From TL's best games of the month, the end of this hour-long split map game between Serral and Showtime in NationWars is ****ing insane: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/247708274?t=04h05m22s

I skipped to like 48 minutes in, you'll catch all the good parts (they said Showtime had an impressive hold 50 supply down early on but I ain't got time for all that)

I'm actually having the same realization except against Protoss

GSL tonight, in 2 hours: Maru vs. Zanster, Bunny vs. Dear. Last chance to cheer for a foreigner to make the ro16 this season

Hype.
Maru gonna wreck

First map of the night is delivering. Hope the rest of the night is good!

game 1 of the winners mach was super cool

general comment - noregret casting with artosis is about 100x as good as tasteless casting with artosis. kinda weird since they've been together forever and have great non starcraft-related chemistry, but goes to show you how good artosis is and how much someone who contributes more than platitudes can bring

Yeah - NoRegret knows the game really well and is a surprisingly good caster for someone who I don't think has a lot of casting experience. He also knows a lot of the foreign players (and some Korean Zergs) pretty well and knows way more about Zerg builds than Tasteless or Artosis. Like, the level of analysis you usually see from Artosis is...

Protoss (which he plays): High. "Oh he hasn't taken his third gas yet and he skipped an adept, this is definitely a 7gate charge all-in"
Terran: Medium. "He snuck out a couple extra hellions instead of beginning a starport, so he's likely to follow this up with an armory for hellbats"
Zerg: "Well he's building a lair so this will probably be a spire or hydralisks"

So, it's great to have someone who balances out that gap.

On the flip side, Artosis does have great personal chemistry with Tasteless, and my gf will actually kinda enjoy watching Starcraft with me if they're casting (and only if they're casting) because they're so funny together.

so you almost think they should replace artosis with someone like noregret?

Did you mean "Tasteless" instead of "Artosis"? If so, yeah, sure. I didn't mean to bash Artosis' lack of Zerg knowledge as a "he sucks, get him out of here" sort of thing, no one is an expert on 100% of the game and that's fine. NoRegret's Zerg expertise balances well with the things that Artosis is an expert at.

nah i was just wondering if you think tasteless' general ability to make banter and noregret's knowledge would be better paired with someone who knows the game. makes sense though since artosis is a protoss specialist and noregret knows zerg.

Why not do a tricast then? You've got a play by play, hype/banter man and an analyst.

For bsball - super clean cannon rush defense: https://drop.sc/replay/7326721

He was random, and then I scouted high ground forge which is 99% cannon rush, so I went pool first in a situation where you might not always know to do so - but, I held it off plenty well before the pool was done. Wasn't perfect (in particular, because I control grouped my defending drones, I kept pulling one off of his probe to go attack cannons) but he still wasn't even close to getting any cannons up.

Saw this on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/c...n_raven_split/

It looks like hacking, but it's not (see comments): if you just stop command a bunch of ravens, they do the thing units do when they're being attacked but can't attack back, and move away from the damage. In case ravens weren't OP enough, you just press one button and your 30 ravens auto-split against a parasitic bomb.

he even did the gateway thing too! i should drone scout more in ZvP

Not exactly.

If you stop command right before the bomb goes off on a clumped group, this happens. If you stop command afterward, you lose all your ravens.

Works like this for mutas, too, but how often do you just have a group of mutas sitting idle?

This is the default behavior of any unit that is idle and begins taking damage. It will always move away from the source of the damage. You likely make use of this in every ZvZ matchup when you're killing idle Overlords early on with your queens, or at least you should. If you move "outside" the OL and attack, it will automatically wander closer to your base and to its inevitable death. If you attack from "inside" your creep then the OL moves outward and might escape once your queen runs out of creep to walk on and the enemy makes it to a break in the landscape.

I know (mutas attacking ground-to-ground units is another example), but generally you don't see it in actual fights because 99% of units you'd ever see in this situation can fight back against damage and thus will try to do so as a default, not spread nicely for you.

btw:

Tested this in the unit tester, I intentionally clumped a group of ravens, bombed them, continued to spam-clump and then as soon as I pressed "S", insta-spread. On top of this it takes multiple parasitic bombs to kill a raven and I think they don't stack anymore.


I played a game against mass raven the other day and it wrecked me - this person just made tons of planetaries all over the map, tons of extra CCs (because they have a million minerals), and it felt like there was nothing I could do because any army engagement ends in me getting wiped out. I got too deep into hydras as my main attempt at countering it, so I think next time I hit this I might try infestor/viper (downside: that comp can't kill autoturrets), and as a last resort I think trying to keep a corruptor clump decently spread (think Thor-ish magic boxing) to make their AA missiles detonate against the raven clump might be a good tactic - but after that I'm out of ideas, no idea how to beat it. I had like 10 mutas in the early game to try to snipe workers/expansions and he was like LOL and wiped the whole group out with 3-4 missiles.

welcome to how it felt fighting bl/infestor

There was a guy on ladder back in the HOTS days i'd probably face once every 2 weeks or so who would only do this (PF @ the natural and all), and this was back when the seeker missile was something you could actually split/ against.

The only two strategies I ever found productive against it (note that both are insanely cost-ineffective) were roach/baneling all inning and hoping his micro was bad that day, or drawing the game out to 40 minutes, tirelessly making spores and spines, defending against every harass, and hoping he made a mistake so you could fungal his ravens. Guess which one i ended up doing

I feel like a midgame tier 2 unit push aimed to hit when he has the infrastructure up, but not the mass # of ravens yet, has to the be the time to beat it.

Interesting. I wonder if this is Raven-only behavior then. Did you try it with Mutas? I've never played Terran, but using the Stop command and no follow-up on a group of infected mutas is a good way to just lose all your mutas in my experience. Maybe in the heat of the moment I've simply never noticed it, given how quickly mutas melt vs Parasitic Bomb in the first place.

Edit: Maybe because mutas have an air/ground attack, and the default behavior to attack a nearby unit overrides the self-preservation protocol?

The plan I eventually developed against that in HotS was, 5-6 bases right away (because they're bad so it's basically no rush 20 for them), mine a crapton, double spire upgrades, mass muta. You could trigger seekers then escape them pretty easily. Made those guys rage so hard.

hm, so that definitely would not work anymore? because of anti-armor being different? and thors?

Yeah, Thors aren't that different but AA missile is, hilariously, better at killing things than seeker missile ever was. It fires faster and it's undodgeable. I think those characteristics also make it harder to use AA missiles against the ravens (you could do so with with seekers because the delay in firing allowed you to close in targeted units onto the ravens before it hit, don't think that works with AA).

Speak of the devil, Blizzard community update:

THANK GOD

Some other minor changes (vikings +10 health, undoing the LotV marauder nerf that split their attacks into two shots, raven autoturret cast range +1) but that's the big one