[G] The Imbalance of TvP

TvP, or Terran verse Protoss, is this guide's main point.
Terran Advantages:
Ability to lift off buildings
Ability to repair
Ability to wall-in
Longest ranged unit in the game
Strongest Air-attacking ground unit
Best scouting tool
Deadliest army at Max supply
Immense power at mid-game
Exponential upgrade increase for metal units
EMP
Worker has 20 more life.

Terran Disadvantages:
Inefficient ground-attacking 'Air units'
Building fire
No further tech at late-game
Micro-intensive (Repair, mines, etc.)

Protoss advantages:
Many useful offensive spells (storm, stasis, etc.)
Strong early-game
Worker does not have to wait for building process
Large bulky units minimize damage of AoE spells
The plasma shield regenerates itself

Protoss Disadvantage:
High supply costing units
Lots of prerequisite buildings required in order to tech higher
Expensive building/unit cost
Weaker army at Max supply
Inability to replenish armor life of units

Units:
In a typical TvP, the Protoss's main army is mainly dragoons mixed with zealots, while the Terran army is vulture, tanks. Throughout the game, these two races add in units such as high templar, arbiter, science vessel, goliath, carriers in order to re-shape their fighting force.
However, one huge disadvantage of Protoss here is that their army relies on dragoons. Goons are weak units despite how they look.
Normally when a person observes a goon, they would only see:
Cost – 125 Mineral, 50 gas, supply 2
Damage – 20, ranged
Life 180 (Shield 80, Armor 100)

This is not as simple as it looks. The shield part of their life is retardedly weak. If you ever played with dragoons, you would know that they have a slow projectile speed and long animation time for their attacks to land. Their 20 damage actually deals 10 damage to SCV's because goons rely on explosive damage. Their 20 damage would deal 15 to vultures, and full 20 to tanks. This means that dragoons would overkill easily since the time that it takes from Dragoon A to finish off that vulture with its energy ball of damage is long, giving time for Dragoon B to start attacking and the target would already be dead, causing Dragoon B's damage to go to waste. This might not seem so important but when your dragoons are under tank's long firepower, and their massive splash damage causes you to lose 4 dragoons each second, it is crucial for Protoss to not 'waste' any damage because their damage even without overkill is crushed by the Terran metal army easily without the proper flanking, support spells, and correct formation.

Finally, dragoons don't have good AI's. They are clumsy when they walk, they tend to run into each other, and often have trouble getting through rough terrain. This factor would not be a big deal if getting through terrain was the only problem. However, this also factors into when a dragoon fights a metal army. Their tendency to clump together and prevent one another to moving to the correct direction (the direction you order them to move) makes them extremely vulnerable to tank's wide splash damage. It also means they have trouble running away easily when a group of vultures come to the group of dragoons, plant mines, and leave.

Tanks on the other hand, is the core of the Terran's metal army. They deal enormous damage, 70 with splash, 85 with upgrades plus splash damage. They have the longest range in the game. The only drawback is that they can only utilize their potential in siege mode, and they are vulnerable up-close. This is why you often see vultures and mines acting as a physical shield between the enemy units and the tanks.
Tanks have 150 life, 30 damage unsieged, 70 damage sieged. Yet they cost 150 minerals and 100 gas and 2 supply. Is there something wrong here? How does something that has immense damage with splash damage, 150 life, disproportionally strong upgrades, combined with the longest range in the game only cost 2 supply? A 120 life, 9 damage mutalisk costs 2 supply. A dragoon, 80 shield 100 armor with 20 damage with shorter range costs 2 supply. A vulture, that does 20 damage, with 80 life, and shorter range costs 2 supply.

This is a problem because most of the Protoss's main firepower is dragoon's damage. Tanks, Terran's main firepower, deal full damage to goons with added splash damage. Tanks deal half damage to Zealots, and Vultures deal 25% damage to dragoons. This may seem disadvantageous to Terran players but Terrans use Vultures to kill zealots and Tanks to kill goons. Rarely will you see a Terran player trying to attack a group of goons with vultures, or group of zealots with just tanks.

Vultures, kill probes in 2 hits. Goons kill SCV in 6 hits and Zealots need 4 hits to kill one. This shows the effectiveness of vulture drops. In terms of harassment, I would say that Protoss would have the upper hand. Reaver drops or templar drops tend to kill more workers. Just the fact that SCV has 20 more life than probes makes it that much harder to kill when in situations where you find that you have managed to sneak in a few units inside his main. So enlighten me as to why Blizzard made it necessary to give the Terran's workers 20 more life than the other race's workers, I still have no clue why.

The ability to liftoff buildings is a huge advantage. In a case where only melee ground units attack an expo, the terran can simply liftoff the building, saving his command center unless the Protoss brings air-attacking units like goons/carrier. If a Protoss could do the same with the nexus, the terran will have to mix more than simply vultures and tanks to his metal army in early game when he attacks. Not only this, but Terran players can use large buildings, such as engineering bay, which has 850 life and costs 125 minerals, to act as a meat shield when assaulting the Protoss army. Believe it or not, 2 of these buildings lifted off along with the Terran army can make a big difference since a lot of dragoon fire is distracted to hit these cheap and efficient buildings.

Wall-in is a huge advantage to Terran. It is not really viable to do with Protoss because the buildings require pylon range while none of the buildings can liftoff which serves as a gate to a wall for your own units to pass through. Most league official maps, have had narrow chokes leading outside your base which allowed the Terran to easily create a wall with a couple of buildings. And since Terran units are all ranged, it even made it easier for Terrans to block off rushes by ranged fire protected by a wall. This is why Terran players nowadays do not have to worry about building a sufficient marine force to block an incoming zealot rush, which allows them to tech straight to metal units at early game.

Repair and Energy Charge. Whenever Terran buildings or units get damaged, they have the chance to repair it back to full health. Whenever Protoss buildings or units get damaged, they let them sit there and wait for the energy to charge back up. This is advantageous to Protoss because it allows the Protoss to not have to spend time repairing things. However, the more SCVs the Terran uses to repair a building, the faster the building recovers. This means that you could theoretically make a wall that never breaks down by having repairing SCVs.

Turrets and Cannons has similar functions. They are both useful for defense for your expos; Turrets cost 75 minerals and only attacks Air units with 20 damage. Cannons costs 150 minerals, and attacks both Air and ground units. It only seems fair to double the cost of cannons because it attacks both Air + ground, right? Wrong. First of all, turrets simply shoot faster. Turrets can be built anywhere on the map, while the cannon has to be placed within the pylon's range. If you have noticed, turret missile tend to continue firing a little bit after an Air unit leaves its usual range. This does not happen for cannons. Few extra shots are crucial since Air units such as observers or scourge have small amount of life. For these reasons, I believe that turrets should cost more than they do at the moment.

When a dropship comes to an expo guarded by a bunch of cannons, the cannons keep firing at that dropship but switch its target to whatever that came out of the dropship. This is more advantageous to Terran drops because the dropship has a higher chance of survival compared to when the Protoss shuttle tries to drop in a bunch of turrets. Even something small like this contributes to the imbalancies of PvT.

As I have explained earlier, the Terran metal army in mid-game is incredibly overpowered, unless the Protoss mixes in storms, zealot bombs, with later tech such as stasis to balance out the power distribution. However, if a Terran army can kill a Protoss army in mid game, the Protoss cannot progress into late game where he can access units such as arbiter and carriers.

If you haven't noticed, there are often guides and answers from professional Protoss players that describe how to approach and assault a Terran metal army using formation, flanking, zealot bombs, and such(ex. check Bluzman's guide). It is micro-intensive and requires lots of practice. Example of this micro, is that when goons engage tanks, they must form a straight line, preferably a large arc, which lets each get closer to tanks for range and minimize each goon bumping into each other. You must also prepare your high templars, make them survive by providing cover, and target the largest slumps of units to maximize the storm potential. Use zealots to diffuse mines or goons, depending on the case, while you try drop zealots onto tanks among the heavy turret/goliath anti-air fire. For the terran's case, they simply siege their tanks, lay mines with vultures, and wait for the long tank range to draw in the enemies. It is a bit more complicated than this because you have to siege some tanks while you unsiege some, and prepare mines in a fashion where it minimizes the damage to your own army. But it really isn't as bad as what the Protoss player has to go through in order to fight the Terran's army.

And because the Protoss player has to go through all this trouble to engage a Terran army, is probably one of the biggest reasons why TvP is so imbalanced in favor of the Terran. The second biggest reason why PvT is imbalanced is Dragoon, no further comments needed.

Why do the best rated Protoss professional players, in general, lose to the best rated Terran professional players? Should we completely ignore these statistics? Many people say that playing Terran requires a much higher APM than playing Protoss. This in fact is slightly true because a Terran has more tasks to be occupied with. Then, can we conclude that Protoss is just a more simple race? Yes and No. Reason for yes is that Protoss doesn't have the opportunity to do as many things as Terrans. We don't have to repair. (This is actually worse for us) Our workers can build-n-go. We don't have lots of extra useful mines lying around that we can use. These extra tasks needed by Terran makes the players busier with the race, but is more rewarding in the long run. Therefore, we can conclude that playing Terran might be more chaotic, but these opportunities offer a pathway to make the T race even stronger. And thus, we can say that Protoss is not an easy race, because it doesn't have any of these extra things that help the race and makes mastering the matchup verse Terrans much harder.

P.S. Vulture is extremely fast and good harassing unit, provide cover for tanks, and comes with 3 useful mines that can deal large damage and scouting purposes all for the cost of....only 75 minerals.