Balance Update - August 13, 2020 - Page 14

PartinG vs Bunny at 17 minutes
INnoVation vs Chance at 8 hours and 18 minutes
Results:+ Show Spoiler +

Those PvZs were soul crushing. Game two of Dark versus Creator was yet another example of what I mentioned in my last post. In the live thread people pointed out Creator delayed his warp gate 12 seconds to get early tech but that misses the point. PvZ's first 5 minutes is now balanced so sharply on a knife-edge that anything less than perfect timing and doing the exact right build and tactics at the right time without being able to know when to do so can end with protoss dead. Creator did the most defensive version of the standard opening. He didn't even send out his adept to scout and he still lost his core and Dark still was able to break down nearly the whole wall. Even with an additional zealot or two from warp gate he would have at best just barely held on and it would have been an even game despite Dark doing what should have been a committed all-in. When the game ended, Dark had three hatcheries and could at any point easily could have transitioned into a macro game.

Not that the other games looked much better. You can say "but it's Dark", but that doesn't discount that the extreme majority of PvZs look like this now. Protoss tries to kill workers and anything less than killing a crippling number of workers usually results in an even game or zerg somehow ahead. Dark wasn't even trying to be cost efficient in some of those games but his production advantage was such that it didn't matter. Against both Zest and Creator, Dark threw away tons of units to disruptors and took what were clearly unfavourable fights (game one of Dark vs. Zest comes to mind. Dark attacked into an obvious concave and lost most of his army) but still won because the protoss players could not match production.

Now that pro zergs have remembered that macro hatches exist again, the disparity in production in PvZ is only going to get worse.

Unless the map pool changes drastically, I just don't see how this matchup is going to be fixed without significant changes to the early game.

Taeja got man-handled by creator. The guy who looked completely helpless vs dark in his match. Taeja scouted the proxy void ray and built a bunker beside it and STILL wasn't able to stop it. Game 1 he lost because of a proxy gateway adept preventing him from getting the orbital to have the scan he would of needed for DTs.