Life in the Middle 28/01/12

After winning my first match this week I could tell that it was going to be a good week and generally felt very positive; eight consecutive loses later my feelings had somewhat changed. Coincidently, at roughly the same time, I found a link to Drewbie's guide, with his strategies and timings, so decided to try them out to see if they would help me stop sucking. By playing better for the rest of the week I managed to end with a 50% win-rate, which isn't great, but is back on track. I wasn't planning to, but this week focuses on TvP; when it came to writing this I had a lot more to say about Protoss than I realised. I end this week as a rank 6 Platinum, so I am pretty much where I was last week.

Still in the top eight.

I've won 80% of my TvTs over the last couple of weeks so I didn't want to change that, but for a while I adopted Drewbie's techniques for the other two match-ups. I think I will continue with Drewbie's TvZ as I like having an early expansion whilst still applying pressure. The build gets out a set of reactor Hellions to scout and do damage before going into Seige Marine with an early expansion. People always seem to panic when they see Hellions, which only makes them more effective. Roaches are the standard answer to Hellions but when you only build two and follow up with Tanks and Marines they aren't so effective.

These two Hellions did 500 minerals of damage and denied a lot of mining time.

I was playing Protoss back when the 1-1-1 build was unstoppable and, whilst it never really trickled down into whatever league I was in at the time, I was super frustrated when watching my favourite players lose whatever they did. This is how I feel now when playing against Protoss, so have been trying to find a way to get my win-rate up. When going bio early game pressure is nearly impossible because Stalkers are so fast, in the mid-game it's impossible before Medivacs because of force fields, and in the late game if you lose one battle it's game over 90% of the time; so I wanted to move away from relying on bio so much.

Sometimes it feels no matter how much you drop and outplay you are still behind.

I think the main problem with going bio in PvT is that it's hard to do damage before Colossus or High Templar come out, and when they do it only makes it harder. It's frustrating to be pigeon holed into having to play a particular way, which still relies on you fighting units that directly counter you, which the Protoss can easily switch between. Fighting High Templar and Colossus require different compositions and fighting both at the same time is a nightmare. None of a Terran's tier 3 units are effective against Protoss which is probably the biggest problem.

I denied his expo whilst dropping and expanding myself as well as killing all his Ghost before the final engagement and was still owned.

In the last PvT I played this week I went for a 1-1-1 all-in because I was really annoyed at Protoss; as it worked I think I will keep at it next week and see how it goes. I had been trying Drewbie's TvP, but only to limited success, so I thought it was time to give something else a go. I liked going 1-1-1 as it gives you access to new units and new strategies and completely changes the feel of the match-up. With other builds I hated how you have to do all the pressure to stop the Protoss from accumulating a doom army by dropping and denying expansions and yet you are still behind and have to engage perfectly to win.      

I love the wide range of units the 1-1-1 offers.

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