On February 25 2013 20:40 Fairwell wrote: I find these threads so strange. I play hots at masters and also watch streams on a daily basis but yet when I see a pvz hardly anyone tries to go for this ultimate mass air composition. WhiteRa uses it a lot (he did also in WOL vs zerg) but I mostly just see him dying while trying to get there. I would love if people would actually stop theorycrafting and provide replays of where "it's unbeatable and nothing can be done".
I personally never use it and just play regular macro pvz games (added voids/phoenix from one stargate and double stargate vs mass muta) and the matchup is so much better now. Zerg midgame options are really strong now (2base hydra-ling speed hydras into mutas, swarm host pushes with spores etc) but so much more dynamic and fun to play. There is no timer until (13-15min mark make your 3 base allin push with 1-2 prism when he tries to get his broodlords out).
I just don't see how this composition with hts + mass air can be unbeatable because there are some distinct differences to broodlord-corruptor-infestor from WOL zerg. It takes way more time to transition into. Air upgrades needed while zerg went for 3/3 melee/carapace which also were useful for his ground units; broodlords with +3 melee do the main dps, even if there is +0 air attack still so transitioning back into ground or having speedlings as a bonus was natural. Also remaxing with broodlords didn't take so long because you either morph corruptors into broods (38sec) or corruptors first into broods (74sec). Tempests take 70sec (from each stargate), carriers 120sec(+32sec for interceptors) and voidrays 60sec. Unless you have like 20-30 stargates you need several cycles. Getting more bases for gas and making a good canon wall is more expensive and takes more time. A protoss has it harder (that is it takes longer) to get 8+ gases so early and canons can't be moved or healed (transfuse).
So what if you get there? Ht's on the ground are not protected as infestors are with broodlords. Broodlords instantly (also automatically) made a huge broodling-wall so you can't just run chargelots to the infestors or feedback them (broodlords have higher range). Tempests have even higher range but they do really low dps and massively overkill. How will you stop a group of 50-60 speedlings or ultras running in to force storms/archon merges with the speed tehy have. Maybe have of the linsg will die beforehand. So he actually needs more ground support (archons/colossi etc). Tempests also do super low dps (9.09 vs non broodlords), that's less than a stalker. Add on top of that their massive overkill and it takes forever to actually kill mass ground. So if tempests are massed you just overrun him. If he has carriers use corruptors or fg (interceptors caught stop doing dps) or hydras (dimaga always used hydras with hold position to kill interceptors). I just don't see the amazing synergy. Tempests do super low dps (and nobody goes broods vs mass tempests) and overkill, hts can be sniped because they are not protected (like burrow moving and snaring infestors behind a wall of broodlings that tank and prevent any ground movement there).
Maybe I missed something important. But that's why I'd love to see some good replays (high level play). I'm sure one of you can help here out since you all see it used nearly every game to great success.
I'll personally stick with ground anyways because now that broods can be countered I think ht/immortal/blink etc with some slight air support is all I need and midgame fights are really fun and dynamic now (except for mass muta, there it's a stupid you either get raped or get enough phoenix out in time to rape him game).
These are generally my thoughts as well. It seems like posters tend to base what compositions they view as unbeatable primarily on their own experiences. Unless you are a top, say, 100 player in the world, your experiences should be almost completely ignored for balance purposes. You do too many things wrong to have a right to have a say in a balance discussion. Your experiences can be relevant for determining whether the game is going in a bad direction or won't be fun for the non-top tier pros but that's about it.
As to the specific topic of this forum, I've only seen a couple games where Protoss has tried to do this strategy in a high level (say Code A-ish level) game. I saw Violet crush Tear in the GSTL, I believe, with roach hydra viper at around the 12-15 minute mark, iirc, which is before he was able to fully achieve the "unbeatable" comp. I saw Stephano use ling and upgraded corrupters to take down this build at around the 15-20 minute mark on his stream, although the protoss didn't have HT out yet. I haven't seen any top tier zergs try to pit their ultimate late game army against this "ultimate" late game Protoss army yet, so perhaps there may be an issue there (and the issue for me would be that it's boring for one side to always win if it gets to a specific army comp) but it's too early to tell since the top tier zergs are only now just starting to play HoTS in earnest.
As far as how the "unbeatable" Protoss air army fares against Terran's ultimate late game army. I have to give the edge to Terran from what I've seen. BC, viking, raven, ghost, tank seems generally to be the stronger composition and to generally beat this Protoss air comp.
On February 26 2013 04:09 Henk wrote: Perhaps having a hive upgrade for hydras that gives +3 range against air?
Something similar has been suggested here, but that was vs air and ground, which might be a bit too much.
Backing off after void rays popped their charge just isn't worth it, because tempests+voidrays will have gotten so many shots off, your army will be too weak to attack again before another the cooldown has been reset.
Maybe allowing blinding cloud to affect air units would help?
blinding cloud on air would work against that... problem is it would work against everything in the game... how would you ever beat broodlord hydra viper?
Wait... I thought blinding cloud already effected air units...
On February 26 2013 04:09 Henk wrote: Perhaps having a hive upgrade for hydras that gives +3 range against air?
Something similar has been suggested here, but that was vs air and ground, which might be a bit too much.
Backing off after void rays popped their charge just isn't worth it, because tempests+voidrays will have gotten so many shots off, your army will be too weak to attack again before another the cooldown has been reset.
Maybe allowing blinding cloud to affect air units would help?
blinding cloud on air would work against that... problem is it would work against everything in the game... how would you ever beat broodlord hydra viper?
Wait... I thought blinding cloud already effected air units...
On February 25 2013 06:15 KingLumps wrote: Good luck engaging a toss when his voids aren't charged. Any smart toss player just retreats if you back off when he activates his voids, only a bronzey would engage after wasting his charge.
Your basic strat sounds like 'let the toss mess up then you win', not too solid a strat...
....Except his army is slow as fucking and corruptors are much much faster. You also have fungal so you can always force an engagement as zerg if you want. I feel like the main problem with a lot of zergs now is that with the fungal nerf, they just don't make infestors. They're still really freaking good...it's not like void rays can really dodge fungals, they're not that fast.
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If you can't hit fungals at 10 range and 2 radius (basically 11 range) with AoE against high templar which have to individually feedback all your infestors with only 9 range, then you deserve to lose. I honestly feel like I don't get at all why people would think skytoss, of all things, is OP. It's nearly impossible to get to, and even if you get to it its not like its unbeatable.
The only noticable difference from WoL skytoss, which got crushed by just pure corruptor, storms don't even matter, is a void ray buff was is equilized by them costing more supply, and you can micro away from them, and plus fungal still destroys them. And to add to that, vortex is removed. No more archon toilets, which IMO, is a good choice, but also makes PvZ lategame a lot easier for Z.
Comparing the ghost nerf to the infestor nerf is stupid, the ghost nerf made snipe worthless against zerg tier 3 by making the damage it did abysmal. Fungal still does massive damage to clumped air units, especially armored ones like voids (and don't try to tell me you can spread void rays, yes you can, but they'll just reclump themselves in like 3 seconds so it's hardly even worth the effort) it's just a projectile, and it even gets more range. So in short, all the nerf did was make it so you don't have an easymode root+AoE damage spell and all you have to do is f-shift-click-click-click, not even having to lead shots or think about enemy movements at all since lol fungal, they can't. The tempest hardly even helps, the only thing they could be good for is supporting a ground army vs. BLs, their DPS is extremely shitty and they massively overkill, their range isn't even that helpful against the relatively mobile zerg force.
On February 25 2013 06:15 KingLumps wrote: Good luck engaging a toss when his voids aren't charged. Any smart toss player just retreats if you back off when he activates his voids, only a bronzey would engage after wasting his charge.
Your basic strat sounds like 'let the toss mess up then you win', not too solid a strat...
....Except his army is slow as fucking and corruptors are much much faster. You also have fungal so you can always force an engagement as zerg if you want. I feel like the main problem with a lot of zergs now is that with the fungal nerf, they just don't make infestors. They're still really freaking good...it's not like void rays can really dodge fungals, they're not that fast.
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If you can't hit fungals at 10 range and 2 radius (basically 11 range) with AoE against high templar which have to individually feedback all your infestors with only 9 range, then you deserve to lose. I honestly feel like I don't get at all why people would think skytoss, of all things, is OP. It's nearly impossible to get to, and even if you get to it its not like its unbeatable.
The only noticable difference from WoL skytoss, which got crushed by just pure corruptor, storms don't even matter, is a void ray buff was is equilized by them costing more supply, and you can micro away from them, and plus fungal still destroys them. And to add to that, vortex is removed. No more archon toilets, which IMO, is a good choice, but also makes PvZ lategame a lot easier for Z.
Comparing the ghost nerf to the infestor nerf is stupid, the ghost nerf made snipe worthless against zerg tier 3 by making the damage it did abysmal. Fungal still does massive damage to clumped air units, especially armored ones like voids (and don't try to tell me you can spread void rays, yes you can, but they'll just reclump themselves in like 3 seconds so it's hardly even worth the effort) it's just a projectile, and it even gets more range. So in short, all the nerf did was make it so you don't have an easymode root+AoE damage spell and all you have to do is f-shift-click-click-click, not even having to lead shots or think about enemy movements at all since lol fungal, they can't. The tempest hardly even helps, the only thing they could be good for is supporting a ground army vs. BLs, their DPS is extremely shitty and they massively overkill, their range isn't even that helpful against the relatively mobile zerg force.
so you never played against skytoss as zerg yourself. maybe do that before posting stuff like this.
infestors get killed by range 12 carriers or range 15 tempests or in a real game scenario also from feedbacks/storms which basically have about the same range. oh and yeah fungal does about 0 damage now to superhigh hp units like voids and especially carrier + tempests and archons.
just stop talking about random stuff and tell us a composition how to beat 2 immortal 3 archon 4 HT 15 VR 8 carrier army.
if there is no way to kill lets say 80% of that army you will lose the game as Z. simple as that.
On February 25 2013 06:15 KingLumps wrote: Good luck engaging a toss when his voids aren't charged. Any smart toss player just retreats if you back off when he activates his voids, only a bronzey would engage after wasting his charge.
Your basic strat sounds like 'let the toss mess up then you win', not too solid a strat...
....Except his army is slow as fucking and corruptors are much much faster. You also have fungal so you can always force an engagement as zerg if you want. I feel like the main problem with a lot of zergs now is that with the fungal nerf, they just don't make infestors. They're still really freaking good...it's not like void rays can really dodge fungals, they're not that fast.
Feedback would say "Hello". Mothership core will allow you to see these incoming and feedback in time
If you can't hit fungals at 10 range and 2 radius (basically 11 range) with AoE against high templar which have to individually feedback all your infestors with only 9 range, then you deserve to lose. I honestly feel like I don't get at all why people would think skytoss, of all things, is OP. It's nearly impossible to get to, and even if you get to it its not like its unbeatable.
The only noticable difference from WoL skytoss, which got crushed by just pure corruptor, storms don't even matter, is a void ray buff was is equilized by them costing more supply, and you can micro away from them, and plus fungal still destroys them. And to add to that, vortex is removed. No more archon toilets, which IMO, is a good choice, but also makes PvZ lategame a lot easier for Z.
Comparing the ghost nerf to the infestor nerf is stupid, the ghost nerf made snipe worthless against zerg tier 3 by making the damage it did abysmal. Fungal still does massive damage to clumped air units, especially armored ones like voids (and don't try to tell me you can spread void rays, yes you can, but they'll just reclump themselves in like 3 seconds so it's hardly even worth the effort) it's just a projectile, and it even gets more range. So in short, all the nerf did was make it so you don't have an easymode root+AoE damage spell and all you have to do is f-shift-click-click-click, not even having to lead shots or think about enemy movements at all since lol fungal, they can't. The tempest hardly even helps, the only thing they could be good for is supporting a ground army vs. BLs, their DPS is extremely shitty and they massively overkill, their range isn't even that helpful against the relatively mobile zerg force.
You forgot about the relatively small addition of the 15 range Tempest. I know it's REALLY minor but...
On February 26 2013 04:09 Henk wrote: Perhaps having a hive upgrade for hydras that gives +3 range against air?
Something similar has been suggested here, but that was vs air and ground, which might be a bit too much.
Backing off after void rays popped their charge just isn't worth it, because tempests+voidrays will have gotten so many shots off, your army will be too weak to attack again before another the cooldown has been reset.
Maybe allowing blinding cloud to affect air units would help?
I really would prefer 1 Supply Hydras with Dark Swarm.
how can you bait out voidrays if they just use tempest to kill anything that gets close? By then you are taking way too much damage, and if you don't commit with your whole army right then and there, you are going to take a ton of damage for baiting out void ray charges.
I like the idea of using vipers with corrupters on the flanks of his army, but even so, with proper vision, tempest will crush any vipers that get near them.
A video which shows the tactics and how it works. If there are any problems with it, feel free to tell me and I will follow up with another video .
That is not skytoss. If the person would had gone the correct unit composition which would pure voidrays and 5-6 high templars with 5 zealots if the zerg would had gone hydra/muta it would actually had made sense.
Just look at the ratio between Corruptors and voidrais, corruptors outnumbers voidrays by a ratio of 3:1 that will never actually happen in realgame cause of the food cap of 200, further if you would max out 200 corruptors vs 200 voidrays, and remember that its the voidrays that are the bulk of the skytoss, why the guy made carriers doesn't even make sense, would the corruptor army be more expensive gas and mineral wise and still lose massively against the voidrays, and im not joking here, it's like hydras trying to attack two collosus they die in droves instantly.
Corruptors sucks ass against voidray so only option you have is to make hydras, but they die terrible against the 4-5 hightemplar and 7 zealots I mentioned earlier. And don't even bring up mutalisks since they stack really great and any protoss will notice that you go muta and mix in 2 archons with 1 templar instead and there goes all your mutalisks as well.
Isn't the answer similar to the protoss answer to the zerg deathball in WoL? Try and pull them apart with drops/harassment? I guess protoss have been cannoning pretty heavily, but maybe some light swarm host placement in different places around the map to kill cannons at the various expansions?
On February 26 2013 08:12 alQahira wrote: Isn't the answer similar to the protoss answer to the zerg deathball in WoL? Try and pull them apart with drops/harassment? I guess protoss have been cannoning pretty heavily, but maybe some light swarm host placement in different places around the map to kill cannons at the various expansions?
While this has logic behind hind it's not going to work due to Tempest hiding behind the Cannon walls & observer slowly poking in.
You would have to Nydus this to switch around and have spores kill the observer. Still will be a tough task to pull off
I think that with the speed upgrade blizzard tricked ppl into thinking that hydras are good units now while in reality they are still awful. Their dps might be high but they are so low on hp that it does not matter. Against a mix of voids + colossus/ht/zealot they just die before doing anything. People here claim that they do better vs voids - ok against pure voids yes but vs a voids + ground mix IMO roach corruptor works better. You are still going to lose fights with it but the difference is that your roaches (which are much cheaper to rebuild) will clean his ground army while your corruptors will die bravely taking some of his air units down. Now if he is on 3 bases he cant possible rebuild both his ground and air army as fast as you can so after few trades you should be able to overwhelm him. Ofc you should start to be aggresive before he gets to 200/200 dream deathball as at that point you cant do anything as everyone knows.
It's not hard to get to, PvZ, open FFE into Stargate, Phoenix harass, skytoss is restricted by gas not minerals so when P takes their third they can drop a fuckton of cannons whilst being safe against all pushes due to cannons, FF and mothership core.
Protoss then adds in VR whilst teching to Storm and Carrier.
This comp is far more OP than BL/Infestor/Corruptor ever was simply because there are no glaring holes or timings that can penalise a Protoss doing the build correctly.
Also due to cannons and recall AND photon charge bullshit, you can't base trade or force the protoss to take a fight he doesn't want to.
I've been playing sc2 since the early WoL Beta... this is the most imbalanced thing I have encountered as zerg thus far. That's including the reaper days, the steppes of war 2rax SCV allins, the tank pushes on steppes, all that shit... Skytoss is just impossible to kill. It amazes me we are less than a month before release and blizzard has yet to balance this.
On February 25 2013 08:58 avilo wrote: I am just going to put this out here - the god composition of tempest + templar is unbeatable in TvP./ZvP lategame. I know from firsthand experience when I developed this 3+ months ago in beta (i offraced as Protoss for 2 weeks) and posted replays on the pro forums and informed blizzard that this would become a problem in the future for the game because it's simply put broodlord infestor 2.0 but better.
Blizzard has known about this unbeatable army for months, I detailed it in the pro forums, sent replays, and a lot of other P/Z pros have mentioned that when Protoss gets here you cannot lose the game.
With that said, let's hope blizzard, you know...fixes it? It's an easy fix - increase tempest supply to 8, and reduce it's health, and make it an actual support unit instead of a massable deathball unit that counters everything late game with templar. A unit like this should be fragile, I played a game last night and landed 7 hunter seekers on clumps of tempests and not one was even taken down to half health...lol.
This also brings the carrier back into the forefront as the go-to Protoss air unit.
I only post here because a lot of people ask "how do you beat mass tempest + templar" in lategame, and I'm here to tell you i tried to convince them this was a balance issue months ago, and they have let it be since then.
It is actually unbeatable when you get to 16-18 tempests + 10+ high templar. So if you play Zerg at the moment and are becoming frustrated with this, or mech TvP lategame and are frustrated with this, i wouldn't worry. It's obvious they are going to have to nerf it unless they want to leave the game in a state like broodlord infestor was for over a year in wings of liberty.
Playing Protoss for two weeks and complaing about something being broken doesn't help anybody except those that want to paint you as a complete moron (because it gives them an example of you acting like one).
Especially when the composition you point out isn't even that strong vs Terran (vs Zerg Tempest/Cannon/Templar is stupid, but sooo hard to get to).
Skytoss is pretty strong vs passive Zergs (too strong, IMO), and I think the Tempest definitely needs an increase in supply (to 6, not 8) and something needs to be done about the Void Ray (although I honestly haven't a clue what).
On February 26 2013 05:14 Decendos wrote: so you never played against skytoss as zerg yourself. maybe do that before posting stuff like this.
infestors get killed by range 12 carriers or range 15 tempests or in a real game scenario also from feedbacks/storms which basically have about the same range. oh and yeah fungal does about 0 damage now to superhigh hp units like voids and especially carrier + tempests and archons.
just stop talking about random stuff and tell us a composition how to beat 2 immortal 3 archon 4 HT 15 VR 8 carrier army.
if there is no way to kill lets say 80% of that army you will lose the game as Z. simple as that.
WoL skytoss is beaten by mass spores + infestors, if they attack you kill all their interceptors with mass fungal. The Tempest completely invalidates this strategy as they can kill all your static defense without ever having to get in range.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/HUHKs9b.jpg)
