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dude i hade a game vs toss who 30 min ago
and i emp his entire army with emp
but the problem is
the ht were spread and had full engergy
so my 3-4 emp hit perfect but
you are still doomed because emp just take 100 engergy away
and not the entire mana
i mean its not impossbile but
for terran is much harder to counter the caster unit
then the caster unit cast storm or fungual to you
he must only hit your army with the cast but you must aim only for the caster squad itself
and that is not really easy
about the hellion marine disscusion
marine are important
and super strong with shield stim and +1 dmg uppgrade
their dps is very high
but after 15 min they are useless
then you can transition or abit ealier from marine to blue flame hellion
if his army is not so stalker heavy
against zealot/ht i would prefer ghost marauder hellion with medivacs
the problem on warden bo is
if you play banshee harras then you tell your enemy that you dont do a big attack in the near future so he can easily secure his expansion
i am more the type to pressure the toss with bio early on
even if it ends in a all in
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the banshee harass can also mean that i a big marine banshee tank push is coming, so it's not that simple imo
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Banshee harass in two locations at once could force two Observers early on which means less (if any) Immortals and more Stalkers. Marauders are highly cost effective against Stalker heavy compositions, while Immortals would pose a bit of a problem early on with this strategy. Banshees give you a harassment tool, a scouting tool, and a way to force your opponents macro away from what he should be building.
To address the marine DPS discussion, Protoss who see marine heavy compositions will favor armor upgrades for their Zealots with guardian shield. This means more light units, which Blue Flame Hellions hard counter. This unit composition is not high dps, it has high alpha strike. You can do hit and run tactics and do significant damage in small doses.
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On July 05 2011 01:20 naventus wrote:
Have you ever tried any of your theorycraft at a high level? If hellions were superior to marines in a ground fight than they would actually be used in competitive since every T has a factory.
1) Hellions are not more durable than marines. Two marines are 110 HP vs 90 HP. Marines can be scattered throughout your concave to avoid them all getting hit by the same AOE. Marines in the back that will be alive will blast through zeals.
Hellions are often grouped up, most fights won't have positions where hellions can kite. Not to mention there's no kiting of stalker + colossus damage or chargezeal. Hellions need to be in the front instead of the back like marines because you need them to splash.
2) Hellions do abysmal combat DPS especially considering that the zeal line is usually scattered. When they hit your concave, you will be hitting 1 maybe 2 at best. So not only are you barely breaking even against marine DPS, it's not continuous DPS.
3) It doesn't matter that marines die. The point is that you trade them against his zeals. Unfortunately hellions do a much poorer job of trading against zeals in practice because of their cooldown, lack of upgrades, and positioning requirements.
Have you ever tried your theory craft at a high level? I mix in hellions all the time with great success. By your logic, every competitive Terran would get a raven in at least tvp and tvz because they already have a starport and ravens are amazing. And you know what? Terrans are starting to get more ravens now. Perhaps soon they will start getting more hellions. Remember when pros refused to get upgrades in the tvp match up even if they had an ebay or forge?
To answer your 3 points:
1. If the Terran is good enough to "scatter marines in his concave" then the Protoss should be good enough to target fire with colossi. Besides, spreading bio into the pure bio army that you're advocating to prevent your bio from taking aoe damage sounds rather silly. And unless you have 1 medivac per bio unit, stim still does damage, as the medivacs are busy healing other bio units, making a hellion hp = to 2 marine hp which the benefits of the marine being medivac healing and the hellion being less susceptible to splash.
2. Have you actually looked at the unit dps? Let's assume 2 atk ups for marines even, which is matched with 2 armour ups for the zealots--Protoss should never really be behind in upgrades due to chrono boost. Marines deal 6 damage at .57 speed. Except zealots have a base armour and guardian shield takes effect, reducing their damage to 3 damage at .57 speed. Hellions deal 24 damage at 2.5 speed (minus 5 from armour from 2 ups, 1 base and guard shield) = 19 at 2.5 speed. So Hellions deal ~1.5x the dps (~5 vs ~7.5) of a marine to a single zealot with a 2 upgrade difference. And then you have to factor in that hellions have splash; if you are hitting one target with a line splash unit then it is a control issue rather than a unit issue--there is no reason that the fastest ground unit in the match up should ever be out maneuvered into doing minimum dps. Also, marines almost never hit their full damage potential in a real game because they are always used in conjunction marauders to kite, meaning that the attack speed of the marine potentially drops by ~50% to 1 (read: hellions would do 3x the dps to a single target).
3. As aforementioned, hellions "trade" better with the zealots. And positioning requirements just means the player has to be competent, which should not be an issue in a high level guide coming from a player like warden.
Hellions also open the window to a myriad of harass options and also offer the best response to protoss who send out a single templar at a time to feedback/storm the terran army.
Also, you've clearly never seen hellions used if you think that they will only be hitting 1 zealot.
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1) Hellion won't have armor upgrades, you will be taking +4, +6 from zeals, and +8, +12 from colossi. Scattering marines in concave is not magic or hard. Your units are clumped, and when you preconcave before fights, it's not that hard to make sure that your marines aren't all standing next to each other. All you are preventing is your 20 marines getting 3 shot at the start by all the colossi because you packed them next to each other.
2) Why are you factoring in GS? We are talking about chargelots, not only will they be way ahead of the army, you will also be kiting them back.
Hellion: 21/2.5 = 8.4, vs armored 3.2
Marine: 5/.57 = 8.7
3) This guide is a guide of 1/2base allins. There's nothing here that represents a true macro game where you are trading production cycles. That's the entire flaw about hellions. Protoss can choose how he wants to mix up his composition from his 15 gates, but what are you going to do? Where are you going to get the time to set up 2-3 factories + get mech upgrades?
If a protoss sends out a single templar, you stim 3 marauders and kill it.
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I'm no GM, but I have seen 0 success with hellions in the army at 1400 master. What has worked for me, and you can see Koreans doing this like MMA vs MC, or even Nada's games last night, is 1 reactor marines / base. Matching his zeal count with just 1 marine each is a huge DPS gain.
Here's a tangential piece of evidence: go try unmicroed upped hellions vs upped zeals. Hellions actually lose. But unmicroed marines completely dominate the chargelots.
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The ability to go EE HAN TIMING with the thors stops all greedy toss players in their tracks. SCV's uber-repair on thors also crushes so many toss options.
Luckily I like my lot/HT mix. HTs with feedback and chargelots eat thors alive...well thors with less than 12 scvs healing it...and storm takes awhile to research.
But then the terran death ball owns lots/HT .... ghosts are so sick.
BTW, can you please upload movies as well? It saves me a lot of time as it cuts to the part where the action takes place.
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Naventus has a lot of good points. I love this guide for its scouting information and the wonderful way it shows protoss timings and weaknesses, but that is what I use it for. I believe you are "safer" if you go with a full on one base tank/banshee/rine/raven OR thor/banshee/rine/raven attack, and expo as you move out. Those are easier to control. This combo is very hard to control and its very very easy to make a mistake and get hammered.
The main point Naventus is correct about is that it wont last in the long run. You cant trade armies and keep on going with this. I used to play mech quite often, and even with just mech units and upgrades its very fragile. If they are ahead in upgrades (they will be), and have an army that is about 100 times easier to control, its not a good recipe for success.
This strat really exaggerates the fact that Terran has the highest skill cap. If you played the game on super slow speed (or have 600 useful apm) this composition would probably never lose with this timing attack, however that is not reality.
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Naventus has a lot of bad points too. Hellions are way better vs zealots with or without charge than marines. I just tested it out in the unit tester and with an equal amount of supply from both terran/toss hellions perform about the same when unmicroed vs chargelots compared to marines.
The thing is though if you're not microing your hellions or marines than you're playing must be subpar. When both marines and hellions are microed vs chargelots hellions can take out twice the supply of zealots vs using marines not only that but hellions apply splash damage to all of the units which pairs nicely with siege tanks splash damage, can instantly wipe out mineral lines, and can sniper templar effectively.
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20 BF hellions do better than 40 stimmed marines vs 20 chargelots? Does anyone here believe that to be true?
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On July 05 2011 01:20 naventus wrote:
Have you ever tried any of your theorycraft at a high level? If hellions were superior to marines in a ground fight than they would actually be used in competitive since every T has a factory.
.
naventus, your theorycrafting is ridiculous. You want solid theorycrafting listen up cause solid theory is based in the fundamentals, not "Hellions are often grouped up, HP x vs Hp x, micro tactic y etc etc"
Your entire arguement focuses on the builds weak late game play or any longer macro game.
Disregarding the mirror match-ups, if you looked at the Win/loss of only the longer macro games, which race theoretically do you think fares best?
Argue any race other then Toss and you dont know much about sc2 theory.
any surprise then, that a top level TvP build focuses on hitting timings to prevent this??
This situation you describe as being so bad for BF hellions is completely off base, Theoretically the value of BFH increases the larger the map the longer the match and comp% of light units in the villians army.
In these longer macro matches vs chargelots /HTs etc etc is theoretically an amazing position to be in
-edit- reading this post in the preview, I sound a bit like a d*(k. apology in adavanc
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I wouldn't be too surprised if 20 bf hellions can kill 50 chargelots.......
EDIT: Not to mention not that I think about it charge effectively deals with marines because it makes stutter stepping much less effective and zealots do a huge amount of damage on contact to marines whereas hellions can still be micro ed to get hit hardly at all and do large amounts of splash damage.
EDIT #2: Just tested it out in the unit tester and with 40 marines i can handle up to 30 chargelots with decent stutter stepping. With 20 bf hellions I can handle well over 50 chargelots while taking minimal losses.
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I'm done here.
I'm not theorycrafting I'm trying to explain how the phenomena I have seen ingame works. You two sub50 count jokers are the ones regurgitating bullshit.
Any top level player will tell you that TvP is fairly even going into late game, especially after KA nerf. T attacks at multiple timings (dropships, ghosts, 2/2 etc), but that's the same with every race and matchup. Different builds will have different windows to punish.
Hellions don't beat zeals. Unupgraded hellions lose even harder. Same way how hellion gets overpowered by mass speedling. If you don't understand that, you haven't used hellions in any real games. Show me your high masters+ replays where you hellions destroy zeals.
EDIT:
Yea you can kill infinity zeals with hellions with kiting, but that's why I said no micro. That's what you don't fucking understand since you've never played a real game. You don't have the time to drive around for 20s kiting zeals. You either clear the zeals asap, or you take too long and die to the rest of the P army.
TO WRAP UP ON HELLION VIABILITY:
1) Hellions are going to be behind on upgrades.
2) Hellions require distinct production that will be hard to fit into any build before 15m+
3) It's unclear if hellion is even superior DPS.
User was warned for this post
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What I fail to understand is why you wouldn't be microing your hellions? People micro their bio, so why wouldn't they micro their hellions? When engaging an army that's chargelot heavy you're supposed to lead in with your hellions so that you can kite them back and if the sentrys try to ff and you have siege tanks than hello splash damage.
Hellions are a good mineral sink leading into the late midgame and are a direct hard counter to chargelots. You generally don't need hellions tvp early/mid game so its not a huge problem that you cant produce them until the mid game as charge normally isn't out until the mid/late game unless the toss went templar before collosus.
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Naventus, your arguments seem flawed. What good is +3 upgrades and guardian shielded zealots against hellions if it reduces the damage from 24 to 19? Versus dropping marine damage from 6 to 1? That mean every two marines does 2 damage to 1 zealot, while 1 hellion is doing 19 damage to 2 or more without even using upgrades. Sovern and Validity made pretty legit arguments for you and you ignored them. You haven't addressed any of the comments about the hellion's effectiveness in this match up, nor the replay I posted, so it's you who is "spewing the same regurgitated bull****" Also, how does your high post count correlate more experience in this match up?
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@ naventus ... have you stated in this thread (sorry if I've missed it) what your league is? Seems like a lot of your arguments is based on (a) theorycraft and (b) what standard play is seen in tournaments/gsl/etc.
Which is fine, but I'm just wondering if this is coming from a gold player vs. masters.
Thanks - have appreciated your input in the thread.
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Great writeup warden, I love watching your stream to! I'm just Plat random at the moment but I'm actually going to try to incorporate some of this play into my T. Thanks!!
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In my experience I love it when my opponent tries to add hellions into their army to fight my zealots. Especially once upgrades come into play.
There are several reasons for this
1.) it's harder to do stutter micro with the terran ball
2.) hellions are much worse than marines vs stalkers
3.) medivacs don't heal hellions
4.) infantry upgrades don't go to hellions
On July 06 2011 09:55 naventus wrote:
20 BF hellions do better than 40 stimmed marines vs 20 chargelots? Does anyone here believe that to be true?
in a vacuum they do a lot better
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the helion vs marine discussion aside.... this is an EXCELLENT guide!
I have been struggling with the late game bio vs storm that you get forced into when playing the usual bio-expand builds.
following this guide and hitting a late-midgame push at around 110-130 supply has been very successful for me. in fact havent lost with it last 6 tvp.
also thanks for pointing out that if you have a fact up and toss greed-expands its auto win with the thor push. i just LOVED that information.
<3 keep it coming Warden. Looking forward to something similar for TvZ
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newbie question here:
Possibility #2: The scv or the first hellion scouts no second gas and 1 gate cybercore into fast expansion.
is there anyway i could tell if it is not a fake FE into 4gate build? its always catching me offguard
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EPT
