BLUF: This season I am Plat 2 with a 55% overall win rate. 57% PVP, 78% (!) PVT, buuuut 36% (at one point 31%) PvZ. I feel I really need to drastically improve my PvZ to get any higher but I rely on cheese and recently have had a lot of success with 2 base 2 immortal + chargelot + prism all in but even then can struggle with early pressure from Zerg. Any suggestions for build orders, things to practice, or especially ways to compete late game would be helpful. I only win late game if they are stupid enough to stay mass ground army and I stomp it with colossus and/or storm.
Adepts: Not used to playing with them since I haven’t played since WoL. Any suggestions would be helpful for better ways to use them and micro them. They seem to be pretty helpful in PvZ.
Sidenote: PvT seems super broken. I only lose to cheese and I am starting to get better at defending those. Cant believe how weak Terran are now.
Background: So I used to play Protoss back in the WoL days and have just come back. I was diamond back then and am Platinum right now. Might be I am worse or maybe other players are just better. There was no master until right before I stopped playing. Right now its the opposite as WoL as far as which match ups I struggle with. I struggled hard against Terran but generally did really well vs Zerg and Toss. Now I struggle hard versus Zerg. Its a little similar in that at the diamond level I started to encounter Zerg players that simply could macro so hard and frankly outplay me in raw APM that I couldn’t compete as well. I just feel that the higher the skill level goes the more it favors Zerg. There is just so much potential there.
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You could try out Vibelol’s BtBM guide on youtube (new one coming out this month).
In general, securing base 2 and 3 with minimal defense is the key to be good at late-game as well as timings for your tech buildings and scouting.
–> scouting with a probe, doing the wall in front of the natural right with adept + 1 shield battery (the shield battery might often not be needed but it’s a waste of ressource that shouldn’t impact your performance until like d1 or masters and it gives a lot of safety)
–> securing the 3rd base with good building placement (nexus, pylon, shield battery, 1-2 sentries, 1-2 adepts - usually 1 sentry and 2 adepts) and an oracle that scouts / gets drone kills / defense vs. allins (often it’s 1 phoenix and 2-3 oracles; oracles are pretty good vs. ravagers, too)
–> scouting roaches means you need 1-2 robos and pump out immortals and/or DTs (if you have a phoenix or more, you can kill the overseer before zerg reaches your DTs / natural)
I hope this helps though please post replays if you need help as we can check your hotkey & control group usage, if you focus on unimportant things too much (like too much army micro).
GL,
Shuu
Says I cant post links? Not sure why.
google it pls - I answered this question like 3 times already (use the forum search function)
If you want help in PVZ, I would recommend you watch a youtube stream by a french player called zuka. He does a few “gold to master” video series with protoss where you can see him play his way up against all levels of competition. PVZ is his strongest matchup and there is a lot to learn. Harstem also has some good youtube tutorials for things like how to defend a 12 pool, how to play skytoss vs zerg, etc etc
Another general thing I’ve found in PVZ is that zergs these days are extremely dependent on denying your third base with speedlings. If they can’t deny it with chronoboost you can quickly catch up economically whilst still being ahead in tech. Conventional play leads to using a small ground force to take the area over generally pretty late because speedlings are so good at controlling the ground in the early game. You will do much better if you open with a stargate, send an oracle over to do some harass (it doesn’t matter if you actually kill anything, you just need to show it to force queens and spores) and then send the oracle back to sit over your third. Build a second oracle as well (optional; i generally do it if I had success with the first oracle killing drones). Have it also sit over the third with a hold position. Build your third base fast (around 5 mins). They cannot deny the base with two oracles on hold position over that space. With this I’ve consistently been getting my 3rd base up near 100% of the time in the first 5 mins in the current meta. I generally transition to double robo/mass colossi (around 4 colossi) with mass stalker and steamroll zergs.