Personally I can't imagine justifications for pylon overcharge, but yes I'm with you.

Neither of these changes result in good skill-rewarding gameplay

I imagine the justification is that they were worthless before, and I'm not sure if I've seen nyduses actually succeed when you have troops in place to fire on it (it does take a moment to get queens out and transfuse, so if you focus it quickly it should still die?), but admittedly my sample size is small.

This game is so fast now. I knew they made changes but damn the game starts and you have to start making decisions.

Nydus always seemed like a desperation attempt so I'm not sure you needed to buff something that was always just going to be a hail mary when the early game went awry

When do GSL and WCS qualifying and Code A and whatnot start up again?

There's a Dreamhack starting Thursday with a mediocre lineup (only 4 Koreans - Parting, Bomber, TY, Solar).

After that, for WCS, if last year is any indication qualifying will start in early January. SSL challenger league was played in late December, and GSL qualifiers happened in mid December (offline, no broadcast) with Code S starting in early January. I don't think the dates for any of these have been announced yet.

Loaded this up for the first time since mid-September. Placed Silver, gents. Hard life.

I predict a 100% winrate until I run into Platinum kids.

Both of my placement losses were ZvZ. I got a hatch cancel in game one and then over-extended and lost to the counter-cancel and contain. My 6 mutas ran into his 9 mutas, and I just left. He was on a second base way longer than I was. Second loss I defended an early ling/bling all-in and then stupidly tried to just kill him instead of stabilizing and teching up. I didn't have banelings, he did. I'm not good enough at zergling micro.

What's the takeaway from these two ZvZ losses? Build a ****ing baneling nest.


Edit: Yeah, first real game is against a Gold. I decide to drone scout because I'm not going to lose to some new cheese. I show up and can't find anything in his base, so I immediately think I'm getting proxy 3-raxed and start preparing. Nope, just Gold. It never comes. At 8 mins I fly in with 20 mutas on a 50 supply lead and he just leaves. Silver my ass.


Edit 2: Third game was against the first Plat. I built a Hatchery at his natural and seemed to be on my way to victory when 2 Oracles showed up and killed ~35 drones at home. gg.

ZvZ muta wars. He was on 3 bases longer than I was and had a bigger ball. I went carapace though, so that helps me hold my own. Toward the 15 min mark I finish my Hive and immediately build 8 vipers.

I've pre-built the evolution chambers for consume, except the vipers are taking ****ing forever to build. I distract his massive muta ball with skirmishes in the middle of the map. He does a ling run-by and my roaches clean it up at the choke with the help of some spines before.

Wait, what? Where the **** did those Roaches come from? And where the **** are my vipers?

Well, I hit R instead of E when I built Vipers. They never came. Instead of popping 50 mutas with a single keystroke, I lose the game because I accidentally built 8 roaches instead of vipers. FML. This is why I'm silver.

I keep forgetting parasitic bomb exists.

I'm really, really bad at ZvZ, since I basically took a vacation from playing it ever in HotS. Most frequent causes of deaths are...
- didn't build baneling nest, 50 lings flood in from nowhere while I'm droning, I die
- didn't scout, 10 mutas fly in from nowhere, I die
- 15 banelings start waddling into my natural, I didn't spine up, I die

If I can survive the first five minutes I'm generally okay after that, as long as I don't take the super worse end of something like getting trapped on 2 bases against a muta opener that takes map control + way faster 3rd.

Nice, I'll look in mid-December. I don't know how they would approach the switch to LOTV and whatnot, but I am looking forward to watching some competitive LOTV. Seems like it's gonna be ****ing nuts.

I need to change my name to "Throw by overextend"

I'm just donating these games to my opponents.

I'm slowly discovering that ravagers are really, really good against mech. It's a very strange feeling to make a mech army turn around when the only units you've made have been out of the roach warren.

There was a community update from Blizzard a couple days ago I missed:

I love the last one. "We are definitely seeing some games with them" - super helpful, letting us know that this is a thing that exists

Won too many. I'm in gold now but the last game was against a Masters zerg.

13 pool on a 4 player map. Got a spine in his base, but he held and I got **** on by the ling flood follow up.

Gotta play for real now.

Ending the evening in Platinum. Maybe tomorrow I'll finish grinding back to Diamond.

I went 15-11 tonight overall. Most of those losses were ZvZ to kids in Diamond+. Though, I had one really disheartening loss to Terran on the giant map with 20 bases. Ruins of something. Terran turtled on 1 base for pretty much the entire game and I threw 20 brood lords and a bunch of ling/ultra into him at about 20 mins. I got WRECKED by ~10 liberators and tanks behind engineering bay walls. A better player than myself would've won easily given how far ahead I was, but I failed miserably at dealing with his drops and eventually just ran out of ****. I lost 30k more resources than he did according to replay.

I was told to kill myself 3 times, and two of my wins were freebies from people that I crushed hard on the game prior.

10/10 would rage at all the throws again.

Slade#1912 if anyone wants to dick around or do Archon mode or something.

I give you:

The SC2 Equivalent of the Opening Fight Scene from Casino Royale

Those vikings got serious work done.

To help schu get his LotV fix, Olimoleague this morning (still ongoing atm but probably not much longer) (weekly online KR tournament if you haven't heard of it)

The tournament was generally smallbeans during HotS and WCS when there was a lot of other things going on, but now that it's the only competitive LotV tournament around bigger names are signing up.

It's definitely interesting watching these games compared to the ones I play - the strats are completely different, which I guess shows how early we are in the LotV metagame (like, in HotS people would do the same general builds/strategies that pros do, but just do a ****ty job of executing them if they were bad enough to match against me).

Like, Trap vs Soulkey game 1, Trap does oracle opener into adept harass with like 6 adepts. I don't think large adept harass forces is something I've had to deal with a single time yet. Meanwhile Soulkey goes lair -> hydra den -> lurker den really fast, something I haven't tried even once.

Jesus christ idk how you beat ultralisks.

The glaring weakness of Ultra play is that they cannot shoot up. Capitalize on that.

But in all seriousness, Ultras are how Zerg win lategame vs Terran shenanigans.

Dreamhack day 1 spoiler (just click it, let's be honest, you're not going back to watch the 38 hours of VODs between all the streams that casted it):

Really enjoying Dreamhack. Getting my lotv fix in.

PvP disrupter vs disrupter is kinda hilarious

This is so ****ing silly and ridiculous. I love it.