Protoss air units are more expensive, do slightly more damage and required a LOT more finesse to use. What is the upside ? Vikings and corruptors will destroy protoss air comps easily, and they cost less and are easier to produce en masse. I’m just puzzled as to why it would be a good choice, unless you’re already so far ahead
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vs Terran, air is trash since the damage point buff to vikings. vs Zerg, it’s basically unstoppable unless there are enormous skill gaps involved. Stats is 6300 on KR, Dark is currently 6900, and Stats obliterated Dark using skytoss. So you do the math and figure out how strong skytoss is.
there is no 1 fixed universal build. depending on enemy race and comp air protoss would work dandy. or for niche situations. watch some of the airtoss casts from whatshisface. loco or something
Wait, you’re making the case that Skytoss is HARD to use? Am I being Punked?
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Because protoss needs their opponent to invest into units that gateway units can actually fight in the late game (EG: vikings/corruptors), and require a more specific dedicated response than any ground options, which make them generally better for closing out a game when ahead. Ideally, the air units cause an overcommitment into such units from the opponent, then a 15+ gateway ground swap on the reinforce can flip the fight and win the game.
Or it’s off the back of being enough ahead that the opponent can’t afford to properly tech into their anti-air and get run over.
Regardless, it’s about forcing your opponent into a position where they need the right balance of units with the right upgrades to be able to handle both whatever air units you make + your current ground army and the warp-in.
If Protoss stays on the ground, they lose hard to liberators or lurkers/broods + vipers/infestors once the opponent has the economy and techs to support their own late game anti-ground compositions.
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Thank you ! That answer my question 
GSL results definitely falsify that theory. Zerg can have lurkers and a supply lead and the protoss will amove, cut through the zerg army like a hot knife through butter, and claim a win. They can do this from an economic disadvantage (losing their third). What it means is that protoss army strength per cost is bonkers high, a toss can afford an unstoppable army for a fraction of the price. Skytoss adds extra hurt to this scenario because zerg has to pick a dedicated response (lurkers can’t shoot up & corruptors can’t shoot down) so it basically cuts the zerg army strength in half by including a couple of carriers. It also doubles the cost of upgrades & tech for zerg. You now have to upgrade your air units or you will rolled, and you have to have spire tech on top of hydra/lurker tech. By making air units, toss takes an impossible-to-lose scenario and turns it into an impossible-to-lose-to-the-power-of-infinity scenario.
The same is true vs terran. Zealot stalker can amove through terran bio with ease. The one difference is that it does require toss to be ahead economically, which they are in PvT. Another difference is there is no reason to go skytoss vs terran when zealots alone hard counter every unit terran makes. When zealot stalker disruptor can ampve through a sophisticated tank, mine, liberator, marauder, marine, medivac & ghost unit comp, toss players have lost the ability to say their ground armies are weak & they must transition to air. It’s simply detached from reality to say toss ground is weak. Toss ground is cracked, it’s so strong it can’t be reasonably countered without enormous differences in skill and effort. It will be nerfed or sc2 will die. The game can’t tolerate these levels of imbalance for prolonged periods.
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Playing Skytoss vs Zerg is like playing gold league vs a GM player and having a viable strategy to win. Thats why they do it. You can amove a 200/200 carrier/archon army and beat the Zerg in 90% of situations, even if they micro.
This only happens when the Zerg army overextends and gets caught in a bad position by an arc/flank of immortal/archon, while the Zerg doesn’t have enough supporting units. The supply lead is often in the form of a higher drone count and roaches, which are, notably, not supply efficient - protoss units other than zealots are some 25-80% more costly per supply.
Once vipers are out, it gets extremely difficult for Protoss to break lurker positions, or do anything with a ground army, since abduct bleeds any of their ground-based tech units (immortals/archons/colossus/disruptors) out of the composition.
Hence the “once the opponent has the economy/tech to support their late game anti-ground composition”.
When a lurker line with no support gets run over, the opponent wasn’t at that point yet - Protoss had already secured an advantage state and pressed it.
And protoss air (aside from tempests) is worthless without its own upgrades, and corruptors are efficient vs everything on equal upgrades without archon/storm/feedback support, so that’s a moot point. Both sides need to invest in tech, and Protoss actually has to spend significantly more on tech & production than Zerg in that regard.
The valid point is that corruptors/lurkers/broods/basically everything that’s not Hydras/Queens (which don’t scale well into the late game) has restricted targeting of only ground or air, which can give Protoss an edge if the Zerg doesn’t manage their composition precisely enough.
Lolwut… No, they can’t. Zealot/stalker is horrendously inefficient against stimmed bio if there’s any micro - the units are more expensive and less supply efficient head-to-head. The protoss army is in overwhelming numbers and get a full surround in the open, then yes, they win, but that’s not just a-moving - they need to pre-position to set up that surround and deal prior damage to get enough of a lead to overwhelm the terran.
Disruptors literally can’t a-move, and with micro to focus down/dodge the disruptors, or some libs, the Terran army can crush that composition, as is shown by top Terran players all the time.
Protoss also can’t just a-move through lib zones - they beat libs by avoiding the zones and focus firing, which is, in fact, not a-moving. Protoss relies on catching the Terran out of position before the libs reach critical mass.
The Protoss is only able to “a-move” through a terran army with zealot/stalker after getting huge disruptor hits such that they have an overwhelming advantage, and if those hits don’t happen, or they don’t have disruptors, the protoss army loses badly to a-moving bio + EMP.
And even when disruptors do clip a decent chunk of units, the Terran can often stutter back to efficiently bleed off the zealots from the Protoss army.
Zealots do not “hard counter” anything Terran makes. They’re, at best, a soft-counter to tanks, but they trade inefficiently with practically everything on both supply and cost unless the Terran forgets how to stutter step their units back to prevent a full surround (and even then, they often win regardless on similar supply/army value).
Zealots are, for the most part, a meat-shield to creat space for the other protoss units to get value.
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I’m sorry but (and this is especially true with the mine nerf) Chargelots are genuinely one of the best units that Protoss has against Terran.
They’re absurdly tanky and completely invalidate any tank-based gameplay by themselves (assuming they have charge), that isn’t simply turtle to BC behind layers of walls and PFs. They force a terran from a position, and do enough damage and DPS - even without the damage on charge that they used to have - that they are a threat on their own even with kiting. Their base armour alone makes them super tanky, even more considering the amount of HP that they have. Splash damage is 100% necessary against them, at least until ghosts come out. Frankly speaking, Ghosts are probably the best answer to them due to their bonus vs light, and EMP, because chargelots otherwise eat bio even without splash damage.
While also bleeding off their own army in the process, but yes, they can bleed off zealots by kiting their way back to the other side of the map where the protoss is no longer in any danger anyway - By the time you deal with them, there’s already another round warping in.
No. As I said, unless the tanks are behind walls and PFs, Zealots are an extremely hard counter to Tanks, both because of the fact that they absorb a lot of damage, but also because they’re light units meaning tanks don’t do bonus damage to them; and they sink friendly fire onto tanks and bio.
Zealots gap close so quickly that tanks will never ever do enough damage to them without a significant buffer (hence, wall, PF), which Bio cannot do due to the friendly fire, even with kiting - which if you’re kiting, you’re leaving your tanks behind to die to zealots, and then you don’t have any counter to the rest of the Protoss tech. Plus, tanks also have a minimum fire range and are extremely immobile, making them sitting ducks once Zealots close on the tanks, especially since tanks have a long siege/unsiege time.
Zealots honestly generate enough threat themselves that you have to kite unless the Terran significantly outnumbers the protoss player.
They don’t need to be efficient, because a Terran cannot reinforce fast enough for it to matter. It’s why Blink is so snowball-y, at least until stim and combat shields comes out, and why Chargelot based compositions are so deadly. At the point stim and combat shields hit, bio gains the ability to fight back against Blink stalkers, but they still really struggle with Chargelots.
The general economic advantage that a Protoss has makes reinforcing and out-producing a Terran with gateway units very viable, at least until ghosts come out. At that point, it’s mostly even. You can literally Zerg a Terran and overwhelm them with sheer numbers of gateway units because of how good Zealots specifically are with charge.
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What? You’re practically gifted an upgrade advantage and Charge Zealots are practically immortal. You NEED Widow mines to kill Zealots. Full stop.
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Toss has the upgrade lead, economic lead, and their tier 1 units can amove through sophisticated terran unit comps. Anyone who believes otherwise needs to watch stats vs cure in the gsl. Stats in his current form is far from cure’s skill level, cure has the best TvP on Earth, and stats was amoving zealots through him with a mass gateway style. It’s crazy that people can watch games like that and then lie to your face and say “zealots don’t counter bio”. It’s like, uh, what, do you have eyes?
Normally they’d make tye case that the code s toss is just an exception because he’s such an amazing player. Except, chargelots require near zero skill to use & their use results in the same outcome no matter who uses them – noob or pro. So if the toss were doing some amazing micro then that would make sense to say they are an outlier. But that isn’t the case, zealots simply counter everything terran, and that’s just reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq2YfxpFKpo&t=12m53s
Tge dude throws away 2k zealots for free. That’s called a game losing mistake for terran or zerg. For toss it’s called winning. Repeated zealot a-moves overwhelm cure despite immaculate micro. Stats kinda micros a bit. He blinks on occasion and throws out a disruptor shot every now and then. But mostly he just amoves zealots and wipes the terrans ground army off the map.
What’s particularly egregious in the above video is the extreme difference in effort. Toss does the occasional blink and occasional disruptor shot; meanwhile terran is stutter, split & focus fire, emp, burrow micro, medivac boost micro, armor shredding, snipe, siege/unsiege. It’s crazy the gsl casters want this to be in the gsl finals. They probably think that will be so cool but I see this and cringe. 
The terran is going the whole nine yards while the toss is just f2ing and amoving.
Cure combos an EMP, stim and focus fire on this 1 disruptor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq2YfxpFKpo&t=843s Amazing. Then he’s over run by a zealot amove. Lmao.
EDIT: I keep watching more and seeing more micro tricks being used by terran. He also does landing micro with the vikings. All to lose to a guy who f2 + aclicks + throws disruptor shots. 
EDIT: medivac pickup micro as well to dodge disruptor shots.
EDIT: SCV repair micro, too.
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But not because they’re efficient or “counter” anything. A-moving bio beats chargelots if supplies/upgrades are similar. The Protoss can be up on supply and still trade extremely inefficiently if the bio is microed. They’re a meatshield for other units, not something that gets reliable value on their own. For zealots to take fights without supporting units, the terran needs to be caught in a bad position and/or fail to micro vs an overwhelming number of them.
If the Terran gets caught out of position by a flank of Zealots when the Protoss is playing a heavy snowball composition with the eco lead, such as the mass gateway style, then they can get rolled over and the econ lead can carry the game to a win. If the Terran player recognizes what the Protoss is doing with such a low-tech style, and plays more defensively until they hit the critical mass needed to blast through the zealots, they tend to win.
Yes, it snowballs effectively. That doesn’t mean Protoss can just a-move through a Terran that plays the situation correctly; it relies on the Terran making a mistake and getting their army caught out in a position where the Zergtoss can overwhelm them.
It’s a very effective style vs Terrans that are overly aggressive in the mid-game.
It depends on the numbers and upgrades. Equal upgrades/same supply > ~15? No, bio doesn’t “need” to kite to trade efficiently, but Terran is usually behind somewhat in eco in the early game, and the mass gateway style isn’t spending as much on tech, so bio needs to hit to a larger critical mass to fight effectively without stuttering back (though they should anyway).
Yes, because Terran and Zerg NEVER win games after losing thousands of resources of units practically for free /s. It happens all the time.
Also, no. Stats doesn’t just a-move zealots and beat the bio - he pushes it back when he’s temporarily up some 20 army supply (supplies are similar, but Cure has a lot in production/still rallying across), and still drops to below Cure in supply by the end of the exchange multiple times. The trades aren’t efficient for him in those exchanges. He lands many good disruptor hits as well, and isn’t just a-moving - he’s constantly pulling back to keep his army consolidated and preserve the tech units and blinking forward + target firing with stalkers to get value.
When he does eventually overrun Cure’s army, he was up ~30+ army supply and landed some big disruptor hits on ghosts, and brought in 3 colossus when the Cure had 0 vikings and 1 ghost left.
The early game also went notably in stat’s favor, with Cure’s tank push and drops trading inefficiently (2 full medivacs lost for nothing, and the tank push killed an assimilator and ~2 probes at the cost of several bio units; the mine drop killed 4 probes, but Stats was playing greedy, early and the mine drop was eventually lost without doing anything else; Stats also picked off the starport reactor and a depot with some blink stalkers for free).
Despite stats’ eco lead, he lost the initial fight. If Cure didn’t get hit by some big disruptor hits shortly after and have too few medivacs to heal up his army, he likely could have snowballed that initial fight to a win.
Almost every disruptor shot was hitting something from Cure as well; it’s not like his micro was any better than Stat’s target firing + blink micro + pulling back + launching disruptor balls (and microing them to connect despite attempted splits), and keeping the disruptors from wandering forward by pulling them back is not any easier than what Cure was doing with attempted splits and stuttering back.
Yes, an isolated disruptor that he didn’t even need to focus fire because the rest of the protoss army was pulling back and nothing was around it. And he’s overrun when he has 6 marines, 6 marauders, and 4 ghosts (+4 medivacs and 6 vikings in the air) vs 24 zealots, 2 sentries, a stalker, and 3 disruptors… Then his reinforcements come in and Stats is forced to pull back again after killing almost nothing and losing several zealots. He’d taken a huge disruptor shot right before that exchange that ultimately went in his favor, and then he took another huge disruptor shot shortly after that leads to Stats being able to push his army back across the map.
TL:DR: That game started with Cure throwing away some 2000+ resources of units for practically nothing, and it was still very close, with him winning the first real engagement despite a significantly less expensive army from Stats having lost way less and having the eco lead up to that point.
Once again, the Batz replay analysis misses critical details and ignores everything that contradicts what he wants to see.
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It’s always coupled with incredible play from the winner & large mistakes from the loser. They throw the game in other words. That’s not what happened here. Toss did everything in his power to throw & terran did everything in his power to win, but toss won anyway.
That’s what you are doing, bud. Never once in the cast did they show the resources lost tab, that I could find, but you’re lecturing me on how Cure lost so many resources. Never once did he make a move where he lost 2500 minerals for free like the toss did. All his fights were trades. Toss literally donated 2.5k zealots for free to the terran. Sure Cure does a drop in at the fourth but he trades it out for roughly equal value. Most importantly it buys time while cure gets his third up and running. Somehow Cure playing well is the same as toss throwing crap away for free, and I am the one who is biased? Not a chance. You can’t gaslight me kiddo.
When you compare a trade-out of equal value to a toss who just throws crap away for free, that tells me you have no clue what you are talking about. That’s the only thing you accomplished with your little gaslighting stunt.
Stop being delusional. Cure’s micro in that game was not any more impressive than Stats’s (it was worse in many instances), and he also made notable mistakes throughout the game, overextending and not replacing his tech units, like medivacs, when he really needed to, because he was in a worse economic position and trading was favorable for Stats.
The early game went notably in Stats’ favor and put him in a position where he could afford to trade inefficiently.
They showed it at ~13:51 game time, or ~15:28 in the cast time. At that point, stats had killed ~1000 more gas, but lost ~3000 more minerals - a loss that could be afforded because he had a much better early game and was ahead in bases; zealots are relatively expendable in that situation, and he was doing a fairly good job of preserving tech units.
He kills 4 stalkers for 2 full medivacs, when Stats was ahead in eco due to already having a saturated 3rd while his was just being landed. On the other side, he bleeds out several marines/marauders to kill an assimilator and 2 probes with the tank push.
Neither trade was good for him.
And Zerg/Terran never lose units in bad trades and still win? They do. ALL the time, and they often win, because when you’re in a dominant eco position from a better early game, trading out units for pressure to keep your opponent pinned even if it’s not efficient is often a winning strategy.
It’s weird how you’re simultaneously claiming that Zealots “counter everything terran has” while also acknowledging that fights where the heavy zealot Protoss army is up in supply can still end up inefficient.
Almost like Zealots do NOT, in fact, counter everything Terran has.
I didn’t see Stats wandering all his tech units into the terran army or overextending too much; his supply rarely dropped below 160 during the exchanges. He was on top of his macro and was pulling back and consolidating when needed, and he was doing better about replacing/preserving his tech units than Cure was.
His micro was also very good; there was consistent target fire from stalkers onto tech units, and the disruptor shots were microed to hit despite attempted splits. There was even an instance where he pulled his own zealots back to avoid a disruptor shot that could have hit them.
He certainly wasn’t just a-moving or “doing everything in his power to lose”. He took favorable exchanges in the early game after a more economical opener, which gave him room to take some inefficient trades. He was trading out zealots to kill medivacs, vikings, and ghosts with his disruptors and stalkers. By the end, Cure wasn’t able to keep his army healthy after stims because he didn’t have enough medivacs/medivac energy, and he basically had 1 mining base after Stats out-positioned him and took out the 5th.
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I stopped reading there. You’ve lost this argument so hard it’s unreal. No point in even reading your post.
And the same is true for all of yours, you know? They’re all founded on beliefs that you have that are simply not true.
It’s impossible to read the forums when you spend this much time clogging it with spam. Please stop and do anything else, it would probably make everyone happier.
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No clue who responded, have you blocked lmao, but no doubt is defending asamu. You only hurt your own reputation bro. Literally the only people in the universe who would agree with you are a couple of crazies on this board. Nobody is going to look at a toss throwing away 25 zealots for free and think yeah this is code s level quality here. Not one person. Not sure what’s up with these boards but there is such a dense concentration of legit schizos here. You know, people who think water isn’t wet, unicorns & bigfoot are real, and, apparently, throwing away 25 zealots is just fine. Can’t help these people. Legit insane.
You mean a Terran that… Plays Terran? You know what you call a Terran that plays the late game against Protoss? The loser.
Being overly aggressively =/= playing correctly.
There are points when Terran can be aggressive with drops or make a push, and points where they should consolidate and build up to hit critical mass, and both, obviously, depend on what the opponent is doing. The same timing can go very differently depending on the opponent’s opener/strategy.
The mass gateway style is the latter - A Terran that hits critical mass and keeps up in upgrades can steamroll the gateway army.
Terran is favored in the late game vs Protoss right now if they can get there in a reasonably even position, and if Protoss doesn’t get a favorable early game, the Terran push in the mid-game very often just rolls them over (Protoss leverage their initial advantage from shield regen/better initial economy due to chrono and warping in buildings letting them mine a bit more in the very early game to expand or tech first).
When tech and army supplies are equal, Terran comes out ahead in high level play. Vikings + Bio > Colossus + gateway. Ghosts + Bio > Gateway + Templar. Disruptors > Bio + ghosts when the disruptor count is too high for the Terran to effectively micro against.
BCs/Libs/Vikings + Ghosts > Everything Protoss - the issue is getting there, since the air units require separate upgrades and production from the bio, so the Terran needs time and resources to transition and consolidate. Protoss can sort of fight it with tempests, but only until the Terran composition is stabilized, at which point, the Terran tends to crush the Protoss as soon as they can force a fight.
The narrative that Terran can’t play the late game vs Protoss has never actually held up. No stage in the game was ever “unplayable” for Terran, and in LoTV, the late game tilts heavily into Terran favor if they get the room to tech into fusion core + Ghosts. Protoss relies on trading in the early part of the late game/late mid-game to keep the Terran from expanding/stabilizing their army to prevent that transition.
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