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Hi TL,
Here is my question, some pro's (idra) and other players have said that the 1.3 fungal boost helps the ZvP matchup because it prevents sentries from casting, stalkers from blinking, and collosus from positioning; but I do not think this is true.
In a game situation where the Zerg is nearing max, and Protoss is 20-30 supply behind, which is where I think the army counts should end up if both players play well. I have used Fungal, and even though it does bonus damage, it does not nearly take out the shields of protoss units. I am not sure of the exact amount of Fungal damage vs. Armored but, if it locks part of the ball in place for a moment, and reduces the shield by around 1/4, where is the effectiveness?
Sentries can still FF enough (unless you are able to lead with infestors and successfully fungal ALL sentries, which is not a likely scenario). Then, after the fungal wears, the rest of the sentries can re-cast. It really does not do significant damage to the ball to justify the massive gas sink into infestation pit + infestors (and also if you want to get pathogen glands).
I don't really see many pros using Fungal vs. Protoss death balls right now, so i'm curious what other Zerg's that said the 1.3 change was going to help the match up vs. P reasoned their opinon on and why more Zerg's dont implement infestors if they are effective.
In season 1 I played ~1500 games and was 3.4k Masters so I know my micro could improve, but I have been playing against pretty decent Protoss opponents.
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Well my only response is you need to give it a bit of time first, its too early people haven't found the exact best way to involve infestors yet,
Well thats how i feel
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I think its hard to say right now. For some odd reason infestor play hasn't been getting as much use as most would have thought after the patch. I think most thought it would be widely used but for some reason it isn't. Could be that it doesn't do as well as was originally thought but I feel like pro zergs are still sticking to the roach\hydra corrupter. The games that I have watched with infestors is mainly ZvZ. In all other MUs, it almost seems like going into infestor tech (upgrades and building them) isn't very cost efficient and almost slows the zerg down and puts them behind the opponent. I think the main issue vs. the death ball is that when you move up to cast fungal your infestor almost always dies. Which is a huge investment for one spell. Time will tell imo.
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I think Zerg are going to have to use several more hotkeys and split up their army into 3 or more pieces.
Then sandwiching from all sides and fungaling the whole army.
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FG does about 47 damage to armored, 36 to everything else.
How many Infestors have you been using, would be my question. Adding in 2-3 infestors wouldn't do much at all. Especially considering Colossi have the same range as the FG cast I believe. You want to have 7+ I would think. I like between 7-12 Infestors in my army.
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I've been trying to get 8 or so infestors before they do their big push. If you are lucky and catch them in a ball while advancing towards you. You can keep chaining 2-3 fungals at a time and hold their entire army in place. Repeat as much as possible then engage smartly with your ling/roach/hydra army to mop up. Most of the sentries should be dead, all the shields gone and most of their army is around half health.
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I have always been of the opinion that fungal growth should (partially) ignore shields and do direct damage to armor (like a light version of plague from broodwar).
With fungal being a projectile as it was in the PTR build, I think fungal doing half of its damage to armor and half of its damage to shields would have been a good compromise.
Especially as protoss have got counters to infestors in colossi range and templar feedback.
Patch didn't do too much to change the infestor's situation in ZvP. I still think it's too much of an investment, too hard to micro; a strategy too prone to backfiring.
Whatever people say, you can't keep chaining fungals against a thermal lance army. Maybe in theory you can -- but doesn't work as well in practice. And it just gets harder and harder the longer the game progresses and the bigger the Protoss army gets.
2-3 infestors are always good. More than that commonly proves to be a waste.
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On April 03 2011 11:57 LaLuSh wrote:
I have always been of the opinion that fungal growth should (partially) ignore shields and do direct damage to armor (like a light version of plague from broodwar).
With fungal being a projectile as it was in the PTR build, I think fungal doing half of its damage to armor and half of its damage to shields would have been a good compromise.
Especially as protoss have got counters to infestors in colossi range and templar feedback.
Patch didn't do too much to change the infestor's situation in ZvP. I still think it's too much of an investment, too hard to micro; a strategy too prone to backfiring.
Whatever people say, you can't keep chaining fungals against a thermal lance army. Maybe in theory you can -- but doesn't work as well in practice. And it just gets harder and harder the longer the game progresses and the bigger the Protoss army gets.
2-3 infestors are always good. More than that commonly proves to be a waste.
I agree completely with this. It's still so hard to make infestors cost effective agaisnt a collosus army, and a spell caster is really there for being cost effective. It also hasn't helped me too much vs blinnk stalker builds from my experience. They come too quickly for me to get infestors out in any meaningful number. Like you said, anything mroe than 2-3 infestors is overdoing it, which is true, but that also means you need to have near full energy on those infestors before they're good.
Only time I've found infestors really effective is against protoss who do some kind of stalker / sentry / immortal / ht without collosus play, but that's not as common now. I think 2-3 collosus is the magic number for toss in ZvP now. It's enough to make infestors really hard to use, nullify lings, and force zerg to not only make corruptors but also have to blindly guess how many to make. If the rest of the money just goes into a solid mix of stalker sentry immortal then its wtf for zerg 
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The problem is that most people only get 1 or 2 infestors. At those numbers, you won't even be able to bypass shields. For infestors to work, you need more than a couple. If you only use 1 or 2 FGs, then the P deathball will just retreat and let the shields recharge.
I see infestors with FG as the most cost effective against protoss atm.
Also, another problem I see with zergs is that they group their infestors with the rest of their army, and then proceed to A move in. Infestors then rush forward and die.
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imo the infestor buff isn't that important versus toss since they can heal their shield quickly unless you fg them over and over in a short period of time. It is more of a buff versus Terran bio ball since it demolish them right now. Just my opinion, do not flame me please XD
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the damaged was buffed to actually be noticeable when you have a lot of infestors.
problem is, they are still super easy to kill hard to micro, most of the time only ever get a single fungal off before being thermal lanced to death, and most importantly, they are slow to tech to, and super gas heavy.
Even getting something like 4 infestors after your lair requires 850 gas counting the upgrade, thats enough gas to make 34 roaches. In other words, by making those 4 infestors, you now have 34 less roaches.
zerg units in general are very gas heavy, and zergs just dont tend to have a lot of gas laying around. we are gas starved. always. So you cant actually even really think about getting infestors and anything else than lings before you have at least 3 bases up and running.
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I totally agree with Lalush.
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have you tried engaging and fungaling at the same time?
Fungal's total damage was not changed anyways - if you are trying to chain fungle I don't think you'll see full benifit. I would say try to engage with a regular army and have 2-3 infestors there. Key is to get the flank, but even comming from the front you can buy that critical few seconds to keep the FF from going up before you get in close. Since fungal DPS got 2x buffed, perhaps what you want to do is have your army fight and just use fungal as an AOE ability that punishes the deathball for getting too tightly packed up (and reducing the surface area you can hit).
You may also want to sac some lings when doing fungals to keep the deathball from autotargetting the infestor... like send in 3 lings ahead of the infestor so the collossi go on cooldown.
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I actually think it makes a huge difference, look at IdrA's new ZvP style that he played against HuK, I think that it was working pretty darn well. It's an actual functional strategy that isn't imba on either side, so great vs heavy stalker mixes. Really enjoy that new style of playing against the deathball. Hopefully it works really well.
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Fungal Growths kill hallucinated units instantly, ofc it's helping. Sometimes it can kill observers.
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On April 03 2011 13:12 supdubdup wrote:
Fungal Growths kill hallucinated units instantly, ofc it's helping. Sometimes it can kill observers.
Im pretty sure this thread isnt referring to hallucinated units nor observers, and im more sure thats not the intentions of infestors.
I believe 2 - 3 infestors should do, as more than that can get sniped pretty easily and about 8 infestors is a huge gas intake. They're just too squishy to slow off creep to fungal and escape, in addition FG has the same range as thermal (as mentioned before from previous posts)
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Infestors fg versus toss is still not a good idea. The damage is... not really there tbh. The rooting is now half as effective as it was, which was what infestors we used for to begin with. I think people need to realize that the change was actually a nerf, a hardcore one too.
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On April 03 2011 14:12 Killswitch wrote:
Infestors fg versus toss is still not a good idea. The damage is... not really there tbh. The rooting is now half as effective as it was, which was what infestors we used for to begin with. I think people need to realize that the change was actually a nerf, a hardcore one too.
Commmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmpletely disagree.
ZvZ, infestors crush mass anything, doing significant amounts of bonus damage to roaches. I think the only thing you could argue the reduced time could be a nerf to is using infestors and queens to deal with mutalisks, where you'd be using the fungal to hold the mutas still while the queens nibble away at them.
ZvT, infestors kick the crap out of bio balls muuch harder than before (marauder extra dmg + fku medivac heals) and vikings. You could argue that it's a nerf against holding banshees still and visible for longer, or holding siege tanks out of siege mode longer. though it seems like a buff against pretty much everything else.
ZvP, infestors do seem less impacting, but mostly because of the power of protoss shields. If you commit to one fungal, you've gotta commit to many or the stalkers will just take shield damage, back off and regenerate. If you do manage to chain 5-6 fungals together, the impact is pretty devastating. In any case, it would be hard to call it a nerf regardless, as rarely were you presented with opportunities vP where you wanted to hold a bunch of their units in place so that your units had some sort of advantage in battle.
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On April 03 2011 11:57 LaLuSh wrote:
I have always been of the opinion that fungal growth should (partially) ignore shields and do direct damage to armor (like a light version of plague from broodwar).
With fungal being a projectile as it was in the PTR build, I think fungal doing half of its damage to armor and half of its damage to shields would have been a good compromise.
I also think that the whole problem of fungal vs P is the notion of permanent damage.
Unless you can kill the death ball in a single fight, most of the damage of infestors will be regenerated by the time the zerg remax.
And the second fight is the problem for those who uses infestors. Infestors are the only unit 100% useless once out of energy, and how do you remax after putting all the colossus at half life without killing any ?
Infestors are still a great support units and don't really need a buff, but they are not the solution that will fix the deathball problem in ZvP.
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I've been raping death balls in ZvP with infestors, ling infestor corrupter.. oh the pure destructive power! It adds an extra 9 dps to everything it hits.. might not sound a lot but it sure as hell is when you think about hitting everything until in the ball..
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EPT
