StarCraft II Matchmaking Thread

General Discussion
1941

But by the time you get the obs it may be too late. In fact, i remember in one day 9 daily he talked about how it may be a good idea not to scout with your first obs, because if your obs is out and some banshees knock on your door, you’re going to be in an uncomfortable position. so that delays the scouting even longer.

For example, from the various threads i’ve read about the Polt Timing attack, it sounds like you need to get a stargate in addition to robo. by the time you get an obs and see the tech lab on the starport, it may be too late. and how many toss players are going to go blind stargate and robo, it would just straight up lose to any regular bio ball aggression.

Regarding repairing SCVs, there’s no symmetry. scvs can auto heal their mech with 0 micro from terran, yet the opponents units must manually target?

1942

Yeah that always annoys me when Tasteless yells “Oh! Awesome repair there!” but com’n, it wasn’t awesome he right clicked it : (

I know thinking in terms of counters isn’t always the best methodology, but it seems sad to me that the counter for each terran unit is higher on the tech tree for protoss in nearly every case which makes it hard for protoss to play catchup. And then T can pull out a counter for anything toss is doing much easier

Though I will admit watching this GSL I’m seeing untapped potential in Toss, but sadly it seems this potential is just bringing them up to be playable instead of actually being scary.

1943

Marine + Raven + Banshee is a sick attack, no doubt. To me it’s probably the fiercest attack Terran can do and it hits at a sensitive time. I like to try to aim to have two collosus by the time it comes. That’s the thing, Collosus is a pretty “safe” opener against Terran no matter what imo. I can’t think of a Terran build that will make me regret having them. And it won’t always work, because it depends on all of the many variables that make up this great game. But that goes for both sides, it goes for the Terran as well. It’s a strong strat that can succeed or fail based on many factors.

And Robo + Stargate is actually really good against Bio ball when you can afford it (expo up and running), because Phoenix + Collosus is great. It lets the Phoenix distract + kill the inevitable Vikings and chase down Medivacs during retreats. And yes, it will help a lot against Ravens + Banshees if thats the route they go.

Oh yea, and auto-repair feature may make repairing during battle easier, but having repairing easy doesn’t take anything away from the game, it just makes a tactic easier to execute. On the other hand, it seems to me that having units auto target the SCVs would kinda just effectively remove the tactic of using repairing SCVs during battle from the game. And that’d be a shame, cause I think its an interesting dynamic, and creates the opportunity for more advanced battle tactics and thinking. And if it gets too difficult, there’s always banelings and Psi storm

1944

I’d like to point out that Roaches don’t shoot up, and a stalker shoots 50% farther. Attack upgrades for a stalker are ass though, and their damage output mid to late game is lackluster. They’re the most useful early protoss unit, but the lack of scaling makes incorporating your early-mid game unit comp into your end game comp more difficult. Compare that to a Marine who becomes ridiculously potent with max upgrades (15.7 dps while stimmed with +3 attack, compared to 11.8 for a stalker vs. armored, 9.0 dps vs. non-armored).

Major problem with protoss is tying in scouting and detection directly with Robo. Your choices are to either go robo and scout/detect, or go templar or air and not scout. No other race is forced into this decision since Overseers and Scans are tech independent.

1945

they should just let sentries have the hallucination ability from the beginning. just make it cost more to cast

1946

Thats not a bad idea with free hallucination

Just curious, I wasn’t a big BW player so I don’t remember, but why didn’t toss have the same problems with scouting in BW? Was observer tech just easier to get? Or was it always a problem?

1947

I think observer had the option to extend their vision. I dunno.

Anywho, it’s awesome seeing Blizzard execs in the audience for GSL!

1948

Zerglings weren’t faster than a probe, so someone with really good apm could keep a probe alive until ling speed came out, and protoss would have a corsair out soon after ready to scout.

1949

Didn’t have work today so I actually stayed up to watch the gomtv finals. real cool.

1950

to add what natureboy said it was much easier to keep your initial worker scout alive longer than sc2. plus the fact that since the game had been disected so much that most people would know which build order the other person would be doing and how to prepare and counter for them easier.

zergs could go 9 pool or 12 hatch. which would transition into either a muta harass or lurker/hyrda bust/contain. number of hatches would determine how strong the attack would be.

terrans either go mech or bio just like in sc2. if against toss terrans will go 95% mech unless they are cheesing early game with a bunker rush or proxy rax to counter a 14 nex.

of course theres about 3 variations for each build but they are the most normal ones. the thing about most of these builds is that unless your opponent cheeses, the fast expand (14 nex, 12 hatch, 14 cc) are relatively safe (although the kespa maps have alot to do with it, with narrow chokes at your nat) which usually translates to a slower game = more time for each race to get their scout units.

1951

Other thing was also that in cloaked units in SC1 were much more common and viable. Protoss needed to get observers in every matchup because of mines, lurkers or dt’s.

1952

gsl

Spoiler

Dayum, watching Jinro manhandle the guy that stomped SlayerS_Boxer was awesome

As well, watching Toss manhandle JulyZerg and ImMVP was equally satisfying

Guess Toss has some life in it after all

1953

GSL

[details=Spoiler]
Yeah, I can’t get over how much JulyZerg looks like Marn. But I’m happy for the guy who beat MVP, IIRC he was the guy who talks to himself while he is playing in order to calm himself down. That’s pretty cool.

FruitDealer and Nestea and MarineKing all in it, still![/details]

1954

Wow, lots of iffy changes in the 1.2 Patch on the PTR

These aren’t live yet but will be soon

More toss nerfs? (though some buffs sprinkled in)

Fungal growth no longer useable by zerg to stop drops/phoenixes?

I dunno about these

1955

Fungal growth not affecting air units + reduced phoenix build time is going to be huge.

1956

Yeah that’s pretty big. Mutas are about to make a return to ZvZ. The SCV repair getting the same attack priority as the unit it’s repairing also huge.

1957

whoa patch got released? I saw my game download something for a sec, but it was so short and I saw no changes listed so I thought it was a mistake

Cool, really excited about chat channels. Kinda disappointed about fungal growth not hitting air units. 100 gas was a bit much for observor, glad its back down to 75

1958

Nope, not fully released but theres a separate server set up for testing the changes

ggs to catchafire, thatguy and CigarBob

1959

oh thank god the scvs are gonna get pwned. now i can attack PFs with my shitty low APM and win! YESSSSSSSSSSSSS

i’m also really excited about the phoenix buff to protoss. i always opened phoenix vs zerg, and this just gives an even larger timing window where I can hit before they have enough hydras. not sure what to make of the void ray changes. in this well written guide the author thinks void rays are the future of endgame pvz. the buff will help out a lot vs ultras, but without the speed it will be harder to harass.

the forums are abuzz with discussion, lots of zerg QQ about infestors lol. will definitely be interesting to see how it all pans out

1960

I started using the guinea pig build versus zerg, which is basically fast expand into 2 stargate, voidray + phoenix. 2 or so vrs and 1 phoenix is enough to give zerg huge headaches. Phoenix lifts the queen while VRs kill it, means that basically queens aren’t enough to stop the vr harassment.

Once you get a few more phoenixes, you can snipe overlords, kill hydras popping with VR backup, and basically prevent Z from wanting to go Mutas; they go hydra instead. You transition into some colossus, and finally pop up like 4 gates or so. Colossus + VR + gateway units = headache for zerg. He calls it “Unbeatable” but I’m not entirely sure, corrupters seemed to work pretty well from what I saw.

I used it to work really well vs Catchafire and That Guy tonight, won both the games. I go gateway, then forge, chronoboost my first zealot and do a proxy pylon + cannon on zergs expansion, harass that and either cancel it or slow it down/get worker kills, transitioning into double stargate. After that I fall apart, usually having like 2k minerals saved up, but still winning easily; that’s how powerful it is. Really should look into learning that build