Recently, my friend has been utilizing the overseer contaminate to delay production and upgrades. After thinking about it for a while, I have found some pretty detrimental uses with it.
Many zerg players will research pathogen glands right when the infestation pit pops and will make infestors when the upgrade is about 1/2 done. This works and your infestors will have the extra energy; however, if you use contaminate the infestation pit at the correct time, you can delay pathogen glands long enough that the new infestors pop without the extra energy. This would mean that your infestors would have more energy which can allow you to win the next fight.
2.Delay Injects/Stop Hatch From Making Larvae (ZvZ) + Show Spoiler +
When you contaminate your opponent's hatchery, they can no longer inject larvae and their hatchery won't passively generate the larvae. This can give you the larvae advantage and help you have a bigger army or increase your economy without falling behind in army. Also, you can use this when pushing into their base to minimize reinforcements that they can make.
With contaminate, you can delay many upgrades which can mess up many timing pushes allowing you to have a slight advantages. Also vs protoss you can contaminate their upgrade facilities right after they used chrono boost which not only will delay their upgrade, but also waste a chrono boost.
These are some of the main things that I think contaminate is very useful for. Sadly, I do not see many people use contaminate a whole lot. If you guys have any pros or cons to contaminate or other uses for it, please reply!
Also, I might add some replays here to show the impact contaminate can have.
I remember Destiny using some 2 base quick lair build a couple of months ago, where he contaminated the warp gates research of FFE builds to delay any gateway timings. It was quite awesome, but it's obviously not really viable with the current meta of 3 base against FFE.
@VirtuousUK very nice, I really like that idea, especially since many protoss will wait to make units from their new warpgates until warp tech is done, since usually you end up with more units faster, however if you push in right before that finishes, you can easily win. Which that is what you did. Well Played Sir!
People don't use it because it's bad. And it HAS TO BE BAD. If contaminate were any good, adding it to a cheap unit like overseer that doesn't require supply would be overpowered like hell.
125 energy is alot, and all you get is a minor dellay for a waste of an apm on your side. ofc if you have an overseer you shuld be useing it, why not, but not the other way around.
That said, contamination is a really fun thing to do.
@Sapp you can't simply say it "HAS TO BE BAD" because it is on a cheap unit. You see it isn't a spell that does damage or helps directly in team fights.
The idea of this thread is to think of the pros and cons. I posted 3 pros in my original post and if you think it is bad, please explain something other than it is a waste of APM. I do agree that 125 energy is a lot. Since it is a cheap unit, you can make maybe 4-5 of them to contaminate buildings around the map or to chain contaminate(like VirtuousUK posted with Warp Gate Tech). Also look at #1 in the original post, such a simple thing to do that you only need 1 overseer to do and can give you an edge in the game since your infestors in theory should have more energy.
I'm still waiting for people to use it as a late-game gas sink when they bank 2k+ gas and their opponents get to make vikings/gateway units after every fight..
It definitely seems like something that should be used in big numbers, and the 125 energy cost is REALLY punishing to the 'timing' aspect of it.
@yeastiality yeah, it does take quite a while to generate that energy, but like you said, late game you can make a ton and when you have a big broodlord/infestor army, you can constantly contaminate the starport to keep the terran from making nasty vikings
I will try it just for kicks and see how effective it is.
If you are to contaminate a building continuously, you will need more than 6 overseers (30 sec spell requires 125 energy (0.5625 energy/sec)).
Or you can have 2-3 overseers to keep rotating on contaminate. The problem is that with all my cycles larvae injects, droning, creep spread, upgrade, build units etc...to add contamination into the mix...worth it?
Also the cost for Overseers need to be considered.
Being said, this is all theorycraft. Dang now i need to play a few games.
Contaminate is so underused. Its nice to delay production and upgrades and stuff, just having 2 outside your opponents base on equal economic footing can allow you to squeeze out a couple roaches or push before they have fungal or cause some of their infestors to pop without the upgrade making them much less effective for that time period. It takes a lot of finesse, scouting info and knowledge of your own game plan to make it work though. If you just contaminate and wait 2 minutes it really didn't do much- its a short term delay.
I don't see contaminate as a spell to continuously delay something, but rather to delay specific things once or just poke in every 2-3 minutes and contaminate, this can slowly put you to advantage. However there are many timing pushes or like i said in #1 that you can use contaminate that can actually give you a pretty big edge.
Hahaha, that build was love at first sight for me.
Unfortunately Contaminate costs 125 energy now, meaning it takes soooo long to recharge. Since there's a lower cost for Overseer, however, it might even it out enough to make D.E.R.P. relatively viable.
Even so, D.E.R.P. is a bit of an extreme example. Contaminate as a nuisance is nice, especially when you're delaying something like stim, extended thermal lance, or a robo (facility, not bay) in order to ruin a timing.
Even so, <3 ovie creep drop and burrowed ling combo to deny an expo. So how about denying the third this way until you scout an all-in/2base timing, then upgrade to Overseer to delay the timing? Better yet, both at the same time. One Ovie and ling to deny the third/fourth and one or two Overseers to contaminate whatever looks delicious.
It's even viable in macro games very nicely, especially if you contaminate the ebays/forges/evos.
I think it has legit potential in ZvZ and hope ppl will experiment with it more. I was excited when Nestea used it against Losira on Dual Sight during the GSL finals really well, unfortunately it hasn't been used a whole lot since.
edit: i just remembered. it got nerfed after that didn't it...
125 energy is a long time it takes to regenerate the rest of the time it will float around somewhere near the opponents place. So a high chance to forget about this unit, like some prisms banshees etc are forgotten sometimes. Also i wouldn't say contaminate got nerfed. Gas cost was halfed on the overseer, energy cost for it only was increased by 66%. While mineral-wise the cost per contaminate got increased, gas-wise it got reduced. Its well worth it still, but it is a bit harder to use, especially since you have to wait some time after the morph to actually use it. And the scout overseer usually doesn't have enough energy. In ZvZ it's something nice to use as always, but you need around 7 instead of 4 to be really annoying.
Maybe because the Oracle is faster, the mineral field barrier is cheaper energy wise, you know EXACTLY where mineral fields are (unlike techbuildings), denying minerals is always useful and stopping an upgrade obviously is always useful es well, but its much harder to catch the right building at the moment of upgrading.
EPT
