Hey, since the HOTS beta started I have been working with pro players to upload cool strats, demonstrations of the new units and full games from their live streams. Some examples of these videos include:
HotS Balance Update #5 New Ability Demonstration
Rotterdam's Oracle Storm Drop
Destiny's Defending with Collapsible Rocks
Sheth and Destiny showing effectiveness of Blinding Cloud
Swarm Host + Spine Crawler Rush
Reaper's New Combat Awareness Ability (Vision Up Cliffs)
Awesome set of highlight vids. I never expected that Entomb having an aoe can actually adds some good tactics to its use by manipulating the worker pathing like that.
Some truly sick plays here, was literally beautiful to see. I really love this beta period, where everyone is hungry to try out new things, people aren't quite certain how to react and they do what their instinct tells them. I think eventually things will be figured out and the metagame will once again recess into a by-the-book play. Though everything minus the warhound looks great in HotS right now and I hope we will continue to see more exploration/exploitation of the new units/abilities/terrain.
The Blinding Cloud looks like the coolest mico ability imo. I think the range nerf was a tad too hasty by blizz, it's something like 1.5 now? I definitely think they should have given it a tiny bit more time to let people figure out how to deal with it to see if it was truly op...
Have any players toyed around with taking "Spawn locusts" off of autocast to set up neat traps (e.g. hold lurker). I don't even know if it's possible but from what I've seen it could be. Just imagine 2 flanks of swarm hosts, and when a terran player moves between them locusts just suddenly come out of nowhere and auto-surround. Would be so cool.
Hmmm, I never cared for the Reaper change, but now I dislike it even more after seeing TheStC's game. That Reaper did practically no damage to either the Nexus or the rocks. But ah well, I'm complaining....
Great post. Love to see the ingenuity of players already creating great games.