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StarCraft 2 Beta |OT| (Beta Now Reopen, GL HF)

LaneDS

Member
Do Archons have any uses? In all the matches I've played, and all the replays I've watched of actual good players, I've precisely zero of them in use. Did they get any love in SC1 either?
 
frankthurk said:
That wasn't cheese that was brilliant harass.

whaaatever, those things build too fast, the T should've definately built a depot or something in his corners though to prevent it from happening again and again...
 
LaneDS said:
Do Archons have any uses? In all the matches I've played, and all the replays I've watched of actual good players, I've precisely zero of them in use. Did they get any love in SC1 either?
They get tons of love in classic, absolutely killer in PvZ, thing is they had splash damage but they took it out for sc2 :/
 
Orangepeel said:
whaaatever, those things build too fast, the T should've definately built a depot or something in his corners though to prevent it from happening again and again...

Please tell me you aren't sorimachi...
'gg fag'? Didn't realize starcraft was running on xbox live.
 
frankthurk said:
Please tell me you aren't sorimachi...
'gg fag'? Didn't realize starcraft was running on xbox live.

how many times does the guy have to say how disappointed he is he isnt in the beta in this thread before you dont assume he's the guy running around saying gg fag?
 

Pandaman

Everything is moe to me
Ice Monkey said:
how many times does the guy have to say how disappointed he is he isnt in the beta in this thread before you dont assume he's the guy running around saying gg fag?
x2+5 the amount of times he comments on unit balance in a game he hasnt played.
 

LaneDS

Member
Orangepeel said:
They get tons of love in classic, absolutely killer in PvZ, thing is they had splash damage but they took it out for sc2 :/

Ah ha. Well, I assume they'll get some kind of work done, because right now they're easily the most unused Protoss unit I can think of.

Even Psi Storm doesn't seem to get used as often, but I'm sure it's still effective if used correctly.
 

Won

Member
Orangepeel said:
whaaatever, those things build too fast, the T should've definately built a depot or something in his corners though to prevent it from happening again and again...

Build time was already doubled. I would say that thing needs a buff again if anything.
 
NovemberMike said:
Before the last patch they were probably the most powerful unit in the game, but the patch just made static defenses a lot better, which nerfed the muta quite a bit in their ability to harass. Missile turrets just got their damage nearly doubled, photon cannons got knocked up to 300 HP and spore colonies got cheaper, not to mention the Thor moving to AOE damage. They aren't horrible or anything, but they've had their ability to effectively harass greatly reduced.

NovemberMike said:
Banshees are actually significantly better against turrets than mutas. Missile Turrets have 7 range while banshees have 6 and mutas have 3, which means that mutas will often take damage from 3+ turrets while shees are taking damage from 1, Banshees have more health, and Banshees do about 2.5x the damage against turrets that mutas do.

EDIT: Found some numbers. Mutas should be doing about 6 dps if they don't have a valid target to jump to (ie. the jump target hits a supply depot or something). Banshees are doing about 20 dps. The turrets are doing about 28 dps and have 2x the health of a muta and more than 2x the range. If you start microing a muta back too late it will often be dead before it actually gets out of the range of the turret.

your perception of mutas in interesting, but way off base. They are easily the most powerful zerg unit even if just because of their speed. Your contention that they are less amazing because of static defense buffs is way off base, too, as you forget how much someone has to invest in static defense for it to matter to a muta ball...and any player worth his salt at that point would just use just as many mutas to control the map and attack the turtle's base with something else entirely.

hypothetical situation: a terran player has umpteen billion turrets in his base, that you notice as soon as you send a ball of mutas in to harass. Any zerg player should have 3-4 hatcheries at a point that the turrets would be all around in his base, but the gist of that is that you can immediately produce 30-40 zerglings assuming you follow the #1 zerg rule of spawning larva like your life depended on it.

Anyways lets continue, lets say he has 3 or 4 turrets somehow shoved at his ramp, PLUS 4-5 siege tanks. Not only is this again a major investment into turtling that will probably doom him against a good zerg player but lets go through the steps to easily break his choke. Go in, focus fire the turrets and/or the siege tanks first with mutas, and basically as soon as the siege tanks are dead, send in your army of zerglings. I guarantee you anyone building that many turrets is both strapped for cash and probably only has his main base. If his expansions have 10 turrets at each, then you must have fallen asleep during the match because it would take much longer to accomplish that than to build a 20-ball of mutas to harass with. In order to have both zerglings and mutas, you only need to build TWO TOTAL TECH STRUCTURES not including lair. speedlings should obviously have been researched and maybe even a +1 attack for mutas so basically you'd be ready after spending 200 minerals on a pool, 150/100 gas on lair, 200/150 gas on the spire and then 300 minerals per hatchery you buy, plus the 100/100 for speedlings and 100/100 for +flyer attack. This is a total of 1050/450 for structures +300 per extra hatchery. Anyways I went too long into that but the point is that you can spend the rest on units while the other guy is spending 75 minerals on each turret or 150 on each cannon.

Also, dont forget if someone turtles like this to the point that mutas would get demolished in their base you can always just build some mutas for defense and tech to brood lords and take out turrets with no hits being taken just like in sc1 with guardians. (can anyone confirm this, that brood lords can out range defense?)
 
My name in SC2 Beta = Seeker.crik

I'm still going through my placement matches.

I'm just happy I managed to win one of them so far. 2 more matches left to play!

I stopped playing the original SC a long time ago (About a decade or so ago) so my knowledge of SC mechanics = very rusty and out of date. So, I've been learning on the fly.

Right now, I'm playing protoss. The build I'm using is the zealot/Stalkers - kill - panic if the game isn't over in 15 minutes.
 

F#A#Oo

Banned
Anyone got any good youtube channels for SC2?

I've sub'ed;

BlizShouter
diggitySC
HDStarcraft
HuskyStarcraft
PsyStarcraft
SCForAll
StarCraftLegacy

Anymore I'm missing out on?

Watching SC vids is really addicitive... :D I watch more then I play...:lol
 
Ice Monkey said:
your perception of mutas in interesting, but way off base. They are easily the most powerful zerg unit even if just because of their speed. Your contention that they are less amazing because of static defense buffs is way off base, too, as you forget how much someone has to invest in static defense for it to matter to a muta ball...and any player worth his salt at that point would just use just as many mutas to control the map and attack the turtle's base with something else entirely.

hypothetical situation: a terran player has umpteen billion turrets in his base, that you notice as soon as you send a ball of mutas in to harass. Any zerg player should have 3-4 hatcheries at a point that the turrets would be all around in his base, but the gist of that is that you can immediately produce 30-40 zerglings assuming you follow the #1 zerg rule of spawning larva like your life depended on it.

Anyways lets continue, lets say he has 3 or 4 turrets somehow shoved at his ramp, PLUS 4-5 siege tanks. Not only is this again a major investment into turtling that will probably doom him against a good zerg player but lets go through the steps to easily break his choke. Go in, focus fire the turrets and/or the siege tanks first with mutas, and basically as soon as the siege tanks are dead, send in your army of zerglings. I guarantee you anyone building that many turrets is both strapped for cash and probably only has his main base. If his expansions have 10 turrets at each, then you must have fallen asleep during the match because it would take much longer to accomplish that than to build a 20-ball of mutas to harass with. In order to have both zerglings and mutas, you only need to build TWO TOTAL TECH STRUCTURES not including lair. speedlings should obviously have been researched and maybe even a +1 attack for mutas so basically you'd be ready after spending 200 minerals on a pool, 150/100 gas on lair, 200/150 gas on the spire and then 300 minerals per hatchery you buy, plus the 100/100 for speedlings and 100/100 for +flyer attack. This is a total of 1050/450 for structures +300 per extra hatchery. Anyways I went too long into that but the point is that you can spend the rest on units while the other guy is spending 75 minerals on each turret or 150 on each cannon.

Also, dont forget if someone turtles like this to the point that mutas would get demolished in their base you can always just build some mutas for defense and tech to brood lords and take out turrets with no hits being taken just like in sc1 with guardians. (can anyone confirm this, that brood lords can out range defense?)

Why does everyone point out that they aren't talking about straight mutas and then use retarded straight unit strats for the other race in their counter example? The terran player isn't going to mass missile turrets or anything, he's going to get 2-3 of them around a vulnerable expansion if he things that a harass is likely. Seriously, what terran spends all his resources on turrets and siege tanks? He's going to have mixtures of marines, medevac, siege tanks, ravens, thor etc depending on what point in the game it is.

Here, I'll do some math (really rough stuff, might be off by a bit). 20 mutas should kill a missile turret in about 2 seconds, but the turret gets an additional attack off at the beginning. So, with 3 turrets, assuming that the zerg player micros perfectly.'

Mutas = 125ish dps.
Towers = 30dps per (so 90dps then 60dps then 30dps).
Second 1: Mutas out of range, towers deal 90 damage.
Second 2: Mutas in range, tower 1 at 50% hp, towers deal 90 damage.
Second 3: Mutas in range, tower 1 dead, towers deal 90 damage.
Second 4: Mutas in range, tower 2 at 50%, towers deal 60damage
Second 5: Mutas in range, tower 2 dead, towers deal 60 damage.
Second 6: Mutas in range, tower 3 at 50%, towers deal 30damage
Second 7: Mutas in range, tower 3 dead, towers deal 30damage.

The towers dealt a total of 450 damage, which theoretically translates to around 3 dead mutas. Keep in mind that really the first tower should have lasted a second longer and dealt more damage, so you are more realistically looking at 4-5 mutas killed. Mutas also take some time to move between towers, so you add a bit of inefficieny there. If the zerg player moves units out they aren't doing damage either, so thats additional inefficiency. This also ties up a significant portion of your army for around 10 seconds, which gives the opponent time to move an army in or push.

The time it gets really bad is with 10 mutalisks or so. Then they pretty much just die. 3 turrets are only 300 minerals and they force the enemy to have a large number of mutas before it becomes viable to harass.

I'm not saying that mutas are weak, but previously they were overpowered and now they are just another good unit.
 
Orangepeel said:

That isn't cheese.. ugh.

Probably shouldn't comment on cheese unless you actually play the game. The guy in the game called it cheese only because he got taken out by it and was bitter. I bet his opponent thought his tears tasted oh so good too.


That was really quick nydus worming for sure but awesome job on placement of the overlords all around. I'm actually shocked they didn't win but they pulled out some newbie plays. They constatnly harassed and when they did enough dmg they should have continued to tech and build up at their bases as opposed to attack with 10 roaches praying it would finish em off.. Likewise with Reapers.

That should be done once maybe twice then moved on to other things. Also the thing that honestly cost them the game was the lack of purple making scvs at his island base at the end and teal sitting on 1300+ minerals and 1000 or so gas at the end with no buildings/units and not sharing them with his partner. Then just leaving.. wtf?

Yea.. total mistake.
 
Ice Monkey said:
your perception of mutas in interesting, but way off base. They are easily the most powerful zerg unit even if just because of their speed. Your contention that they are less amazing because of static defense buffs is way off base, too, as you forget how much someone has to invest in static defense for it to matter to a muta ball...and any player worth his salt at that point would just use just as many mutas to control the map and attack the turtle's base with something else entirely.

hypothetical situation: a terran player has umpteen billion turrets in his base, that you notice as soon as you send a ball of mutas in to harass. Any zerg player should have 3-4 hatcheries at a point that the turrets would be all around in his base, but the gist of that is that you can immediately produce 30-40 zerglings assuming you follow the #1 zerg rule of spawning larva like your life depended on it.

Anyways lets continue, lets say he has 3 or 4 turrets somehow shoved at his ramp, PLUS 4-5 siege tanks. Not only is this again a major investment into turtling that will probably doom him against a good zerg player but lets go through the steps to easily break his choke. Go in, focus fire the turrets and/or the siege tanks first with mutas, and basically as soon as the siege tanks are dead, send in your army of zerglings. I guarantee you anyone building that many turrets is both strapped for cash and probably only has his main base. If his expansions have 10 turrets at each, then you must have fallen asleep during the match because it would take much longer to accomplish that than to build a 20-ball of mutas to harass with. In order to have both zerglings and mutas, you only need to build TWO TOTAL TECH STRUCTURES not including lair. speedlings should obviously have been researched and maybe even a +1 attack for mutas so basically you'd be ready after spending 200 minerals on a pool, 150/100 gas on lair, 200/150 gas on the spire and then 300 minerals per hatchery you buy, plus the 100/100 for speedlings and 100/100 for +flyer attack. This is a total of 1050/450 for structures +300 per extra hatchery. Anyways I went too long into that but the point is that you can spend the rest on units while the other guy is spending 75 minerals on each turret or 150 on each cannon.

Also, dont forget if someone turtles like this to the point that mutas would get demolished in their base you can always just build some mutas for defense and tech to brood lords and take out turrets with no hits being taken just like in sc1 with guardians. (can anyone confirm this, that brood lords can out range defense?)

Awesome, the zerg must be destroying the terrans in the ladders then! Or if not all the foolish zerg must have missed the brilliant muta strategy!
 

zoukka

Member
frankthurk said:
Awesome, the zerg must be destroying the terrans in the ladders then! Or if not all the foolish zerg must have missed the brilliant muta strategy!

I go muta very often, but the mere sight of 2-4 towers + the stimmed up marineball is enough to make me retreat and try sniping low priority stuff... the medivacs are just so bad. Probably the #1 reason why scourge is no more.
 
If you just go all muta you will die. Thats the thing that most players really screw up on.

Though one game some guy thought just making Marines would be a great harass.. so I sent in mutas on an outlying building.. he sent his marines and out popped 20+ banelings that just rolled in and took out his army. :lol
 

zoukka

Member
TurtleSnatcher said:
If you just go all muta you will die. Thats the thing that most players really screw up on.

Common sense should tell you what do with the extra minerals :b I love speedlings so it's easy to pump muta + speedling and it works quite fine. I went muta + baneling which needs a lot of gass, but I just raped the opposing protoss.
 

Won

Member
Just had my first game in which my opponent kept building bases all over the map after he lost. :/
I guess he wanted to see how many Battlecruiser I could built. I CALLED IN THE FLEET, MAN! IT'S TOO LATE NOW!

I think I also added all EU players now. Always forgot to do that.
 

chris-013

Member
-COOLIO- said:
how do you get into silver league from bronze? because ranking up to first would be a maaad grind if thats it

Zzoram said:
I think it's based on win ratio, not actual ranking.

It's actual ranking because you need to be at the 1-8 places of your division to go up in the league.
 

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
LaneDS said:
Do Archons have any uses? In all the matches I've played, and all the replays I've watched of actual good players, I've precisely zero of them in use. Did they get any love in SC1 either?
Official Blizzard quote: "Just a unit to have when your HT run out of energy"

Bullshit.

Anyway I haven't been on very much (ok actually I haven't gone on in days) due to having 2.5 major projects for school.
 

LaneDS

Member
Hazaro said:
Official Blizzard quote: "Just a unit to have when your HT run out of energy"

Bullshit.

Anyway I haven't been on very much (ok actually I haven't gone on in days) due to having 2.5 major projects for school.

Ugh, yeah that's pretty awful. Maybe if you could split them back into HT later on it'd be more acceptable, but that's a big stretch. I still expect them to get some love because as of right now they serve little to no purpose it seems.
 
LaneDS said:
Ugh, yeah that's pretty awful. Maybe if you could split them back into HT later on it'd be more acceptable, but that's a big stretch. I still expect them to get some love because as of right now they serve little to no purpose it seems.
Split them? Uh no. :lol

It has its uses.. if your HT is out of energy and you need a quick unit to rush in cuz u lost lets say like half your army.. they do help as they have a decent amount of health (well shields)
 

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
LaneDS said:
Ugh, yeah that's pretty awful. Maybe if you could split them back into HT later on it'd be more acceptable, but that's a big stretch. I still expect them to get some love because as of right now they serve little to no purpose it seems.
I think one of the commentators referred to them as 'super zealots' that can attack air.

That's a good way to go thinking about them. Maybe if they get decent splash damage they can be used to counter broodlings
 

Ashhong

Member
Ice Monkey said:
your perception of mutas in interesting, but way off base. They are easily the most powerful zerg unit even if just because of their speed. Your contention that they are less amazing because of static defense buffs is way off base, too, as you forget how much someone has to invest in static defense for it to matter to a muta ball...and any player worth his salt at that point would just use just as many mutas to control the map and attack the turtle's base with something else entirely.

snip

just wanna say this was a very informative post. i want to try to get better with zerg now. gg
 

Bisonian

Member
Ice Monkey said:
Also, dont forget if someone turtles like this to the point that mutas would get demolished in their base you can always just build some mutas for defense and tech to brood lords and take out turrets with no hits being taken just like in sc1 with guardians. (can anyone confirm this, that brood lords can out range defense?)

This is true. I've taken out turrets with Brood Lords without them firing.

Double checked the official numbers.... Brood Lord fire range is 9, static air defense (turret/cannon/spore) range is 7.
 

ZealousD

Makes world leading predictions like "The sun will rise tomorrow"
Me and DeltronZero (aznpxdd) were doing some 2v2 placement matches earlier. First four matches were a snooze fest, but we had a pretty epic fifth one. Our opponents went double 10 pool, put us behind really early on. They then waited for a bit and hit me, wrecking my econ. But a quick counter push and some great micro ended up giving us the win. I'm really surprised we pulled it off.

http://www.mediafire.com/?milmghjynim
 
ZealousD said:
Me and DeltronZero (aznpxdd) were doing some 2v2 placement matches earlier. First four matches were a snooze fest, but we had a pretty epic fifth one. Our opponents went double 10 pool, put us behind really early on. They then waited for a bit and hit me, wrecking my econ. But a quick counter push and some great micro ended up giving us the win. I'm really surprised we pulled it off.

http://www.mediafire.com/?milmghjynim

Zealous make sure you close your wall early.. lol.. you had a supply depot open for 5 mins while you kept feeding marines to Deltron yet nothing was happening. Think if they zerg decided to just go for you instead :p


Nice game :) Deltron - That zealot/sentry shit is so lame .. works well agst roaches but anything smaller it rapes..

Also those 2 were god awful.. wtf they both had quadruple digit minerals by the end of the game. Blue had 2700 minerals when you killed him :lol


EDIT: Lolz at Deltrons Terran build order comment early on. No wonder you keep dodging partnering up with me.
 

ZealousD

Makes world leading predictions like "The sun will rise tomorrow"
TurtleSnatcher said:
Zealous make sure you close your wall early.. lol.. you had a supply depot open for 5 mins while you kept feeding marines to Deltron yet nothing was happening.

Yeah I was expecting them to commit to the early harass more than they did.
 
NovemberMike said:
Why does everyone point out that they aren't talking about straight mutas and then use retarded straight unit strats for the other race in their counter example? The terran player isn't going to mass missile turrets or anything, he's going to get 2-3 of them around a vulnerable expansion if he things that a harass is likely.

I was just talking about mutas versus static defense. If there are only two or three turrets at an expansion, a good amount of mutas will completely demolish the expansion. No matter how many mutas the turrets take out, the loss of income is more than worth it for the zerg player. So, consequently, I was responding to an idea of turrets being a main strategy to keep out mutas, and provided a counter argument to how to get past that type of strategy, because if it's just two or three turrets then its not going to stop mutas. So to recap, in order to stop mutas with turrets somehow, you have to devote significant time, resources and effort in order to do anything other than take one or two out.

If you want to protect all of your buildings, you're going to have to indulge in many more than two or three turrets or cannons. Not to mention that any player building lots of static defense in preparation for possible attacks is already at a disadvantage because you cant do anything further with static defense other than let them sit there. I have a replay of exactly that, a group of 6 or more mutas versus the pylons powering two photon cannons plus a bunch of tech structures. Due to some smart maneuvering on my part, only a few shots from the cannons actually hit my mutas before all the buildings were deactivated because there were no pylons left.

NovemberMike said:
Seriously, what terran spends all his resources on turrets and siege tanks? He's going to have mixtures of marines, medevac, siege tanks, ravens, thor etc depending on what point in the game it is.

Let me restate what I said in my other post, but now in response to this point. I went through the effort necessary to get zerglings and mutas available for building, and it came to 1050 minerals and 450 gas (plus 100 minerals for the two drones, so 1150 minerals). You mention the mixture of units that you think a terran would use versus just mutas and zerglings. Well, if a terran builds all the required buildings for the units you mentioned, well it comes out to even or maybe a little less for rax/fac/starport + tech labs and armory, but then your problem is waiting for queues to finish as opposed to just producing whenever larva is available, not to mention the amount of larva you can have with constant queen spawning. The point is that in order to be effective as counters when your army gets demolished you need to have at least two if not more of each production building plus the tech labs if you want more than just marines/hellion/viking/medivac. Plus adding in the upgrades i had accounted for in my scenario puts it over the top of whats required for zerg.

I'm getting too complicated though, the point is just that you have to build much less to have access to mutas which are a jack of all trades when it comes to killing things. Even building marines to counter them doesnt work perfectly as you can just fly to an expansion or something while the marines desperately try to chase you with stimpack. Same with the thor but its even worse. Vikings are an OK attempt at a counter but require you to dedicated starports to the task, if not building reactors just for such a task. Same thing goes for phoenix, except they have even worse of a time of being effective as a general unit instead of just being a muta counter.

Not to mention in order to defend against muta sniping of tech buildings is almost impossible unless you keep all your army around your tech buildings. Every game I play with mutas I can sit there taking out an expansion then in about 10-15 seconds I can be back at my base defending against some assault, then go hit the guy's partner as a surprise. Before you know it, they are irreparably crippled.
 

aznpxdd

Member
TurtleSnatcher said:
Zealous make sure you close your wall early.. lol.. you had a supply depot open for 5 mins while you kept feeding marines to Deltron yet nothing was happening. Think if they zerg decided to just go for you instead :p


Nice game :) Deltron - That zealot/sentry shit is so lame .. works well agst roaches but anything smaller it rapes..

Also those 2 were god awful.. wtf they both had quadruple digit minerals by the end of the game. Blue had 2700 minerals when you killed him :lol


EDIT: Lolz at Deltrons Terran build order comment early on. No wonder you keep dodging partnering up with me.

Yeah, that game would have been cake if they didn't both 10 pool my ass.

But yeah, the Sen/Z build sucks ass, damn they got raped by banelings.
 

Chris R

Member
Calavera520 said:
Any news on the mac beta?

I really hope it's out soon.
I hope the fact that I'm checking my battle.net account from a mac doesn't hurt my chances for getting into the beta for my PC :(
 

Haly

One day I realized that sadness is just another word for not enough coffee.
aznpxdd said:
Yeah, that game would have been cake if they didn't both 10 pool my ass.

But yeah, the Sen/Z build sucks ass, damn they got raped by banelings.
For what it's worth, I thought trapping the roaches between 2 forcefields, a gas, and your zealots was pretty impressive, even if it rendered the bulk of your zealots useless.

I was expecting some Hallucination shenanigans though.
 

aznpxdd

Member
Man I'm such a whore. I think I am now in 2v2 Platinum with the following:

Panda
Alum
Valenti
Haz
Zealous

(all 5-0 in placement I believe)

then...

Pez in Silver :lol
 
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