ya that's what's frustrating to me is i enjoy playing big long macro games, but i just feel like it isnt an option vs protoss. zerg midgame is obviously very strong, but it seems DRG is the only pro level zerg who is able to beat them right now. even in the "minor leagues" of foreigner play it's pretty tough for lots of guys.

whatever the guy was playing lots of games with attero and others of that ilk in his match history so i assume he's really good. that's the 2nd game ive played vs a highly ranked protoss tonight where ive been theoretically ahead for 75% of the game and then just lose to a deathball.

obv im improving somewhere tho cause if you isolate just the last month of play im:

ZvZ - 43-43
ZvP - 41-42 (considering it was like 30% before, ill take it)
ZvT - 36-17 (lol terran)

oh

and 7-0 v random holla

what is it about terran....that makes only koreans good with it.

infestor good unit

Obviously everyone is going to have different opinions on this but IMO it has to do with multi tasking. Terran has a ton of things that someone with a really high APM can use to their advantage that some diamond leaguer just cant. Ex: Doing double pronged drops while macroing...seems easy enough for a pro but even top non koreans struggle with keeping up macro while dropping.

lol of my 10 ladder games tonight

6 vs toss

4 vs zerg

i won 3, 2 vs zerg, 1 vs some protoss guy who 3 did old school 3 gate expand pressure.. im losing to diamond protoss players. it's really, really sad. like all i need to start doing is just making mass roach and a moving to beat diamond players.

Want to start this out by saying I think you played quite well.

He did defend well, and you basically spend the first 16 mins of the game trying to shove pure roach through blink stalker immortal. I think you had plenty of time to throw in a muta switch....ya ya you dont want to make mutas because toss cry all the time but who cares about them anyways.

Protoss figured out how to defend against pure roach on 3 base a while ago.

Other then that, it all came down to the final battle, which you botched the micro hard. You know he has a mothership so have your broods spread, you also had 2 idle infestors, allowing him to blink under you. I also think you should have cut your corrupter count by at least 4 and had more infestors. Keeping the stalkers pinned down wins you the game there.

sigh just tried the tank medivac one for like 40 minutes and i still cant get it.

the 3 marines versus 2 zealots one took a long time. raged so much when i get the second zealot down to 2-3 shots and i turn wrong and get sliced up

you needed more infestors on the final battle and better spread, other than that consider taking your 3rd before you get 4 extractors up so u can saturate it faster, you don't need all that gas if u are going roach. I liked your trade in the beginning, maybe u could have ended the game there if you applied pressure with roach/ling or just deny protoss 3rd

sort of lol'd at this... qxc talks forever how there is no imbalance and everyone sucks... then starts talking about how ridiculous protoss late game is and how much easier it is for protoss players to win there. asserting there are things terrans can do to win, but they take more skill and thinking lol. "i mean if they both do nothing different, protoss wins"

but then he backtracks and says it's on him :-P

QQQQQQ

http://www.sk-gaming.com/video/45956...en_good_at_SC2

i agree. i think having more infestors could change that quite a bit. just seems silly to me i gotta go through all that and micro perfectly and he has to hit a-move and sometimes v :-P.

jk.

sort of.


yea i misclicked bls into a ball twice today while trying to spread them. i gotta figure out that micro better.

and yeah for the rest of the night tonight i either went the route of make roaches until protoss player is dead (off quick 3 base obv) or roach/ling defense into muta/ling/mass spine on 3 base and ive won nearly every gmae ive played towards the end of the night. was also fortunate to get a bunch of terrans too.

I watched first part of that interview and i couldn't watch more than 10 minutes, he is trying to hard to sound smart but truth is he isn't even top50 in this "sucky" foreign scene.

I watched all 3 parts of this. He didn't talk about how ridiculous protoss late game is at all. He talked about how it seemed to him right now an insurmountable task, but his perspective is meaningless and irrelevant. He said that right now, it seems like Terran takes more skill and thinking to win, the point being Terran hasn't been figured out yet as much in the PvT lategame not that it is imbalanced. He also gave examples of Terran being figured out more in other ways to explain the T dominance, rather than imbalance. It's almost like you just took his quotes out of context and didn't watch the whole thing. He didn't backtrack, that was his whole point!

I also don't get the comment about him not being top 50 sucky foreigner and is just trying to sound smart. His points don't become any less valid based on his ability. What did he say that you specifically disagreed with? Commenting on his ability wrt the veracity or value of his statements is a logical fallacy. At no point in the almost hour long interview did he allude to or suggest in any way that his skill levels were high. Why do they even matter? The only time he talked about his personal ability was for all killing IM which he clamed was really lucky.

Karak-I have no experience with this so I am not offering a personal opinion in anyway, however Stephano and DiMaga both said in recent streams I have watched that Zerg lategame deathball is unbeatable for Protoss, unless the Zerg makes an error. What do you think of that?

i dont have time to rewatch the interview right now, but im pretty sure he actually used the word ridiculous specifically. it was a joke. dont get all TL butthurt on me here. i was just making fun of qxc.

So nada beat level 30 of Starcraft Master (tank+medivac vs 3 stalkers) in only two freaking tries. Fastforward to 3:08:30 in the video:

http://www.twitch.tv/col_nada/b/310698297

most people on teamliquid beat it easily on their first

this came off snarkier than i intended. but yeah i was just making fun of qXc. obv he comes off as a douche in that vid.

re: the zerg deathball:

yes and no.

here's my view on the theory of zvp deathball/stages (assuming FFE and assuming protoss isn't doing anything cheesy, like 2x stargate, and the zerg isn't going into mass muta play):

1 - very early game Z obviously threatens the most with 6-10 and sometimes 11 pools and then 2 base roach/ling all-ins/bling busts
2 - around 7:30-10:30 mark toss threatens a ton with its various 2 base builds, stargate harass, DTs (not very common) or mass zealot attack on a 3rd. honestly most zerg are going to feel very comfortable until 8:30 as the only thing that hits earlier will be 6 gate (very easy to defend if you took an early 3rd and know it's coming) or mass VR/zealot (not as easy to defend, but it's fairly easy to scout and as long as you get a roach warren down by like 7-7:30 you should be fine)
3 - around 12:00 mark it depends on what the toss and zerg are doing. meta prob still favors toss unless zerg got an army advantage and beat off a 2 base attack. if toss is taking a really quick 3rd AND teching, they are very vulnerable to dying right now. in fact, tech + 3rd at 12:00 mark prob equals win if zerg is macroing properly.
4 - 13:30-15:30ish mark is a dangerous time for protoss if he's decided to take a 3rd after a failed 2 base pressure or behind tech (mass phoenix, colossus or something). roach ling attacks around now can be deadly. even if you do have colossus on the field, you could possibly just get surrounded by zerg units (sauron zerg).

then we go into the various deathballs... these can transition out of muta play or anything really

first deathball is the protoss 3 base deathball which is typically 3-5 colossus + gateway units (primarily blink stalker). you can kill this with roach/corruptor/infestor. you dont have to have hive tech. could also be a lot of immortal + archon, but this is unlikely as it prob snap dies to mutalisk.

second deathball is the zerg hive tech deathball which is broodlord/infestor/corruptor/roach/ling and sometimes hydra (the more hydra, the fewer infestor/corruptor). usually gonna be off 5ish base 8-10 gas (altho can happen off 4 base 8 gas obv). this will have a lot of roach meatshield and likely 8ish BLs. BL upgrades won't be spectacular unless we got to this out of muta play and if we survived this long and got hive tech up comfortably going muta, toss likely isn't in good shape.

the third deathball is the 4+ base protoss deathball, which is the scariest in the game imo... that's gonna be archon + colossus + blink stalker + maybe HT w/ storm + (most important of all) mothership

the fourth deathball (think stephano) is where your army is entirely BL/infestor/corruptor/queen/spine crawler. you won't have much in the way of lings/roaches. you'll have 82348234 spines protecting your bases and preferably moving under your deathball as it inches forward. prob some spores and 2-3 queens mixed in as well. ive seen guys go 5+ queens with this as well (not including queens at home).

i dont want to call it a fifth deathball, but eventually toss is going to start mixing in a lot of storm.

i think deathballs #3 and #4 are fairly equal, but if controlled perfectly (assuming eco, upgrades and all else equal) the zerg deathball is better. with less than excellent control, the toss deathball is far better. it's easier to control and is a bit more forgiving (other than missing a vortex, which is not forgiving).

it all comes down to the vortex and fungals. if the zerg spreads properly and avoids the vortex, he probably wins. if he gets nailed by the vortex or whiffs fungals and the stalkers blink under the BLs, then the protoss wins.

one big boon for protoss is they can be massively behind and still win if they nail a good vortex or catch the BLs out of position. BL/infestor/corruptor takes too long to build and the toss deathball will just move forward and rape everything, even if they are at a big supply/upgrade/eco disadvantage. zerg does not have this luxury. if the zerg is substantially behind, no micro in the world will save him. he's going to die. i mean i dont want to sound cliche, but with a big advantage, all toss really needs to do is a-move and make sure they dont lose their expos to counters. the deathball is a freaking world eater.

my conclusion is this: unless you have control like stephano, try and win in the mid-game in zvp. i think zerg has such an advantage in zvp mid-game it is silly not to take the win there. sitting back, macroing and going for the deathball can be fun, but you open up the opportunity for an opponent who is behind to still get a victory if you make any number of mistakes. watch korean zergs... like narwhal said they go for the win in the mid-game. that's where Z shines in ZvP and that's why many protoss players feel like it is "unfair." of course, late game feels sort of unfair the other way. it all balances out.

compare: in MLG arena ret lost a game to some foreigner toss (forget his name) where he got a huge lead and just sat outside his base and macro'd up, rather than attacking. the toss maxed out on 3 base, ret made some micro and army comp mistakes and everything just dissolved. did he have a huge eco lead and a lot more bases? yeah, but it doesn't matter once toss is in the middle of your rally points. you're dead.

however, DRG would just relentlessly attack when he got a lead. was it on a map where you could smash the protoss 3rd and nat with roaches and toss couldn't defend well? he did that until the protoss died (all while mixing in drones and tech behind it). was it on a map (like daybreak) where toss can turtle pretty comfortably on his 3rd and/or had tons of sentries to be safe? he went muta or drops and pushed the issue. he never at any point just said ill push my macro advantage, take a 4th and 5th + the rest of the map and get to hive tech like stephano does. he cant vs korean protoss. their timings are too crisp and they'll hit him when he's most vulnerable: the transition to hive tech and BL/infestor.

reading that post over now, my instant reaction is that it's really long and written in a silly manner (i think the substance is ok :-P) so props to whoever reads it

One other thing about the transition to Hive tech deathballs (especially the 4th one, as Karak called it) is that it takes so long that you don't even need to be super crisp on timings or anything. It takes 200 seconds minimum (in-game) to have your Greater Spire finished from the time your Hive starts, then an addition 25? seconds to morph the initial BLs. That's almost 4 minutes of game time that you basically have to spend teching. If you want that purely BL/infestor/corruptor army, that's at least another few minutes because it's unlikely you morphed 20 BLs initially, right? It's a really bad protoss that can't find some timing to hit you within that obscene window of time.

Maybe it's just me, but I find that I have to be way too passive during that time. I get the concept of turtling until it's complete, but that's just way too hard for Zerg compared to the other races. It's easy to turtle as Protoss because of the combination of FFs and Zerg's complete lack of a siege unit before T3. Likewise, it's hard to turtle as Zerg because of the comparative ease of access to siege units (colossi) and Zerg has no really good defensive techniques to mitigate that. It's just impossible to actually buy enough time for your deathball to kick in.

i think that's why you need 23498234234 spinecrawlers or the ability to threaten a muta/ling counter sending the toss into a base trade (and honestly then you need spines too)

also, good infestor usage can make it take a long time for the toss to travel the map, but if you dont have good creep spread and/or he's good with his HTs, they can get burned up by colossus or feedbacked pretty quick

IDK, most of the time I feel like my spine crawler wall was pretty worthless besides freeing up some supply, which is fine I guess. Maybe I don't make enough, but it doesn't seem hard or costly at all for the Protoss to just bust through two rows of spine crawlers quickly.

Too much strategy, not enough QQing.

I make at least 40+ when I'm way ahead usually

I didn't read it.

I sentry expand against a zerg that takes a third within 5-6 minutes on entombed. He tries to attack me at my 2nd by breaking down my rocks and atking with roaches and lings. I put his roaches in FF play pens and then go destroy his third, he says "hahha when blizzard added forcefields they F*CK THIS GAME TO THE RETARS". I'd feel bad if he did something other than power drones after losing a huge chunk of his army. LOL! He also didn't break down his own rocks lol.

He comes across douchey for sure but it's because he has that Asberger's thing going on imo. People like Idra seem way more of an actual RL douche than him to me personally. I think a lot of what he said is going to be misinterpreted because it involves calling people (including himself) bad. People don't like that and will react by thinking he is just a douche even when he's dropping truth bombs.

Nah I read it and enjoyed it, ty.

Stephano very rarely gets to lategame vs P from what I have seen so he probably agree's with you. I have been watching him on stream and at Assembly and he generally is maxed out on upgraded roaches and just rallies to their base to reinforce and wins after like 15 mins vs pro EU Protoss players. Against Korean P's I am sure its a lot different.

The Zerg deathball is better but harder to get to and only if you don't make mistakes controlling it seems. So when transitioning to it hopefully you have a big advantage from the mid game.