The HotS Protoss Help Me Thread - Page 166

On August 29 2013 02:38 Nyast wrote:
I have two tricky questions regarding PvT:

1. Should I send the MScore to scout ? I'm afraid that if I send it and see incoming helions, I will not have the time to come back home to defend it.

2. If I scout a fast factory / helions, how do I defend it ? Even when I know it's coming, I lose probes. Often I can defend the first, or even the second wave, without taking too much damage.. but once a medivac is out, Terran usually goes for a drop in the main and a run-by in the natural at the same time. Should I just give up on the natural until I have enough units to defend it ? In that case I'm going to lag behind in economy. Also, playing against helions forces a lot of early stalkers, which suck later. I usually die in the follow-up, whatever it is ( like the first MMM timing ). Am I still supposed to go fast colossus ? Should I delay/forget upgrades for a while ? Basically, if I scout incoming helions, how do I react ?

On August 29 2013 02:59 rd wrote:


1. no

2. Theres nothing to really react to, other than making sure you have the right defenses in place. Nexus cannon in one base, all of your gateway units (usually 3 stalkers and some sentries) in another. If you have to, pull all of your probes to the cannon'ed base and bring your gateway units to it.

On August 29 2013 03:12 Nyast wrote:


Right but the nexus cannon doesn't have enough dps to kill 4 helions fast enough before they fry my entire probe line. Even when reacting fast enough and trying to move them away, they'll still get between 7-8 kills. And if you divide your army, they'll still get as many kills between the two bases. Usually Terran starts to harass with 2-4 helions, and the drop comes at 7'15 with 4 helions in main and 2-3 in natural.

On August 29 2013 03:12 Nyast wrote:


Right but the nexus cannon doesn't have enough dps to kill 4 helions fast enough before they fry my entire probe line. Even when reacting fast enough and trying to move them away, they'll still get between 7-8 kills. And if you divide your army, they'll still get as many kills between the two bases. Usually Terran starts to harass with 2-4 helions, and the drop comes at 7'15 with 4 helions in main and 2-3 in natural.

On August 29 2013 07:42 megapants wrote:
your best bet to defend properly is to simply know what it's coming a few minutes before it comes. the timing is critical for defense since that is how you know where to best position your few units.

the first sign that terran might do this sort of play is if you scout no reaper and gas mining. obviously he's going to go factory tech. if terran doesn't go reaper and gets factory before reactor, he can produce 4 hellions at your front as early as 6 minutes. you can evacuate your probes from the natura - or don't transfer any over from your main in the first place if you don't feel confident enough to risk it for those ~30 seconds of mining time - just before this timing and leave one at the ramp to place down a pylon wall off to prevent him from getting up the ramp. softening up the hellions with whatever units you have out during this defense is key to holding off the next wave more easily.

if you already committed to robotics, then you should definitely get a forge out quickly after to get cannons to deal with the medivac followup. this also lets you get way ahead on upgrades, since terran is obviously investing a lot of gas to do this attack. if you knew this attack was coming before committing to robo, i would suggest delaying robo for forge first - since timing alone should be enough know when this attack should be coming without needed observers to spot - and then get your robo so you can get even further ahead in upgrades. this is also an ok response to cloak banshee, so it's a bit of a catch all if he decided to go for that follow up. but going robo first is fine since having observers around your bases is helpful for dealing with that multipronged harrass.

you could also delay robo until after you get additional gateway, assuming you know he's doing this hellion play, in order to set up a big counterattack or to get more units out to take a really fast third nexus if you manage to actually kill off most or all of his units, but thats really risky and will have a hard time against widow mine or cloak banshee follow ups.

it's acceptable to have probe losses if you go for a 4-5 minute nexus vs this play since you'll be getting so many rounds of probe production in comparison to them - they likely aren't going to be even mining off their second base til like 8 minutes, much less producing a lot of workers. i think an important part to feeling confident holding this attack off is whether or not you got your tech out before you took too many losses. like, even if he gets 10 worker kills, if you already started your robo and forge, you're going to be at least even, as long as you actually KILL the attack, since they seriously delayed their mid game to deal this much damage.

hope that was helpful

On August 29 2013 22:56 SC2John wrote:


1. BAHAHAHAHAHAHA, you actually tell the dude how to kill you hahahahahaha. Okay, first thing, you have a really fucking weird build lol. It's like 11 probe scout then a zealot with a delayed pylon (25 instead of 23) then you don't make a sentry until 5:10 despite having over 200 gas. I don't know if you intend for all of these things, but nothing lines up and nothing makes sense with your opening. I suggest you learn one of these builds. Next thing, you need to be more on top of your forcefields. Next thing, that amount of stalkers is completely unnecessary; if you need extra DPS, put down a cannon. That, along with generally bad crisis management has put you so behind that you can never win. Your first observer is out at 9:00, you never take both natural gases, and then you put down a colossus bay, build a warp prism, take a 3rd, and THEN build a colossus. Why?

2. The build is this game makes much more sense. I think, however, if you're planning to do a MsC expand, you should attempt to scout later, especially on a 4-player map. The reason for gateway scouting is that you can generally get up your opponent's ramp before a wall goes down; on 4-player maps, however, you have a fairly low chance of that, so you might as well just scout after core and get the same information while saving some minerals. Again, you face the problem of having too many stalkers and no cannons; build an early forge and put cannons down instead of wasting so gas on stalkers.

Basically, you're builds are looking a little sloppy and unrefined, and as a result, dealing with something like this is uglier than it needs to be. Holding the initial hellions shouldn't be that hard. As for dealing with mass hellions, just make AN immortal; they work wonders. Against an opening like this, you can build 3 immortals and then just immortal bust ftw (because he won't have enough units to fill the bunkers).

Sidenote: don't delay your robo like that post above was talking about, that's a bad idea.