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Hey, NebuLa here. I'm diamond ranked but I hardly ladder so I may be a bit better/worse.
I play both Zerg and Protoss to a diamond level, but with both I can't seem to handle blue flame hellion drops. It just seems that you can't do anything about the initial blow they deal other than blindly put up cannons or leave units in your mineral line.
Here is a link to a game I just played as Protoss against a masters Terran, and he totally out played me to the max while focusing on crippling me with blue flame harass: http://bit.ly/kCpEs4
I opened 2 gate robo and he went 1-1-1, and I got my expansion up before him. This was nullified however as his blue lame hellions took me totally by surprise and they killed basically all of my probes in my main, even though I pulled them when I saw the threat. I couldn't scout him very well as he had a raven on the prowl .After the initial blow the hellions dealt, I defended the harass without too many more losses, but the initial kills were enough. He then proceeded to take the map and get alot more bases up on me while I tried to recover and rebuild.
So what I am asking is, how to I know a player is going blue flame hellions if I haven't had a chance to see he is making hellions before they are in my mineral line? It just seems that it's a viable investment for Terran throughout the game, so it could come at any time through a tech lab factory which could also be tanks.
Thanks in advance, NebuLa.
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blue flame helions are imba imo. i see pros lose a billion probes to them as well. nothing you can do as protoss apart from spotting and stoping the drop. if they are in your base, you better have a great simcity and warp gates on cool down else goodbye probes.
User was temp banned from the Strategy Forum for this post.
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If you scout well and see hellions you can prepare for it but im assuming you talking about 1 base blue flame rush. If they rush to helions and medivacs (as zerg) just target the medivac with ur queen and try to kill the hellions. after it is over you need to put up a couple spine crawlers and mass drones only. I've lost 20+ drones to early hellions and still won since rushing to blueflame takes so much away from the economy. going only drones with inject on 2 base takes around 75 seconds (i think its 1 second 1 energy) to get over 20. its a huge risk but ur only chance
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Spotting the drop is key but it can be iffy actually killing the medivac. splitting workers and avoiding tight corners is absolutely essential. I find placing stalkers preemptively to be a mixed bag because the medivac can almost always unload before two stalkers will kill it, but if you see a starport and expect drops then you should place a stalker or two wherever you have blindspots. Map vision wont always let you spot the drop because some people are good at using map edges and avoiding your spotters, so really you need to see the starport and tech lab factory. make use of your early observer and make sure you have full vision around your base. Sorry I only have general advice, I have a lot of trouble with this too.
Edit- see my sig for more info xD
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Well, I can't speak for protoss, but for zerg, I don't think they're too too much of an issue if you're handling things intelligently. I will almost always open up with some roach pressure on scouting a fast gas (one or two) as zerg. I feel that no matter what, you're going to come out at least in decent shape. If he's opening 1 gas reactor hellions, you're going to do significant damage with your roaches and keep the hellions at home. If he's going blue flame, all the better for your roach pressure. He's forced to defend with his hellions while you're free to simcity your base to prepare, get a few roaches to stick by your base for hellion defense (if you chose to suicide your initial roaches, or if you're going for roach/ling bling). If he's doing any other gas opener, you end up fine (IMO). Roaches will come out after reapers, but can get a fair bit of pressure in and force early game marauders, which will weaken/slow his initial push. If he opens up banshee, he's forced to use those banshees to defend while you can just comfortably get an evo and spores up. If he's going for some type of 1 base tank push (LOL), he won't have seige in time for your roaches and you can back away and have some good power units for that tank push. If he's doing some type of big one base marine marauder play, for whatever godaweful reason he might be doing that, your roaches are free to back up and once again be good meaty units for your push. All these options let you safely drone on two base and prepare for whatever the terran is doing while keeping him on his side of the map.
As to early drops, one queen on the medivac (both if possible) while using your roaches/lings/whatever, to fend off hellions will shut it down pretty fast. If you're getting caught by surprise by these dropships, you're not doing well enough with your overlord spread in the early game, and that issue can be solved with a little bit of map analysis.
*As a note, I know you don't need roaches versus hellions, and we've probably all seen IdrA pull some miracle pin with 4 zerglings to stop a hellion runby, but that requires a lot of control, and to play passively, I just prefer oppening up with something that puts pressure on him to reveal his tech, defend with it, and allow you time to adjust. It takes quite a bit out of the "coin flip" feeling I got a lot when I first started playing zerg.
Gl
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First, don't pull workers when the hellions attack them; they'll just line up for the hellions. Leave them mining, then warp in a Stalker or two to kill the Hellions. Second, you have ample time to scout the drop with an Observer. I've had P players watch me leave my base before, and those are the ones who easily fend off the BFH drop.
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Read This and this.
Scouting for clues, poking at the front,control the xell naga towers (will allow you to keep units in base).
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As Protoss, you really have to see it before it comes. Stalkers need something like 8 hits to kill a hellion so hellions will actually get a few worker kills before it dies. I think the best solution is to scout it ahead of time and position your units to intercept.
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There was a thread a while back about a splitting method to split workers when hellions came in. You can also make a wall of gateway on the far side to constrict hellions movement, it's an easy way, free way to help agaisnt blue flame. General sim city helps a lot agaisnt hellion although they can come back to bite you if the terran drops you a lot (until you have TC upgrades) .
I can't find the thread but you needed yo select all your workers, hit s to make them stop and hence making them inactive. Then you just hold F1 (it selects an inactive worker) and spam the minimap with move command, making each worker move individually to a random (well you did chose it) location within your base.
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Fast blue flame drop is extremely greedy and can be punished if protoss does any light pressure at the terrans ramp (3gate , 2gate). Sure the terran will have a bunker but some of these blue flame builds only involve making a few marines so you can easily bust through and win the game. If the terran has more than that then the blue flame is going to be delayed a bit. That should give you enough time to prepare for it properly.
In general the best way to defend against hellion drops is to sim city your base with your buildings.
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Do you have only a single replay where this has happened to you?
It is hard to judge a player's style from a single replay to see if its bad habits or just mismicro based on a single game.
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On June 28 2011 01:17 SpiZe wrote:
There was a thread a while back about a splitting method to split workers when hellions came in. You can also make a wall of gateway on the far side to constrict hellions movement, it's an easy way, free way to help agaisnt blue flame. General sim city helps a lot agaisnt hellion although they can come back to bite you if the terran drops you a lot (until you have TC upgrades) .
I can't find the thread but you needed yo select all your workers, hit s to make them stop and hence making them inactive. Then you just hold F1 (it selects an inactive worker) and spam the minimap with move command, making each worker move individually to a random (well you did chose it) location within your base.
TC upgrades? what?
edit: just realised, twilight council
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The thing is, people tend to underestimate the cost for your opponent as well. A hellion/medivac drop costs 650/250, so unless they kill at least 6-10 drones, it really wasn't worth it for them to make the drop, assuming they have more than 30 workers, lol . I know we've all seen people take out 40 workers in a single drop, and of course that is the danger of the drops. But I also know I've seen plenty of blue-flame drops that have died in seconds, killing 2 workers. If you counter the drop with roaches, and pull your workers in time, then you just wiped 1000 resources off the face of the earth with barely any effort at all. That could have been 3 or 4 more siege tanks they could have had.
Blue flame drop is simply a pretty risky strategy that has potentially huge returns. If they fail a drop pretty early in the game, you could probably just go f'ing kill them.
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Russian Federation4295 Posts
Best counter vs helions is spreading workers everywhere on the screen:
1) Stop all workers
2) Select anything other
3) Hold F1
4) Right-click spam on the screen
5) ???
6) PROFIT!!!
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It's very hard to stop the drop completely (as in, 100% prevent it from happening). But the key thing to understand is the Terran player automatically puts himself behind by rushing for a BFH drop. He needs to do damage or else he is behind. Focus more on taking minimal damage (split and run your probes and avoid sharp corners as these tend to line probes up) and don't be afraid to set up some static defenses if you scout the techlab factory and/or the starport. You're going to need them eventually to defend MMM drops as the game progresses so they are hardly a waste of resources if your opponent decides not to drop you with the hellions.
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As a zerg after a certain time has passed - maybe 6th minute for 1 base and 9th minute for 2 base terran I try to keep at least 2-4 banes and 6-10 lings on the defence. That is if I have map control and dont see him moving out to push.
A bit tell that he is gonna drop you is if he gets a viking and starts clearing the sky towards your bases. Also if you dont see any agression before 5:30 (just guessing that timing, not certain) - like any mix of marine-hellion-marauder-reaper trying to bust your front.
The tip that Existor gave is quite useful. I recomend you learn it 
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On June 28 2011 03:09 Existor wrote:
Best counter vs helions is spreading workers everywhere on the screen:
1) Stop all workers
2) Select anything other
3) Hold F1
4) Right-click spam on the screen
5) ???
6) PROFIT!!!
This! It's kind of slow though because the workers don't stop instantly. If you have roaches/stalkers nearby though it's totally worth it, the hellions won´t be killing drones/probes any quicker than you can kill the hellions.
I play Zerg though and it might be different with Protoss as your base is full of gateways.
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Blueflame is OK. It's the blueflame hellions that get me.
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I've read through all the responses and I have to say thank you all for helping me out on this. However in response to all the people that say scout better, in that game he had a raven out to prevent me from scouting, and his blueflame hellions were delayed so I didn't know about them until my probes were dead.
Even so, I guess it isn't very common for a Terran to do that build so I'll focus on persistent scouting and splitting my workers correctly if shit does hit the fan. Thanks again guys =]
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If my army isn't in a position ready to deal with it there are generally 2 ways to deal with it, and neither are good T.T
1. Do nothing. Moving could potentially line up for a devastating shot.
2. A-move the closest 4-6 workers and run with the rest. With luck some of the original 4-6 will survive and continue blocking the hellions from chasing.
I do think that blindly setting up a simcity to prevent hellions from going in the way furthest from the nat is the best way to deal with it, as it allows your army on 2 bases to defend both the choke and main mineral line fairly easily.
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he shouldn't of been able to kill your observer, scoot outside his base ,look for a opptunity to poke, then once you see the sign to a drop, 1.1.1 build, low marine count, reactored factory? late natural?
round of units and chronon used of nexues to quickley replace the probes lost.
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Yes we all have trouble with these sneaky little blue flame hellions. As toss, you need stalkers to kill, and sentries to deny the hellions from moving away from your stalkers. Optimal building placement can provide good choke points to ff, ideally trapping hellions. I've scouted the drop and still lost 15 workers because I didn't use proper force fields to deny the hellions movement.
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Only tip I can give you would be to try keeping the map control and spotting the drop coming. From there, you can fight it off and try splitting your probes in order to lose the less possible.
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I guess with all things you just have to handle it with out panicking, pulling ALL your probes usually ends in tears when the hellions get a sweet shot off. And of course you can always guess as to what is coming from how many refineries/what you see at the front door. Or you can get an obs out (2 gate robo = fast obs?) too see whats coming to kill you 
Other than that i think a few posters have stated make a good sim city. Just limit the movement the hellions have, don't let them have wide open areas for them to skirt your stalkers etc. funnel them if they are going desperately for your probes. I guess if you knew 100% that it was coming you could use cannons.. but thats pretty newb its more effective to block them. Cannons kill them too slow 
And rushing for BFH is a pretty all in sort of strat, if it flops then the terran is left with a medivac and a few marines whereas the protoss player can have a healthy gateway army and be working towards getting out tier 3 units.
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Mexico5280 Posts
Well, as T and P having a good simcity helps.
IIRC when a Pylon or supply depot is touching a refinery by the corner probes can go through it but Hellions can´t. For Z its all about spotting them and Roaches and even Lings can clean up easily.
Splitting your workers does wonders too, jut don´t box them and click they will line up and you will die
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If a Terran is rushing for a blue flame hellion drop, about what time would it arrive? That way you know exactly when you need to start worrying and when you can stop worrying. Terrans?
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If you have extremely high APM, what you can do is:
1. See either the medivac inc (if ur lucky) or hellions in ur mineral line (if ur unlucky)
2. select all workers and press S to stop
3. press f1 (selects 1 idle worker) right click somewhere far away so that the probe starts running.
4. repeat step 3 as fast as u can
5. watch all ur probes run in random directions
Unfortunately, blue flame hellions (along with bane rain) will inflict enough dmg in the first few seconds to cripple your economy.
Dont listen to dumbasses telling you to keep stalkers, immortals, or even colossi in your mineral field. A stalker takes 9 shots to kill ONE hellion. It takes 1 shot every 1.44 seconds. That means it takes about 13 seconds to kill one hellion, let alone 4.
By that time, every probe in your base will be dead and the 3 remaining hellions will have evacuated. having more stalkers doesnt realy help either. Colossi and immortals are both too slow and dont do enough damage fast enough either.
Your best bet is to keep a few sentries. FF the hellions away from ur miernal line, or if hey are already in it, FF them into a tinyyyyy circle. Units that are completely surrounded by FFs have pathin issues and stop attacking.
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If Terran is rushing for a blue flame hellion drop, the thing is that if you don't even bother moving your drones (which groups them together for devastating suicide damage to yourself), proper management (of just attacking or attacking with freshly warped in unit) resulting in 6 or 7 worker kills will STILL put you of at least equal.
HOWEVER, if it's late into the game and they blue flame hellion, then it's usually that you have a big enough army to stop it, but you just didn't look at your minimap when you should've. If you're Protoss, that's a huge hit, since Protoss has the worst worker recovery options.
On the other hand, TvT is all about harassment, so see how that works out.
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As P, get in the habit of always building a nice anti-hellion sim city from the beginning. Ideally, you'll have one choke that one or two stalkers can block. Hellions kill stalkers so slowly, and can be warped in at the last second.
Good sim city around the nexus also helps against drops. Focus on building placement that defend where the common drop spots are.
There's no good reason not to sim city like this in PvT. You can still hide key tech structures in other locations no problem. It helps to create defense "zones" near your nexus that are easier to defend than just placing buildings all over. Be careful not to impede your own movement too much with a too restrictive sim city.
General drop defense also helps obviously. Observers, probes, pylons and stalkers patrolling common drop paths are very effective.
For examples of the sim city, watch just about any Kiwikaki PvT.
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On June 28 2011 10:29 ScythedBlade wrote:
If Terran is rushing for a blue flame hellion drop, the thing is that if you don't even bother moving your drones (which groups them together for devastating suicide damage to yourself), proper management (of just attacking or attacking with freshly warped in unit) resulting in 6 or 7 worker kills will STILL put you of at least equal.
HOWEVER, if it's late into the game and they blue flame hellion, then it's usually that you have a big enough army to stop it, but you just didn't look at your minimap when you should've. If you're Protoss, that's a huge hit, since Protoss has the worst worker recovery options.
On the other hand, TvT is all about harassment, so see how that works out.
notsureifserious.jpg
I would argue that Protoss is at least equal to T and Z lategame, if not better. T has MULEs, but that doesn't help for gas, and for purely rebuilding workers, they are by far the slowest. Zerg can be the very fastest, but if you're continually pressuring them, making them waste a production cycle on drones instead of roaches/muta/etc can win the game for you. Protoss on 3 bases(we're talking late game here) can spit out 6 workers every 20 seconds if you have the chronoboost, and it doesn't take up production time.
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Well, scout for his choice of buildings. Choice of gas and such. When i play, seeing he walled off gives me the sense that he is doing something fishy.
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Dunno if its posted allrdy, but if im blueflame dropped i attack and block the bf-hellions with 6-8 workers when they drive in/near my mineral line and pull away all other workers.
While my worker block the hellions 2-3 seconds all others scv's can escape and my army/units have time to move their slow ass to kick that nasty hellions.
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protoss just give up on scouting once their first obs die :D make more obs and have them scattered around the map also i would say dont have your army so much in the back. and block as many paths as u can with buildings only leave one entrance.
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There really isn't a "Hard Counter" to blue flame hellion drops without too much sacrifice in economy (Are you really going to put 3 cannons in every mineral line, or 2 spines and a spore?). The most important thing for zerg is good creep spread and sim city that prevents them from running into chokes to destroy your lings. Speedlings are actually fine against blue flame hellions as long as they are on creep.
As Protoss on 1/2 bases you can defend it quite easily with stalkers, good sim city, and instant warp-ins. Force field is also helpful if u can trap them. If you select all your workers and click on the nexus it sort of separates them. The worst thing you can do is click the mineral patch at your natural because it stacks them nicely in a line....yeah you know what happens.
On 3+ bases Zerg should have mutas out by this time to punish drops and good creep spread. A few spines at each base doesn't hurt.
For late-game protoss 1-cannon at each mineral line and good sim city are crucial. I believe there is a way to position structures that let probes in/out but not hellions (kind of how you can make a wall that lets zealots/lings in but not stalkers).
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On June 29 2011 00:08 CryMore wrote:
For late-game protoss 1-cannon at each mineral line and good sim city are crucial. I believe there is a way to position structures that let probes in/out but not hellions (kind of how you can make a wall that lets zealots/lings in but not stalkers).
I'll have to look into this more, another guy in this thread said about a pylon touching the corner of the assimilator lets probes through but not larger units. I will test this and if it works, I'll do this as standard aswell as all of the other suggestions in here.
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EPT
