StarCraft 2

I think it's more likely that Life will win another one, that guy is a beast.

I wonder if people will come back and play HotS MP more. They really fixed the #1 issue which is ladder anxiety. As a quick rundown:

*Added XP system giving you rewards for playing (I don't care about rewards, some may)
*Removed seeing your ladder rank/icon after playing a game. You have to exit some screens.
*Removed seeing your opponent's ladder rank/icon after playing. You need to click the "performance" tab to see it.
*Added a "Play Again" button
*Bonus pool now eats your losses in points. So if you have 40 BP and lose a game that would subtract 20 you instead just have no change in points and 20 less BP.

I'm finding it easier to grind games these days without constantly worrying about my rank and shit.

And unranked play, which is awesome if you are diamond or above because you will usually get someone pretty weak

I think I'm sold on HotS PvZ, so hard to get out of the mindset where you simply couldn't counterattack though.

edit: Diamond league bitches !

PvT is bullshit and almost unplayable without stargate and phoenixes, medivacs give way too much map control against people with brain, you can get easily dropped without any risks. Zealot/sentry/immortal phoenix seem to be my best midgame composition, rushing t3 is almost impossible, because you WILL get dropped and harassed to hell. Even if you are scouting with obs and hallucinated phoenixes, you still can't punish him. Oracles seem to be rather shit, low hp/shields and low range, once people just build static defense around their mineral lines, they become flying paperweights that cost 150 gas and they aren't even that good vs drops. Of course, they work vs baddies and the speed at which they evaporate undefended mineral line is only rivaled by hellbats. Hellbat drop is one of those bullshit strats btw, especially with reapers to deny map control before it happens.

Medivac speed boost has definitely made drop play significantly more viable in hots. I don't know if I'd call it bullshit since Protoss in WoL would just not give a fuck and just "lol warpgate" defend drops. Which is far more bullshit imo.

Rule of Bomber: "If Bomber doesn't disappoint, it is only to set up a bigger disappointment later on."

There's some ridiculously strong timing attacks being enabled by the fact that Terran can traverse their entire tech tree on a single gas. Remember that build I posted? There's actually a much stronger one that was pointed out to me, basically:

12 Refinery
14 Barracks
Factory and immediate Reactor on Barracks when Barracks finishes.
Starport as soon as Factory finishes, make 2 Hellions from Factory and 6 Marines from the reactored rax.
Marines 5+6 and Hellion 2 pop out at the same time, swap reactor to factory, make 2 more hellions, keep making marines.
Medivac when Starport finishes.
With next 100 gas, when Medivac is about half done, start Armory.

Hellions 3+4 will pop about 10 seconds after your Medivac pops. You also will hit 400 minerals at about this point, so start an expansion. Then pull the majority of your workers and take them alongside your 8 marines, 4 hellions, and Medivac to the Protoss base. Start 2 Widow Mines and rally factory to Protoss base. Don't load anything into the Medivac yet, just send it down. Park the Hellions at a cliff overlooking the Protoss main, and send your Medivac to them. When armory completes, morph them to Hellbats, then elevator them into the Protoss base while running into their natural with your marine/scv attack. The idea is to force them to overcharge their main to not die, at which point you can just go bunker their expansion with widow mines backing you up and win easily because it's 2 bases to 1 and you have your tech out.

While immediately reactoring the barracks is risky, I don't see any way to hold this without using a blind build, either by allining them myself or continuous chronoboost (5+) on warpgates research plus a heavy probe cut to get gates 2 and 3 down in time so you can warp in stalkers in time to deny their drop. If you deny the drop you can overcharge the expo and hold easily. Protoss players honestly tend to play very greedy in general with only 1 or 2 chrono boosts on warpgates, if any at all, so this build just slaughters them. If they went 17 Nexus or Gate Nexus Core they won't have overcharge ready and will die no matter what they do.

How do you not stop that build via map presence? Its not like a handful of un-upgraded marines and some hellions w/o hellbat can really do too much in a straight engagement. You could endlessly delay that push with simple presence with stalkers on the map. There seems to be this mindset I've seen a ton of Toss do in HotS where a Terran is 1basing and they just play the game pretending like the Terran FE'd. So many times I see very simple drops that could be crushed if the Toss did a safer build. But instead nah they just Gate FE, Core, Robo, Die.

Zaphid_sl said:

Rule of Bomber: "If Bomber doesn't disappoint, it is only to set up a bigger disappointment later on."

Click to expand...

Nope, this is the GSL of Bomber! He deserves that championship! (Well, not as much as MVP deserves a 5th one but /shrug).

Tenks_sl said:

How do you not stop that build via map presence? Its not like a handful of un-upgraded marines and some hellions w/o hellbat can really do too much in a straight engagement. You could endlessly delay that push with simple presence with stalkers on the map. There seems to be this mindset I've seen a ton of Toss do in HotS where a Terran is 1basing and they just play the game pretending like the Terran FE'd. So many times I see very simple drops that could be crushed if the Toss did a safer build. But instead nah they just Gate FE, Core, Robo, Die.

Click to expand...

Assuming a standard opening, 9pylon/13gate, mothership core before warpgates, he has four units out when you move out. Zealot/Stalker/Sentry/MsC. And some Protoss skip the zealot. He can't stop anything. If he chain chrono boosts he can finish warpgates just before you arrive and deny the drop. Otherwise, sure he can scout it coming in, but if he failed to boost.....he can't really do anything.

It's not like it's unstoppable, pretty much any allin kills Terran dead, 2 or 3 gate expo kills it badly, even 1 gate FE kills it if you chain chrono boost. It just specifically kills the 1 gate FE, gate nexus core, and Nexus first builds that the vast majority of Protoss have been using for like a year against Terran.

Early game TvP is still pretty big clusterfuck, since you have no idea whether the terran expanded and unless you do like 9/10 scout you don't even have to get inside their base unless they let you. I think I'll be doing something like 1gate stargate for a while and put down the nexus only when I know they expanded and see how it goes. Cutting units when you are doing 1gate expo is bigger risk than ever before since reapers, medivacs and hellions all outrun anything you might have so even if you have map control with stalkers, you can still get blindsided. So maybe we will see a comeback of forge expands ?

I did a pretty cute build yesterday which was basically show my SD/Rax at the front while taking a standard gas. I hid another rax behind the minerals in my natural. After I pushed the probe out I walled up, took another gas, and floated my rax back into my base where I put on a reactor. I then basically 3x produced reapers for a while constantly darting in/out and doing damage. I transitioned way, way too late out of it because I was dancing around the map with like 14 reapers but he had 5 gates cycling so they became pretty worthless. It was a pretty fun and interesting opener. I believe it has merits as long as I understand when to get out of it sooner. I'll probably try more work with it later tonight. Only downside is it requires hella APM. I may try it going 3 naked rax instead of 1+1reactor.

Yeah, massed reapers will butcher delayed WG, because if you can pick off the stalker that moves out for map control, he's in deep shit.

State of the game today BTW, 5am for me, that's like 8pm for you, right ?

Depends on the area of the country. 10 PM EST / 9 PM CST / 8 PM MT / 7 PM PST.

Cool stuff. Won't really matter to me but will be great for casting via replay and live event recovery.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/8501413

Wow they've added a feature that SC1 had, and created the ability to reconnect to a disconnected game... something that any game should have.

Whats the point of your post other than being a shithead? So what if they are late the fact is they added it based upon community feedback.

The point is that it'sreallylate. Being able to watch replays with someone is what players wanted since beta and tournament games have already been ruined multiple times by disconnects.

I'd be inclined to agree with Tenks, but the community managed to hack together the feature in about a week. The real answer is that it wasn't on their feature list in WoL and their live team is probably nonexistent or Blizzard doesn't see value in adding significant features in patches.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/view...opic_id=395154

Time to start owning up the Korean Ladder, Tenks. I believe!