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On November 30 2010 05:08 CecilSunkure wrote:I watched the blink stalker replay, the first you posted. I think this whole build you've shown is really just a testament to how the void rays should be used post 1.1.2. Previously void rays were valuable only when they were fully charged, thus making them more like surgical strike craft; they were good for rushes and early game, and good late game to just throw a couple into an enemy base during a big battle. Now however, they are much better off as a part of an army composition since they have much more burst damage due to the level one stage buff. I saw a recent game in GSL 3 where that one guinea pig player had a collosus void ray build (we jokingly in the re-stream called it the "laser build") that rolled over zerg players. I'm saying that I think the void ray should now be used more as a part of an army composition rather than it's previous lone base-wrecking style of use. I think the success of your early stargate is due to the fact that the void rays have pretty great burst damage, and can't be targeted by zealots. Also, in order for ground units to engage your void rays, if you have zealots underneath then your army's damage output will be really strong vs early game ground compositions; in order for stalkers to engage the voids they risk running into zealots. Since voidrays are so vespene intensive I suggest getting a forge and a cannon immediately after expoing for insurance. This cannon is used in PvP by Day9 and Adelscott ( http://day9tv.blip.tv/file/4099940/ ). The cannon shouldn't be much an issue since you'll have excess minerals. I would say that it looks like you're going to really need some zealots and a couple stalkers and a sentry, so you'll definitely always want 2 gates maybe 3 before you expand. A lot of people have been retorting in that in PvP proper blink micro would wreck this, but honestly proper micro of the zealots and the void rays should do excellent as well. Worst case scenario, stalkers blink directly under your void rays, but, you should have quite a few zealots under there and the stalker army should take at least as much damage as it deals. I'm hoping a realization that void rays are great within an army (relative to pre-1.1.2) will help develop more methods of gaining an economic advantage against a 4 gate without much threat of dieing to an early 4 gate push.
My thoughts exactly, and my experience agrees with it as well, they're a great army unit vs P, and pretty decent vs Z later on (my luck vs T fluctuates a lot, I'm reserving judgement).
On November 30 2010 05:08 CecilSunkure wrote:You must be doing something right if you are beating players over double your current points.
Thanks, although that also has to do with my having so many 2v2 and custom games under my belt (Also I was playing in Beta since somewhere around patch 5, and I was in the top division every time at varying points)
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I'll try this out soon with my practice partners and post up some replays. I'm currently top 2k players in the US. Actually I just did the math, and if I have a 53% win ratio, if I played till my bonus pool was empty I would be ranked #1500 in the US with 2150 points.
Anyways, I'm just excited that I realized that voids might be able to break the PvP 4 gate stalemate, but then again I'm probably just getting my hopes up =P
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should work pretty well in low numbers, wonder how it would work against phoenix play, i mean phoenix are really superior in every way to this unit composition. But it would be interesting to see if you can hold the early push with the voidrays with it (because phoenix need energie to do damage vs ground). Hope this build will become ladder standard, so i have something new to play against.
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Against an agressive four gate you would have 3 warp gates 4 zealots a sentry and a void ray against 5 zealots and 7-8 stalkers. I don't see that working out too well for you, although assuming you lock me out, warp in another sentry to buy 30 seconds total to get 2 more zealots you still would be having a problem.
Against robo openers this seems superior.
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This is a very strong build, voids are just strong as hell vs stalkers if you keep them alive. 3/3 so far. I've used a lot of voids vs terran but haven't given it much of a test in pvp.
Good forcefields are crucial, ill post some reps after class
My take:
Don't keep just making zealot sentry void ray, Add in stalkers once you have too many zealots to properly engage a choke. You are going to get FF'ed and you need to be dealing damage still so throw in a few stalkers once you have enough sentries and can spare some gas.
Its fun as hell too ^^
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Wow ur opponents failed so hard.
I still will try to test this out. But that you beat an opponent who stores up 1400 minerals isnt really that helpfull.
Just one game with bad opponents i guess.
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Im so impressed by this build. I have tried it once or twice and I really like it. Its looking like im going stargate as my standard opening on most maps with all three matchups these days. Great for phoenix harass against zerg and harass against terran, and now voids against protoss. I love the mobility and map control i get with stargate. Plus I usually drop a forge to stop cloak threat and to help defend while i harass. Kind of similar to what terrans do with PF. Much more fun to play with as well rather than having an a-move robo-gateway unit ball. Ive even tried carriers once or twice late game and ive been impressed with their effectiveness. Maybe some day ill go mothership too. :D
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I messed around with voids a lot in PvP especially before the latest patch. They used to be pretty imba on Desert Oasis where you could charge up on their gas very easy. Combined with a 2-pronged attack from their ramp it was hard to stop.
Nowadays they are used more as a compliment to your army and the build certainly has its merits vs those who quick-tech colossi. The problem lies in the fact that nobody really quick techs to colossi anymore and that there are better ways to punish such players. Another issue I think is that you will get run over by AFAIK the 2 most popular PvP builds atm which are 4-gate and blink stalkers.
I think if your goal is to just win every game you can then I'm not sure this build is really for you. If you just like having fun and trying different stuff then this can be fun. I think it's pretty safe to say it is viable at all levels below high diamond.
edit: I do remember having massive issues with FF's when pushing with zealot/VR mix. Sure if you are lucky enough to FF behind their stalkers you can prevent retreat (which is pretty hard given stalker range and speed and blink), but they can just FF in front of them to cripple your zealot DPS.
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Ok I've added you Mr Vauld, ready to show you whenever you like.
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Glad people are liking it, and glad to hear some success from people. I really enjoy this build, it's quite fun, and a nice change of pace from the usual 4-gate or war of the worlds that PvP usually is.
@Skyro
I find 4Gate and Blink Stalkers both have put me under pressure and have definitely made me earn my win (any robo build has straight died against my first push), but neither is a guaranteed loss (In fact I have yet to lose to either using this). I'm curious how people would be able to do at high levels however.
About the FFing to block your zealots out: Every sentry is two less stalkers so my voids have less danger, and ff'ing that way just means I run away and reengage with a bigger force.
I don't usually cut off their whole force with ff, usually only parts when it's even possible, but it usually is when they're trying to focus the voids, at which point i can just run my voids away and let my zealots demolish the stalkers.
@GoldenH
I'm currently out working on a Chem assignment and two Lab Reports, I'll try to go on later tonight, but I may not be able to until Wednesday night.
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On November 29 2010 11:22 sob3k wrote:Show nested quote +On November 29 2010 11:19 Vauld wrote:On November 29 2010 11:05 30to1 wrote:
Yeah - I've been saying the same thing - everyone talks about colo and FF beating this - what they don't understand is that generic pvp meta loses so horribly to this that they can't ever get there. Thank you, that's exactly it. It's not possible to have enough gas to get to colloxen vs this without dying. It totally is, they just have to abuse terrain and play more defensively (after 4gate timings). They will have a very hard time breaking you in the open (after you have some voids), but you will also not be able to bust their expansion at all if they use FF and cliffwalk correctly until you get significant void numbers.
yeah and in the mean time? they cant bust out cause you can hold them in while you take the map. plus void ray harass, while not extremely effective, is very annoying. unless you have amazing micro its gonna do some damage while you GET those significant void ray numbers and trounce him
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I find that if they go 2 gate robo fe or 3 gate robo all in, this build works extremely well. I think people are getting too worked over about void rays when the majority of the damage comes from your zealots. Although I've won my last 3 pvp's, I still feel really uneasy if someone were to actually land decent forcefields against my zeals. I'm still only Platinum, but it seems to be a nice alternative to the repetitive openers in pvp.
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This build works great. Timing push with 3 voids. Stalkers are NOT that good against voids with the zealots slicing through them. Use the voids as bait, the zealots are as much the dps in this build as the void rays are. They won't have more than one collosus at the time you push out. I have yet to lose with this strat. This works really well against robo builds, or, counter-intuitively stalker heavy builds, as without zealots as meat, your zealots will rip through the stalkers as they try to micro to kill your void rays. I like the psychological effect of void rays as it seems they will do anything to focus them down. Use that to your advantage and micro them back letting the zealots slice away the stalkers trying to work their way through.
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This build is actually very good in mid/lategame if you can get to it, but your early defense is really really weak. There are variations of 4gate attacks that get a whole lot of units out BEFORE finishing warpgate research.
Those builds beat you 100%.
At the moment you are doing just fine because the "normal" 4gate and 2/3 gate robo builds which are very dominant in US/EU are missing that huge early timing window they have.
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Yeah I think the strenght of this build is that your opponent needs to run from the zealots, which allows your rays to get charged, or that he tries to kill your rays as fast as possible and just gets
sliced in half by the sick Zealot Dps. Because Zealots are still soo strong if ur opponent doesnt melt them before they can do anything, and on the other hand nearly everyone is paranoid about charged void rays.
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Well, as has been mentioned before, the guy who 4 gated (but not rushed) into expand had the game won. All he had to do was a cut a few probes, focus on units to deflect the oncoming push since he can scout that you have no expand going up - and make constant probes after your expand starts.
Also, in that game I'm pretty sure you would have just died outright to a 4 gate push with constantly chronoed cyber, just have to build 4 pylons into an arrangement such that 1 of them can be hit only by range, aka your one stalker. And even if I cant due to anti build pylon micro, still don't think you would've held, since you had no gateway production ability really.
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Zealot/Voidray is very strong, mainly due to the general terribleness of stalkers vs. both those units and the lack of other protoss AA. That said, this build looks very very weak in the early game - none of your opponents knew how to properly 4wg rush or micro their stalkers, and in both the blink stalker replay and the 4wg-> expand replay, I feel there were several moments where a more experienced player would have just won.
In particular, I don't see how this build can hold off either the 4wg rush (of any variety), or 3 gate blink stalkers. Both will hit with overwhelming force compared to your initial army, and have wayyy better reinforcement options. In fact, a 4wg build might even be able to get away with just mass zealots - they kill your zealots, then go for your mineral line. Voidrays kill zealots very slowly, and the base armor on zealots really impacts the voidray damage output. It will take a charged voidray ~12.3 seconds to kill one zealot, which is quite a lot of time for even small groups of zealots to wreck things.
The lack of detection also worries me a little. If you aren't being aggressive enough to notice a DT rushers lack of gas units, your going to get wrecked. This is also the natural followup to any blink stalker play in case the blink stalkers don't kill you themselves.
In zealot/voidray, I think charge is going to be a super critical upgrade as well. Without charge, zealots can get kited (and endlessly mocked by blink stalkers) or FFed out of the fight while stalkers deal with the voidrays. Charge gets the zealots in fast enough that its hard to forcefield them out (baring a pre-FF, in which case you just wait it out anyway), and their move speed is bumped up high enough that stalkers can't reallyyyy stutter step without getting stabbed. Similarly, +1 air on the voidrays is very critical as the game goes on, as they scale phenomenally better than stalkers do when shooting at armored targets.
I don't know, I love voidrays, but 1gate stargate is just very very ballsy in PvP. I'll try it out though, I've been on tilt in PvP again (korean 4wg x8 in a row hahaha /wrists), so having something new to screw around with will be fun at least.
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On November 30 2010 11:56 MalVortex wrote:
and in both the blink stalker replay and the 4wg-> expand replay, I feel there were several moments where a more experienced player would have just won.
So why don't you explain when and why?
On November 30 2010 11:56 MalVortex wrote:The lack of detection also worries me a little.
Read my earlier post, I said something about this issue.
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I find stargate tech off 1 base extremely weak. But I do love void roys so what I've been doing lately is to go something standard and once both sides are on 2 bases, I build 2-3 stargates and mass void rays.
Important things are:
1. deny obs scouting as long as possible (if you sniped an obs there's a good chance he won't make one for a while if he's massing colossi, which is likely on 2 bases).
2. upgrades you want +2 weapon and speed upgrade before the big encounter.
8 void rays is a good time to either attack or take a 3rd. Stalker immortal supports void rays better than zealot sentry imo. They're bigger, taking less splash dmg and fast enough to keep up with void rays.
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I've tried this is my last 5 pvp games, and I've won all 5 
Needless to say it's my core build right now in pvp. The timing attacks work really well with 1 void (to pressure / take down there natural, and then again with 3-4 voids for a strong push to set up my third. I do find after getting my third that switching to robo tech really punishes an opponent who is even a little to stalker heavy.
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EPT
