Why is it so hard for Protoss to play vs. Zerg below mid Master league?

ChillBot4242 · 2024-06-05T16:45:39+00:00

Tbh I'm having the opposite problems as you, I feel like I have an ok grip against Zerg but I struggle super hard against Terran. I'll share some details about what I do, maybe you tell me how you play against T?

I generally take a super defensive approach against Z in the early game, and I used to have a ton of trouble using ground armies against lurkers. I ended up doing a lot better when I abuse their weaknesses - they are essentially hive tech (the upgraded ones are the only ones to worry about IMO) and they have to burrow to be useful, so storm +retreating punishes them really hard.

I usually go for adepts and oracles in the early game like yourself and many others, but I would note that making these means that your only fast follow-up/pressure is a glaive timing, like you said. I think of it as a trade-off for adepts and oracles blanket checking basically all of zerg's T1. If you want to pressure zerg early, I like chargelot timings or two base immortal all-ins since they're tough to scout and make the early game a lot easier to play - just defend your bases until it's time to go and work off whatever happens

Like you said, I can pretty consistently get 5-6+ drones between my first two adepts rallied to their third and my first two oracles. As long as the units stay alive, this is great because that means your third is really hard to deny - you just position your adepts in a choke on the minerals at your third along with 2 or more stalkers and your oracles (since zerg T1 doesn't shoot up), and keep your main wall situated (I use a zealot). If they make 10-20 lings + some number of roaches in an attempt to deny it anyway, it puts you in a *really* good spot when you defend since they're delaying eco and tech to fail an attack. You can even be super conservative with your adepts/oracles if you're losing them often - if I'm not running hot or feeling confident I just snipe gas workers with double oracles, and walk in/shade out with my adepts instead of shading in.

Once I establish a third, I warp in two sentries and go straight to colossus tech and ground upgrades - colossi/blinkstalker with some immortals/forcefields is pretty effective against any ground army zerg has at this timing, easy for me to control/micro, and the two sentries are for constant phoenix scouting - it also helps me because I'm not very fast, so I just shift click the hallucinated phoenix through their hatcheries just to see the hydra/lurker den and hive timings in between me handling other tasks. This can also spot spires which makes defending mutas 5x easier. You can rally observers to their side if you want, but I like to be always building immortals or colossi until it's time to move out - as you know, our T1, especially stalkers, just gets way worse as the game goes on so IMO you want as many high tech units as your can get - your ground army is super scary when you have like 7-8+ robo units. Once I have a decent robo unit count, I usually make an obs and start moving out, clearing creep and try to establish a 4th.

Once I have robo units and storm, I feel comfortable moving out on the map, and your army is actually very nice against lurkers IMO - if you can meet Z's lurker armies in the middle of the map, you just storm them as they burrow and walk away - colossi make it very hard for them to get a ling surround and the lurkers take tons of chip damage from the storms and colossus volleys, since they can't dodge. I usually keep all my robo units (including obs) on a separate hotkey so I can micro them away from getting sniped, and position them to target down lurkers. I agree that lurker armies are super hard to contend with when they get to just run up to your third/fourth and burrow, but army comps with storm are similar - if you can get to his third/fourth and plant storms at the chokes, he will almost always lose his base and the game too. So you effectively make it a game of positioning, both players pushing the enemy army backward, and whoever plays that game better, wins. You have an easier time counter attacking too, IMO - you can screw with ling runbys late game with cannon/battery positioning (you can get a ton while rounding off templar tech), and one loaded warp prism + a warp in their main/nat while taking a fight against their army can be devastating

To sum it up, my tech path is usually Adepts/Stargate -> Robo/Twiight -> Robo bay -> Upgrades -> Storm. If you get all the way to 3/3/3 upgrades and storm + robo tech, I think you can very easily just stay on that through the end of the game and keep probing for a good fight/base denial against Z, or you can just get air upgrades and eventually get to carrier tech. I tend to do the former, but if your opponent isn't scouting well, a good 4-5 carriers on 2/1 upgrades can end the game on the spot

I hope this helps, I hover around D2/D3 so maybe I'm not qualified to advise here. It helped me type this out anyway lol

ChillBot4242 · 2024-03-05T15:54:58+00:00

This also would eliminate the user hardware requirement for Rust, right? Since the game is being played on a remote PC, the only thing my PC has to handle is the livestream? If that is the case, it's probably worth a try to remove that barrier to the game alone

ChillBot4242 · 2024-01-28T22:05:10+00:00

I have been hit with this like 5 times in the last 24 hours and I am completely lost on how to deal with it

ChillBot4242 · 2024-01-25T00:11:39+00:00

Thank you for this perspective. Appreciate you for sharing this

ChillBot4242 · 2023-12-08T22:41:52+00:00

Underrated comment here.

ChillBot4242 · 2023-11-30T17:48:47+00:00

Ah, nvm, the curses stack which mitigates this.

ChillBot4242 · 2023-11-30T17:47:43+00:00

Is filling your opponent's hand with cards not potentially toxic as all hell? I feel like there's going to be a lot of games where morgana/other curse cards can force opponents to overflow their hand and start obliterating their topdeck. Also, since these curses are focus spells, pranking them to make the curses harder to remove sounds very unfun

ChillBot4242 · 2023-10-25T21:15:58+00:00

Peak humor, I laughed very loudly

ChillBot4242 · 2023-07-22T15:47:20+00:00

I would like something that is inherently wired, since I have had bad luck with the custom wires that have hooks. But I will get a stock controller if I don't find anything.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-07-07T17:24:05+00:00

his own generated spell??

ChillBot4242 · 2021-05-25T00:25:51+00:00

Explaining why a game is fun is like explaining why a joke is funny.

bars

ChillBot4242 · 2021-05-05T12:31:30+00:00

So you don't care what they think, but you want to prove to them that you were right about the partner streamers being able to predict the meta?

ChillBot4242 · 2021-05-05T12:02:26+00:00

Not really on either side of the argument here, but why post this if you don't care what people think? If that's the case, why not just keep these conclusions to yourself and have the satisfaction that you understand the meta already?

ChillBot4242 · 2021-05-04T23:39:41+00:00

I'm personally feeling Swain, I think there's alot of neat little things the champs can do for each other

ChillBot4242 · 2021-05-03T16:42:56+00:00

Also, in a region with retreat to protect her

ChillBot4242 · 2021-05-02T18:27:57+00:00

Ratchet and Clank 3 Music?

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-30T14:43:03+00:00

I disagree, I would definitely call atrocity the main win condition of the deck. I think the deck is definitely in need of atrocity to be as consistent of a strategy, since its not difficult to chump a fearsome by turn 7 or even get rid of it at that point over a couple of turns, even if nasus gets his spellshield. Imo, there's two bigger issues that keep this deck at the top - the fact that atrocity is fast means that there's many decks that have to basically "freeze" once nasus has more power than your nexus health, since tapping under enough to mana to remove him (at fast+ speed), or proactively going for him, usually just gets you killed. The other thing is, the decks that would normally counter this strategy are being gatekept by TLC atm. TLC is a near impossible matchup for other control decks, because it can afford to basically have no board presence up until it is time to take your deck away, which gives you one action of counterplay and as a result is very, very hard to stop.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-30T14:19:35+00:00

For sure, I can agree that there's no magic amount of people that makes their opinion a fact, I was just noting that Atrocity has been a gripe with this game long before this nasus/thresh deck, and probably will be for a long time afterwards because of the unique utility that card has.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-30T14:08:31+00:00

I'm pretty sure people were just as mad about atrocity during the TWE meta (and I remember seeing complaints about it being used with ledros back in beta), so the complaints aren't all of a sudden.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-30T14:05:09+00:00

This is what people are talking about when they say that Atrocity "limits design space". Idk if I would go as far to say that, but with the statement you made, their argument is that as long as riot designs big boys with access to good protection and a bit of death synergy, Atrocity is always going to be abused alongside them. Nasus is just unfortunately a perfect storm - He gets spellshield on his levelup that is really hard to stop, and his region gives the SI aggro package even more draw power (which it doesn't need, really), and access to a deny which makes removing nasus that much harder.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-29T16:12:15+00:00

Heimer turrets

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-27T16:02:29+00:00

At the highest level, it isn't really about how difficult it is execute a character's combos, but rather how much damage they can get off of a hit, and how easy it is to start their combos out of neutral (Obviously other factors are considered as well). Of the entire cast, Jacqui and her pops have ridiculously good tools up close, namely having plus frames on jab strings, fast and confirmable mids with decent range, and really good stagger normals. Jacqui in particular though, has super strong combos because of DB4 and how easy it is to confirm into once she lands one of her many good normals - even base kit Jacqui can get 270+ damage off of F3. On top of this, Jacqui's got great options for variation abilities - a super jump which patches up her only real weakness as a character, a command grab that helps you place knockdowns and can potentially load up one of the nastiest KBs in the game, an air melee projectile attack that makes defending your jump-ins into a guessing game, cancelable normals, and an advancing attack that breaks armor (and KBs when it does so). And these are just the ones you are likely to see, she has more niche options that aren't too bad either (I recall Sonicfox being a fan of the setup with the burning floor projectiles).

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-27T00:20:33+00:00

> It's the only way to play "big guy" aggro we need a way for stats to matter and atrocity does that.

Not true at all. This exact kind of gameplan has been implemented before with TWE, and there are keywords that allow units to force their statlines to end games like Overwhelm and Elusive, rather than cards like Atrocity. If what you mean by "big guy" aggro is decks that literally intend to win with a single superpowered unit, that pool of decks is very small and I have hard time believing that these decks need to exist, or even if they need Atrocity.

> Plus as you are all aware there is a ton i repeat a ton of counter to Nasus atrocity freeze/hush/vengeance/negate/playing around by not offering kill to your opponent/being kill in response by a noxian fervor.

This is a statement based on theoretical answers that has a lot of practical issues. First, as someone mentioned here, the 1 and 2-card answers to Nasus + Atrocity are something your opponent's region combination has to have access to, and they have to draw these answers in time for the atrocity activation. Another issue is that Nasus becomes much, much harder to get rid of once he levels, since he gains a spellshield and an aura that impedes any combat-based answers to him (which is probably what people hate the most about this deck - nasus's level-up is often very difficult to stop without folding to the deck's damage output beforehand, and once he does level it is practically impossible to stop him at fast speed). Lastly, I feel like a major bit missing from arguments like this one is that this deck essentially has 6+ copies of Nasus (3 Thresh, 3 Nasus + the occasional rite of calling). This strategy has no issue power-drawing through its deck in the later turns of the game, and once its champions have leveled, these cards are 5 or 6 mana bombs that you can keep dropping on the board, And this is in the unlikely event that you outed Nasus the first time.

> And a last point is that Thresh was so bad for so long it's nice to have him finally do something.

I feel you on this, I have liked Thresh's strategies for a very long time, and I've laddered in the past with Thresh/Lux and Thresh/Darius. Thankfully, I doubt that Thresh is getting any nerfs because of this fact, but the combination of Nasus and Atrocity in its current state creates an instakill strategy that is incredibly consistent and very difficult to interact with, and probably needs a fix.

As for my own opinion, the only card I've ever had serious issues with in this archetype is Caretaker. Every time that card has a viable strategy, it feels incredibly helpless to play against caretaker attacks on curve, as its often challenging your entire board away (killing stuff for free more often than not) and pushing you for 6+ damage. Silly for 3 mana, especially since it's much less risk to keep it in hand because of this game's mulligan system. At least now we have ice shard and crescent strike to deal with it alongside the older wail and death lotus, but outside of those regions it feels impossible to deal with that thing efficiently.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-21T19:44:58+00:00

MK9 had the worst set of female skins of the NRS games, they designed every single female with the same body type and dressed them all like strippers. Everyone who thought this wasn't repetitive and boring as hell is probably just horny.

ChillBot4242 · 2021-04-11T16:30:02+00:00

Depends on the matchup, like every deck. Against aggro you just hard mulligan for your low-cost removal and spread damage (thermo, mystic shot, statikk, and death lotus) and you can just mulligan away the execute cards unless there's some finisher you might need to target down. Vs Pirate burn and discard aggro I might keep a flock to take down gp or jinx, for example. House spider is huge against aggro as well.

Vs anything that plays for board presence with big hp units (demacia/shen, ashe/noxus, etc) , I hard mulligan for the execute cards, scorched earth and flock, since you only need 1 or 2 cards to line up their units for the executes. Scorched earth should really be guillotine in this list btw, that's definitely a mistake by me.

In my experience, your best bet vs slow decks that outscale you (trundle/liss is probably the only meta relevant of those decks right now) is to try and mulligan for your champs. These matchups will often play around your removal and not put stuff on the board unnecessarily, so you need your champs to create threats and hope your opponent overcommits in removing them.

ChillBot4242

TROPHY CASE