PvZ What's good against Lurker?

Lurker is VERY hard to beat at my level. Plat2. I try to fight them with imortal, colos, archon, stalk, charglots. Occasionally I can beat them, IF my detection doesn’t get sniped. By more often than not they just eat my army.

Zerg usually has hydra supporting them.

So unless I quickly tech switch to air, I’m pretty much dead.

I’m a zerg player, so feel free to correct me here. I find my lurkers can struggle against disruptor, especially before quick burrow - I cant clump them anymore and spreading them is extra micro I need to do, which might give you an advantage if I start lapsing my macro. Disruptors also zone out and devastate hydra/ling numbers. They should at least buy you more time to make a protoss deathball.

You could also make a few phoenixes, maybe 2-4, to lift and kill lone lurkers looking to do econ damage or ones rallying across. No need to commit to tech switch into air for phoenixes

Something cheeky I could see, but probably isn’t reliable, is using DT’s and sniping any detection they bring with them. Psionic Storm also deals well with them, if you can get in range - don’t even need detection.

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Just send/drop/warp 5 chargelots simultaneously in each of his bases. He will either lose them all, or start running home with his units, allowing you to kill the lurkers for free with your main army :upside_down_face:

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For Hydra/Lurker army, what I find the best is a Carrier/HT army. Carriers wreck Lurkers and HTS wreck hydra, so its an Interesting dynamic. If he makes a lot of Lurkers, he usually doesnt have enough Hydras for the Carriers. Make too many Hydras, and HTs rip em apart.

Having Oracles still alive from the early game helps with revelation.

No simple counter though as far as I know. If it’s too early and you can’t get enough Carriers for this Carrier/HT army, disruptors might work.

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Personally with my standard zealot-archon- immortal army I try to rotate all the time and stage at least one run bye apart from the main army. You cant see it but the zerg must all the time then unbaroow and reburrow the lurkers, move the rest of the army. Then at our level (Diamond 3 here) big chances are you will catch at least part of his lurkers unbarowed, then you can pounce and kill him… OR the runbyes might do good dmg. The worst thing you can do is attack froom one side into burrowed lurkers with rest of his army on top… IF he sieges your base with 6+ lurkers and some hydras /ravagers, its very hard to win with standard ground army, you cant rotate then as you defend.

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My zelot run bys are decent. But some zergs make lime 5 spines at the outer bases and it kind of nerfs them. I’ve been switching straight to air against zerg now. Winning about 50%, if I can get a good carrier count before they all in.

Nice, whatever works for you:)

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Lurkers are very hard to deal with particularly when supported by hydras.

Here are some tips:

  1. don’t engage up ramps or in chokes. Instead try and come from multiple angles.
  2. focus fire lurkers with immortals. You have to micro them or they’ll be firing on hydras which is a waste
  3. pick up lurkers with phoenix. 3-6 phoenix can really negate a clump of lurkers
  4. disruptors can siege them but it’s a slow process and you need a lot of disruptors
  5. in general if you see lurkers you need to prep a sky transition or figure out a way to outright kill the zerg asap.
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Harstem made a video about it.
Try to play with a few colossus, single uses of templar (meaning don’t use them as a blob but single them out to prevent lurkerhits on the group) and go into max of 6 carriers when getting close to max.
Try to hit lurkers with templar when they are burried and force constant repositioning.

Try to prevent playing with archons and if you see he has lurkers, try out constant pressure on the outer expansions or his natural (most of the time no spines there) since lurker armies tend to be deathbally, meaning bad to split up properly without over or undercommitting at one particular side.
You can abuse that pretty badly.

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add Disruptors to your composition

You dont even need the Observer if you have Disruptors…

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Disruptors, Stroms, Immoralts in high numbers, Any skytoss units.

This is true, however once vipers on the map, disruptors useless. Immortals useless, any expensive unit is useless. Even skytoss gets WRECKED by corruptor viper. As a protoss you just simply have to severely out play the zerg.

once high templars are out, vipers (and hydras) are useless :wink:

Just build mass archons and some collossi with your gas and use chargelots to buy time and kill queens & hatcheries.
Mass archon beat mass lurkers.
You can obviously go mass carriers with some archons and chargelots, too, while hiding behind cannons & shield batteries.

air units. only thing that works vs lurker.

vipers and ht cancel each other out. both have the same range for feedback/abduct. you can abduct a ht just as fast as 1 can feedback.

Hmm interesting. However, feedback has 10 range and abduct has 9, according to liquipedia

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The only thing that works is to retreat and reposition. If you do not let them burrow and cause damage, your opponent wasted food and gas for units that are not producing results. Ideally you can catch them off guard.

That’s pretty much it. Get to skytoss. Nothing on the ground is going to work due to limited APM. In theory you can micro immo or disrupter and not have 10 zerglings wipe a mineral line, but in practice you usually just lose all you workers and then the lurkers come across and finish the job.

I find that carrier and HT are the best. Positioning is key. Limit the number of hydras that can attack your army but moving around holes in the map that are impassable to ground units, add mothership so they can’t just not have detection and can’t just run up on you bc of timewarp. Remember both hydra and lurker are much much faster than HT’s…

Sentry bubble can also help against hydras, +2 armor is quite good in a long fight.

Regarless though, zerg has far FAR too many options to deal with skytoss comp, so get ready to make more comp switches as they move to dominate the air too…

im only bronze , BUT

dosent toss have a lift thingy ? its like abduct for toss :slight_smile:

knock out 6 lurkers retreate , knock out 6 more ?

next i will mega pump out corruptor to take contole of your air ,

id just fight back with phenoix and keep lifting lurkers and boping them on the head .