Protoss tools simply cant handle Terran in the current meta!

General Discussion
41

Mechanically easy at pro level madewd. Playing skytoss/cannonrushing in diamond can be done literally with 50 apm, yes, but what about managing multiple spellcasters - sentires/blink stalkers, templars and late game mothership ? That is easy ? Then zerg must be insanely hard F2 a-moving ling bane army. I told you the only zerg units having potential to micro are ravagers and mutalisks. Other units lings, banes, ultras - amove. Roach - hydra - simple stutterstep etc. If you play a-move race don’t call protoss “mechanically easy” - it’s called arrogance or better delusion.

I can smell your hatred to protoss because you get your s handed to you on the ladder - that is the reason why you call protoss “apetoss”. But your sad reality is that you simply suck and need to improve. That’s all there is to it. Just like i need to improve by bio to beat diamonds zergs. Nobody’s gonna nerf zerg just because i suck at diamond.

42

Skill issue.
[herO vs Cure (PvT) - OSC Championship Playoffs 11 [StarCraft 2] - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIEjIvqJmII)
Hero 3:0 Cure and Hero is not even that good: amount of games he lost for pressing F2, suiciding units by walking into enemy, forgetting crucial upgrades like Charge is just… big.

These 3 games Hero play were uncharacteristically not sloppy, and he rolled over Cure.

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43

Honestly speaking I partially disagree with this.

Amoving banes is a disaster waiting to happen since they’ll target and splash on the first unit they see, even if it’s not optimal for them. Most of their micro comes from avoiding splash damage, and making sure they hit the correct units with correct movement micro, rather than a-moving.

Lings are often split for doing runbys (along with banes), and will often be split to bait and mitigate splash from widow mines and other splash heavy units. They’re often set up with a flank and surround that, while not strictly active micro, is still pre micro that’s necessary in many cases to get good engagements.

Ultras are fairly a-movey, I’ll give you that, though most of their “Micro” comes from trying to prevent them from getting stuck on structures.

Roaches and hydras both have stutter-stepping, while the latter often has to split, at least somewhat, against splash damage, while the former has burrow micro that is feasible (often causing re-targeting, but also to allow for healing mid fight if players have burrow).

Infestors are infestors, and spend much of their time burrowed till you need to unburrow, cast, and then re-burrow to save them.

Vipers you’re generally trying to keep them from flying in and suiciding since they don’t have an attack, but they’re also a spell-caster so there’s a little micro there with their casting.

Corruptors are pretty a-move, but again you’re wanting to spread and avoid splash, but you also want to clump to do as much damage to air as possible. It’s a delicate dance.

And broodlords you can kite with utilizing their broodlings and terrain to your advantage.

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44

I’d go so far as to say I doubt a terran or zerg could qualify for a premier while making these mistakes. Reynor offraces as protoss and takes games off of serral; alphastar takes games off of serral (it is actually 3-0 vs serral). Beating zerg is possible, it’s just not possible with such an enormous skill gap. I honestly believe parting/stats/maxpax/classic are capable of doing it. I’d rank it Stats > Maxpax > classic > parting. Parting was historically weakest vs zerg, classic was great but had a unique vulnerability to serral, maxpax has beaten serral in online cups but that’s very different than an offline premier, leaving only stats who has actually done it before while on a main stage.

The problem is, none of these players are practicing to any significant degree except maxpax. Stats, classic and parting are all ~6300 on KR which is light years from serral. The only protoss that I think really has a chance is Maxpax. Sos is another notable mention. He’s pretty high on KR but he’s a tricky toss and with an exploit on a new map it’s possible he could beat serral but, again, his mmr is just way too far below serral. Serral is 7300 and sos is 6600. That means serral wins 85% of his games and a 94% chance to win a best of 3, 97% chance to win a best of 5. Serral also does his research and knows what builds his opponents are going to use, so the probability he’s going to be caught off guard by a weird sos strat is probably 0.0%. That’s unless sos develops these strats without playing on his known accounts / offline play. If it’s online, it’s too easy to queue into him and see what he’s practicing. I don’t think the KR players realize that a good portion of serral’s success comes from the fact that he clearly has very good intel on what they’ve been practicing on the ladder, so they are losing via meta gaming.

Serral only has 1 or 2 or maybe 3 players that he has to worry about in the finals. Everyone else he can beat from raw skill. That means prep work is extremely easy. He knows exactly who he’s going to face and exactly what builds they are going to use because they have been practicing those builds on the ladder vs him. These players need a much more diverse set of strategies so that it’s harder for serral to profile them. Even strategies that are technically “inferior” are useful because their mere possibility makes it harder to optimize counter strategies.

Ty is a good example of this. He was only 6300 on KR because he had a diverse set of strategies, many of which were technically inferior, but he was impossible to profile. When he won code s, he used 2 port BC vs protoss. It was one of the most amazing games I have ever seen. Another advantage here is that with lower MMR you can practice on the ladder without risking facing serral every game and revealing what strategies you are practicing.

In my estimation, the majority of the problem is that players are min-maxing the 1 or 2 or 3 best builds and it just makes them too predictable vs a mechanically superior player. If you are predictable it means the game goes longer, and the mechanically stronger player wins the longer games.

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45

I remember that series, and that game; it was absolutely beautiful to watch - But even then, TY’s strategies, which often seemed to have a very uniquely gumiho-esquness to them, were backed up by stellar mechanics at the time (after returning from military service, he (and stats) hasn’t been anywhere nearly as active). His mind-games were equal only to sOs’ and Rogue’s own mind games, but in the times that they didn’t work, he still had raw skill to fall back on, and even more mind games that meant you could never truly count him out.

I recall a series where TY played against Dark - Dark hit him with a powerful timing attack that TY barely survived; as I recall he had 2 medivacs and 4 marines left, and had dark scrambling around thinking he had a lot more, doing false bait drops, flying empty medivacs in (Both for scouting and to pose a “threat”) that ultimately chipped away at Dark’s lead enough that he was eventually able to take the game that Dark had effectively won, out from underneath his feet.

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46

I disagree with this. The tournament should have a brand new map pool that nobody has played on. The maps are introduced by the tournament, then pushed out to the ladder. This favors strategical players over memorize-and-spam players. You actually have to think about what you are doing or it will go horribly wrong, so you can’t just mindlessly spam apm to 7 bases. It would make the tournament way more interesting because it’s a whole new map pool that nobody has even seen until it’s unvieled on stage. They can get a lot of content interviewing pros about which maps they like or not and what their thoughts are after playing their match.

If they play on the same old same old, we all already know the meta, who is favored on which maps, which strategies are storgn and which are weak, and that practically sets the tournament outcome into stone.

I predicted the iem and last three gsls weeks in advance based purely on map pool and seeding. It’s so obvious who is going to win that it’s a waste of time to even watch. Maps favor terran so vs T performance will be the deciding factor of the tournament, maru has the highest vs T performance so he wins. EZ PZ.

47

Even if that’s true zerg “micro” is 10x easier than terran. 95 % of zergs a-move their lings/banes and still get lot of damage. Splitting lings to make a flank is super easy mechanically - use stealing Alt + # and then a-move. Zerg benefits most from F2 a-move because they’re designed that way. There are even zergs in top 50 GM who don’t use control groups at all !!! Only F2 button. HeroMarine complained about that on his stream.

Try F2 a-move with terran or protoss in top 50 gm.

48

Oh I’m 100% aware of that, but saying there’s “no micro” doesn’t mean that unit’s don’t benefit from micro anyway. Top tier players absolutely do this consistently to get the best out of their units. And certain micro translates further down (mine-baiting for example).

49

pfft all Zerg players have to do is take an engagement on the ramp and everything just disappears.

50

And people wonder why I was baneling allining so much.

51

Protoss tends to do very well in TLMCs but that’s probably also due to the lack of players. You’re on massive copium if you think they’ll do a circuit on a fresh map pool after watching what the balance council has to say. https://youtu.be/OrCSQCX96yw?t=1638

52

The salt would be half the fun. Watching pro players cry was the majority of wol era entertainment. Why was idra so popular? Exactly. Wwe and mma and nfl realized a long time ago that the sport itself isn’t enough to be entertaining. You have to include drama. Nfl was so worried about being sued they are an entertainment company and not a sports company. So they can rig things to create drama without getting into trouble with match fixing etc. That’s how important the drama is. That’s also why it’s insane they banned life for life. They should’ve given life a contract and told him please and thank you.

If a tournament featured a new map pool, it would be extremely embarrassing for pro players because none of them win via strategy. Every single one would fall flat on his face, making basic errors, if they had to think on their feet. Fluid intelligence is far slower than static intelligence. It’s a proven, scientific fact. If pros can’t rely on memorization and pre arrangement, they would have to actually analyze things on the fly. That means they can’t act nearly as fast. You know, like what I do on my stream. It’s a totally random build order with an arbitrary win con. No way to win if you aim for typical win cons like bigger eco and base denial.

Uthermal is speaking 2000 wpm and none of it makes sense because the active learning process can’t operate at the speed that is required to play sc2. It’s just babbling. The one truly strategical win I’ve seen in his videos, that I can think of off the top of my head, was a TvT where he forced a terran to land his vikings in response to turrets. That’s one heck of an alternate win con. There are hundreds of those kinds of win cons but pro players be spamming their apm and denying their opponents bases and it’s just ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, you’re off to sleep 20 minutes in, and the game’s only half over.

That’s why you have to be skeptical of fast talkers. Jordan peterson is thoughtful and eloquent because he speaks slowly and often pauses for minutes at a time. But pro level sc2 players can vomit 900 actions a minute aiming for base denial or efficiency win-con and people think there is actually thinking going on. Lmao k. There is zero thinking involved.

Long story short, the speed at which Jordan Peterson speaks is proof that the fact that pro players are resistant to the idea of new maps in tournaments shows they know they are apm spam / memorization / pre arrangement players and that they’d absolutely bomb if the had to actually use their brain in order to win a tournament. They know they win by spamming apm and we know they know; they know we know that they know, and they keep doing it anyway as long as they can get the tournament dough.

I say, do new maps in a tournament, make the pro players REEEEEEEE and capture every moment of their salt on the hot mic. Legit go under cover to hear them whining in the bathroom stalls. Serral’s all crying at the bathroom sink about how op terran is and like punches the wall after he loses to some no name terran with a clever cheese. That would be solid gold right there. I can’t spam drones for free wins if there is a new map pool! Terran imba! I’d love every minute of it.

53

I’ve been doing hatch before overlord for at least 4 years at this point. Pro players legit just barely realized they can dodge the probe block with it. I saw serral use it, finally, in the masters coliseum. Pro play is legit 4 years behind the cutting edge strategical side of grandmaster. That’s why I am glad they nerfed the baneling, and why I hope they nerf the zergling too. These units have horrible net negative efficiency which means the only way they are useful is if you spam a billion drones and throw a billion ynits at your opponent. Aka, These are tools of apm spammers, zergs who get ahead by the sheer merit of turtling and making drones. These playstyles require room temp iq and those who use them are my sworn enemies. These horrible playstyles have destroyed esports and that’s why the zergling must be nerfed. At a bare minimum, adrenal needs to be removed. It’s equivalent to a +2 upgrade so zerglings are +5/+3 and ultras are +3/+5. It’s bonkers overpowered. God forbid pro zergs can’t win by making drones and amoving. God forbid they have to actually think about what they are doing.

The only unit in the game with +5 attack is also the most mobile and cheapest unit in the game. What could go wrong. Metabolicboost is the best upgradein the game bar none with adrenal in a close second. As far as pro play is concerned, what’s the point of having terran and protoss be in the game as long as the zergling remains as is? We all know who wins the next tournament, and the one after that. Let’s just hand out the trophies and get it over with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NxRSMULsUs&t=4510s

Boom. That’s my 14 hatch build. People called me a loon when I did this build. I’d beat streamers with it & they would say my build “messed up my spending” and every other criticism in the book. Oh wait it hard counters cannon rushes so hard that hero looked like a fool for even trying. And people wonder why I was beating PartinG’s cannon rush, easily, years ago. This is not a big strategical revolution, it’s changing the timing of a hatchery. It’s the definition of a very basic, very simple, strategical change. It took them YEARS to figure this out.

Strategy is basically absent in the pro scene. Pro play is pre-arrangement and memorization. The zergling needs nerfs. Tournaments need custom map pools. Bookmark this post so that when the pro scene catches up in 4 years, finally nerfs the zergling & adds new maps to tournaments, I can say I told you so. It will take them 4 years to come to the same realization. They are not strategical thinkers. They are legit years slower at figuring the game out.

Ty was clearly a strategical player, not a pre arrangement / memorization player. That’s something you think of off the top of your head in the heat of the moment. I have 4 marines and a medivac so what on Earth do I do to win this game. I know, I will bluff that these medivacs are full to buy time (time being the one thing I need to get back into it). His only advantage in that scenario was the fact that Dark had no idea how full his medivacs are. Brilliant. Talk about one GIGA-brained win con. Serrals all spamming apm and crashing banes into mineral lines but chads like Ty are winning games using empty medivacs. Clearly these two are not the same.

54

Ok Mr “know it all” - time to change StarCraft 2 into actual strategy game. Go and tell your suggestion to balance clowncil. Curious what they have to say. I’m all for it. I’m tired of losing games because i didn’t click fast enough.

Glad we agree, btw this sentence shows your Split Personality Disorder - in one thread you’re praising Serral for his outstanding performance. Here however you FINALLY agree that Serral is nothing more than just average zerg clicking machine. Congrats. You’re slowly realizing reality of SC2.

55

When it comes to nerfing zerg based on serral, I am against that. When it comes to nerfing zerg to make the game more strategic, I am for that. Congratulations, you’ve discovered Hume’s law: the goal depends on the motivations.