![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.sc2armory.com\/images\/protoss\/logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
<\/p>\n
The protoss are by far my favorite race to play in Starcraft.\u00a0 In retrospect, there is a very easy element to playing the toss because their units are far stronger pound for pound than other races and the units are very straight forward in nature requiring less sorts of combinations of effectiveness besides maybe the SC1 superunit the hydralisk.\u00a0 So it’s no surprise that my playtime was spent very exclusively (I played one round of zerg) with the new protoss.<\/p>\n
First of all, you begin the game with 6 probes, identical to last year, which as I’ve commented before, makes the early game feel significantly faster.\u00a0 The improved pathing and intelligence of the worker unit makes it a breeze to get setup quickly.\u00a0 No longer do you need to individually select your probes for maximum effeciency by distributing one by one to minerals.\u00a0 Selecting them all and telling them to mine will make them realize much faster they need to hit a new patch.\u00a0 Rallying out to minerals, which is a huge point of contention among the hardcore community, is fantastic.\u00a0 I also want to say that I felt like, but never confirmed, that when you make a pylon, you can actually build in it’s pylon power area while it’s warping in, but I tend to overlap so I perhaps was imagining things.<\/p>\n
My old build in Starcraft 1 was 7 probe pylon, probe, gateway then varied up between forge for defenses and second gateway.\u00a0 Things branched out depending on my scouting.\u00a0 Surprisingly, it translates fairly well to Starcraft 2, but not 100%.\u00a0 When the 7th probe came out there was a delay getting the pylon, and likewise with the 8th probe a delay on the gateway, but it wasn’t a big deal.\u00a0 Placing buildings shows a very nice grid system and the pylon power felt like it was notably larger in radius that in SC1.\u00a0 Again, that last bit was a feeling and not something I actually know.<\/p>\n
Several times scouting probes would go aggressive and attack probes on my minerals.\u00a0 Typically due to bad pathing in SC1, units wouldn’t be able to flee as easily within the constant motion of gatherers, however, I was able to kill off the scout effortlessly by picking up 5 of my harvesting guys and setting them to attack while backing out the one that was under attack.\u00a0 The pathing is so good that by the time the aggresive probe scout realizes what I did, they’re dead.\u00a0 So for future reference, don’t sacrifice your 50 minerals by attacking, you will lose that fight.<\/p>\n
This particular build of SC2 had an implementation of vespene gas that didn’t sit well with me at all.\u00a0 You start with 2 geysers in your town each with a max of around 2100 or so gas, but you can only harvest 200 at a time before it needs to recharge.\u00a0 While recharging the probes cannot go inside the assimilator so they sit idle (except they don’t trigger the idle probe button) but a warning sound does go off to let you know when the assimilator is recharging.\u00a0 It’s a forced micromanagement system and it makes vespene gas seem like a much more valuable and less available resource than before.\u00a0 It’s supposed to encourage a good gamer to move the probes back to minerals while recharging but I lazily just left them idle.\u00a0 They’d return to work on the assimilator automatically.\u00a0 With this change, if you don’t expand, well even if you do expand, it ends up being that you make a lot more of mineral only units.\u00a0 In the case of the protoss, the zealot.<\/p>\n
The staple of the army with the resource change, the zealot is truly an awesome unit.\u00a0 Like I said before, pound for pound they decimate units of the other race in equal numbers with little micro required.\u00a0 As they gain tech upgrades they become far more devastating.\u00a0 Most of my games pitted me against either toss or zerg.\u00a0 One habit you get into from playing Warcraft 3 is when things are looking bad, you need to minimize experience gain on enemy heroes and retreat once things go downhill.\u00a0 In Starcraft 2, especially after learning the charge upgrade, running is completely pointless.\u00a0 You might as well stand still and lose your army.\u00a0 The charge ability cooldown isn’t short, but it’s short enough that you can pick off running units very effectively.\u00a0 Many times did I teach my opponents that running is a worse option than staying and fighting.<\/p>\n
The dragoon was the toss’ land based ranged unit.\u00a0 Multipurpose, it would attack both ground and air.\u00a0 Now they’ve split the duty into two units, the stalker and the immortal.\u00a0 My thoughts were pretty mixed on this, but after playing zerg it became clear that they’ve done this not just to the toss but to the other races as well.\u00a0 Multidimensional units are in effect too good to a degree.\u00a0 I would say more so for the zerg since the hydra was slim and a massive army of dragoons was bulkier and more cumbersome to work with (again I blame the pathing).\u00a0 So what they did was split the role up a bit.<\/p>\n
My overall impression of the stalkers were that they felt kinda weak and expensive for their price.\u00a0 Their build time was prohibitive for a fast switch when things needed them.\u00a0 However, once you gained a bit of them and upgraded the blink ability, in the hands of a pro they could wreak havoc.\u00a0 P.S. I’m not a pro, but I was good enough to do some nasty things with them.\u00a0 The blink range is so good that when you have stalkers taking focus fire, blinking it to the rear would force the opponent, or slow reacting opponents, to move to attack it often resulting in just a move command while the rest of the stalkers did their thing.\u00a0 Going back to the retreating army, blink also prevented many an army from licking their wounds in their base.\u00a0 However, unlike the zealot, it didn’t feel powerful.\u00a0 One on one with a mutalisk was a scary setup.<\/p>\n
The immortal is the other half of the land based ranged equation.\u00a0 I didn’t make too many of these as I wasn’t going up against what I heard they’re built for, which was heavy hitting units such as seige tanks.\u00a0 I imagined them to be the base breakers to a degree and as such, didn’t have as much experience with them.\u00a0 I did make a few, and last year to my horrible mistake, made them thinking they were ground to air when they’re actually only ground to ground.\u00a0 So I don’t have much to say about them.\u00a0 They seemed more durable than the stalker but obviously with an inability to attack air made them a liability when things moved in that direction.\u00a0 They also couldn’t chase down units.<\/p>\n
A curious new unit was in the gateway, the nullifier.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure in this build it had force field, hallucination, and something else that I never used.\u00a0 I never used hallucination though.\u00a0 I did give force field a try.\u00a0 I couldn’t tell how I could effectively use it.\u00a0 I should have tried it out a bit more that’s for sure.\u00a0 You’ll have to get impressions elsewhere on this unit.\u00a0 I didn’t care too much for it though and ended up skipping them on most of my games.\u00a0 I’m certain though, that if force field works the way I think it does, it’s actually a pretty powerful little ability.<\/p>\n
High templar I skipped in favor of switching up to archons in one zerg match.\u00a0 They are every bit as powerful as they were in the first game.\u00a0 Truly the ultimate protoss land unit hitting ground and air with a splash attack.\u00a0 Dark templar I used very effectively vs a protoss (of all things).\u00a0 In a match versus a guildmate, I was being contained in my base so I pumped up enough defenses to keep him at bay while I teched to DT.\u00a0 One aspect of playing protoss that can never be underestimated is the degree to which I employ observers.\u00a0 I try to make as many as there are starting points and expansions plus a few for my offense.\u00a0 In zerg and protoss detection is so important due to lurkers and dark templar that if you realize you need it, often times it’s far too late.\u00a0 So I teched to DTs and when my first one came out I couldn’t resist, even though I should have, and sent it out to see how well he’d do.\u00a0 Of course, incredibly powerful he started ripping through his units forcing a retreat.\u00a0 Though something very strange happened and for some reason he stopped attacking and just started moving around with the units I queued up for death.\u00a0 That was the only time I saw that happen though, but it was weird.\u00a0 I forgot to check if DTs could merge into archons in this build.\u00a0 Someone else probably knows.<\/p>\n
One of my main gripes with SC2 is the removal of the reaver.\u00a0 Taking out the reaver left me clueless as to how to seige a defended base without taking damage.\u00a0 The problem is they want to use the colossus and presumably high templar with psi storm for skirmish aoe but the colossus’ range was too short and damage was too low to seige buildings.\u00a0 I made a few collossi and the unit was aggrivating.\u00a0 I found out later there is a range upgrade.\u00a0 The unit is slow moving, though not as slow as a reaver and it’s attack isn’t ideal.\u00a0 It hits enemies in a straight line, but the line can cut through enemies in a way that it doesn’t become an aoe anymore.\u00a0 For instance if the enemy is positioned in a horizontal plane, there were times when my guy would attack one enemy in a vertical line.\u00a0 Though there were cool times I was able to use the collosus.\u00a0 Some very cool map design includes hills as cover, which allows you to place a collosus up there for defense.\u00a0 Remember, no line of sight on a hill means no counterattack.\u00a0 Additionally, some expansions are placed at the base of a hill, allowing me to pop a collosus up there to attack the peon line.\u00a0 Overall, that unit needs some work.\u00a0 They take FOREVER to build and are pretty costly.<\/p>\n
The only two air units I used were the phoenix and the void ray.\u00a0 The phoenix is the corsair replacement and the void ray is more or less what I’d consider the scout replacement in the sense that it can take out capital ships but overall better because it can take out buildings just as well.\u00a0 The phoenix was demonstrated with an aoe ability last year and I expected it to still have it.\u00a0 One zerg match I noticed my opponent going heavy mutas so I started making a bunch of phoenix units and a horrible feeling crept over me as I hover over their ability slot to see Anti-Gravity.\u00a0 The phoenix is air to air only so anti-grav is interesting as I’m thinking the combination allows you let them hit ground units.\u00a0 However, I didn’t test that theory, and when I used it, it channeled and disabled the phoenix which wasn’t good as I was using them for hit and runs.\u00a0 Mostly, I used them to kill overlords to great effectiveness.\u00a0 The phoenix is fast, very possibly too fast.\u00a0 No zerg player was able to keep up their overlords without placing them in some kinda concentrated anti-air super defense area.<\/p>\n
The void ray was simply too expensive and slow building of a unit for me to use too many of, but I did whip some out and they were almost exactly as advertised.\u00a0 I used them in base raid hit and runs while my main land army was attacking.\u00a0 They are extremely slow moving though.<\/p>\n
I tried to get some carriers\/motherships out but the games ended before I realized I could make them.\u00a0 So no impressions of those units.<\/p>\n
Gameplay<\/h1>\n
There are some new gameplay and UI elements I touched on earlier that make going back to SC1 totally impossible.\u00a0 One new thing in general terms was the multi-building select options.\u00a0 Again, hardcore SC1 players are arguing too much micro is being removed from the game.\u00a0 In SC1 you had to select each unit producing building to make a unit.\u00a0 In SC2 you can group select them.\u00a0 There’s no way they’d take this out as it makes certain other elements very difficult.\u00a0 For instance, gateways converted to warp gates are very micro intensive.\u00a0 When a warp gate is created, each time you make a unit you have to target it’s warp in location.\u00a0 To have to select (or hotkey) each warp gate and select the unit would be aggrivating.\u00a0 However, it’s unlike it’s War3 counterpart where if you\u00a0 had selected 3 barracks and pressed the footman once and all 3 would make one if you had the resources, pressing zealot with 3 gateways will only make one zealot.\u00a0 Pressing the zealot key 3 times will queue one up in each gateway.\u00a0 That’s the compromise, but ultimately it’s a far better solution anyway since you have better control over your assembly line.<\/p>\n
Speaking of hot keys, grouping now has a visual tab attached to it.\u00a0 Typically my groupings consist of groups 1-3 being my army and 4-6 being my buildings.\u00a0 I didn’t use 7-0 too much because they’re too far away on the keyboard.\u00a0 However, now that there’s a visual tab, it’s easier than ever to group to those last bindings and access them.\u00a0 I started using the last tabs for upgrade buildings so I could quickly get upgrades and such.<\/p>\n
Hotkey grouping is nice with unlimited (though I hear it was actually limited but to a fairly high number?) selection.\u00a0 What happens is when you select everything and group it, you see something like 14 units per page, and an indicator shows up with the pages of units you have.\u00a0 It’s a good system, but finding a unit on page 2 that’s been hurt takes some time.<\/p>\n
There were sick things that could be done with warp in and the new phase prism.\u00a0 Playing with a friend of mine I was showing him the ropes of what I knew since he didn’t keep up but did play a lot of SC1.\u00a0 I sat over his shoulder while he decided to try an offensive tower on a terran player.\u00a0 I had him quick tech to warp gates and by the time the terran noticed, it was far too late.\u00a0 The protoss army could now be warped in directly to the cannons, it was awesome.<\/p>\n
Expanding is also INCREDIBLY fast to an unfair degree for protoss.\u00a0 For an island expansion I took a probe in a phase prism and deployed the phase prism into pylon mode and dropped all my cannons first with the nexus.\u00a0 Then I could deploy a regular pylon and was able to move the phase prism out later.<\/p>\n
The protoss are in great shape and the new units and combination of gameplay elements really make the game feel much deeper than Starcraft 1.\u00a0 I’m incredibly excited for the beta and release and can see myself pouring thousands of hours into this.\u00a0 My impressions of the zerg will be up later, but it will probably be much shorter since I only played one game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ll warn you first off by saying that if you never played Starcraft 1, there are going to be terms that I use that you may not understand at all. I’m not even going to provide a glossary either so deal with it.\u00a0 Again this is a super long post, so if you’re interested hit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timothyhanson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}