My ranked stats this season:



I can't help but think the highly successful ZvZ cheese is inflating my MMR to the point where I'm just not as good as the Terrans and Protosses I'm playing against.

Also, I played against perhaps the most absurd build I've ever seen tonight:
- refinery first
- rax
- when rax finishes, reactor + factory
- pump out reactored marines, build reactor on factory
- factory builds two widow mines, start armory
- armory finishes, reactor out hellbats + marines

This attack hit me at 8:00 (on Waystation long spawns) with two hellbats, two mines, and 8 marines, while I'm still trying to drone and my 3rd isn't even done. Meanwhile he's starting a 3rd CC on the low ground and I can't do **** about it because this attack basically kills me. What am I supposed to do, scout out exactly what he's doing somehow and build exactly the right amount of roaches and lings that still allow me to hold this off while not overbuilding army so that I don't get economically behind his super fast 3 command centers? **** this bull****.

i thought protoss was ez
what happened??

Yeah you just need to scout. When did he build his 3rd CC? It doesn't sound like that fast of a 3rd CC if his attack hit at 8:00.

Plus any sort of bio push without medivacs should get easily cleaned up by a lot of lings + ~4 banelings with a good engagement. If you see the early armory with no starport just get roaches and laugh at any non-medivac push.

You don't have to drone super hard when they're doing some sort of tech build. Just think when a terran goes banshee opening, you're going to want to invest a little more in Queens + faster lair instead of just droning up your 3rd like you would vs standard hellion + fast 3rd CC openings.

The economical advantage comes after you completely mitigate the damage from the tech (ie: you have overseers and extra queens for the banshees), you are free to drone even harder or have complete map control, instead of taking damage from their quicker tech.

In this case, if you had a few roaches and a bunch of lings, you'd clean up his tech push with a resounding victory, and have complete map control to deny his 3rd base, and drone like crazy, take a 4th, tech to whatever etc. It's almost like he's all in with that push.

Also IRT to the ranked stats:

First of all LOL @ how OP that zvz build is...

I think you should just play a bunch of unranked, and just leave the zvz's. Practice vs terran and protoss. Once you start getting the hang of it, don't leave the zvzs, and your mmr will rise to the point of your ranked mmr, and you'll be playing T's and P's at your ranked mmr's level. Then, once you're comfortable with that, just start playing ranked again, continue to cheese zvz, and get to masters league easier than you thought was possible.

Whatever he's doing with the armory, you want roaches. Scout that first. Like kowalski said, his Econ can't be that good if he has that attack. Plus, if you crush that army, you can deny his third forever (and likely also deny his natural), which should give you plenty of time to take your third and drone up.

What is the ZvZ build?

Just the inflated MMR from lolZvZ, I think. Say my MMR is at some equilibrium point where I'm winning 50% of all matchups, then I start doing this ZvZ build that increases my ZvZ winrate to 90% - then my MMR goes up and Blizzard starts matching me with better players (of all races) to compensate, but my ZvT and ZvP haven't improved at all so I start losing those matchups way more.

I used to do exactly this all the time and it doesn't really work. My MMR balanced out at the point where most of my opponents were in gold or plat and I didn't really gain anything from beating them.

My current plan is to keep playing ranked, leave every ZvZ until I'm at 50% winrate, and then maintain a 50% ZvZ winrate (for every one I win w/ cheese build I'll just leave the next) until my MMR balances out with the vP/vT matchups.

Yeah, that makes sense.

10 pool
9 drone
10 extractor (@ 75 minerals)
9 drone
10 overlord
10 lings x3
13 queen
15 ling speed + pull out of gas
15 lings
16 lings
17 overlord
17+ lings

With the first six lings you mostly want to deny their gas mining (if they're mining gas, common against pool first) or try to pick off fringe drones at the edge and make them dance around/not mine if they went hatch first. You don't want to get into a big 6 lings vs. 15 drones fight and lose them, because the real pain of the build comes when speed + the lings built off your first inject hit. You can also basically ignore the natural, although if they went pool first it can be handy to go down there to try to pull their lings out of position before speed hits and then when speed finishes their lings are far away from any queen/spine/drone support and you can pick them off easily.

With scouting how is that not hard countered by pool first for example? I suppose people don't scout.

I imagine it should lose to pool first. But usually I still win anyway. Sniping queens helps.

Can they have banes in time if they go gas and do bane nest before speed?

Like, if they were doing that anyway or if they do that when they see my lings?

For the former, I imagine they can, but nobody I play against ever goes bane nest before speed. Latter, not sure (but again people usually go speed before banes).

Also, wrt scouting - all they can really scout is that you don't have a natural. Queen is done in time to kill their first overlord if it tries to scout your main to see gas.

When they see your lings/scout correctly.


They can also scout the lings coming out right which gives him time? Also on some maps they can see the main right?

Would be interested in playing against to see.

On Overgrowth I noticed I can skirt the first overlord w/ lings by taking a slightly longer path (send them towards the 3rd to go around that way and the first OL will just barely not be far enough towards the natural to see them slip around - second OL usually sees them though). I imagine on Waystation you could do the same (certainly on long spawns, not sure about close). On Merry Go Round your first overlord will scout or not scout one position by the time your lings pop so you have a 50% chance of dodging their overlord but a 100% chance of attacking the correct position first.

Yeah, reacting correctly to it it probably gets shut down pretty easily. But if people reacted correctly to it I wouldn't have a 80% winrate in ZvZ this season.

Well yeah, I did a speedling all in one season with 80% WR where you go 14/15/17 gas hatch pool, get speed, pull off gas and go all in with lings. Hits before bane nest. If they scouted the expand was slightly late then they could counter it easy but most people seemed very surprised.

Gas into hatch into pool??? Something seems inefficient there, you only need to start your extractor ~20 seconds before pool iirc to have 100 gas when pool finishes.

i've never seen that build before. maybe it hard counters yours, but i can't imagine it's good vs anything else considering i've never seen a pro do it.

Sorry, gas/pool/hatch.

is there anything that proves the general idiocy of protoss players more than this guy i just faced who went double robo colossus off two bases, then took a third and tried to take a fourth while not not getting a single upgrade?

oh wait, he got observer speed.`

It should lose to pool first, but it usually doesn't because people don't know how to react properly. Most people assume it's a gasless 10 pool which is just made to kill the natural while you get your own natural down, so people think you're throwing when you go into their main. They get wide eyes and try to save their natural once it finishes by bringing their queen + slow lings + whatever down there, and your speed finishes and they lose.

The only way I've found people hold if I don't **** up my micro is just by sacrificing the natural, making a spine in the main and just getting their own speedlings + banelings with a 5+ drone advantage. When you come across someone who does this it's hilariously how hard the build fails. It shouldn't work against anyone, but it just does.

I have lost to people who keep their natural, but it usually involves a spine crawler and really good queen micro, combined with me messing up my ling micro.

Here's a guy from today who went pool first, with a spine crawler, and went for a baneling nest and still failed for whatever reason... Maybe he made drones during the attack, maybe he didnt micro his queen, I don't know, lol...

http://www.twitch.tv/killerwalski/b/528219946?t=21m

I alter the build on 4 player maps to get one set of lings, then queen, then the rest of the lings instead of starting with 3 sets of lings, then queen. The reason is because you need the first 2 lings to scout the two positions your overlord doesn't scout, and getting that faster inject makes up for the harass you miss out on from not knowing where he spawns.

On Frost, I usually just roll the dice and hope for the 2/3 chance that my ovie scouts correctly or (if he doesn't) my lings hit the right base. Even if all of those fail, depending on his scout orders he might not see anything with overlords and it's not all that bad if I just show up with 10 lings in his main when he's not expecting them versus having 6 show up at an earlier timing.

If he added a stargate to add mass phoenix he probably wins.

I go bane nest before speed close to 100% of the time when I sniff out a 10 pool speedling attack. You can tell when it (or a baneling attack) is coming, because they're hesitant to commit at all with their first lings, just like you said you do.

but that would require a second hotkey