[D]That Protoss Elephant - Page 14

I was going to write my own thread on the subject of Protoss, but I feel this thread is so well presented I may as well just add to the discussion here.

Protoss as a race is best embodied by MC. MC is both the most consistent and the least consistent protoss player around. He will often ace his group with amazing builds and timings and then a few weeks later lose to players that he is in theory much, much better than and fall out of a group or tourney extremely early. This also applies to basically every matchup for Protoss and the fact that they have three totally different styles that require different skillsets for each one. It's not uncommon for the average Protoss player to have two good matchups and one awful one on ladder for example, much more so than the other two races.

It's important to note that I don't want to discuss balance, but I do feel like certain metagame shifts can be extremely good for Protoss. I dont think anything is particularly imbalanced, but I do feel that the metagame heavily favours Protoss in TvP right now and at the same time it heavily favours Zerg in ZvP. This is a stark contrast to two or three weeks ago when the complete opposite was true. There are situations in lategame TvP where the Protoss player is totally helpless as well, at the mercy of his opponents micro.

Lets first examine the current state of PvT. I'm by heart a Terran player, however my PvT is leaps and bounds better than my TvP. The reason for this was in order to tackle my weak TvP I wanted to learn the Protoss openers and try to find the weak points so that I could exploit them. The problem I found though is many of the weakpoints are simply build order losses, with basically nothing the Protoss player can do to stop the loss. Things like hellion drops and really early (pre msc) all ins are great for Terran, but the Protoss player can't stop them. He basically needs to just accept those losses and play to the meta where most Terrans dont do those types of builds.

The list of dangerous Protoss openers against Terran right now is HUGE. 1base proxy oracles, blink all ins, 1base immortal busts are all very good and look very similar in terms of initial setups, so Terran needs to scout very, very effectively to spot the all in. The second part is that those all ins all require totally different setups for defense from the Terran, guess wrong and you lose. Moving onto two base play Protoss can open with all sorts of DT drops modified off Tails initial build (Which is genius). They can open two base Colossus, they can fake Colossus and go into templar and even then they could just open straight up with templar. Hell even a delayed oracle opener can be really really good. The variations in terms of openers Protoss against Terran that are all very good and very viable is beyond extreme, and the vast majority of them are also extremely safe and very difficult to punish.

The single thing that ties all these openers together is the mothership core. Typically in the past Terran would try to hit a small 1-2 minute window where the Protoss was vulnerable in order to do damage, or even win the game. Many of the builds like 2 base Colossus and double forge HT openers had a small window for the Terran to try and exploit. The Terran still needed to have excellent scouting and play extremely well to hit that timing, and at the same time the Protoss had various tools available to delay and stall out until they got the tech they needed to hold. This led to some very exciting games that would settle down after the window went away. Now though the MSC basically removes that window by forcing the Terran to back off for 1-2 minutes at a time (depending on msc energy) while at the same time making drops much much more risky. The crazy amount of greed Protoss can get away with, and the amount of viable openers is very stressful for your average Terran player right now.

The Terran side of things is basically the heavy one base openers like Hellion drops and bunker rushes. If you want to play a more standard game though you're in a ton of trouble. The widow mine drops have been mostly figured out, it's not really a fully viable opener anymore (especially with tails DT drops out there). This leaves you with a standard +1 4 medivac timing, but with a MSC that just gets shut down extremely hard. You see the problem here? Terran players have very few options for aggressive builds and rely heavily on taking advantage of Protoss mistakes, while at the same time a bad read from the Terran results in a near instant loss. This problem is even more compounded by how strong the lategame Protoss army is even without micro is extremely scary.

I dont really want to go into too much detail with PvZ and PvP, but I'll touch on it a bit. PvZ right now is FFE into immortal all in or pray you can hold a third base. Zerg has adapted to the skytoss strats by using a ling/hydra timing to really nullify that idea very, very early on and deny the Protoss a third base. PvP is basically stargate or bust now and the game very closely resembles the boring snoozefest that is ZvZ and muta vs. muta battles.

The real Problem with Protoss? The obvious ones are warpgate, FF and Colossus. Colossus being easily the worst unit in the game. Not only does it cause huge win/loss states for races that react properly/or incorrectly to their presence on the field they totally screw up the balance of air units in the game. Anti air units have to be balanced around being good anti air units AND being good anti Colossus units without being too powerful in one aspect or another. The best example are Void Rays, which are great against Colossus but they also crush Corrupters and Vikings. Capital Ships stand no chance in the current metagame because of just how insanely good anti has to be to deal with Colossus for another example.

The other things people don't seem to talk about are just how extremely black and white all the Protoss units counters/units they counter situations are. This leads to micro and control either needing to be Korean level good, or just not very impactful (most late game Protoss matchups don't require much control, although there are some situations like HT vs. vipers etc). This also leads to unit mixtures needing to be just about perfect from whoever the Protoss is fighting. Terran needs the right mix of Vikings/Ghosts/Marines/Marauders to combat the lategame toss army properly, any mistake here and Terran makes his job much, much more difficult. If the Terran gets it right though the Protoss player loses complete control of the fight and the game.

Chargelots wreck marauders, in large numbers equal supply marauders will kill themselves from stim and take nearly the whole map to either win the fight or lose it. In most cases though you dont have an entire map to kite back and the Zealots win easily. Chargelots at the same time gets wrecked by marines or hellbats, so if your splash gets taken out/disabled and you can't cut his marine numbers down you're going to lose the game badly.

Stalkers are pretty weak overall, but they're great vs. roaches with good control. Put them up against well upgrade Marines, Marauders or hydra's though and they melt into a pile of shattered Protoss dreams.

Then you have units like Immortals who are capable of racking up 30+ kills on units like roaches/marauders/stalkers if they're well protected. They are so strong and so very underrated. At the same time though rely on them too heavily and you expose yourself to large numbers of very cheap light units like chargelots/marines/zerglings.

Archons are another unit that is either game endingly good or causing you a near instant loss. Archons can clean up marauders/a few marines like nobodies business. Have 5 archons left against 18 injured marauders and 4 marines with 4-5medivacs? no problem for the archons. Get them emped at the start of the fight though and watch your 1500 gas go right up in smoke.

Lets wrap this up now. Basically everything about Protoss is complete feast or famine. They have almost nothing that provides stability to their matchups and they lean so heavily on the metagame it's not even funny. The worst part about Protoss though is that your victory depends almost entirely on what your opponent does and not what you yourself do. This needs to change, and soon.