I think the banelings back then were better than current ravagers. You’d have 30 or so and they’d by ramming into the natural of the Terran and that was cataclysmic to every building. Honestly I think it was probably near impossible to defend adequately. @your video that’s a good example of how you needed enough roaches to one shot the bunker. That must be an old video because people figured this stuff out pretty fast.
You made me curious so I checked. During HotS I only had two replays against him. My replay archive only goes back so far. I won both times. That brings back memories because I decided to boost an account into GM to flex on CMC’s (clan maegis clowns) and these are those replays from that account. That was back when 2 base roach was actually a powerful style. I loved those builds. That has lots of options and many variations. I could do anything from 2 base 3 gas speedroach allins to 6 gas baneling roach allins to 12 roaches into fast hive for broodlords.
The game had great variety back then. Now it’s take a third base, get a lair and baneling speed, get a fourth up, go into hive. The strategic variety has been deleted from the game. It’s all about APM spam now. Strategy has no impact when you can be out of position for a millisecond and some ghosts delete the entire net sum of all your advantages in half a second. You build up an advantage for 15 minutes to lose it in half a second. If that were some marines or zerglings, that’s fine. But broods or ultras disappearing that fast is just beyond broken. It’s absolutely insane that Terran players think it’s fair to use ghosts for snipe. It’s so busted if I were doing it the game would lose all value to me. The purpose is to win on a level playing field the ghost is just so busted not even avilo would deny it. Just get yourself a “free win button” and put it on your desk and hit it anytime you want a “win”. That’s roughly equivalent to the accomplishment that is using ghosts to win games. Just smash that button anytime you get the urge to use ghosts. We’ve got an addiction to cure here. Low T beta males need wins in any capacity because they are so desperate for a dopamine hit they will take literally anything they can get.
Well let’s compare. In hots you spend half of your army value to remove the wall with slow roaches to finish off the remaining army. Banelings have to get into melee range and are clumped up to ensure that a siege tank could instantly delete them all. The other, you need 5 ravagers that can attack from siege range, so you only take damage in an engagement.
I’m convinced you’re actually talking about early lotv meta. Here’s a fun fact, the only zerg unit that outranged widow mines in hots was swarm hosts and broods. I remember a game on Coda casted by Zombiegrub where the terran made nothing but widow mines and the Zerg tried his hardest to make a comp that would work but instead lost after taking widow mine shots to the face all game long.
Speaking of Avilo, what could Idra have done better. Your hero quit during hots after all. https://youtu.be/NKJau_RhrcE?t=596
You have a point but everything Zerg funnels into the Terran’s natural will die no matter what anyway. At least with banelings they blow up the Terran’s stuff as they die. You also don’t send them in all at the same time. You stagger them. Siege tanks were weaker back then and so he’d be using widow mines which means you just have to have split micro. That’s one of the things that I miss about the widow mine meta. The siege tank makes it complete suicide to enter choke points of any kind. Widow mines ironically sucked in choke points because they’d be clumped and you could manually detonate banes over top of them as you ran past with your ling bane. So you could basically ignore them if you had nice micro. With tanks, you don’t know how many are there or where they are positioned and you have zero warning before the splash hits you. These are all factors that are opposite of widow mines. The terran can be siege outside of your base and you have no idea if he’s moved his tanks and it’s suicide to try to find out.
Yeah all lair tech units were outranged except for the hydralisk, but nobody really went hydras against terran except Hyun. He did it with some variants of his roach builds. Most people greatly preferred infestors over hydralisks vs terran. The nail in the hydralisk coffin was the liberator. Hydralisks are incredibly bad vs Terran but the moment the liberator was added, the Hydralisk was a dead unit.
I used to go 12 roaches. 12 roaches is high enough it looks like an allin but it’s also not super committed so you can transition off of it. It’s in the grey zone where it could be either an allin or a macro build. If a terran were to be extremely greedy, it could be used as an allin. Against a more defensive terran, it wouldn’t have enough punch. Anyway, I would go 12 roaches then make ling bane as necessary while rushing straight to hive. You start the lair after starting your hive. You then add on corruptors which you can use to deal with medivacs but you really want to hide them in most cases. You get 4-6 of them and it would stop a common timing attack that terran did off of 3 bases with bio and tanks. After holding his push, you’d immediately counter attack. The moment you have the broods morphing, you drop a hydralisk den. I was one of the few GMs who used hydras vs terran and this is why: as the broods were moving out, I’d crank hydralisks and lings. The hydras provided the air support needed to cover for the broods. It was a very clean timing attack that just slaughtered terran players.
EDIT: The reason liberators in particular absolutely obliterate this style is because they’d wreck the hydras, unsiege and kill the broods. Hydras are just totally useless against mass liberator and any terran worth their salt will crank liberators the moment he sees hydras.
That was actually the exact build I was using vs UpATree when he hit my army with a nuke, and that game was the one that made me decide this build was totally nonviable. A 4.8k mmr clown was easily beating it. I can’t describe how incredibly nerfed that strategy was. I was using it in high GM and it became a cake walk for master-1 clowns to t-bag on.
I also played a lot of 2 base muta. It wasn’t the allin variant. You’d get 3 queens and take 4 gas and start a lair. You add on a baneling nest but only if there were signs of a 2 base allin coming. If it’s hellbats you make a few banes and a spine. If it’s 3 rax then you just need lings and 8 banes. If it’s a 1 factory tank push or 2/1/1 then you need to rush baneling speed. Otherwise you go straight into mutas and take a third. You make 8 mutas and +1 attack and you start baneling speed followed by 1/1 melee upgrades after that. This build was super tight at holding the typical bio pushes but with good micro on the mutas you’d absolutely clown on them. You’d kill the mines, chase down the medivacs and the ground army takes care of the bio. You are then free to take a fourth and start hive and it was a winning position.
In the current game version, the idea that a Zerg could hold common terran pressure with 2 base mutas is absurd. The idea that (even if you held) that you’d be ahead is doubly absurd. You end up behind in economy and upgrades. Blizzard took literally every strategy that I liked and just took a giant dump all over them.
Mutas really don’t fit into the ZvT meta anymore because the only time you can really afford them is after the 4 base mark but by then the terran is hitting his upgrade lead and you absolutely have to rush hive instead. Mutas just don’t provide enough value to outweigh 3/3 bio.
Idra had a tough time with mech. He was a macro zerg and he preferred winning head on engagements. You can’t do that with mech. You never could. Mech’s vulnerability was always multipronged tempo plays. You have to bury them in units while you suck the map dry of resources and keep them contained on 3 or 4 bases.
Stephano was much better vs mech and he was the better player in general. Idra did get really screwed by balance. He cried about overlords being too slow and since then they’ve given them several buffs. I forget everything he cried about but he ended up being right about most of it. The SC2 player base just wasn’t ready to hear it at the time.
I’m utterly convinced that the only thing that made Zerg decent in hots was 4 larvae injects which made snowballing with banes and mutas oppressive, that’s it though. Show me a clip in hots that has this level of clowning on an opponent. https://youtu.be/UEdtLwr6Ke8?t=692
it wasn’t just liberators though. Siege tanks still 2 shot them and ravens nuked them while invalidating their attacks. You’re not the only person that does this btw, Snake still uses this.
Exactly how Dark plays right now.
Neither Stephano or Hyun was able to match the success that Snute had with infestors and ravagers. To this day I’m still confused on how he was able to take games off the top koreans with nothing but bile-fungal combos.
It’s funny how Dark now goes for two macro hatcheries in his main. You still need the same volume of injects but it costs 300 more minerals to achieve.
Yeah I remember that game. Ravager infestor is ironically the best counter to BC play. If he teleports a BC into your base near ravagers, you can kill it with biles the moment it arrives if you are fast. I’ve done it many times.
I don’t think so. He might uses hydras in general but not with the same builds. I believe his ZvT late game style is ultras into broods.
Right but he’s willing to deal with the BS that are ghosts and thors. I don’t know what’s happening, but he magically finds 2 thors alone and kills them for free or gets the ghosts alone with banelings. Against an NA terran who does literally nothing but mass ghosts and thors, this will never happen. Literally their only purpose in life is scanning stuff and rapid firing snipe and moving ghosts backwards into liberators.
It’s like the “NA reaper meme”. EU players log into NA and run into a low GM and his reaper micro is incredible. They are like “Wtf? Is this maru?”. Yeah, it’s a similar deal with ghosts. NA ladder heroes have code s level ghost micro while neglecting every other aspect of the game. Their sole purpose in life is sitting in mom’s basement, eating dorritos, and rapid firing snipe.
This would be fine if it took skill to get to that stage. But, terran has such incredibly powerful defensive tools that a neanderthal can get to that stage. You make a few of a certain kind of siege units and it’s literally impossible to end the game against them until they take a 5th base. At that point there’s a bit of a vulnerability, but it’s too late. They have all the money they need for snipe spam.
Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news, terrans can easily beat zerg with 2 base allin builds. Yeah, Zerg’s strategic diversity sucks.
Yeah that’s because Stephano fell off hard after wings of liberty. Snute was more of a HotS guy and I think he made it to like 2015-2017 ish of LotV.
So I’ve got this SC2 bro. He and I go way back. It’s a bit of a bromance. We’d go the gym together and flex in the mirror and talk about chicks and SC strategy. I made a set of custom SC2 table coasters for him once. He plays plays protoss (don’t worry, I’ve mostly forgiven him). Anyway, I was planning on metal casting a protoss pendant but never got time. Ever since I was a kid I loved creating things. When you made something, it gives it so much more value than something bought. You can tell the story of how it was created. I’ve got this CNC machine that’s accurate down to 4 thousands of a inch or 0.1 mm. That’s good enough for jewelery, and machining dies for metal casting is easy, and melting metal is easy with an MAP torch is ez pz. So I was thinking I’d carve a mold out for a protoss pendant and cast it out of silver. Not doing gold, sorry, that craps insane and he ain’t worth that much. But, I never got time to do it. So here I am browsing etsy etc and find one that’s really not too bad:
https://artifactoria.com/shop/videogame-inspired/starcraft/starcraft-protoss-pendant/
Huh. Price isn’t too bad either. If I were to make it it would cost that much in materials. Anyway, it just feels wrong making a Protoss pendant out of sterling silver. They are gold colored for crying out loud. I guess this is the “ghetto” protoss who are on a budget. You know, the ones from the down-town planets.
Protoss be rollin’ like:
I’m hoping you’re ready to deal with more of it. The patch is harming aggressive bio players more than defensive mech + ghost players even with the ghost nerf. The ultra changes in particular are scary, hopefully that will end the only make ultras if you want to throw meme.
The viper and thor interaction is also going to be all out of whack, and I doubt the broodlord changes will fix that. I’ve noticed that the top Zergs are leading with a corruptor to tank the initially thor volley so maybe they’ll use more tricks like that. Dark’s probably shaking his head after getting the broodling spam nerfed after what like 2 months of use?
Is this one of your many side hustles that you’re advertising? Taking a page from Playa I see.
Lmao, ultras will still evaporate in a split second from stimbio. Just the other night, I rushed 2/2 ultras off of 4 base and the terran got into my face and an ultra popped. Before it could decide what to attack, it died. He didn’t even have marauders. It was like 15 marines and 3 unsieged tanks. What these changes mean is that they are more likely to get a whack in before they instantly vaporize.
I think this change is much bigger in ZvP. The new ultras are drastically better vs Zealots as this video shows. The zealots beat current ultras with 43 to spare, but the new ultra beats the zealots with 2 to spare. The new ultra still loses to marines, but less badly (79 leftover vs old ultra, 58 vs new ultra).
Well when combined with broods, it’s blinding cloud that’s powerful. If you abduct thors, a thor can kill a brood before dying. Abduct is bad in combination with broods. Abduct is used more with lurkers, and that style will be greatly nerfed. I think thors 3 shot vipers so picking off 1 thor didn’t make sense – you’d send in a bunch of vipers for mass abduct. So they are nerfing the scenario where you yank 10 thors into lurker range. It’s very similar to the ghost issue, but the ghost does it a hundred times better.
FYI, one of the last times Innovation and Serral faced off, Serral won by using abduct on Innovation’s thors. Innovation is quite likely the goat. He’s definitely the best terran player. He beats Maru by a little bit.
You just have to right click the thors on the ground until the target is in range, then right click the target.
In gsl st he was killing broodling with broodlings to keep constant broodling spawn happening outside of thor range. It makes sense they’d nerf that. What you do is you attack with half of them, then you select them all and a-click repeatedly on broodlings and it will cycle between the two halves and give you a constant supply of broodlings to focus fire.
In what world would you want to make ultras for the sole reason that it can do decently against zealots. Your 2/2 ultras against marines was the peak performance of ultras in all of hots btw and you never had a map with 7 bases to mine from. Somehow when people bring up ultras being bad it’s always in the only matchup it’s used frequently.
Innovation doesn’t define the meta like Maru does.
That’s true but how are you going to pull apart a turtling mech player with abduct being nerfed? It might also be an issue in ZvZ since late game is just vipers abducting other vipers.
He was also doing it with 8 broodlords on waterfall. What a god, it’s probably easier to maintain the rhythm when you have 25+ broodlords since the terran will also be taking them out.
Against mass gateway styles the zealots tank while stalkers focus fire the ultras. This just means you chew through the zealots faster. This can also play a role when the protoss switches from skytoss to mass gateway remax after a late-game mega-battle. They go stalkers and zealots. You don’t have time to remake broods in that scenario and what few survive the main battle will just be blinked upon, so ultras are a good option.
That’s because literally nobody could play Innovation’s styles well enough to make them work. He did a lot of 8 rax vs Zerg and maru hates 8 rax. I can’t remember a time I’ve seen him do 3 base 8 rax. He always goes for a fourth and ghosts.
Here you go:
Look at how far away the siege point is from Rogue’s fourth. Innovation wins anyway. Terrans aren’t doing 8 rax even though the current map pool is like perfect for that exact build.
I never liked vipers to be honest. They are a “budget” solution when you can’t get to ultra or brood tech fast enough. Lurker styles also weren’t my favorite. I don’t like the endurance games where you whittle them down. They are just very boring.
I use the HotS era methods for dealing with mech and I have a very high winrate against mech. It’s basically a free win. You make mass swarmhosts, mass spines, then about 20 supply of banes. Generally he will try to counter attack and you just crash a bunch of banes into his mechball when he isn’t looking. It softens them up so much that the spines become a real issue. It’s expensive, but you aren’t doing anything with the gas anyway since you have mass swarmhosts.
Another option is tempo styles like roach ravager and you put heavy multipronged pressure on him. You just keep crashing in and biling down command centers. I played this game vs ClownCrunch where he cries and cries about how I keep trading armies for command centers (“I don’t think the way this guy plays the game is the right way to play the game. He keeps donating armies for command centers.”). I legit bile down the forward tanks, get in range of the command center, then hit it with a billion biles. You couple this with muta tech switches since he will be making a lot of tanks and/or burrowed roach harass.
You can also do roach ling bane. The way this one works is that you try to get his hellbats with banelings then you do a really big ling flood. You also get a few roaches because you can stutter step them backwards to kill the hellbats too. I actually learned this style from watching Rogue beat Innovation. Innovation lost and smirked at the end when the ling flood came and killed all his tanks. It was kinda a “Heh, you got me” smirk.
The most important thing to remember about mech is that he has to produce very specialized units and he has to queue what units he needs in advance. That’s why tempo and tech switch plays are so strong against them. It’s not like he’s spamming a solo-unit comp (marines) that trade efficiently vs all zerg units as long as you micro them. If he makes thors, what’s to stop you from morphing a ton of ravagers and just hammering him with biles? If he makes tanks, what’s to stop you from making a wave of mutas?
Yeah, doing it with fewer broods is very hard. You have to aim at creep tumors and use changelings.
Swarm hosts only ever worked in hots due to vipers and even though you can make your style work without vipers, adding them will make it much easier. Ghosts and thors aren’t specialized units any more they deal with most unit comps that Zerg can throw at you.
Heromarine keeps trying eventually he will win a premier. As for maps there was no better map for an 8 rax than golden wall, current map poll doesn’t come close.
Six, thors need 6 shots to kill a Viper. At +3 that drops to 5 shots.
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Two shots as the viper approaches and three more after the abduct. A total of 5 seconds for 1 thor to kill 1 viper. Now imagine if you will that there are 5 thors. Sending 1 viper in to kill 1 thor is suicide. The viper is best when you want to mass-abduct many thors.
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Ok, provided the Viper is in range for that long and the Thors’ first shot isn’t wasted on something like a Corruptor, then that would enable 3 Thors to kill a Viper. It still isn’t “3-shot” though.
You take a hit just to find out where the thor is. If that doesn’t align perfectly with the direction you need to abduct, you have to abduct multiple times. The same is true if your army is farther back.
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https://i.imgur.com/ucA3ODc.png
https://i.imgur.com/wsT8FYs.jpg
Guess what the build was. It was a double proxy hatch roach “rush”. “Rush” is in quotes because it’s basically a 1 base roach rush, but slowed down by donating 2 free hatcheries to the protoss. Why? The game is just too easy to play the smart way.
Imagine if a Protoss took 2 nexii in the middle of a Zerg’s main, then went into a cannon rush and somehow won. That’s basically what’s happening here. It’s absolutely absurd that a 5600 mmr Protoss can lose to these kinds of builds. The timings the Zerg has to hit are absolutely critical, and donating 2 free hatcheries to the Protoss causes the Zerg to totally miss those timings.
Players will legit beat one of these builds then message me and BM me and call me trash. It’s like, man, you beat this thing by the skin of your teeth. I am basically playing with a hand tied behind my back, and you’re somehow proud you won.
Yes, Rocker is free MMR because he’s boosted by cannon rushing in PvP, so you would expect his natural response in PvZ to be the same. I challenge to you make 1 base swarm host nydus work against him.
You mean like this guy? h ttps://imgur.com/a/M4ORKsy
Lmao, yeah he’s got the right idea but he gets an F for execution.
Ironically he is one of the protoss that this could work on because he keeps probes off gas for forever and uses cannons to take a fast third. If he can’t get the third up, he will take a hidden third with a probe hiding on the map. You’d probably have to go 14/14 and put on some pressure while going up to lair then hide the infestation pit at an overlord out on the map.