I also present a work of art I call: Mad Toss. (Please tell me if these big image posts bother a lot of people, and I'll stop making them. It's hard for me to eval how other PCs handle them. Also, I've really stopped BMing people because that's dumb an Idra-like... and I've RECEIVED more BM as a result!)

NSFW LANGUAGE

AlphaDog=idra twoplustwo account? confirm/deny?

Zerg is such a tough race to balance. I'm a plat Terran and TvZ is my worst matchup. I have no problem taking TvP or TvT late game. But if my initial push or my reinforcements to that push don't do huge damage to Z, I might as well just gg.
I've had games where i do the 3 tank push, kill his natural, get my natural up, and still lose.
All that being said, I look at pro level PvZ and it loltastic.

I dont understand if zerg is so hard and protoss is so easy play protoss and laugh it up? I dont think its true but its so strange to be complaining about it when theres a simple fix, protoss macro is the easiest as well so its an easy transition! Either way if you off race for a week you will either figure out the weaknesses in protoss play or it actually is super OP and you can stay and crush.

4v4 last night had someone try an in base proxy hatch on me for the first time. i had a scv going to build my first depot and thought i saw a drone out of the corner of my eye. sent another scv to check, yep drone. wtf could he be doing. only thing could be proxy hatch.
told my teammates i think i'm being proxy hatched. didn't kill drone, just finished wall.
made bunker in range of hatch, waited until hatch finished, then filled bunker with marines. he built a queen, and 4 lings. I killed all of them and the hatch without losing a unit. Then I BC rushed him. lolz.

Work in progress.

Living up to your name

Did you boom boom boom all over his face with those banes you were morphing?

This posts sounds like the early retail terran posts itt

Ive never seen you post about balance before as far as I can remember do you think zerg is broken? Youre the most qualified ITT probably.

And for the record I do exactly what I outlined in that post. Ive been struggling PvZ lately and I just started playing ZvP and doing the pushes I was losing to to figure out the weaknesses.

MOLETRAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP



that is all.

You might be able to dig up a whining post or two of mine from when I get frustrated about losing, but overall I try to stay away from it. I do troll our chat channel about making nothing but marines and winning but that's just in good fun.

I think all the races have their areas of difficulty and moments of weakness. While one can look at a PvZ and say omg the toss has it so easy, just a-move the deathball and win! you have to consider the game as a whole. Yeah it might be kind of easy to amove your colo+vr+stalker+sentry ball...But there are definite points of vulnerability along the way to that amove+win army. If the other player doesn't find and exploit them, or at least make life difficult along the way, you kind of deserve what's coming.

Reverse into ZvP. When I get my maxed money army of 4 ultras, 80 banelings and a bunch of cracklings with full upgrades and a booming economy behind it, I imagine I get the same feeling of invincibility that protoss players might feel with their deathball. I feel like I'm unstoppable at that point, and usually I am. I've had players tell me zerg is op, lol like that takes skill and other similar statements. It's just another one of those situations where you have to poke at vulnerabilities all game long.

I feel like I can look at a replay and write an essay on the mistakes I made without even taking into account what my opponent does. Until I can get that down to a couple paragraphs or reasonably few mistakes (playing perfect just isn't in the cards), trying to get the balance of the game changed doesn't seem like the best way to improve my winrate.

Probably the biggest complaint I've had about this game was the map pool. Back when we had such masterpieces as Steppes, Incineration Zone, Jungle Basin, Delta Quadrant, Kulas Ravine, LT. Not all were terrible, but there were aspects to them that greatly favoured or greatly hampered a particular race. Now that most of these have been changed or eliminated in favour of what I consider to be more balanced maps I'm pretty happy with where we are in that department. Vetoes allow me to get rid of most of the maps I don't want to play on (looking at you DQ, Slag and Scrap ).

The problem I had with a lot of these maps was the time it took to get from one base to another. I felt like I was forced to play an all-out aggressive style, because of the way that zerg larva works. I'm sure many people are familiar with the idea that you build drones until you see stuff coming. The problem was that on these small maps was that by the time you saw the opponent moving out, it was too late to produce units. He would arrive before they spawned, game over. So then I tried just mixing in units with my drones. I wound up with some army and some drones, and not really much of either. I found that I was forced into big aggressive plays on these maps, and that's something that I thought was broken. If you know zerg is going to be playing early aggression against you, it can be defended. If I don't play aggressive early, I end up in a bad spot with a neutered economy and a mediocre army. The other option is to roll the dice and build a big economy, hoping your opponent doesn't attack. Once all these miniature maps went away, I feel like the game became much more fair, balanced, or whatever you want to call it. Now I don't have to deal with this situation much any more. 1/3 of the time on shattered and metal I'll roll close spawns and I'll do some early aggro with banelings or roaches. The rest of my games (tal'darim, 2/3 metal, 2/3 shattered, typhon, shakuras, xel'naga) I feel like I have the option to be aggressive or passive, I'm not forced into an obvious path.

Terran and Protoss have generally been hit by the nerf bat since retail, while Zerg has benefitted from a few buffs. Oddly enough, ZvP has gone from my best matchup at retail to my worst matchup at present. I think it's because of the shifts in the way people play the game, and an increased understanding of how the races interact. I used to be able to get away with a big ball of mutas and harassing people to death, but protoss players struggled with it for a few months, then gradually became better at handling it using big gateway plays to kill it off before it got off the ground or discovering that faster building phoenix do pretty well against it. So then I had to find a new way to play, and moved on to roaches with burrow. That did pretty well for a few weeks, then protoss players started figuring that out too. Now I'm onto ling/bane/ultra. It's yeilding pretty good results right now, but is it going to be good a week from now? a month?

I don't think zerg is broken. There's enough holes in my play that I have to fix first before I'd say that. A lot of you guys have seen how I play and how "good" my mechanics are lol. I've won games where I feel like my opponent is better than I am. I've lost games where I feel I'm better than my opponent. It's just that some people will only consider the latter case when they make their argument that something is imbalanced.

I've written this post in between the world allstars v IM games, so if it's disjointed plz forgive ^^

alright, i had some time to sleep on it, and obv. the post i made last night was rage-driven. I think I might be meta-gaming myself into dumb losses.

the core of my complaint is the inability for zerg to scout and react to what the protoss is doing, and with tricky stuff like the ogsMC 4 gate popping up, I feel like i have to blind counter things. Even if the protoss does just do the standard sentry expand, I still find myself not knowing what is going to be coming as it's just so easy to deny zergs scouting until around 9 minutes into the game, around the time a 6 gate is getting ready to hit, and I feel like if I don't get roaches and burrow I'm just going to die every time. This sets me behind if the Protoss just decides to turtle and take a 3rd and go for the deathball, because i'm stuck with a largely roach army that has no chance against a macrotoss.

SCOUTING TIPS ANYONE!?!? (PLEASE DONT SAY "SAC AN OL" OR I'M GOING TO KILL YOU)

sac an OL

battle.net down for me now can't get on..

sac an overseer

Sac 2 OLs at the same time.

Creep around his base with a burrowed roach.

Tech to hive then sac a brood lord.

Baneling bust his ramp then sac an ultralisk.

The options are limitless.

sac a queen

i know it costs you a couple hundred minerals, but why not just scan him?

lol

i really hate you guys

Burrowed movement roaches imo.

Use an observer, hallucinate, or scan.

Oh wait...LoLLLLL.

jk

I find that a lot of scouting information comes from poking in and then backing up. It also puts pressure on the other person. I see a lot of the top players constantly harassing. That gives you an opportunity to see what they have. Sometimes you just have to get buildings just incase you run into something. Against Protoss you'll probably run into Colossi alot, so probably at some point you just have to get a Spire (corruptors). Throw a zergling at them, see what it runs into.

I also see a lot of the top players attacking with some of their army, while rallying the rest back in their base. They don't just attack with a deathball. They keep up their macro and if their harass attack seems to open a hole, then you can start going for the killing blow. I think that works a lot better with Terran and Zerg since Protoss has to warp in, and normally you warp in to reinforce.

That's just what I've been seeing lately. Maybe it's time to take a little break. For me, PvP and getting 4gated is really annoying, especially when it happens 2 times in a row and I, being a noob, don't know how to defend it properly.

4gate back!

Stunna has enlightened me on the defensive 4gate. I never ran into it in awhile and I never threw it into my game because I was trying to get more comfortable with playing. I learned how to do it now so whenever I get PvP again I'll just be 4gating.

you have become what you have hated! :P

I saw BigT do it last night too. He wasn't the aggressor, but he did a 4gate and stayed in his base. He eventually held off 3 pushes and won the match. I'd have to say though that PvP seems like it could drive someone to change races.

Are there builds similar to that in TvT and ZvZ?

BigT sounds familiar. Who is he?

All I know is that he's a Protoss player who played around 4000 games in S1. He plays a ton.

He was a streamer on TL until he said some things and got banned. Now he streams on own3d pretty much every night.