Serral is a joke LMAO

General Discussion
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I’ve been playing mass hydra styles at about 5200 mmr with a 70% zvt winrate last season. So believe you me when I say that a tier 1 hydra will be severely overpowered. Every zerg matchup is balanced around terran and protoss having the air advantage in the early and mid game. The only strong anti air that zerg has is the corruptor and its strength comes at the cost of being hyper specialized – it can only attack air. So really zerg’s biggest weakness in the entire game is its anti air in general, but this is especially true in the early game.

If zerg has access to tier 1 hydras, basically nothing can stop a 3 hatch allin. Terran stops it via banshees and tanks and bunkers. Tier 1 hydras take banshees out of the equation meaning terran can only respond with tanks. If tanks are the only option, zerg can expand and drone uncontested. Banshees are only a viable defense to an allin because they are also useful vs economic plays so it’s the duality that makes it viable. Similar logic applies to zvp with oracles and void rays. T1 hydras would be straight up imba in favor of zerg. The queen doesn’t have this because it’s practically quadriplegic off of creep which means it can defend but not attack and that keeps banshee defense an option in most cases. A notable exception is vs the drop alord builds on small maps.

Swarm hosts by comparison when coupled with burrow play would be very interesting because protoss and terran each have the air advantage & zerg has the evasion advantage. So each player is advantaged in their own way, and who wins comes down to whoever manages to use positioning and micro and tempo to leverage their advantage the best.

I beat PracticeX, a 5700 mmr terran, using a 1 base swarm host burrow build on stream not to long ago. It was easily the most fascinating game I’ve played in years. But frankly he misplayed a bunch & this would never be viable if he had more practice against it. Zerg tech is simply too expensive & has loads of downsides most notably how it cuts your anti air by a factor of 3. If you go 2 base and start a lair, you have 1 hatch producing queens. You just can’t deal with an opponent who goes straight to air in a 1/1/1 or a stargate opener. You just die to any protoss or terran with more than 3 brain cells. If swarmhosts are tier 1 then you don’t have to get lair. They still wouldn’t be great to make, because they are expensive for the early game & they are super immobile off creep – all the mobility options of swarm hosts come later on like nyduses for example. So it’s not going to be overpowered, it would simply be a hatch tech option for zerg that creates some really interesting and dynamic game play.

I 100% guarantee that if you try to mass swarmhosts off tier 1 that you will die to a single void ray.

Simply untrue. 2 base hydra can trounce stargate openers AS IS, you can even kill them with lurker rushes & burrowing lurkers all over their base. They have to rely on revelation and if you split up then they just die. I did it all the time on stream, and that’s with the slow-down of lair. If you are doing hydras vs stargate, it would be with burrow and multiprong and the protoss would just die because you run away with hydras that are tagged and you burrow unburrow hydras all over him and pick things off until he’s dead.

That’s what would happen with hydras because they can actually kill void rays. Void rays will hunt down and kill 15 swarm hosts before they can make it back home safely. Swarmhosts would not break the balance of pvz or tvz for the simple reason that terran/protoss remain in control of the air. So if you can get swarm hosts close enough to the enemy’s base, to harass him, comes down to the map, positioning, timings, and micro.

T1 swarm host would also give zerg a viable proxy style. Every race has a viable proxy style except zerg. Swarmhosts are greatly benefited by creep & the aid of a couple queens and a spore. So zerg is technically still disadvantaged because he has to balance the anti air between his proxy and his main base, but it wouldn’t be giga trash like it is currently. Right now you make 1 BC and the game is over unless your opponent is genuinely narcoleptic.

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What stream ? Can you post a link ?

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And presumably, that’s with the upgrades, which would still be locked behind lair tech even if Hydras were allowed at hatch tech…

They’re not good vs adepts, not particularly good vs bio, aren’t particularly great vs stalkers when at a range disadvantage, etc…
In small numbers for the cost, Roaches outperform Hydras vs practically everything that isn’t dedicated anti-armored or air. It’s why Hydras don’t get mixed in until relatively late in ZvZ - beyond them being lair tech, it’s just not worth adding them in when Roach/Ravager is more efficient.

The larger concern, IMO, would be lurkers coming online earlier, but that could be largely resolved by significantly increasing the build time of the lurker den, or perhaps nerfing lurkers and adding a lair tech research.

Hydras without their upgrades do not have the speed to easily run away… Again, even if Hydras were enabled at hatch tech, their upgrades could be locked behind lair tech, and there are options for nerfing early timings, such as increasing upgrade times or nerfing the base unit.

Could it be a problem? Yes, and if it does end up being one, there are relatively simple ways to address that, such as specializing their damage towards armored, allowing for them to be more effectively countered by the likes of lings/zealots/adepts/hellions, and reducing their effectiveness vs banshees.

“4-5” massing. You keep getting this confused. Mass anything that’s not a basic core unit is rarely a real option in the early game. Swarmhosts don’t need to be massed; they’re a harass unit, and locusts have extremely high DPS for the time that they’re active. 4-5 swarmhosts very early in the game would be very annoying.

This definitely is not the case. T1 hydras would be at their best against Protoss, where they MUST be paired with roaches or banes to handle adepts with such a timing.

Proxy hatch builds and proxy spine rushes (the latter especially in ZvZ) are already viable. Heck, they’re probably the most viable in the case of getting scouted when compared to T/P proxies.

Ah yes, BC rushes, the build that wins all the time at the professional level right now, and is dominating the current meta… /s
Wait, no, that isn’t happening.

1 Like
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Literally play the best race in the game, still complain, whine about GM rep when Zerg is winning all the actual money, lie on here about stuff, ignore strong points, pathetic.

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The fact that Bly has fallen off the radar is extremely saddening. +1 if it brings him back since it’s nydus that makes swarm hosts really good.

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Hydras beat all units in the game. I beat a 5100 zerg that massed ultralisks using pure hydralisk a couple weeks back. It’s all about knowing when to fight and when to give up ground and when to counter attack and how to use terrain to your advantage.

Nope, I beat roach spammers in zvz with mass hydra too. I beat muta ling bane apes as well. Hydras are easily the strongest unit in the game excluding rare scenarios like 5 colossi and no vipers. Players just aren’t willing to create new styles, they just copy them from the pros, and all the pros who created all the modern styles have retired. Everyone thought the ravager killed the immortal sentry allin until MC made a brief return to the GSL and clowned on every zerg opponent he faced using immortal sentry. 99.9% of players copy the 0.1% of people who create builds and right now nobody creates builds because the meta has been so boring and unchanging for so long that anyone with even a tiny creativity bone in their body uninstalled sc2 years ago.

You won’t see lurker rushes off the back of hatch tech hydra play because the terran will be massing tanks to fend off the hydras which as a bonus hard counter the lurkers. Zergs will rush hive when doing mass hydra, like in the video below. This has already been mapped out & is super strong vs terran without the t1 hydra. The natural progression here is that the terran adds on ghosts to counter the vipers. So what tier 1 hydra play is going to do is funnel TvZ down the ghost mech turtle route. Bad idea.

That’s why you burrow and pre split.

Don’t matter cuz terran don’t have things like stim either anyway.

No they wouldn’t. 99.9% of zergs would have their swarm hosts revelated and killed in the blink of an eye by 1 oracle and 2 void rays. The game would be over because the investment didn’t pay off & the zerg is now behind in eco.

Nope, we can analogize this to the roach because roach is available pre lair. 2 base roach builds can ouright kill a variety of openers but if the terran is to survive he has to be able to lift his third. You can’t lift a third vs hydras:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wy8VC8BNpw

This is a macro build with a 7 minute hive. Are you ready for the allin version of this that hits 2 minutes faster? Do you see how unstoppable this attack is? This barcode is a 6k mmr player called “Lee”.

Nope, not even close. They are easily scouted & require your opponent to misplay in order to win, which they usually don’t at the 5.2k+ level.

Vs a proxy swarm host build a 1 base bc build is a hard counter because you simply can’t split your anti air between the main and proxy sufficiently vs a unit that can instantly teleport between the two. Remember, a 2 hatch lair build requires cutting your queen production from 3x at a time to 1x at a time. It’s obvious why a bc works here. I counter this by rushing burrow neural but that easily countered by a terran who simply makes a raven. Raven forces you to neural it. BCs yamato w/ a scan. Game over. But terran players are gigatrash so it ends up working. They haven’t had to face vs a new style in over a decade. They’ve been spamming the same builds on repeat since wings of liberty. They just don’t know what to do vs a proxy neural rush. But that doesn’t make it viable because the only reason it works is because it’s rare and they have no practice against it. Make it a standard build and it would never win a game ever. High gm opponents will be floating 1300 minerals on 1 base vs this build. It’s not going to work if they get more practice vs it.

T1 swarmhosts on the other hand have a legitimate shot at winning a game like that because you’d getting them out long before his BC invesment could pay off. It’s doubtful if they could even get a banshee out on time. We’re talking 2 or 3 rax plus cyclones off a factory in order to beat this build, and that probably favors the swarm hosts.

Boring meta that heavily favors protoss. Protoss being favored means only the most tryhard builds are viable through perfect execution. Not rocket science why zergs will leave the game. I went the same route. The only reason I still play once or twice a month is because TvZ is a lot of fun. I lost a ZvP vs a diamond protoss in the same stream I beat a 5700 terran with proxy swarm host. What are you supposed to do vs protoss except leave the game and give them the mmr they desperately crave, which is what I do. 5k toss I just leave the game at the start. Not wasting the time on it. They crave the satisfaction of a win but you deny them that by leaving at the start. It’s literally the only thing you can do as zerg to get a slight W vs protoss right now. Just leave and at least then you deny them the satisfaction of bashing your face into the concrete. They can play PvP since they love protoss so much, lmao, but never in a million years am I wasting time on these players.

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Serral is extremely good, his Z play is really solid and taking no risks, he is not specially fast or cheesy. The problem is that the Z race does not allow any fancy micro or strategy, it is just sitting and macroing, attacking always on creep because if you cheese or do a heavy timing you are gambling the game and fighting outside creep will get you into a disadvantage. Then, lategame vs T…T has the easier time, their PFs are strong and can deal damage without micro, same with widow mines and sieged libs and tanks, at the moment something is near, they do a ton of damage making defense really easy considering also sim cities laugh at most Z units. During combats, snipe kills all of the beefy and expensive Z units with almost no counter other than maybe landing a fungal, you spend a lot of time building Blords and then they disappear even if you have 8 of them, you spend a lot on ultralisk and they start derping trying to attack before disappearing to snipes. It is not good that Z only has the chance of throwing resources at T hoping for some base snipe and overall losing resources vs what you kill, and then T will just land a CC and start the base in no time.

So the main problem is design, T race is better designed than Z,every unit is ranged, they can repair beefy PF, towers with really high dps,they have extremely mobile high dps cheap units, overall a good amount of static defense power meaning you can roam around and your bases will be defended because you have also sensor towers.

But in the tournament Clem played better, that’s for sure, from what I saw, Serral took many risks and Z is not a race to take risks.

1 Like
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Answer me!
Give us the link to your stream. Are you streaming on twitch ? Are you the slammer who needs bigger hammer ?

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Yes he is.
20 characters

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I know but i want link to stream where he did it (beating 5.7 terran with 1 base swarm host.

…or it didn’t happen.

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To me it looked more like young kid with passion to no life all day vs old gamer ready to hand over the reigns nothing to do with racial balance or skill just an old player fading and a young one peaking. Serral was sweating the little twig kid looked like he could play 18 more hours straight on nothing but doritos and mt dew lol.

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I showed you clips beating parting, you didn’t even bother to watch them before you regurgitated lies about my mmr ranking despite clearly seeing it in the clip. What makes you think it wouldn’t be a complete waste of time to show you swarm host victories. I have two on hand. One is vs a 5800 terran called “Zero” and another is vs a 5600 terran called “practicex”. Which one do you want? Are you gonna lie about it right after I post it?

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I saw your screenshot beating Parting under 4 mins with your “14 pool b4 hatch” build but that was like in 2017 ? So even if you ever beat any terran 5.8 with your 1 base bullsh1t then it was probably also like 6-7 years ago where 5.8 was equivalent of todays 5.2. Whatever.

You know that it’s much easier to beat higher ranked players with something unorthodox because they are not used to play against it. I bet in a normal standard game 5.8 would whoop your s into oblivion and probably you would lose any interest in playing SC2.

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I’ve beaten him more times than I can count. Some days it seemed like he was the only guy playing.

And what does that mean for the strategical abilities of these players? They have none. SC2 is a game of spamming apm, not a strategy game. It’s akin to playing a song on the piano – a song you’ve memorized by playing it a thousand times before over the span of decades. Functionally there is literally zero difference between high level sc2 and a jazz piano player.

Oh please. Standard plays are the strongest strategies in the game. Winning with standard is so easy it will put you to sleep. The hardest part of being a pro sc2 player is staying awake. You either have to be an adderall addict or have a severe mental health disorder to enjoy high level sc2. It is so easy and boring it’s practically a sleeping aid.

High level sc2 players enjoy repetitive tasks, are moderately intelligent (but not too intelligent), stay indoors and have zero social life. Do you know what that sounds like? it sounds like a cluster C disorder like obsessive compulsive disorder. It’s a new manifestation of OCD. They gotta optimize build orders to perfection in the same way a germaphobe has to clean his house 10 times a day before he can go to sleep at night. Do you think it’s a good idea to give these people the ability to design sc2? Modern sc2 is an absolute disaster because OCD apm spammers have transformed the game into a religious cleaning ritual. And then people wonder why on Earth nobody plays sc2 anymore.

The thing I will never be able to square away is how on one hand the design team got rid of the 6 worker start because the early game was “too slow” but then they make you play a super slow and boring 16 minute early game before either player has any real shot at winning. They need to go back to 6 workers and need to buff TF out of game ending moments like fungal. When you misplay, it actually matters because the misplay can cost you the game. Modern GSL had terrans losing 6 medivacs of marines to 1 parasitic bomb, shrugging it off, and winning anyway. The micro, tactics, strategy, none of these things resolve the game outcome. What is it that resolves the outcome? Multitasking & endurance. SC2 as it is played by pro players is the most boring video game on the planet. It’s like a 10 year old kid saying “Look mom! Look at how fast I can click!” and she responds with “That’s nice, honey” without even lifting her eyes from the ebook she’s reading. That’s modern sc2 in a nutshell.

People say “Yeah, ok, you were so good at previous versions of the game, but that doesn’t count now.” I am fine with that. I don’t want to be good at this version of sc2. SC2 as I knew and loved it is dead. It doesn’t exist anymore. The version that does exist requires you to be literally insane to enjoy it. I would rather drag my face across asphalt than play pro level sc2.

Explaining game design basics to internet lunatics be like:

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How Dare You???

How Dare You???

First of all it was " removed in Patch 4.11.0 in November 2019 "(https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Patch_4.11.0)

So that is almost 5 years, NOT 3 Years.

Get Your Facts straight, before posting stupid stuff.

Secondly this one the most OP and Stupidest thing in the game, ask any pro player or streamer!

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WOL patches, why the hell do they matter?

Ok, so do you remember when 1 fungal on the bio army would win the Whole Game? Like a Nuke on the Army.

It was BS, Stupid, and OP as f.

Everyone agreed the bane needed a nerf, and it still very very strong and one the most cost efficient unit 25 Gas and 1/2 supply it is still insanely strong.

They got the speed buff!

I know you want the GG lords back, it is obvious just from the first few zerg nerfs on your List.

Hydras received several buffs and it is Still the Best DPS in the Game.

Hydras beat stimed Marine Medivac Marauder on same upgrades (and actually it gets even better for Hydras when they have 3 3 vs 3 3 MM with Medivacs of course)

Lurkers have been one the best unit in the game since they been added to Zerg in SC2.

And still the Movement Speed for a siege unit, Lurker has very good speed, Tanks and Immortals are turtles in comparison.

That Unit had no right to be in the game, and is one the reason it almost destroyed all the community of SC2.

Ask any Pro Commentator during the HOTS Era how fun it was to commentate a 3 hour long game of Exactly Same Attack!!!

So Map Hack gets 10% less vision, let’s All cry how this unfair for Zerg!

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This might be the most biased post I’ve ever read on this forum. That is impressive. I legit couldn’t read past you saying The Hydra is the best dps in the game. Literally the worst unit after the mutalisk and you think its the best DPS in the game? Ahahaha. Hydras never received buffs btw. They had combined upgrades and then had them split.

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Dude, the Reaper is like the biggest one.

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Again!

Please Check Your Facts before you post on these forums, it makes you look like a a complete troll.

Patch 5.0.11

  • Muscular Augments move speed bonus off Creep increased from 0.79 to 0.98.
  • Damage point reduced from 0.15 to 0.1 (Damage Point is the time it takes for a unit to complete it’s attack. Reducing it allows more time for movement in between attacks.)

Patch 5.0.12

  • Speed upgrade research time reduced from 71 to 64 seconds.
  • Range upgrade research cost / time reduced from 100/100 / 71 seconds to 75/75 / 50 seconds.
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Yes, the DPS is insane!

Hydras has 20.4 DPS and a Stimmed Marine has 14.7 DPS !