)
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I really think that you should mention Archons and Drops in there somewhere, and elaborate a little more on DTs. Archons are actually incredibly strong as the game progresses. They scale disturbingly well with attack upgrades (+4 per upgrade to biological? YES PLEASE). They are monsters versus Ultralisks, taking very little damage due to having no typing, and dealing a ton thanks to the fact that their big hits aren't reduced much by the Ultra's terrifying armor. Versus MutaLing, they're surprisingly potent, although you'll probably only be getting them that early as IST. The fact that both Mutas and Lings clump so tightly and have such small range makes their splash very potent, and they are pretty durable, so Mutas can't swoop in and kill them while only taking damage like they can with Stalkers. They're also more effective in drops than one might imagine after you have sufficient attack upgrades to 1-hit drones. In a saturated mineral line, a pair of Archons can kill upwards of 10 drones in just a couple shots. They also require a lot more to defend against than something like dropped Templar, where a handful of speedlings or the queen can force them away after they've put down their storms.
This brings up the next thing I was going to mention, drops. Any Zerg who goes Roach Hydra will have insane amounts of trouble ever killing a warp prism, ever ever ever. Hydras are not very mobile, and Roaches are not very capable of shooting up, so you can basically drop to your heart's content, and only have them able to kill what you drop at best, not ever your prism. As you said, a big part of PvZ is trying to limit the number of Drones they produce, and drops can be used as an overarching strategy, not just an occasional tactic, to accomplish this. There are a wide variety of units that you can drop for this, each requiring a somewhat different response from the Zerg. High Templars are probably the best at killing Drones straight up, but they're also the easiest to defend against, as 6 to 8 lings near every expansion can pick them off as they land, which is pretty expensive. Archons kill Drones pretty well and are also strong, but the Zerg can just run his Drones away until Roaches arrive to mitigate this damage. Zealots/Sentry drops are awesome, because you can FF his ramp and then proceed to stab everything with the Zealot's laser hands, but the Zealots are so much slower than Drones unless you have Charge that these will probably be better for sniping Evo Chambers and tech structures than workers. (I wouldn't recommend dropping any of these other units with Sentries, as appealing as it may sound, because if you mess up and lose the drop, it'll cost you SO MUCH GAS.)DTs can do tons of damage very quickly and require detection, but also can't pursue Drones, so the Zerg can do something similar to avoid damage unless you have enough to kill his hatch before a Seer arrives.
This brings up the last thing I wanted, which is because I don't know much about it. You said that adding DTs was a good idea for CSS in lategame, and it seemed like you meant for something other than harass. Is there an effective way to use them in your army composition? (Perhaps similarly to Archons, for playing against Ultras?) You can also use them to make Archons for slightly less gas than HTs, I suppose, which probably look pretty appealing to CSS, who is always starved. Please do explain, and thanks so much for this guide, it did an awesome job describing PvZ for us right now.
EDIT: Tried to make it look a little more readable.
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Note also that unless you open with Phoenix, Phoenix are not a good counter to Mutalisks. They are good to prevent the Mutalisk death ball from starting, but they are not good at controlling the deathball once it gets large.
I Actually tried this in the Unit tester with
4 Phoenixes (600 minerals/400gas) against
7Mutalisks (700 minerals/700gas)
(no micro from either side) and Protoss wins around most of the time. Tested both without any upgrades of either side, and both all upgrades to level3. So, the above statement must be false.
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Ok, I also tried 3 Archons against 7 Mutalisks, and Protoss wins easily
3 Archons against 2 Ultralisks and Protoss wins.
Imho, once Protoss and Zerg both reaches 200/200, Protoss should always win easily. Its Zergs job to prevent this from happening in the first place.
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On November 15 2010 04:05 Aragorn2 wrote:
Note also that unless you open with Phoenix, Phoenix are not a good counter to Mutalisks. They are good to prevent the Mutalisk death ball from starting, but they are not good at controlling the deathball once it gets large.
I Actually tried this in the Unit tester with
4 Phoenixes (600 minerals/400gas) against
7Mutalisks (700 minerals/700gas)
(no micro from either side) and Protoss wins around most of the time. Tested both without any upgrades of either side, and both all upgrades to level3. So, the above statement must be false.
No, you're completely wrong. Reactionary phoenixes don't counter mutalisks. Phoenixes only work if you opened blind stargate. 4 vs 7 aren't realistic numbers btw, if you got reactionary phoenixes youll get outnumbered 1 to 3-4 in minutes.
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On November 15 2010 04:13 Aragorn2 wrote:
Ok, I also tried 3 Archons against 7 Mutalisks, and Protoss wins easily
3 Archons against 2 Ultralisks and Protoss wins.
Imho, once Protoss and Zerg both reaches 200/200, Protoss should always win easily. Its Zergs job to prevent this from happening in the first place.
Archons are too gas heavy too get in large numbers, theyre beasts but come too late, are too expensive and are ineffective at defending vs muta harass.
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United States8476 Posts
The biggest problem with archons early is that they're so gas intensive. Protoss needs to devote all their gas into countering mutas and one archon means 6 less stalkers or 2 less templar. Either 6 stalkers or 2 templar is a better option vs mutas. Also, archons are bad at stopping harrass, easily focus fired, and don't benefit from armor upgrades. Finally, archons are bad vs roaches, which is a common transition from muta. You can't just do these unit tests to simulate a real game. You'll never have a situation where you just have 3 archons vs 7 mutalisks.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On November 15 2010 02:05 Kpyolysis32 wrote:
I really think that you should mention Archons and Drops in there somewhere, and elaborate a little more on DTs. Archons are actually incredibly strong as the game progresses. They scale disturbingly well with attack upgrades (+4 per upgrade to biological? YES PLEASE). They are monsters versus Ultralisks, taking very little damage due to having no typing, and dealing a ton thanks to the fact that their big hits aren't reduced much by the Ultra's terrifying armor. Versus MutaLing, they're surprisingly potent, although you'll probably only be getting them that early as IST. The fact that both Mutas and Lings clump so tightly and have such small range makes their splash very potent, and they are pretty durable, so Mutas can't swoop in and kill them while only taking damage like they can with Stalkers. They're also more effective in drops than one might imagine after you have sufficient attack upgrades to 1-hit drones. In a saturated mineral line, a pair of Archons can kill upwards of 10 drones in just a couple shots. They also require a lot more to defend against than something like dropped Templar, where a handful of speedlings or the queen can force them away after they've put down their storms. It's just not possible to spam archons like you would want to in the late game. And even if you can, once you lose those archons (be it to hydra, BL or Ultra) it's even harder to rebuild your army I've said throughout this thread that Archons are amazing units, but you just can't spam them Further, Archons require shield upgrades which are usually neglected because of their insane cost.
This brings up the next thing I was going to mention, drops. Any Zerg who goes Roach Hydra will have insane amounts of trouble ever killing a warp prism, ever ever ever. Hydras are not very mobile, and Roaches are not very capable of shooting up, so you can basically drop to your heart's content, and only have them able to kill what you drop at best, not ever your prism. As you said, a big part of PvZ is trying to limit the number of Drones they produce, and drops can be used as an overarching strategy, not just an occasional tactic, to accomplish this. There are a wide variety of units that you can drop for this, each requiring a somewhat different response from the Zerg. High Templars are probably the best at killing Drones straight up, but they're also the easiest to defend against, as 6 to 8 lings near every expansion can pick them off as they land, which is pretty expensive. Archons kill Drones pretty well and are also strong, but the Zerg can just run his Drones away until Roaches arrive to mitigate this damage. Zealots/Sentry drops are awesome, because you can FF his ramp and then proceed to stab everything with the Zealot's laser hands, but the Zealots are so much slower than Drones unless you have Charge that these will probably be better for sniping Evo Chambers and tech structures than workers. (I wouldn't recommend dropping any of these other units with Sentries, as appealing as it may sound, because if you mess up and lose the drop, it'll cost you SO MUCH GAS.)DTs can do tons of damage very quickly and require detection, but also can't pursue Drones, so the Zerg can do something similar to avoid damage unless you have enough to kill his hatch before a Seer arrives. Drops are alright, seeing as the goal of this was to provide an over arching look at the match up in it's current form I didn't feel that drops were appropriate. I didn't want to introduce any theorycraft and while I've played around with drops I've never found them to be overly effective (or at least enough to justify the investment).
This brings up the last thing I wanted, which is because I don't know much about it. You said that adding DTs was a good idea for CSS in lategame, and it seemed like you meant for something other than harass. Is there an effective way to use them in your army composition? (Perhaps similarly to Archons, for playing against Ultras?) You can also use them to make Archons for slightly less gas than HTs, I suppose, which probably look pretty appealing to CSS, who is always starved. Please do explain, and thanks so much for this guide, it did an awesome job describing PvZ for us right now.
EDIT: Tried to make it look a little more readable. Just mixing them in with your regular army does wonders. Unless they're bringing along 3-4 overseers you can easily pick off any detection they have and let the DTs rip up their expensive ultralisks. Usually when they start mixing in overseers I morph them to archons because as you pointed out, you get cheaper archons
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I haven't played SC2 very much since 1.1.2 because of the zerg. I was doing PvP and PvT just fine, but PvZ was crushing me (early game).
This guide was very helpful and I greatly appreciate it. My play early play-style was centered around zealots and upgrades, and I've been neglecting both sentries and stalkers in favor of phoenixes. This guide made many things clear, and I'll definitely try some of the things explained here.
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Got to 2000 Diamond a minute ago. Of the 13 games I played today I'm 2-3 Against Zerg, 4-0 against Terran, 3-1 against Protoss. I say this to brag but also because those losses were against FKING ROACHES!!!!#$!# I cannot stand them. I took KiWiKaKi's PvP Socke's PvT and TTOne's 6gate/forge +1 timing push around the 10min mark but I cannot get TTOne's build to work as well as he did =(. I feel like I just can't get the build to work. I also feel like the only other option is blink stalkers. GUHHHHHHHH
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Very nice informative post, Plexa. I'm sure a lot of Protoss users who are struggling will  you after reading this. Thanks! ;D
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@ slapmysalami,
You might get good results if you change that TTone build of forge FE into a 6 gate +1 push by going 5 gate + robo with +1 push. Just make 1 obs and then immortals from the robo.
The push will still be insanely strong against muta/ling play, especially as even muta/ling give a good use for immortals, ie. spine crawlers. Leading with the immortals makes it much easier to beat a huge amount of spine crawlers. Against any play with roaches the push will obviously be very strong as well. Also because you have a obs you can shoot creep tumors and be able to scout roach/hydra play in time, against which it's generally not so good to push. Having the robo up already will also let you get colo much faster when you do need them.
The only disadvantage of that robo imo is that you can't do that TTone push anymore at very big maps then. On big maps you can still do the 6 gate variant then or simply do something else completely like phoenix harass for example.
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i enjoyed this post a lot -- definitely helps to explain the unspoken concepts behind what i've been seeing in several replays
any chance for a follow-up of a PvT post?
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EPT
