Yeah, it annoys me so much for some reason. Anyways I'm playing again and am super awful now but that's ok. Mostly just ****ing around to get used to playing again

I maxed out on hellions for instance, that was fun

Latest balance discussion from Blizzard: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/star...update-march-6

In the "oh wow what a shocker" category

Who could have ever guessed that you give the raven back a lite version of a seeker missile that fires even faster and can't be escaped and it becomes idiotic really fast

(proposed changes: overlord drops move from evo chamber tech -> lair tech to help PvZ, raven anti-armor missile splash reduced from 30 damage to 5, viking health bumped from 125 -> 135 - these all seem good imo)

so i just realized you can inject hatcheries that already have larvae on them? wat? should i wait for the larvae to spawn before doing this, or is there a benefit to injecting anyway if you have the energy

Inject immediately on cooldown of the hatchery. There is a max though (eventually) but you always want as much larva as possible. It's a resource like minerals or gas.

so if the larvae is 1 second from popping and i'm nowhere close to 200 energy on my queens, should i still inject?

also tasteless is still doing the thing where he explains basic RTS strategy to viewers in a game where mostly hardcore esports fans watch? solid.

When you queue up an inject before the current one is finished, you're not hurting yourself. In an ideal world you'd not have enough energy to create much of a queue, but in reality, we suck. So the queue is helpful. They simply go off in sequence, one after another.

cool thanks

I'm worried that more people are doing my intentionally-quit-to-tank-MMR strategy. I've had three games in the last two nights against people that were definitely better than their MMR would suggest:

- "gold" Terran has kind of a weird opening on Backwater - walls off the main entrance with 2 raxes and a supply depot (he was on the left side so I got a hilarious and easy snipe on his stim with my first lings because his addons faced outward), but takes like three command centers behind it and with tanks in the right places his defenses are pretty solid. He sticks to marine tank but with really good macro and is cranking out lots of units and spreading them around enough that my mutas don't have great places to poke into and do damage. I win because his engages aren't great and he doesn't push hard enough to stop me from building an endgame army, but based on his macro alone I'd guess he's high plat/low diamond

- "platinum" Terran does an early double drop attack, sending 2 medivacs to my third and 2 to my main, while not taking a third himself - it does a decent amount of damage, but usually against this type of play in Platinum I'm thinking, okay, he put all his energy and attention into doing this attack, it did some damage, but it didn't kill me and players who do builds like this always fail to adjust to a long macro game afterwards. But this guy? Nope. He takes his third and delivers constant marine-tank pressure towards my third for the rest of the game, then takes his 4th during all this, I'm scrambling to get out enough lings/banes/mutas to fight it, and every time I kill off his army more shows up before I'm in a comfortable enough position to win a decisive battle and settle down. Eventually he gets the third and I have to gg out. My average apm is maybe 120-130 but the constant pressure in this game drove mine up to 170 (his was around there too). I'd guess high diamond for him.

- unranked random player rolls Toss and does a 2 base blink all in. I'm like, oh that's cute, I'm just going to crank roaches and overwhelm you now. Except...his blink micro is perfect. He barely loses any stalkers while pushing forward, blinking individual stalkers back during the fight, and then retreating back to his pylon while I'm getting roaches shaved off in every attack. Basically I keep sitting on the same number of roaches while his stalker count just grows and grows because they don't die. I'd guess...masters? I don't think I've ever played against an attack that strong, and who even knows if Protoss is his best race or not.

I think with the last two guys I looked through their match history and confirmed that they quit games like I do to depress their MMR. It's spreading!

wish there was an option to avoid mirror matchups in unranked, at least - that would probably solve some of those issues

how am i supposed to win this game? his one army destroyed 2 full max armies by me in the span of 90 seconds

https://drop.sc/replay/6761219

4:20: 25/16 drones mining in main, finally down to 22/16 after you fill the gas geyser again and start another extractor, still too much when your other bases aren't saturated
5:30: a few ravagers are good to stop liberators, I think 3 biles kills one
5:45: you only have two gases taken and a 800/100 bank, I think that's a sign you should probably start your other gases a little sooner - your double evo finished but you don't have enough gas to start +1 armor yet
7:30: by this late in the game you need to have an idea of how many bases he's on
13:30: hive just starting now, which is a bit late. try to think of it concurrently with 2/2, so that you can start 3/3 reasonably soon after 2/2 finishes - like, when you start 2/2, think about the infestation pit, and then have hive on your mind for when the infestation pit finishes, especially because vipers (which you lacked in this game) are such a crucial pairing with roach-hydra against Terran
13:50: attacking into sieged tanks with ranged units (barring an overwhelming advantage, which you don't have here especially coming in on two fronts) and no vipers is suicidal
14:00: after losing the first battle you remaxed almost entirely on roaches and I know you know from WoL what inefficient supply they are as the game gets later


Looking at this fight here:



Picture this same fight with, like, 5 binding clouds blanketing that arc of Terran units. It's a completely different fight! He has no response to that. Instead, the tanks are relatively protected and blasting away at your units (along with the marauders shredding roaches), the hydras are too far back to be able to hit most of the army, it's not a good situation. If Terran wants to play turtle-y with tanks, you have to either make wayyyy more than them to break it or tech up to something that disrupts their position (vipers or brood lords).

If you're maxed on lings and banes and mutas and just bumrush this position, you might have been able to take the fight. I'm not an expert on roach hydra against Terran but I imagine you have to be a bit more tactical in your engagements to have success with it.

thanks goofy. you're right on all of those things. i think i tech way too slow. im used to league games that take 40 minutes lol. 730 is so early game! Kappa

ive won my last 2 games by not teching slow and getting to hive tech as im taking my 4th. for ex: my next game against a turtling terran i hit ultra/crackling vs his mech army. he just got slaughtered. then i tech'd straight into BLs (altho it didnt matter... the game was over) cause i had 5 bases and infinite resources. he only had 3 and kept losing his 3rd to me

i ranked up to plat 3 despite my ineptitude v terran.

im hard on myself, but i have only been back 4 days lol

someone just tried to 4gate me

is that... still a thing?

On one base? lol, no, wow.

One thing worth noting that you probably aren't aware of - tanks got a buff at some point in the recent-ish past, damage in siege mode was boosted from 35 (+15 armored) to 40 (+30 armored), with a slight nerf in firing delay. So against roaches (or any armored unit) specifically, that's a change from 50 splash damage every 2 seconds to 70 damage every 2.14 seconds, which is...a 31% buff in damage? So, take that into account when attacking into tanks. (7% buff against non-armored so pretty whatever against non-roach Zerg units)

Lol! Since when?? My answer makes no sense given this sorry about that.

you were zerg? that seems like it should work about 0% of the time. did they go adept heavy or something?

Amazing how they're still trying to balance SC2 nearly eight years after release when they had brood war perfect after three

so are liberators the reason muta/ling/bane is not seen? or is it still widow mines vs bad zerg micro? or wat?

i just hate roaches and it seems from watching karak's replay that he'd do a lot better with non-roach based comps too?

More like three years of balancing LotV than eight years of balancing SC2

Liberators are probably a bigger reason why in pro matches, but it doesn't really deter me on ladder - lots of people don't make a proper amount of liberators (I think maybe ~5-6 can stop any number of mutas), it's more common to make Thors (I think their splash range got slightly buffed so that magic boxing is no longer possible, at least to the extent that only one muta will get hit by splash, maybe now it's 3-4 mutas at once instead) which are also a moderately effective deterrent.

Still, mutas are still great at defending drops (and it's not like Terrans escort medivacs with liberators), and corruptors are a decent alternative (like Dark uses) which are much stronger against liberators, or you can put that gas into hydras instead (and I guess leave some hydras behind at the edge of bases with extra static D to defend drops). And then sometimes you get players who don't play reactionary at all and will keep making marine-tank or whatever, then you make like 25 mutas once you take a couple fights and your bank gets large enough and laugh as you wreck their main.

I agree with that.

I love mutas, but against the Terrans I face, with my level of mechanics, it works roughly never. If the muta surprise doesn't outright win you the game (a Terran army that can't shoot up), then out come the Thors and you're boned. Not to mention marines being crazy efficient vs mutas.

Gone are the days where I could just build up my ball of 40 mutas and win games with constant harass. It's sad.

Instead, I am a HUGE fan of Corruptors for Medivac duty, with the added benefit of 6 Corruptors sniping a CC with frightening speed. If there are no open command centers, reactors and starports are also excellent Corruptor targets.

RIP Mutalisks.

Mutas need micro vs terran. Mass mutalisk used to sometimes be awesome Vs toss and needed little micro apart from a little bit vs storm.

No amount of muta micro is going to help you against the Thor changes.

Why do you quit matches? What's the fun in playing against unnaturally easy opponents?

Losing is less fun than winning. There's a limit though, playing people who are legit gold level is too mindlessly easy, it's still more fun if I have to break a sweat.

It's been a really long time since I tried to play competitively on my main, maybe I'll give it a shot and see if this theory should be updated at all. I think the last time I tried to play seriously I got sick and tired of losing to bad players who were just good enough that I couldn't hold their cheesy hellbat all-in.

i didnt expect to get here so quick
but nice