The state of the Hydralisk in ZvP - Page 6

On February 26 2011 12:18 dark fury wrote:
This is something i have been thinking a lot about in the last couple of days. Its sooo common to see even top master zerg players go roach/hydra/corruptor against gateway/colossus and then ragequit and complain about colossus OP when they lose. Two guys even made a 30 minute vlog complaining about it (no offense to idra and artosis, they are ballers of the highest level)

Disclaimer: Everything presented in this thread represents my personal and completley subjective opinion and i dont want to pretend that im some sort of all knowing guru of starcraft 2, because im not. i could very well be wrong on several occasions and you are free to disagree with anything i say. In fact, im much eager to hear you opinion. This is a thread for constructive debate and open discussion.

Disclaimer: I know some people out there are gonna say "dude hydras pwn gateway units" or something obvious and un-constructive along those lines without even reading what i have to say, but its a pretty widely acknowledged fact that you dont really NEED hydras to handle the protoss gateway units. Roaches, especially with speed, burrow and attack and armor upgrades are very good and cost-effective against any stalker/sentry/zealot composition and will always beat a gateway-only army of equal supply. Its not the zealot and stalkers that kills the zerg so effectivley in the mid game, so there is really no need to get hydras just to counter them. What you need to worry about is to respond to the protoss tech path wich will be colossus



To start off, i do think that hydralisk can be a nifty tech choice for the early mid game if you get the hydralisk den before your roach warren and rely on hydralisk/speedling, wich is a great opener and can put on a good amount of pressure with some decent nydus worm/drop play.
Hydras/ling however, becomes completley nullifed and humiliated once the protoss gets out AoE in the form of high templars or even worse, the colossus. thats why you need to make a well timed transition into Roach Warren and Spire, or some other techy build wich can handle the protoss tech units.

Roach/Corruptor or Roach/muta/Corruptor or even Roach/infestor/Corrupter is SOO much more effective against any colossus based build that doesnt include a lot of void rays. Again, people seem to think that you need a major amount of hydras to beat the gateway bulch of the protoss army, wich is just not true.

The deciding factor is that roaches can actually tank the colossus DPS while the corruptors kill them, wich hydras cant. The reason you lost against colossus that deathball despite having a good number of corruptors is because colossus simply kills hydras so fast that his remaining ground army is gonna be superior once the colossus go down and all you have left is 1/4 of your initial army. You overmade hydralisks in a situation where the protoss had devoted his entire tech-path and game plan to hard counter them. With Roaches you can also burrow-move under forcefields and snipe colossus and get into superior positions. Being able to get around and counter well-used forcefields is SUCH a game changing ability thats its almost ridicolous that its not being used to greater extent.

Some people will argue that roaches in big numbers are bad because of their low range tend du cluster up with many of your roaches not being able to get into the front, and therefor you need hydralisks because of their superior range, but getting your troops clumped up is merely a result of poor micro, wich can easily be avoided by

1, Attacking in the right positions, avoiding choke points and narrow enviroments

2, Splitting up your troops. There is absoloutley no reason to have all your roaches/units on one hotkey and zerg should always aim for mulipronged attacks at different locations simultaniously. Forcing the protoss player to split up his huge scary army is necessary in order to beat him

To wrap it up and summerize things, i would like to state that i am by no means trying to imply that the hydralisk is a bad or "Underpowered" unit, its just that some people tend to overmake them without realizing that even after losing continiously. In general it is always good to have a hydralisk den up in the mid-to-later phase of the game, because i do think they have a lot of strenghts and advantages:

*Having a pack of hydralisks at the back of your army provides a great boost in DPS

*Allows you to snipe observers prior to spire tech

*Great resonse to phoenix harrasment (but do not rely on them to counter void ray/corruptor

*Amazing for hit and run missions with nydus worm or overlord drops.

*Once you manage to kill a good amount of colossi, making a dozen of hydra is a GREAT response as most protoss players wont be able to reproduce them fast enough to match your hydra count, and it will prevent any sneaky-tech switches to mass air.