EPT[D] Protoss 'Shock and awe' - Page 6
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CecilSunkure
United States2829 Posts
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Plexa
Aotearoa39261 Posts
On June 07 2011 05:47 Anihc wrote: Yes warp prism is a lot better but like Plexa said in the OP, the main downside to this tactic is that it takes a lot of multitasking/APM to use. Proxy pylons take slightly less multitasking/APM. And you can look reaaalllly stupid if it fails  On June 07 2011 05:41 travis wrote: What you say here is exactly where I think the primary usefulness in this lies. Mineral dumping. I think of it as trading minerals for time :3 On June 07 2011 06:02 Foirtchern wrote: I've done multiwarping before. I said earlier in the thread that its pretty fun but i dno if its really viable. It was a game against megalisk on shattered temple where i was just warping in zealots/archons alternating between his main and third. Ultimately though, I dont think it was more effective than one prism. Plus chances are you won't be able to get the same mileage out of your zealots - seeing as everything you want to kill is in his main. PLEXA - I was curious to note that when considering when and where to Warp your shock zealots, you did not (I believe) mention the possibility of a multi-warp/drop. In your primary example, you noted target priority: Main, Natural, Army, Defensively, eventually settling on the Main as being generally the best choice. However I am wondering about the possibility of the "Multi-Warp". I have not had an opportunity to test this, but I am forced to wonder about maximizing damage and whether or not warping 4 Zealots in the Main and 4 Zealots in the natural is more or less effective than 8 Zealots in the main. While this does require an extra Warp Prism, with the increased use of High Templar instead of Colossus, and the Age of the Archon upon us, this could be fairly nasty to deal with. So Plexa, have you tried this? Success? Failure? I'd love to know why Multi-drops weren't considered and whether or not you think it is a valid expansion on your well developed concept? PS Also, what about about an Immortal drops? They are "cheaper", hardy, and can effectively deal with Roaches and a defensively position Siege Tank with a little Zealot support. On June 07 2011 06:05 Voltaire wrote: I didn't think someone could take the term warp prism harass and turn it into a huge post. This isn't event warp prism harass. lol. | ||
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AxelTVx
Canada916 Posts
On Topic: You mentioned you don't go protoss deathball anymore, however, what unit composition do you go for then? Against a Baneling drop + Roach ball, you need forcefields and collo for that damage needed for when you micro from banelings, and you need many stalkers to snipe the overlords. So, what do you then? | ||
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TheKefka
Croatia11752 Posts
Lets say for instance you have your typical colossus/sentry/stalker army going for a push and your warp prism is going to the back to warp in.What happens is you will kill the zerg army with the death ball.The problem is the reinforcement that comes in after killing off a,lets say,hydra/roach/corrupter army.When you do that the warp-in timing of the warp prism is key here because at the same time that you engage the zerg army you should warp in zealots to target down the hydra den(the spawning pool as well if the attack goes uncontested) because they are probably going to kill all of your colossus,which leaves you with the ground stalker army(most likely with blink) and than they reinforce pure speedling/hydra after that first engagement. You would find yourself in a even better position if the zerg would go for a heavy baneling centered tactic.While this would require a high amount of APM(warping in and telling the zealots to target down the bane nest,while dropping FF to isolate the rest of the army from the overlords that are about to bane drop you and sniping them off with the stalkers)i think its quite possible for a pro player to handle it.Imagine if you managed to snipe the nest,the zerg would be left with a speedling army with unupgraded roaches that would die to a army of blink stalkers and at least 1-2 colossus. The tech structure that you are targeting should be the one that would pose the most threat after your first engagement and actually starting to kill it right before you engage the zerg.It seems like a guessing game but its really not,you can logically assume whats best based on his and yours army composition. Anyways this is why i feel the priority should be tech>drones.  | ||
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Plexa
Aotearoa39261 Posts
On June 07 2011 06:22 Axel.Bowex wrote: Immortal/Stalker/Archon/Storm/Sentry etc. Pretty much anything that will come out of a gateway + immortals haha. Storm rapes banelings harder than colo since they love clumping Off Topic Question: Plexa is this a hint that you'll be "officially back" to TL soon? :D On Topic: You mentioned you don't go protoss deathball anymore, however, what unit composition do you go for then? Against a Baneling drop + Roach ball, you need forcefields and collo for that damage needed for when you micro from banelings, and you need many stalkers to snipe the overlords. So, what do you then? | ||
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AxelTVx
Canada916 Posts
On June 07 2011 06:28 Plexa wrote: Immortal/Stalker/Archon/Storm/Sentry etc. Pretty anything that will come out of a gateway + immortals haha. Storm rapes banelings harder than colo I think you avoided the off topic question there Anyways, do you mind uploading some replays of that, as I would love to study those, and implement that into my game. | ||
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Probe1
United States17920 Posts
Great article and well thought out. Sucks to be me though | ||
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wei2coolman
United States60033 Posts
By the way, if you could neural parasite a warp prism as a zerg, You should be allowed to warp in zerg units! (lol jk). | ||
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elitesniper420
Canada135 Posts
Believe me, I would love it if Protoss would do this. Seriously, it would be great. I'd leave a couple of roaches at each base and when they try this it's going to be a complete waste. Then I would just outmass them. It's like Protoss is doing their job for me in wasting minerals not going towards their giant a-click ball. There's a big difference between Terran drops and Protoss drops. One, Medivacs actually have use in their army, and two, marine DPS / speed is amazing. Gateway units on the other hand, are much weaker when they aren't surrounded by sentries and tier 3 units. | ||
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wei2coolman
United States60033 Posts
On June 07 2011 07:18 elitesniper420 wrote: Protoss don't need this, plain and simple. The goal behind the Protoss is to reach a maxed deathball as soon as possible. That's why harassing or anything that needs micro is completely pointless and it's much better to stay in your base and defend until you've hit that limit. Investing in this slows down your ability to reach that critical mass, and thus this will never be used at a professional level. Believe me, I would love it if Protoss would do this. Seriously, it would be great. I'd leave a couple of roaches at each base and when they try this it's going to be a complete waste. Then I would just outmass them. It's like Protoss is doing their job for me in wasting minerals not going towards their giant a-click ball. There's a big difference between Terran drops and Protoss drops. One, Medivacs actually have use in their army, and two, marine DPS / speed is amazing. Gateway units on the other hand, are much weaker when they aren't surrounded by sentries and tier 3 units. And this is why zerg'd stay stagnant for so long, they were too ingrained in the old way of "LOL 300 food push guyz", but they'd still die to death balls. Zergs are finally figuring out that, "hey, if I get a smart unit composition, I can just lol roll all over them in multiple waves, rather than 1 giant 300 food push", and also learning "hey If I drop hydra's in his mineral lines, his workers die fast!" By limiting your thought process to "maxxed death ball" you auto exclude HUNDREDS if not THOUSANDS of other scenarios in which you can win w/o going to "Max deathball". Personally I think protoss needs to do more effective midgame harass/cost effective pushes. The main problem I see w/ zealot drops is that protoss never tries to pick the zealots back up.... (probably cause warp prism is slow, but they don't even bother trying). So instead of having some unit retention when doing harass, they're paying for a gamble of doing damage, rather than terrans which can pick up their marines back up and be like "lol, still got 8 marines, umad?" and continue dropping in different areas, so that any damage done by terran drops are always effective, because they're not left to die. | ||
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Jayrod
1820 Posts
On June 07 2011 06:53 Probe1 wrote: This what I needed, Protoss finally innovating their same old bland strategies that we've learned to cope with! Great article and well thought out. Sucks to be me though This is exactly what I was saying about zerg when I first saw incontrol getting crushed by the mass expand bling/ling drop/infestor styles a couple months ago. Microless roach/hydra wasn't cutting it anymore. Its cool how the pendulum swings back and forth. | ||
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awwnuts07
United States621 Posts
On June 07 2011 05:45 ThatGuy89 wrote: another point is can you really afford to stop collosus or immortal production? you could say that one chronoboosted warp prism might only take 35 ingame seconds to build (no idea how long it takes) but chances are you could lose it or you might even want 2 to hit both his 3rd and main at the same time or alternating. And i wouldnt want to throw another robo just for prism production. I know MC (might as well reference him since essentially the #1 Toss) stopped Colossi production in his game against Idra on Testbug, even though Idra had like 40 hydras barreling towards his stalkers. I guess when you have 40+ blink stalkers with +3 weapon upgrades, you have enough muscle to keep the zerg army from killing you, however, you can't really kill the zerg either. So it's like this weird stalemate situation. He eventually added DTs to hit those expos his army couldn't get to, but imagine if he had made a warp prism? It's not like he didn't have the space minerals. Same situation happened in a game with Ret. MC didn't make a single colossus, just Blink Stalkers accompanied with a few sentries (Ret wasn't making Hydras though). Eventually he added DTs to the mix, but he could have gotten a warp prism. He had the money and a Robo that was doing absolutely nothing. | ||
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rsvp
United States2266 Posts
On June 07 2011 07:32 awwnuts07 wrote: I know MC (might as well reference him since essentially the #1 Toss) stopped Colossi production in his game against Idra on Testbug, even though Idra had like 40 hydras barreling towards his stalkers. I guess when you have 40+ blink stalkers with +3 weapon upgrades, you have enough muscle to keep the zerg army from killing you, however, you can't really kill the zerg either. So it's like this weird stalemate situation. He eventually added DTs to hit those expos his army couldn't get to, but imagine if he had made a warp prism? It's not like he didn't have the space minerals. Same situation happened in a game with Ret. MC didn't make a single colossus, just Blink Stalkers accompanied with a few sentries (Ret wasn't making Hydras though). Eventually he added DTs to the mix, but he could have gotten a warp prism. He had the money and a Robo that was doing absolutely nothing. That's a different scenario. Idra had so many corruptors that's it wasn't worth it for MC to make colossus. | ||
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wideye
United States209 Posts
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elitesniper420
Canada135 Posts
On June 07 2011 07:30 wei2coolman wrote: "hey, if I get a smart unit composition, I can just lol roll all over them in multiple waves, rather than 1 giant 300 food push" Just think about this for a second, how often did this work in the last MLG? The thing is by the time a Protoss gets a max food army there's nothing a Zerg can do. Ultra/Ling/Baneling is a total gimmick and it's why you see pros not use. Every single Zerg pressured the Protoss, and it's definitely not the way around. If you look at Idra vs MC Game 2 you can see that with his drops he's able to force MC to making Gateway units instead of Tier 3. Or what about any Losira ZvP games? In Losira vs Naniwa he never let Naniwa take that third base, while in MC vs Losira he was all over the map making sure MC doesn't max out on Colossus. Point is this Warp Prism strategy is only useful in late game (I don't see how it's going to work early off 2 bases ever), but in late game you don't even need it. Forget the whole "I need a new way to play Protoss", you've already found the perfect way. Take it from MC, after his early pushes he will always build up a giant ball on 3 bases before going to attack. | ||
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Carmine
United States263 Posts
If this is all in then the standard protoss style (which I believe uses proxy pylon to reinforce main army) is equally as all in because protoss still be in horrible horrible shape if they lose their whole army without doing significant structural damage to the Zerg. This is closer to a warp prism harass than it is to a 4gate, because a 4 gate relies on brute force, while this is relying on splitting your opponents army. And again, like I said in my first post (which you never responded to), just make another warp prism and do a "proper" warp prism harass where you don't have to suicide your units. | ||
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awwnuts07
United States621 Posts
On June 07 2011 07:35 Anihc wrote: That's a different scenario. Idra had so many corruptors that's it wasn't worth it for MC to make colossus. What about the game with Ret? I believe it was game 2 on Metal. I understand not going colossi since Ret's comp was largely Roach, Ling, Infester(?). Wouldn't it have made sense to get a WP since the robo was unused? Or was MC so far ahead after killing so many of Ret's units that it wouldn't have mattered what he built? Here's the game I'm talking about: http://www.sc-replay.com/replay/03-06-11/55979-oGsMC-VS-LiquidRet.html | ||
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ScythedBlade
308 Posts
But with Protoss, drop mechanics are not only bad (We don't have plentiful of overlords, medivacs that heal, weakest ass dropship material of all things, for the most expensive dropship out of all 3 races), but we can never save enough of our units. And Protoss relies on having reusable units that don't die so often. REALLY though, what would make it fair is if Blizzard actually gave warp prism something like 100 shields/100 hp, or even 150 shields/150hp. Just saying ... | ||
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rpgalon
Brazil1069 Posts
any decent player can kill a warp prism in 10 seconds... I can even trade the warp prism speed for this | ||
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iChau
United States1210 Posts
On June 07 2011 08:47 ScythedBlade wrote: The real problem I find with Protoss drops is that at least with Marines, you can pick them all up and save em, especially against Roaches. But with Protoss, drop mechanics are not only bad (We don't have plentiful of overlords, medivacs that heal, weakest ass dropship material of all things, for the most expensive dropship out of all 3 races), but we can never save enough of our units. And Protoss relies on having reusable units that don't die so often. REALLY though, what would make it fair is if Blizzard actually gave warp prism something like 100 shields/100 hp, or even 150 shields/150hp. Just saying ... I just played a game where I stalled for 2 minutes just alternately spamming zealots into two mineral lines. He just gave up for some reason and tried to attack me. Zealots are REALLY disposable in PvZ AND PvT. The reason is that they're so cost-efficient with upgrades like Plexa said many times. Apparently, the guy was really scared of the warp prism. Also, I saw a post in the thread that says, "Having extra warpgates is good". I find this true. | ||
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