So, many of us saw the usage of patrol stacked vikings in TvT that enabled boxer to snipe off some incoming units in his RO64 match. What many might not have seen is something that was shown in mvp's match against SoundWerra (I dont know if he did it intentionally, but its where I first noticed it).
What is this thing? A way to dodge missiles from vikings. This can be used in the early game to conserve as much energy as you possibly can, and can be used against patrol clustered vikings to let your own vikings get in unscathed for the first volley (put the cloaked banshee slightly ahead of the vikings then cloak as it runs in). There may be other uses as well, but this is what I came up with so far.
As it turns out, SC2 has its own share of tricks that are still in that we havent seen yet. This trick with cloak works with any units that use missile attacks, I dont have a list... but marauders and stalkers and other units like that have missile attacks.
This sounds nice, at least in theory, but it's pretty much impossible to know his number of vikings when they are patrolling like that, so if unless you happen to be pretty much equal in vikingcount, I dont see how nullifying the first volley will really help you. Nonetheless, this is certainly interesting, and has its uses if you know how many vikings he got
Well, if you keep Banshee's infront of your Vikings will the enemy Vikings prioritize your Banshees over Vikings because of proximity? If so you could decloak / cloak to eat up more vollies during a fight.
not new :p also most tvt players have a raven in their mix on top of that u almost never see more than 5 stacked vikings because u dont want to overkill in case opponents viking comes in for a battle
On October 26 2010 20:52 MorroW wrote: not new :p also most tvt players have a raven in their mix on top of that u almost never see more than 5 stacked vikings because u dont want to overkill in case opponents viking comes in for a battle
How is the Raven detection range compared to the 9 range on the Vikings? I assume keeping the Raven in front of the Vikings will be a terrible idea in most cases. Although the PDD will prevent the enemy Vikings from sniping your own patrolling Vikings, the banshee can still cloak, basically just making sure the PDD will even out the battle, instead of giving an advantage
it´s a mechanic that was fixed in one of the patches .... first it was the case that marouder missiles hit an other unit if the targeted unit was load in a medivac, than they fixed it that the missile hits nothing .. its the same case with cloak .. the units vanish and there is no target anymore
On October 26 2010 20:52 MorroW wrote: not new :p also most tvt players have a raven in their mix on top of that u almost never see more than 5 stacked vikings because u dont want to overkill in case opponents viking comes in for a battle
How is the Raven detection range compared to the 9 range on the Vikings? I assume keeping the Raven in front of the Vikings will be a terrible idea in most cases. Although the PDD will prevent the enemy Vikings from sniping your own patrolling Vikings, the banshee can still cloak, basically just making sure the PDD will even out the battle, instead of giving an advantage
Vikings devour PDD energy, it takes two shots of the laser to stop each salvo (of two missiles) from each viking.
The bigger question is whether or not something like this should be allowed to stay in the game? You have to look at it objectively for all it's uses and abuses. Could a perfectly executed cloak/decloak/cloak potentially absorb all damage?
I think the use of this is mostly just lucky and would only work on a player who doesn't know about it. Once players are aware of it, I don't see it being very useful at all really.
I think this should be patched. would love to hear counter arguments though, because i'm too tired to think up any of my own atm.
I think it adds some twitch gaming sense, the missles fired from vikings are not exactly slow. It also adds an opportunity cost to leaving vikings in a stacked patrol ball.
On October 26 2010 23:16 AcrossFiveJulys wrote: Wouldn't this not work if they had detection nearby? So why not just fly your banshee in cloaked rather than cloaking at the last second?
Because then the banshee won't be targeted for the first volley. Basically this way you absorb the first volley by cloaking the banshee once the missiles have been shot, making them miss. As long as you send your vikings in immediately after you should have an advantage in the ensuing battle because the opponent's viking's attacks will be on cooldown.
On October 26 2010 20:52 MorroW wrote: not new :p also most tvt players have a raven in their mix on top of that u almost never see more than 5 stacked vikings because u dont want to overkill in case opponents viking comes in for a battle
How is the Raven detection range compared to the 9 range on the Vikings? I assume keeping the Raven in front of the Vikings will be a terrible idea in most cases. Although the PDD will prevent the enemy Vikings from sniping your own patrolling Vikings, the banshee can still cloak, basically just making sure the PDD will even out the battle, instead of giving an advantage
Vikings devour PDD energy, it takes two shots of the laser to stop each salvo (of two missiles) from each viking.
the raven sight is longer/equal than the viking range for sure lol
On October 27 2010 01:28 Ndugu wrote: The use of stacking vikings has made me REALLY excited for some potential HSM usage.
Just pray you do not recieve death threats by mail when the opponent realize what happened.
By the way, I just checked, and the detectionrange for the Raven is in fact 11, so that will render the cloak trick pretty much useless once a raven is out
hmm since it works with cloak does anyone know if it would work for ghosts? or even zergs burrow? with just any projectile that you are able to see marauder attack for instance,
this is cool but hard to pull off in game.. i always knew cloak stopped incoming attacks but never tried this because its too micro intensive and i might mess up causing me to lose worse
cool trick, but I dont see it being too terribly applicable as you could just use a couple of ravens and several pdds, istead of suiciding a banshee and relying on a small timing window to cloak :/ they arent exactly cheap
Pretty sure its been known that if you cloak before the attack hits that it doesn't do damage, it's been seen in a ton of tournaments and showmatches and stuff. ie: banshee running away from a scan and just getting out of range while the vikings shots are coming in, or a dt running out of detection/scan range just in time as a marauder shot or banshee shot was coming in.
This reminds me of DOTA, how going invisible would disjoint a ranged attack, if you didn't have any detection. Interesting that it is in SC2. Not sure yet on whether it can really be abused or not.
Hopefully Blizzard doesn't see it or else they will patch it. Ive seen alot of the "skillful" glitches taken out to make it as fair as possible. (Neural Parasite while burrowed trick)
On October 27 2010 02:30 Musiq wrote: Hopefully Blizzard doesn't see it or else they will patch it. Ive seen alot of the "skillful" glitches taken out to make it as fair as possible. (Neural Parasite while burrowed trick)
Neural parasite was not useful nor did it require skill.
However, the Voidrays 'fazing' as faze called it, that was unbelievably OP but since the VR's have had 2 nerfs since that was patched, maybe they could bring it back?
I love little bugs like this. :-(
Like on league of legends, when Garen first came out he had a bug where his Q would reset his attack timer, allowing you to essentially double attack which naturally got patched.
I got a ton of people to sign a petition, wrote a little article explaining how little things like this increase the skill boundary and seperate the casuals from the competitives and lo and behold a few weeks later garen had his bug back.
And guess what? On the latest patch:
Jax Empower # Now resets Jax’s autoattack timer when cast
I think Blizzard will focus very much on adding skill-based things like that in future expansions. I think they're really worried about getting a 100% solid base that they have complete control over and understanding of with Wings of Liberty.
Once they have this secure foundation, and know it is as balanced as humanly possible, I imagine little tricks like that will find their way into the game in increasing numbers for all races.
Seems inefficient. If you are spending 200 gas on cloak anyway, I don't see why not to use this, but if you are not I would spend it on a raven and just use PDD.
On October 26 2010 22:45 CharlieMurphy wrote: The bigger question is whether or not something like this should be allowed to stay in the game? You have to look at it objectively for all it's uses and abuses. Could a perfectly executed cloak/decloak/cloak potentially absorb all damage?
If someone managed to do that, they deserve it. Because I don't think that's humanly possible, even by korean standards.
On October 26 2010 22:45 CharlieMurphy wrote: The bigger question is whether or not something like this should be allowed to stay in the game? You have to look at it objectively for all it's uses and abuses. Could a perfectly executed cloak/decloak/cloak potentially absorb all damage?
If someone managed to do that, they deserve it. Because I don't think that's humanly possible, even by korean standards.
It is the same as in wow a rogue vanishing a point blank deathcoil which happens somewhat often.
I tested this with a unit tester map and the same applies also to corruptors, phoenixes and battlecruisers vs banshees and to stalkers and marauders vs ghosts but apparently not to the thor vs banshee or the hellion against the ghost. The thor's aa cannon probably does damage to all units, including cloaked ones due to splash. The same goes for hellions splash and probably for archons, too.
Can someone confirm this?
Now have fun abusing this tactic with your ghosts against hydralisks. ;-)
This is very very good trick. PDD as has been said earlier is near useless to large number of vikings because a salvo of missiles require two lasers and getting a PDD (and the Raven) requires such a large investment when you could just have 2 vikings or something of that accord that you need to get either more Ravens and more PDDs or attack early when the viking count is low to really take advantage of the PDD.
The banshee and cloak trick allows Banshee to tank an infinite number of viking hits allowing your smaller fleet to gain the first strike and edge if you can micro. And if the guy is on auto target, you can keep cloaking and not cloaking. This is especially useful in mid-late when your opponent starts getting a critical mass of vikings, and you opened up banshee. At that point when the opponent starts to get lots of vikings up, he won't try to get a raven out immediately, and scans are deadly at this point.
A micro trick that gains a big but specific advantage in a battle given certain specific conditions like no detection. Condemn it or appraise it, when some pro uses this to decide an important battle, we will all cheer.
EPT
I used to use this all the time. Now everyone will know and it'll be fixed. 
