EPTThe state of the Hydralisk in ZvP - Page 2
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dark fury
Sweden426 Posts
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entropius
United States1046 Posts
The problem in zvp is that protoss have so many options that force you to get hydras, even though they're an inferior unit -- forcefields, immortal compositions, etc. This wouldn't be so bad, since hydra/roach is reasonably competent in a straight-up fight against gateway units. This, then, is a good role for the hydra: something to stand behind the roaches and shoot stuff (at least until the protoss gets storm). The trouble, of course, is cololsi (sic), and thus the corruptor. Hydras suck because colossi melt them especially badly, and zerg has no good counter to cololsi. Corruptors fucking suck, honestly; they are the dedicated zerg air-to-air unit, yet they lose for cost to voids. What a hell of an air-superiority unit, eh? They also don't kill colossi nearly fast enough to stop them from dominating your ground force. Suppose a protoss has 4 colossi. If you build 8 corruptors to counter them, you've spent the same amount on anti-colossus units as he has spent on colossi. Anyone with any experience in zvp will immediately say that that's not enough -- you'd need something like 16 corruptors (twice as much minerals/gas!) to kill those colossi before they demolish your ground army. Even if you do that, though -- even if your corruptors kill *every single one of those colossi*, they've already done massive damage to your ground force before they died, while your corruptors are now dead weight, and you'll lose to the ground force. This, really, is the problem: corruptors are too weak against both voids and colossi, so the zvp mid- and late-game consists of the zerg desperately trying to come up with a solution to colossi. The entire matchup hinges around this: if the zerg can stop colossi he wins, if he can't he loses horribly. Hydras have no place in countering colossi (since they die so badly to them), so they're irrelevant to the matchup. If Blizzard doesn't want to fix corruptors, which despite being a dedicated air-to-air unit are terrible at that role, they could perhaps fix things by making hydras actually good. Making the range upgrade add 2 range would be a good start if they want to keep them fragile. Then while zerg would still have to grossly overproduce corruptors to have a chance against colossi the rest of their army would be stronger to make up for it. It probably wouldn't imbalance zvt too much -- at the most it would bring hydras into parity with the rest of zerg options in zvt. | ||
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Taf the Ghost
United States11751 Posts
On February 26 2011 13:21 Whitewing wrote: Hydralisks demolish gateway units: protoss HAS to get aoe to deal with them, they're too strong vs. everything else protoss has. Problem is, once that AoE is out, it's too strong vs. the hydralisks. Hydras should go back to being a cheaper, tier 1 unit, and be a bit weaker than they are now so that zerg has an early game AA unit (other than the queen), and so they can play a support role throughout the game. Roaches should go up to tier 2, and have their 2 armor back. It's a solid idea... but it'd break ZvZ sooooo badly. | ||
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dark fury
Sweden426 Posts
Void ray is supposed to counter the corruptor because the corruptor counter the other 2 protoss air units. Phoenix is also considered to be an air superiorty unit, yet it gets killed by the corruptor. I think the corruptor is fine. Obviously, you cant have a air unit that completley counters all the other races air units. | ||
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justindab0mb
United States213 Posts
Hydras are good because they have 2 more range, allowing them to hit over forcefields. Otherwise try to avoid them if possible. | ||
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entropius
United States1046 Posts
On February 26 2011 13:21 Whitewing wrote: Hydralisks demolish gateway units: protoss HAS to get aoe to deal with them, they're too strong vs. everything else protoss has. Problem is, once that AoE is out, it's too strong vs. the hydralisks. Hydras should go back to being a cheaper, tier 1 unit, and be a bit weaker than they are now so that zerg has an early game AA unit (other than the queen), and so they can play a support role throughout the game. Roaches should go up to tier 2, and have their 2 armor back. They don't demolish gateway units that badly, really. They're useful, sure, but a well-composed gateway army is at least competent against them. (They're also dog-slow, which has to be taken into account in considering how good they are.) | ||
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dark fury
Sweden426 Posts
On February 26 2011 13:35 justindab0mb wrote: Ehem... the reason my roaches aren't attacking isn't because of poor micro... it's because of this particular spell which is VERY powerful (hint, it starts with an F)... Isnt it awesome to have an ability called burrow wich allows you to crawl under the forcefields and get into a superior position while regenerating health at an insane rate, then? | ||
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entropius
United States1046 Posts
On February 26 2011 13:31 dark fury wrote: Entropius: you dont need 16 corruptors to kill 4 colossus. If 8-10 corruptors cant kill the four colossus before most of your ground forces have melted away, you are obviously overmaking hydras. roaches can tank the damage. Void ray is supposed to counter the corruptor because the corruptor counter the other 2 protoss air units. Phoenix is also considered to be an air superiorty unit, yet it gets killed by the corruptor. I think the corruptor is fine. You didn't read the next bit. Even if 8 corruptors kill 4 colossi (an even trade in resources), you have traded your 1200/800 on corruptors for his 1200/800 on colossi, but only <i>after</i> those colossi have done large amounts of damage; meanwhile you are left with nothing useful, since your surviving corruptors will then sit around and masturbate until there is something else to shoot at. Consider a bit of theorycraft: Corruptors do 10.6 DPS vs. Massive. 8 corruptors do 84.8 DPS vs. Massive, and will kill one colossus every 5.3 seconds (4.3 or so with corruption considered, which is about three times its cooldown). Each colossus will get to fire once before the corruptors get in range. This means that the first colossus will get to fire 4 times; the second will get to fire 7 times; the third will get to fire 10 times; and the fourth will get to fire 13 times before it dies (assuming your hydra/roach/ling/whatever is busy engaging his gateway units, since to do otherwise is suicide due to colossus range and forcefield). This is 34 colossus shots. Roaches do the best at tanking them, so let's consider the effect of 34 colossus shots against roaches. Each shot will hit 3-4 roaches, so let's use 3.5. Each shot does 30 damage, * 3.5 roaches hit, * 34 shots = 3570 damage deal to your roaches, which is enough to kill 24.6 of them. In this scenario, your corruptors kill his colossi. After this happens you each have used up 1200/800 of resources, since his colossi are dead and your corruptors are useless. However, he has gotten ~25 dead roaches out of the deal, and you have a handful of useless corruptors. Yes, there are some assumptions made in this calculation, but they are not unreasonable ones. Most importantly, the result is so much in favor of the colossi that even some small systematic error in the "theorycrafting" won't change the final result: 8 corruptors cannot kill 4 colossi before they do enough damage to swing the ground battle. Regarding void vs. corruptor: Voids can shoot ground. Units that can shoot both ground and air should be significantly weaker than those that can only shoot one or the other. Phoenix do lose to corruptors, but that's not terribly relevant since: 1) those corruptors can do nothing else useful, while the phoenix have graviton and can shoot overlords 2) Phoenix are faster, and thus are never forced into a bad engagement (most relevantly) 3) Protoss have no compelling tactical reason to maintain an air-to-air force. Zerg *must* maintain significant air-to-air capability or they die to colossi. | ||
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Bawbjohnson
United States174 Posts
On February 26 2011 13:38 dark fury wrote: Isnt it awesome to have an ability called burrow wich allows you to crawl under the forcefields and get into a superior position while regenerating health at an insane rate, then? Burrow is rather useless if they have an observer with their army. | ||
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HavokTheorem
New Zealand250 Posts
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dark fury
Sweden426 Posts
Also, in the next patch fungal growth will deal 30% more damage against air units (void ray stalker colossus) wich will make this composition even more reasonable to deal with. | ||
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dark fury
Sweden426 Posts
On February 26 2011 13:58 Bawbjohnson wrote: Burrow is rather useless if they have an observer with their army. No, you can still bypass the forcefield. The observer only allows the protoss to attack the roaches while they do so, but thanks to the super high regeneration it is unlikely that the protoss will be able to kill too many of them while you burrow-move. | ||
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reprise
Canada316 Posts
On February 26 2011 14:05 dark fury wrote: No, you can still bypass the forcefield. The observer only allows the protoss to attack the roaches while they do so, but thanks to the super high regeneration it is unlikely that the protoss will be able to kill too many of them while you burrow-move. I think you overestimate the power of burrow-regen. Roach has 2 range less than Stalker which allow quite a bit of free shots from a slow moving Roach. Coupled with Collosi DPS, losing 10+ Roaches without doing any damage is not uncommon. On February 26 2011 14:04 dark fury wrote: Entropius: Roach corruptor can deal with gateway units+colossus quite efficiently so i dont see any reason for complaining, if the protoss has voidrays to counter corruptor, you should have been able to tech up as well and get the appropriate counter. Also, in the next patch fungal growth will deal 30% more damage against air units (void ray stalker colossus) wich will make this composition even more reasonable to deal with. The only units that stand a chance against Void Rays are Mutas and Hydras, and outnumbering with a large amount of Corruptors. Mutas are a nonoption due to high cost, low survivability and damage output. The Corruptor has already been discussed so I won't bring it up gain, but it leaves the Hydras simply evaporate to Collosi. You can't look at these situations so black and white as "X counters Y so I get Z." And PTR notes shouldn't be brought up in a current discussion. | ||
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DoubleReed
United States4130 Posts
On February 26 2011 14:05 dark fury wrote: No, you can still bypass the forcefield. The observer only allows the protoss to attack the roaches while they do so, but thanks to the super high regeneration it is unlikely that the protoss will be able to kill too many of them while you burrow-move. Yea, this is very impractical. This really only works if the forces are quite small, or if they have like only 2 colossi.. Otherwise, you'll simply take way too much damage. Burrow-regen is good, but not THAT good. | ||
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Juice303
United States42 Posts
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Bawbjohnson
United States174 Posts
On February 26 2011 14:05 dark fury wrote: No, you can still bypass the forcefield. The observer only allows the protoss to attack the roaches while they do so, but thanks to the super high regeneration it is unlikely that the protoss will be able to kill too many of them while you burrow-move. Like everyone else said, burrowing while they have an observer is just letting them do tons of damage to your Roaches without them doing any back. The regen is good, but when you have that death ball doing damage to you while you slowly move under a FF, well, it's pretty useless. | ||
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entropius
United States1046 Posts
On February 26 2011 14:04 dark fury wrote: Entropius: Roach corruptor can deal with gateway units+colossus quite efficiently so i dont see any reason for complaining, if the protoss has voidrays to counter corruptor, you should have been able to tech up as well and get the appropriate counter. Also, in the next patch fungal growth will deal 30% more damage against air units (void ray stalker colossus) wich will make this composition even more reasonable to deal with. Roach corruptor *cannot* deal with gateway units + colossus efficiently. As mentioned earlier, even if you spend as much on corruptors as he has spent on colossi your corruptors will become useless (by being useless) at the same time as his colossi become useless (by being dead), but by that point your roaches have taken so much damage that they'll be flattened. Pure gateway is actually somewhat competitive against roach, especially if there are immortals or bad terrain (forcefield) mixed in. What would you tech up to in order to counter voids? The only zerg unit that beats voids for cost is the hydra, and they're useless with colossi on the field. Edit: Burrow-move is better than nothing against forcefield. It's especially good against splash, like colossi. But once they have 3-4 colossi your roaches will be taking so much damage that any delay will result in a huge number of them dying. | ||
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BattRoll
100 Posts
I find that no matter what the case - you're being hard countered. Generally toss is going to mass stalkers which counter roaches. And of course collosus counter hydras. Corruptors do a decent job of taking care of them but they're fairly slow and it's pretty hard to catch a toss deathball out of position. Sure roaches can avoid forcefields, but you're doing it mid battle at the cost of losing your corruptors . If they somehow have an observer alive, your roach burrow was probably not even worth doing. I tend to do a heavy ling/baneling/muta play (banelings situational) against toss because it pretty much nullifies collosus - Of course the issue with that is you're very fragile against a 4/6 warpgate push - a few well placed forcefields and you unavoidably lose so you're heavily relying on spine crawlers for defense. I find that this style of play usually leaves me in a much better position throughout the game though and I generally only have real trouble with a good blink/stalker build. I just find that going heavy roach/hydra only really works for the early mid game - and once they get out collosus you're pretty much screwed unless you get some miraculous sniping of collosus with your corruptors and somehow meet their army in a perfect position. So in my mind if I'm going heavy roach/hydra - I am attacking immediately because it's basically going all in. | ||
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Smipims
United States61 Posts
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entropius
United States1046 Posts
On February 26 2011 15:30 Smipims wrote: The problem with hydras is that they are simply so good against everything the protoss has. Hydras beat zealots, sentries, stalkers, immortals, voidrays and phoenix. And very easily. Upgraded stalkers chew through upgraded roaches I think. Especially with forcefields and a few chargelots or blink. None of that matters, since hydras die so hard to the everpresent colossi. Marines are an even harder counter to everything non-AoE that Protoss can make, but they are vulnerable to storm and colossi so things are balanced. The trouble with hydras is that while they're effective against things other than storm and colossi, they're not all *that* effective, and they get owned so utterly hard by colossi that whether or not they beat generic gateway shit is irrelevant. Yes, sometimes they're good. I just played a protoss 4-gating me and held with ling/roach. Then he expanded and 6-gated me, and I held with ling/roach/hydra. Then I went and killed him with roach/hydra. I could only do that, though, since he had no colossi. Once colossi come out the entire zerg army has to be geared to dealing with them, and hydras have no place in that. | ||
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