The strongest Protoss players are legit terran players who decided to offrace. I am not joking. The quality of their micro and decision making is impeccable. I just did a hydra ling infestor timing vs a skytoss player who normally mechs. He made 3 phoenix and lifted my infestors during the battle at a critical moment when I needed to fungal his void rays.
Can we have an honest conversation about the APM / skill requirements to play Protoss? Is battle.net ready for such a thing?
Even on the last pylon show all three pros (including Showtime) agreed Protoss was easier for pretty much the entire ladder and lower part of the pro scene.
Their units are supply chunky (easier to macro) with lots of health and splash.
For much of the ladder level, the front-loaded production with warpgate also makes things a lot easier. “oh no I see a push at my door, good thing I can get an instant extra round of reinforcements from my 1K/1K bank”. If Z or T do that they get to watch a base die while waiting for the units they just queued.
They have recall. No more words needed. It’s a free game-ending mistake avoided every two minutes.
The best PvZ army mostly ignores terrain, has a billion hit points, and is pretty strong with just a-click. But it requires repeated, reactive spell-casting and consistent focus fire to kill.
And early game TvP is the mostly stupidly fragile thing. You can load up 10 TvPs and lose to 10 different kinds of BS by the 7 minute mark because you micro’d a cyclone a second late or your scan missed a single DT.
While turtling on 2 base, despite the Protoss having a third fully saturated. Watching the protoss do gateway based styles and just a-click endless waves of wasted zealots and blink stalkers, into stimbio and tank fire and losing it all, and yet somehow the terran is always down in supply and can never get a third up.
Yeah pretty much all the events that would require strategic foresight are automated out of the race. If they are out of position, they recall or cast overcharge on their batteries or warp in a round of units. They can also pick up and save units in a warp prism in many scenarios where those units would die. Their units are few in number, making micro easy, and have very simple amove micro. If you amove marines, they die to banes or tank fire but if you amove pretty much any Protoss unit it trades well. All their spell casters are super simple 1-click solutions to all other problems (ranging from feedback to storm to disruptors). Like, why don’t these units have downsides? You know, like the infestor which is stationary after casting NP. Why aren’t templar stationary for the whole duration of the storm? Ghosts are stationary and if they take damage the spell is cancelled. Huge, huge double standards in design.
There is much more to it than that. Carriers have the highest HP regen in the game, highest HP in the game, the only auto-micro in the game, the only production that can produce while flying, the only production that can produce while moving, the highest DPS in the game, and the longest range in the game (16 vs 13 for a siege tank).
The carrier itself can regen HP. The interceptors regen HP. The carrier can also rebuild interceptors. So the amount of HP being produced from a carrier is just nuts and that’s completely separate from the shield battery or other bonuses like the ability to teleport thanks to recall.
I’m open to a honest conversation about apm / skill requirement for Protoss. The thing that makes me feel as if it’s pointless though, is the fact that this is design related only and development is closed.
I don’t think the point for blizz was ever to have balanced apm among the races, but rather balanced winrates. So which race puts more “effort” is something new of a critique point is it not?
So where would we go discussing this? To the already existing conclusion among players that the average apm is diffrent among races? Sure, ok. But why would we do that. And where would we go from there?
An honest conversation does not involve throwing insults at whoever has different viewpoints than you or finds the flaws in your logic. You are the last person I want to hear having an “honest conversation” around here.
I thought it has been discussed countless times and you opened several threads about the matter and many other comments. But it is funny that you opened a thread after being outsmarted/outplayed by a player lifting your infestors, I though apetosses only did amoves while eating bananas and laughing at the enemies.
But let’s be real, if you want to compare APM you should erase rapid fire from the game as not every race uses it on the same amount, also erasing from the game that ‘‘input key’’ thing?, no way holding down a button while making units it records thousands of apms. T is the race that uses it the least, so I think their apm is the more meaningful among the three races, Z is the more spammy and P middle ground.
You can’t start any decent discussion about the matter when the main factor does not affect every race on the same level.
They can’t change a game so much at it’s late life, the only way is new game by more capable
… that’s exactly what they do which is why there is such a stark difference in skill between protoss mains and protoss offraces. Terrans offraced as Protoss are the toughest Protoss opponents I’ve ever faced, and I’ve faced lots of top GMs and Code S level players. A 5k Terran offracing as APEtoss is more difficult to beat than a 6k APEtoss main.
It’s pretty clear cut that APEtoss is easier to play due to lower APM requirements.
Press X to doubt 
APM analysis shows Protoss have their ladder ranking inflated by roughly +900 MMR. So a 6k APEtoss is very similar in true skill to a 5k terran.
Your APM analysis is wrong.
I didn’t know you believe in unicorns. Whatever floats your goat, buddy. Just a pro tip: people might be a bit judgemental towards you if you go around being a math denier. Some beliefs honestly should be kept closeted. That’s just my 2 cents. Do whatever makes you happy.
This coming from the Trump supporter.
Which is more likely: That you are just salty, or that you are literally the only person in the entire world who can understand how to actually correctly measure skill, and that it is entirely coincidental that it makes you out to be far better than any other metric does?
It is amusing that Rotti (who has admitted to it in the past) tried to frame it as a ridiculous claim that Protoss is easier, and even looked for Showtime to push it back. But even then it backfired as Showtime was pretty much in agreement with what Lambo and HM were saying.
Deniers in these forums have 0 credibility right now as most pro-players that answer the question agree to it, be it Protoss or not.
I mean the thing that astounds me the most is that they (MANY of the people on these forums) have shown not just how incredibly biased they are, but that comprehending very simple statistics / reading charts is well above their cognitive ability. Now mind you that I suspect merely playing SC2 puts a person at a slightly higher IQ than average. Studies show that merely playing PC games puts a person at 110 IQ. SC2 is probably slightly above that. Maybe 112 or 115.
In other words SC2 players are probably a full standard deviation from the mean, meaning they are smarter than 84% of people, yet aren’t able to understand simple statistical concepts like averages. It is mind boggling how bad the understanding of statistics is for the typical person.
I called the APEtoss imbalance back in May of 2020. It was crystal clear from the number of major/minor tournaments they won and their prevalence in premier tournament finals that they were achieving those far too frequently. They only underperformed in Premier tournament wins due to A) tremendously skilled T/Z players (Maru/Serral/Rogue) and B) a decent bit of sheer luck. But only a brain-dead troglodyte would look at only the finals of premier events when judging balance (they are, by definition, outliers). So if you threw out the outliers, APEtoss was overpowered.
But Blizzard decided to nerf the queen multiple times, infestor and brood while buffing APEtoss at the same time. These are supposed to be professional game designers with a computer science background yet obviously they didn’t understand statistics either. So APEtoss went from being a little bit overpowered, to winning 4x as many tournaments as Zerg. When Serral was dominating in 2018, Zerg won 1.2x tournaments and everyone was losing their minds over how OP zerg was.
The point is, never underestimate just how incredibly stupid people are. It is truly mind boggling.
It is not math denying,you analysis is based on every race being the same,which is not correct, every race gets a different amount of apm from rapid fire, meaning your analysis is wrong. Eliminate APM that comes from rapid fire and then you can start doing better calculations.
No, you’re not allowed to talk about the reality of playing Protoss.
Well Skillous get 5800 as Terran by his alt account. What’s his Protoss MMR right now? 6800 I believe?
And he is mechanically the best Protoss in EU right now judging by his games with MaxPax where Skillous outmicroed and outmacroed MaxPax all the time (Skillous had worse strategic judgement and lost mindgames several times).
Not surprising - he is playing StarCraft2 only since 2018…
And Maru get to top 1 on Korean ladder while playing Protoss. If Maru was Protoss player Protoss would’ve been nerfed into even weaker state than during first year of LotV…
On one hand you are correct since ordering marines take a lot of APM.
On the other you can’t just hold A and D for a few moments when ordering units as Terran: unlike Zerg and Protoss if you do order units that way than your units will be put in the queue, which means they will not be produced but resources will not be in the bank (while technically not being spent) - you have to divert some part of your attention to do precise number of button clicks.
As for rapid fire, what other than Liberator siege and Ghost snipe rapid fire is used for in terran army? nothing. And we don’t even see that most of the time.
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