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I mean, SOS is unequivocally the greatest StrarCraft II player of all time. As long as you measure by number of successful proxy nexus plays in professional matches.
Disruptor: nerf atleast 4 patches in a row. Collosi: nerfed when disruptors where added. Never regained dps after disruptor nerfs. High templar feedback dps removal (one of the only ways to properly trade with other races spellcasters, randomly lost 50% of dps, because it wasnt "fun" for the other races.) Zealots:charge on impact(read more dps) removed, nothing got added. Immortals: cost increased (added shield autoproc that basically does nothing) Stalkers: slower attack speed, higher damage, was a nerf too. Attacking slower vs fast attacking units makes them straight up worse, overshooting dps also made them worse. Only vs blinking onto tanks and fighting marauders has it been slightly buffed, yet both those units destroy stalkers insanely hard. I could talk about carrier dps nerfs. Tempest having lowest dps per resource cost of basically all the tech units in game, The uselessness of batteries during lategame.... But no... its a skillissue... before all these nerfs protoss was properly competing. After "only aggressive players are left" The problem : the 'wrong' viewpoint. Like ppl saying warping in is a problem. When the entire purpose of the race is to tech up.... its fine if gateway units arent going toe to toe with other early units. If the actuall tech makes up more then enough for its tech cost. Right now protoss tech does not make up for its insanely expensive tech cost and unit cost at that tech. (Ie. Collosi techroute = robo, robo bay, thermal lance, collosi cost themselves, attack upgrades) for a unit that gets countered from the air without having anti air. That only deals reall damage to marines zerglings and hydras while having very low hp for such a high tech cost unit. )
you could make a random list like this about any race, but it doesn't matter. Just look at all the protosses in the top 30 in aligulac. None of them(apart from maxpax who doesn't play offline) are good enough to win a world campionship, even with all those nerfs reverted, they would never be on serral or maru's level. Yes the balance currently is far from perfect. And especially pvt is very terran favored, mainly because the early game is absolutely broken, terran has pretty much infinite options and if the protoss makes a tiny mistake, he dies, if he plays perfectly its an even midgame. And lategame is also imba, since nothing beats ghost+range lib. But that is far from the only reason toss isn't winning anything. Just look up liquipedia, almost every toss that has won a tournament in the last couple of years have retired. like how can you say that before the nerfs protoss has been winning some tournaments, so that now that we got some nerfs and every top toss has retired/went to the millitary, the nerfs are the problem. This don't make any sense. You are right in one aspect tho protoss tech units don't not make up for their cost... against terran. Every tech unit either sucks or has very low impact on the game. Apart from disruptors, every tech units gets hard countered very easily. HTs and archons are useless once ghosts are out, colossi are useless once terran has enough vikings, captial ships also die to vikings or just marines and ghosts, immortals don't do much. It is only disruptors and disruptors, no other unit is worth making. This isn't the case against zerg, archons, immortals, HTs are always very powerful, even disruptors and colossi are also pretty good... until vipers come out, and we don't need to talk about skytoss too much. And unsurprisingly Protoss isn't doing bad against zerg at all. Before the current patch it was kinda zerg favoured, but only because of the maps, and the op +2 banes. But currently toss is doing very well in zvp.
Your list doesn't even get started. Remember when they took out Khaydarin amulet because they were "free storms" even though they cost 150 gas just to warp in a unit with like 50 HP? Oh yeah well free except the fact that you had to pay to research the upgrade. And you had to build the tech for it in the first place. And they nerfed offensive storms by making them take like 15 seconds to slow warp... but still they never brought the upgrade back. I think the most head scratching protoss nerf was the adept glave nerf where they basically made it only good for cheesing with instead of just making the adept a better mobile mid game unit against light units like the unit was intended to be with the original glave upgrade. As you alluded to, the carrier is completely nerfed which is really strange since I don't remember it ever being imbalanced in high level play. Remember when they just decided to make protoss upgrades take longer because of chrono boost? I remember laughing when they did that because that's the whole point of chrono boost.
I came here to basically post something like this. Remember that stalker fire rate got Nerfed because of the four gate and then even though now the build is not broken like it used to be stalker never got its attack speed back. The reason that current protoss players are aggressive is because there is no other way for them to win at all. Terran has much better defensive options and Zerg has much better reactive play with fast tech switches and remaxes.
@@norberthiz9318I don’t agree 100% on saying Protoss lacks players that could potentially score a World Series, I think it’s more reasonable to say they lack a player that is goat of the race. Serral, Reynor, Maru, they’re the goats of Terran and Zerg who is favoured in every match essentially and Protoss doesn’t really have that. Opinions about the consistency of Protoss aside, hero and the other Protoss players are too inconsistent to rely on. However, regarding the chances of Protoss winning a major tournament. The reason why they have yet to see any results is because of that Terran imbalance, you simply can’t get through a tournament without competing against a Terran. Talking about chances, while it is most likely that the goats will win, players like solar and oliveira are still plenty capable of rolling against those odds in a bo7, but the problem occurs when every 1/3 of the time you’re more likely to lose. Protoss will get a few title victories as time allows it, but they are on a bad run with the percentages against them.
@@AnimeFan-wd5pq those 2 things are not mutual exclusive. Protoss does lack absolute top tier players currently(in offline tournaments) and TvP is imbalanced. Yes Protoss never really had a "goat contender", but currently there aren't even protoss players on solar or olievera's level(apart from Maxpax obv). herO is just so fucking inconsistent its crazy, he just simply throws half his already won games, you just can't rely on a player like him to win tournaments and get deep runs consistantly, and the only other top toss is Classic, who is very good but for some reason he performed very bad lately, he didn't even qualify to katowice, which is not a balance issue. The thing is when you combine these two, you end up with a Toss not winning anything and never even making a deep run in any tournament. But that is still much more on the fact that no Toss is good enough currently, they wouldn't win anything if balance was perfect. Just remember that the only protoss who made a finals in a premier tournament this year was maxpax, and then he only lost serral 4-2. If Maxpax can make it into a finals and only lose relatievly narrowly to the goat of zvp, then it is not a balance issue primarily. if the other tosses were even close to Maxpax in skill they would make good runs even with the current balance problems.
I feel like you got to ask the question. Is protoss not having success because there are no good defensive protoss players? or are there no defensive protoss players because the other races have a high chance of winning over a defensive protoss in the current state of the late game?
Game was being balanced with 2 points in mind. 1) Zerg and Terran have to be stronger than Protoss at mid-late and late game. 2) If some race except terran can win with early timing attacks it is bad, and that race have to be nerfed or other races should be buffed at early game.
While offense is always preferred- defenders in this game have an advantage (with exceptions of course). Especially protoss with batteries. So you need to ask- why is the race known for defense losing at defense?
If we look at the pros behind all the winnings, we will find that there is not that many of them. It could literally be just sheer luck that the 5 people capable of winning didn't. Its not like protoss wasn't present. Looking at the runner-ups its 5 protoss, 4 terrans and 7 zergs so what exactly is so imbalanced about all of this?
i think the balance forced a lot of players to play an agressive protoss style the last few years. since the top tier terrans and zergs dont lose lategame vs P. so i think they are on a clock to finish the game before 200/200 and +3/+3.
yuh i was gonna say, protoss players choosing not to improve defence and try to be more efficient with their practice is no accident It's just not worth it
the newest Patch helped the situation for PvT massively. before seeing protoss die/ take fatal damage / get behind a lot to the first terran push was just absurdly common, now it feels like the early midgame isnt a knife's edge for toss anymore. PvZ feels quite good, toss wins lategames and midgames well enough, the problem there being Top zergs are Cracked and are super good in ZvP lategame(Especially serral that guy's beyond beastly.) And lategame wise, the ghost nerf and immortal nerfs have made lategame PvT feel nicer. PvP has also improved greatly and we dont have 1 base fests anymore. I think protoss balancewise atm is really good. What is lacking however is Players, Protoss just has not enough Top tier pros. Europe has Maxpax & perhaps showtime, KR has HerO & Classic. Zerg to be fair also has not that many players, but They got Serral, Dark, Scarlett, aka basically among the best players in their reigons/the best.
@@snowdrop9810 I would disagree on that. Ground toss isnt viable once Ghosts are out. Disruptors are still the saving grace that make it possible, even after the supply nerf to it
The reason that aggressive strategies are good on the ladder, but bad in tournaments, is very simple: in a tournament, you are playing against a known opponent from a pool of maybe 8 players; on the ladder, you are playing against an unknown opponent from a pool of hundreds. Aggressive strategies rely heavily on risk-taking, and in the tournament format the risk-taking doesn't pay off because it's too easy to predict what your opponent will do. A defensive player can usually pull out a win by having a good sense of how to prepare their defenses vs this specific opponent, and that's not an advantage they'd have if they played on the ladder. Since the ladder favors risk taking, the top performing league is going to be filled with risk-takers aka aggressive players. Generally, Protoss is better at being aggressive. Both Terran and Zerg are usually the reactive races against Protoss (although in TvP it's a little more complicated than that), which means Protoss gets to dominate Grandmaster league. It's less about balance and more about what strategies are good in what scenarios. Protoss has a lot of strategies that happen to be really good for the ladder scenario, and I happen to think that should be adjusted a little bit. The question remains of if Protoss' defensive styles are strong enough to win championships (in the right hands), and I'd argue that it is: Stats regularly beat some of the most aggressive players such as Byun. The ladder is stuck in a bad scenario where defensive Protoss is very strong, which requires an equally strong macro response from the Terran or Zerg, but you have to balance the possibility of any random allin hitting at any second. The reason that Protoss is good at aggression is the warp-prism negating a lot of the defenders advantage. In a TvZ, a Terran's units have to walk across the map (there is a reinforcement delay), the Zerg is able to cut off reinforcements with counter-attacks, the Zerg can scout what the terran is making and how big his army is -- these aren't limitations that warpgate has. You have no idea what the Protoss will warp in next, you have no idea if he will warp-in or back off and make probes, you have no idea where he will warp in next, etc. Warp gate in combination with the warp prism makes Protoss very good at taking aggressive risks. I think recent changes are headed in the right direction. Warp-gate should be a defensive tool, not an aggressive one, and Protoss should have to move their army on the map like everyone else. The zealot speed buff and creep nerfs helped with this a lot, but I think they need to give the warp prism a reduced warp-in speed. They should probably bump-up the cargo capacity a bit to compensate, because the goal isn't to make the unit useless but to make it less random.
Problem with Toss has always been that they are very bad at absorbing damage compared to other races. Lose a couple pylons and a chunk of your production is going offline. No mitigation for worker kills (MULES, rounds of drones, extra command centers to fly in). Messing up on the defense is much more damaging to protoss than it is to anyone else and something that would be an inconvenience for Zerg is game-ending damage for Toss. Which is weird, because you would think things like all purpose cannons, shield batteries, and regenning shields on buildings that get upgrades with your units would make them great at defending, but it's just too easy to snipe something here and there against an opponent that has no zoning (creep/tanks/widowmines) or intel (creep, sensor towers, burrowed units, scans, changlings if they aren't watching) outside of an oracle scan that the opponent can see exactly what you've caught and have vision of.
Come on man you Can place Observées all around the Map to get some nice contrôle Map font tell me Toss don't have Intel The Chronoboost on the Nexus IS super effective to refill a minéral Line as well and maybe if protoss start to put some défensive Nexus to be able to cast more overcharge batterie they will bé able to défend more Toss got Feedback Storm Colossus and more to zone They are the race that IS able to get thé more advantage of the terrain and IS the race who should bé able to trade the most efficient The hardest part for protoss IS to play Split game i think.
@@ChaineRubis Observers take production time, which is contrary to creep and sensor towers, they take away from the army, and chrono is nowhere near as effective as a mule or droning to recover a mineral line.
@@ChaineRubis "Toss got Feedback Storm Colossus and more to zone" none of them are zoning tools, they are pokers and increase micro requirements in a fight. Colossus is the closest to a zoning tool in the list, as it has enough range to deter mid range engagements. the only thing that acts a a zoning tool, and it has been modified to act like that in the disruptor, but with the supply cost increase, the army sponge effect and the reduced area of effects. " They are the race that IS able to get thé more advantage of the terrain and IS the race who should bé able to trade the most efficient " lol not, terran is the best capitalizing because is the race with the best range and zoning tools. every weird map is advantageous to terran: open space? siege tank map, narrow corridors? siege tank map, a lot of air space? drop or fine a broken siege tank. lots of ramps? put mines there. big main? drops and mines. short maps? 3 barracks. the only weakness is a big map because if dilute the power of zone control. that why zerg always win the big maps. "The hardest part for protoss IS to play Split game i think." so, you say that they are really efficient, but if their efficiency is tested, then is the worst race. stop drinking dude. or do you mean splitting armies? because you know, splitting armies depend of the zone control of the parts and the kiting dps in case of engagement. protoss lacks both and that why protoss suffers when it has to split armies.
@@kirito3082 just a perfect exemple of Toss playing well It had nothing to do with the balance just skill th-cam.com/video/hxcHzZorn_4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IITq6MDdss32EVQA
@@kirito3082 just a perfect exemple of Toss playing well It had nothing to do with the balance just skill th-cam.com/video/hxcHzZorn_4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IITq6MDdss32EVQA
The reason the top protoss aren't defensive, is because if they don't do early all in / cheese they have no chance in a drawn out game vs terran. If you look at big money games, if it's even through the beginning stage and goes into a late game, I'd give terrans like an 70% winrate, which over 5 or 7 games that's going to be like a 95% series win rate.
This. Yet we keep getting carrier nerfs every patch despite being completely horrid and unusable past master level because silver players whine about them. Unbelievable. Give Protoss SC1 carriers that are actually worth their cost and call it a day
Exactly. It’s a consequence of race design which can’t be easily reworked. A good Terran simply has the tools they need to succeed in the late game. Protoss wins when they force mistakes or catch them off guard with creative weirdness, but reflecting what you said, that’s not as likely to win a bo5 or 7 in big tournaments against skilled players. It’s not even really a balance issue, it’s just how the races play at that top level.
@@goatse9000 One of the key things when we're talking about race design is that the Protoss are designed to be optimized to do one thing well, but also have a blatant achilles heel. This is the biggest component of them dropping off so severely in the highest levels - the highest level players have the ability to target the weak points in the right way, which the lower levels just don't have the micro for. Basically, the unit design of Protoss means that there are "gaps" in the metaphorical armor that terrans especially can target - if they are good enough. The 'gaps' are structural, so just 'play better lol' doesn't work - the vulnerabilities will be able to be targeted by a sufficiently skilled player. Ghosts don't help either. Ironically this is why Raynor is such a good Protoss player - he treats Protoss like he's playing Zerg. Instead of the optimal unit composition, drown your opponent in constant aggression and run-bys while out-expanding the opponent. It says something that Protoss plays better when played as Zerg, than when played in their 'intended' manner.
@wischmopps293 Yeah. Sure. It's not like this problem is endemic to Protoss over not just Starcraft 2 but the original Starcraft as well? We have twenty years of results that say Protoss has a fundamental structural problem in race design. I bet you play Terran.
I think part of the issue is that Protoss's design really does not cater to defensive play as well as the designs of Zerg/Terran. Warp gate, the rapid shield regen, and the high hp/low dps of most of their units really does not mesh well with a defensive style. The low dps of protoss units means they need a larger investment to defend something than Terran or Zerg do, as units focusing down workers/tech have more time to deal their damage. The main defensive tools Protoss has are the shield battery and disruptor, but batteries don't have a lot of HP, and many units can simply overwhelm them with focus fire even in small numbers, and disruptors rely a lot on the opponent's ability/inability to react to them. By contrast, Terran/Zerg units; particularly Marines, Zerglings, Hydras, Lurkers, and Siege tanks, have extremely high DPS, but low HP, which makes them fantastic on the defense, as units have very little time to deal damage before getting cleared. Zerg can play very reactively with Larva and creep/overlords/lings to spot for incoming attacks; Terran has scan to scout with no chance of being denied, repair, and specialized units for defense + high DPS units in general, which do well at defending. As someone else pointed out, vision is also extremely key to playing defensively, and Protoss's vision tools are extremely gas intensive and cost supply and important production time that are very easy to lose due to their short range (Revelation range is too short to get vision vs vikings/vipers, and oracles are extremely fragile and don't see much further than any other unit), while Zerg/Terran have vision tools that are much cheaper and cost no supply that have practically no risk involved due to costing practically nothing and/or having extremely long effective range with scan, sensor towers, changlings/overseers, and creep. That vision advantage makes it easier for them to spot what the opponent is doing, especially in the mid-late game, and react accordingly.
My theory is just that the whole idea of expensive high tech units leads to armies that can't be easily rebuilt. You go in with robo or stargate but if you lose an engagement you're knocked back to gateway units. You could build more robos or stargates but the units themselves are also quite expensive and you need the gateways. This might make defense even more important because losing units is a bigger deal There are also other issues like worse vision/detection but i think that's the big one
That's also a vital reason why protoss armies have to move around in clumps. I would furthur trace it back to the warping mechanism. Gateway units were consequently no longer designed as pivots of the protoss ground army like Brood War (cuz otherwise protoss would be OP). They can't do shite without immortals or colossi so they have to stick around.
I would also add the fact that late game Protoss is just less scary now compared to broodwar. Carriers were a threat you needed to take out no matter what because it just didn’t have supply effective counters. Now Terran and Zerg can literally win against straight carriers with mass Viking or corrupter. This in my opinion is what leads to the prevalence of these long late game matches where almost nothing happens. I hate this because it really just kills the entire race design of Protoss units being powerful and technologically more advanced, because if so, then why can a matching supply of corrupters beat carriers?
@@AnimeFan-wd5pq '' Now Terran and Zerg can literally win against straight carriers with mass Viking or corrupter.'' But above, let's say, NA Gold league, ANY Protoss could have TEMPLAR with STORM in a COMPOSITION with their carriers (instead of straight or ghey carriers) and Zerg/Terran would have a difficult time, RIGHT? Also it's corruptOr, holy pewdiecancer fantards on a stick.
Yep The high tech expensive units can't be easily rebuilt. They're incredibly easy to pick off for the most part. If you could warpgate at least the robo ones in it might help but still would face similar problems.
Maxpax is not playing offline but if were talking best toss players right now you have mention him, he can play aggressive and defensive in creative ways aswell. Im convinced he is able win any major actually
@@MrShadowbite Like you think hes two asians in a trenchcoated? You think milliseconds of lag are making him exponentially better? Even though lag is usually a double edged sword.
As a Terran player, I had this theory about Protoss pros not winning 3 years ago: it’s because of the macro mechanism. Main macro mechanism for each race: - Zerg: larvae and injecting - Terran: mule and reactor - toss: boost and warping Both Zerg and Terran mechanisms are flexible than the toss. With more skills, the production capacity you can squeeze out of a build is significantly larger than that of toss. In theory toss’s mechanics have just about the same potential, but because of how the gateway units are priced, and how they perform in large group battles relative to their price tag…. Nope. I still remember when I tried to play toss few years ago, thinking how worthless gateway units were. I mean, the only units worth mass producing in mid game is the stalker. It’s just a dps-nerfed roach that can shoot up. But they cost twice as much. It’s ridiculous. You meant to climb the tech tree in mid game(gas intensive), and you have these stupid expansive units for map controls/defense? How many pro games we saw toss lose right after their first batch robo unit came out? The macro side of toss just can’t keep up with how skill these pros are. Plain and simple. Toss can only win when the game wasn’t THIS figured out.
@@ChaineRubis Not in a long macro games. In those games they become filler while the actual valuable unis like collosus / templar / immortals etc are hard to replace once you lose them.
How do you feel about this take: "Protoss units don't do the things they're intended to do well." Shade doesn't let Adapts escape due to restrictions on re-activating it. Immortals don't fight tanks, because they can't get to tanks. Pheonixies (pheonixi?) get more kills on ground targets than air. ectect
I feel like protoss' biggest advantage has always been warping in on the attack to mitigate defenders advantage. Their strength is attacking. At the very high end, to defend protoss has shield battery and i guess disruptor shots to ward enemies away. Not to mention protoss have the worst time recovering of they take economic damage. Terrans have mule's and zerg can create drones much faster than a toss makes probes. I also feel like protoss spell casting is ultimately weaker. Stasis ward may be AOE but it normally just chunks away the smaller units, meanwhile interference matrix doesnt have to be baited into, can target the most important units (doesnt need aoe) and doesnt make the target invulnerable. Not to mention how anti armor missile and emp just shred a lot of survivability instantly in an aoe and the only counter play is feedback. And zerg have abduct, fungal and neural, once again the only real counter play is feedback. The issue with feedback is that it seemlingly both doesnt do enough damage and has to be preemptive from the squishiest unit on the field
A unit that is squishy, slow and vulnerable to EMP. So you have to have a whole group of them off to the side and micro them in 1 by 1 or try to prism drop them, again somehow avoiding the EMP spam. I don't understand how the entire protoss army can get 50% of its defense deleted by a bunch of tanky sniper boys. Every terran late game nowadays is just ghost micro. I can't.
@@plopoplapa If you can't execute the templar drop then don't. If only Vsauce didn't talk rubbish because he can't compute, it would have saved many people watching many pointless videos.
It's incredibly hard to be a defensive Protoss because you're given almost no tools. Chronoboost is inferior at playing macro games. It's almost useless later in the game, but good early to rush upgrades and do timing attacks. Protoss has flat out the worst detection mechanic and the worst map vision. And whenever Protoss gets a solid defensive option, like the early void ray opening (back when VR's were cheaper), they'll immediately nerf it. Even shield batteries got nerfed. Defense is great if you're trying to get into a macro game, but going late game is almost always a terrible situation for Protoss. They win the vast majority of their games in the midgame. I actually think Hero is the best Protoss that has a chance of winning a tournament, not necessarily because I disagree with the premise of defense winning championships, but because Protoss defense is so godawful I just don't think it's going to beat anyone.
Detection and scouting are huge problems. Skytoss is supposed to be the tactic of the protoss, but the void ray which was actually good at killing queens is no longer in the game so to speak. I said before- protoss should have sensor towers. That would balance most things i think.
The reason Protoss hasn't won anything is because there are units with abilities that are quite literally designed to counter Protoss and their ability to defend. Ravagers were specifically added to the game to break forcefields from sentries. Sentries, the strongest defensive spellcaster Protoss has, are completely useless now in a defensive situation. You can't block a ramp, you can't prevent your units from being surrounded, and you can't defend against counter-attacks. The incidental "building damage" tacked onto the Ravager bile is even worse. Cannons and batteries aren't effective since you can just bile them down.
Exactly! There's more to it ofcourse but think about what makes terran able to defend this situation, repairable bunkers and siege tanks, protoss has none of this, it's not even comparable.
Maybe its because sentries were the casters that gave you unmatched battlefield manipulation? I mean, you could temporarily "modify the map" with a caster...in a micro intensive RTS where 3-5 seconds means the death of your army. Every protoss used and abused sentries before. I'm glad to see that got a counter. That being said, people forget that sentries dont only have forcefields. I feel like the unit used to be very good because of forcefields and now that it has counters, players just threw it to the garbage bin. The shield it has gives +2 armor against ranged ( 85% of the units in sc 2), and yet i never see it used in any engagement. Imagine getting Ultra's Chitinous Plating upgrade but for your entire army at any point from min 3 onwards. Of the things wrong with StarCraft, Sentries are not on that list.
I'd love to see sentries with the shield recharge ability they had in the campaign. Terran has medivacs. Zerg has transfuse. I know shield batteries are a thing, but they are stationary and vulnerable. It doesn't seem that gamebreaking of an ability for what sentries cost in game. It would probably need to be a research on the cyber core to avoid super early shenanigans.
also long range backline ground to ground/air unit like dragoons is missed...stalkers are just trash in that role....but yeah zerg has no business having ravagers...they literally counter siege tanks and practically are better siege tanks that and shoot and move with the army...its ridiculous
@@balanceofjudgement4282 guardian shield isn't used as frequently as it should probably because the revolving array of abilities they manage are pretty intense control wise. I really really wish some of that unit control would be shifted away from active abilities. It may help if that ability gad a much smaller cost to activate and drained energy over time rather than be on a strict timer so that players could use it a head of time and not worry about it. Course it could also help if sentries didn't cost like 100 gas while have TERRIBLE stats even for a caster, no damaging or damage assisting abilities, and hard counters to EVERY ability it has. Forcefield -> massive/bile. Guardian shield -> melee/good targeting. Hallucination -> detection/paying attention. The sentry could use a rework to help protoss because the sentry is designed forva different era of StarCraft ll
I think this is a great take, and goes hand in hand with the fact that Protoss as a race can’t sit back and take its time. Protoss has no choice but to be agressive from the start to try to slow down Terran and Zerg, because otherwise is gg pretty fast.
I have this theory that missing players like Zest, Trap, sOs, and Parting in top form actually hurts all other competing protoss players as much or more than it helps them to not have to contend with these masters for slots in the playoff brackets. You talked about aggression and made a lot of good points, but you skipped something I know you are aware of which is the limited number of times you can successfully pull out the same timing attack / strategy in a given tournament (and especially against a given opponent during a longer series). Even with Parting, I don't recall him innovating a ton of strategies (ok, the single pylon wall was truly one of kind), but you would see his tactical adaptations for different maps and players, and I still believe that helps other protosses to realize how to turn an advantage into an instant kill in certain scenarios given a particular map pool, player base and metagame. Protoss relies on a diverse meta, and I believe all protosses benefit when terrans and especially zergs are having to worry about 3-4 different timing attacks or strong pressure builds with solid transitions that are truly deadly. I mean deadly as in even players above your skill level will struggle if they falter at all despite suspecting it may be coming and knowing exactly how to respond, (not just the kind of builds that you can catch someone off guard randomly if they get complacent, forget to scout, etc). Instead, these days it feels like we have 1 or 2 of these kinds of builds per matchup that are actually viable against playoff caliber opponents. Well, more in PvP, lol. Anyway, it seems we are missing these tip top level innovators and refiners who can actually influence the overall meta by showing the entire protoss playerbase what the race is capable of, and also instilling way more uncertainty and challenge into defensive zerg and terran players trying to get through open tournament stages. You might argue that timings and strong pressure builds are more and more a thing of the past as SC2 matures... but I'll ask you, is this the case in BW? (I don't actually know the answer, mostly kind of curious) And more relevantly, is it even the case for Terran or Zerg? Protoss really seems to be lagging behind in the meta, and while some of that is inevitably going to be about balance and game design, you really can't undersell the loss to the protoss meta from losing these guys who are just absolute crushers. Like ruin your next month because of how badly they beat you in the tournament. Sincerely, A Guy in the Comments
Well, from what I've seem from BW games, cheeses or early pushs don't usually win you the game right away. A lot of players can get back at the game without that much effort. Although a succesfull cheese sure is an advantage to the cheeser, just not game ending.
We all know RT can horse around in his streams, but seeing him address such topics, it amplifies how passionate he is to this game series. This is why we love Artosis.
RT, the tools protoss has to defend in SC2 are worse than the tools zerg or terran has. It's a weaker race and DEPENDS on outsmarting the opponent with tricks or tactics. Terran defenses - Siege Tank Bunker Planetary Widow Mine Liberator Sensor Tower Turrets Supply depot that can raise and lower Zerg Defenses - Creep, Creep, Creep, CREEP. Not only gives vision and notice of upcoming attacks but also boosts movement speed - Queens with transfuse - Spores and Spine crawlers that can reposition - Overlords for more vision - Ability to produce mass units quickly in response to seeing an attack coming (with creep and overlords) - Lurkers Protoss Defenses - Cannon - Battery + battery overcharge (frail, limited range, limited duration, requires nexus energy, can be targeted down) - Disruptor? (expensive, requires high amounts of micro, requires lots of tech, slow, vulnerable) - Tempest? (only certain builds, nobody weaves a few tempests in for defense.) - Observer for vision... most pros good enough to spot and destroy them - NO DOOR. Requires 1 unit to always be standing at the entrance to natural, if the one unit dies the door falls. - Recall. Amazing defensive tool but does require nexus energy, has a CD, and units arrive awkwardly around nexus. - Storm. (joke of a spell compared to storm in brood war. In such a fast pace game templar are too slow.) Now, RT, which race would you like to play to be the best defensive player? Obviously Terran. Next is Zerg and lastly to no surprise is Protoss with the most awkward exploitable defenses.
I remember when SC2 came out. I was so psyched to the my templar and use storm. To say it was underwhelming is an understatement. Like WTF is this. Where's my storm from SC1?!
@@spokoman23 The templar just cost too much and require too much tech to move THAT slowly and deal that little damage. Like, the only way to get value is to hit a tight clump of marines or zerglings, like forget about it. Takes like 3 storms to kill a group of vikings or corrupters, by then they've already killed your army.
You know, the same type of caveats you added for Toss also exist for other races. Not saying you’re wrong but that the analysis feels biased without it.
100% agree with RT's points, that's true across all RTS, you can even look at how beasty completely wrecked everyone in AOE4 with very very turtle style play in SC2 though it's been almost a decade of the state of the game making it completely non-viable to defend with protoss (specially against zerg)... the meta has been "kill them before late game" for a reason, so even a top tier defensive pro-toss would likely be super unstable anyway because past the early game the race is just screwed. There's a lot of stats and trap (at their prime) examples of that. Even trap was only super successful durnig his period because there was also a surge of terran, PvT is somewhat manageable, PvZ is completely broken
I don't disagree with anything said but I would characterize it slightly differently than 'too few protoss players are willing to grind properly to develop a defensive playstyle' and more 'the fundamental design of protoss makes a defensive playstyle unappealing'. And I'd say that where the protoss design goes wrong is with the Warpgate. Because Warpgate fundamentally warps the offensive disadvantage. As Artosis said, a properly designed RTS matchup has a decent defenders advantage, such that the offensive player has to make a significant outplay or deception or get lucky to win; otherwise, the defender's advantage will allow the defensive player to gain an economic advantage and eventually grind out a war of attrition. Warpgates alter that in a similar way to how muta/ling alters BW zvz, though to a lesser degree, which fundamentally breaks all protoss matchups, though to a lesser degree. And it's because Warpgate removes almost all of the travel time for new gateway units to reach a battle front, which ordinarily is the largest part of a defender's advantage most of the time. Because that travel time is gone, in order to make all protoss matchups less broken than BW zvz, gateway units have to be balanced around that, which means that they have to be fundamentally weaker than all other equivalent units that will have a travel time to a battle front. And what that means is that protoss players' basic units are just plain weaker defensively. And it also means that a strong protoss late game army has to be skytoss (unless protoss are given a really strong anti air unit out of robotics, like terran got Goliaths/Thors/Cyclones out of factories). However, most players find losing to skytoss equally if not more annoying than losing to protoss cheese/aggressive builds, so skytoss being really strong rarely lasts longer than a patch or two. So yeah imo the design of Warpgate means that any balance team has faced 3 bad choices when it comes to protoss: either make protoss strong by making cheese strong, make protoss strong by making skytoss strong, or make protoss weak. Balance has been stuck on option 3 for the last 1-2 years or so. IMO the only way to 'fix' protoss is fix Warpgate so that protoss gateway units can be buffed in compensation and protoss can have a way to win a standard late game besides pure skytoss, or make a really good antiair unit out of robotics so, again, protoss can have a decent lategame besides skytoss.
This might be one of my favorite videos RT. First off I agree with your points but even if I didn't I love the insight and overall concept of this video. I'd actually like to see more like this maybe like diving into specific match ups with what your thoughts are what could be altered to improve overall balance. Just my 2 cents. Love the content as always!
If you want to improve balance you identify the race that loses the most. Then you slightly modify their units and buff them. You don't look at protoss losing and say- nerfing void rays will make them win more -_-
I'd also like to add that a protoss also suffers from its gateway inefficiency built in to compensate for warp gate. Warp ins tend to be much better on the offense than trying to do one on the defense and half the reinforcements get targeted down before they can do anything by Terran bio ball just machine gunning everything down by the time the warp in is complete or you just accept you lost the position and warp in further away. That or the warp gets wrecked by something like ravager bile. Also psystorm is overall less effective with how quickly units move and evade in sc2 whereas in broodwar you could rely on Terran bio being basically useless and slow siege lines to score some pretty devastating hits as vultures and golis struggle to navigate around the tanks. I feel like a shorter duration higher dps storm could help against the zerg and Terran hyper quick bio as honestly collossi feel way too easily sniped by vikings/corruptors/vipers for them to be really effective in the mid to late game and disruptors just feel to swingy for a consistent defense. Also maybe bring back something like maelstrom or maybe a minimum unit number trigger for stasis traps to be less useless against the better zerg/Terran triggering them all with like 1 marine or zergling consistently. Mind you this is speaking as a Terran player and just noticing some holes in the protoss defensive roster.
to be fair it would bring terran and zerg out of t1 unit spam in the matchup and i'm not necessarily opposed to it. You can't tell me you don''t feel a little bad for the protoss when they micro their little hearts out with warp prisms, templars colossi juggling and blink micro only to get rolled by a swarm of like 50 banelings that just move commanded forward. Plus I feel like it might expand the usefulness of things like ultras and swarm hosts just to shake things up a bit in the meta. For terran it would definitely force earlier ghosts and maybe counter mass liberator that tends to take over later on and just setting up zones of no if the temps can get their dmg out a bit faster. Maybe see a bit more mech play and sky terran. I guess I just feel like storm was always one of the iconic protoss tools for offense and defense but the current way SC2 is played makes it pretty nonviable to the point that something as inconsistent as disruptor balls is the preferred zoning tool. Maybe not a massive tweak but something just to make it a more viable option for protoss to stock them around in bases as a defensive tool the way they do in SC BW@@sakesaurus
@@uriel005 toss need 1. anything to counter random 2. some early game unit that isn't GARBAGE in mid game (adepts and zealots are really bad) Then we'll see the oh wow defensive bo and skillsets that usually aren't worth practicing.
problem is the warp gate compensation. On offense having better units to warp in could really break the game as 16 zealots warping into your natural mineral line can already be pretty devastating. The reason I went with high templar for the buff is because at least with them you have to wait on the energy and can't suddenly start warp prisming to each base 2-3 to just ko the entire economy. Or making stalkers as effective as dragoons on top of blink and better pathing ai. overall I think its actually pretty hard to balance them just because of the way warp gate and warp prisms work. You can't go too overboard with it without utterly breaking them on the offensive.@@sakesaurus
Rogue being mentionend as a lategame defensive god is just weird. Basically all of his best results have been from brutal, targeted cheeses. His finals vs zest was just a seris of cheeses. His recent gsl win vs creator was through the same. His massive win against classic was with 50% insane all ins. It's just not his defining characteristic, he's always been a god tier tournament player due to strategy.
Nah, I don't remember exactly, but back when he won his championship, he was unbeatable in the lategame. I remember him being the first to go for massive multitask, completely outplaying everyone. They just could not keep up, not until the rest actually got better.
He has certainly won several tournaments that were actually disappointing despite how cool it is to see absolute dominance, because he just won a Bo5 or Bo7 in the minimum amount of games, only two of which even reached the full midgame. But he has also been one of the most successful defensive lategame zergs, especially during periods of the meta where zerg cheese was not considered viable (or zerg lategame was OP).
Rogue is an absolute killer with cheeses and aggression but he also had an unbeatable late game. Having a fearsome late game makes your cheeses better. Much better. This is the same case for Maru.
The core issue is that Gateway units suck. Gateway units have to suck because of Warp Gate. We therefore need to improve Gateway units in such a way as to not make warp rushes busted. Here's the solution. A brand new upgrade at Templar Archives that says "Units summoned at Gateways deal 10% more damage." The Protoss can now transition all or some of their Warp Gates BACK into Gateways and then endure the long unit build times to construct a mega army that can actually trade cost efficiently vs Ling Baneling Roach Ravager and Marine Marauder Medivac.
I wouldn't state that so categorically. Stalkers' damage density may be poor in the late game (or, rather, a Bioball's damage density is nuts in the late game), but that is its own problem. But look at the early game? Terran builds a bunker just to be able to expand. Until you get Medivacs, Stalkers and Adepts can just bully bio with their high health pools, trading shields for Marines. Midgame Blink Stalker pushes are genuinely hard to hold, and Terran needs well-placed Tanks to have a prayer, while Toss' force is just Stalkers and more Stalkers and that gives Terran nightmares. Gateway units are excellent for as long as engagements are small-medium in size. They lose out against massed MMM, which is just the most dense concentration of ranged dps in the game, and you need AoE to solve that. Same for Zerg, same for Toss. Same for Terran, even.
Would love to hear your thoughts on balance, and maybe even some specific changes, and in general. Protoss feels very limited, while both Zerg and Terran can answer them in many different ways, which makes it very hard for protoss. That is also why, in the past when there were new changes protoss would do well for the first few months, but after Zerg and Terran could come up with a response, protoss would just start to loose mostly everything again, and now, protoss can barely get out of group stages in big tournaments.
Really enjoyed this video. I think one caveat about defending I'd like to discuss is that there is simply no point in doing it if you're don't have a timing or late-game options. For instance, in the Maru proxy era, (at least from my understanding and memory) Terran players all struggled in that period of time because there just weren't many options beyond proxying games. Playing a defensive, more consistent style would certainly let you get into the mid-game or late-game, but the balance and game understanding at the time would just mean you would start playing at a disadvantage. So from what I understood from watching Maru's games was that he realized that increasing variance as much as possible allowed him to force Protoss players to play defensively and would give him an advantage just from being scared. This is to say that of course, being strong defensively is an incredibly strong trait in a player. It shows a deep understanding of the current meta game, and allows you to create tempo when you successfully parry an attack while mitigating risk. It also gives opportunities for counterattacks at the opponent's most vulnerable time. But when defending is simply not strong (i.e. an overpowered lategame composition exists like mass ravens, mass carriers, blord infestor, etc), you can't just defend until you win. Rather you're FORCED to take risk, as playing consistently simply puts you at a disadvantage. Obviously being able to do cheese and lategame play and to just have OLIVEIRA 100 levels of stats across the board is ideal. But depending on the meta, player styles really can clash depending on what's strong and what isn't. It really makes balancing interesting because sometimes a strong strategy can emerge from just being overall weak everywhere else which completely redefines the matchup. So as a balancer you might be left scratching your head where you have to nerf a really strong exploitative strategy, but also encourage other styles of play by buffing? David Kim wins again. I think it just goes to show how creative pro players like Maru can be when they exploit strategies to the point of seeming imbalanced, even if their race overall is probably weak. Anyways, thanks for the vid RT, I always love me some RTS theory
I agree about what you said, but I also have a suspision Stats rise or even Neebs dominion was possible becasue simply the balance was better for Protoss then, specially for "stable" units. And its been nerfed again and again. Now im not sure if its possible for defensive Protoss to be at the top of the top.
ArtosisTV you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking why there are not more defensive Protoss players at any one time. The reason is that if Protoss allow the other two races to go on offense themselves they get crushed. Protoss is simply underpowered, if either of the other two races get control of the game Protoss is almost never able to make a comback. Protoss was nerfed far to hard over the years, zelots lost their damage on the charge, senturies got gutted, and the offensive tools for both Terran and Zerg that being Banelings and Emp are overpowered. Honestly EMP should be totally removed from the game but also skills that disarm or render totally useless other units such as the raven and viper. That or disruptors need to be buffed a lot and Protoss need a viper like unit that can disable the other races most effective units with just a simple click.
The disruptor nerf was the dumbest shit blizzard has ever done. It's literally Protoss only answer to roach and bio and now it's insanely easy to dodge at the pro level
Across all competitive games, even in other genres like competitive TCGs or fighting games, on a best-of-1 ladder you only theoretically need to win at least 51% of your games against equally skilled players to gradually move up in rank over time. This is why cheesy, hyper-aggressive strategies work well in that format and not in elimination style tournaments where you need consistent win streaks across multiple opponents and against the same opponents multiple times in a row. When a player is forced to climb through a bracket, banking on high risk, high reward aggressive strategies over and over again is bound to fail eventually when they inevitably run into a player who manages to pick the correct counterplay more often than not. Winning consistently in an elimination tournament setting basically requires minimizing this sort of risky strategic variance and forcing games into scenarios where one player can dominate over and over again through superior fundamentals.
Part of the reason so many Protoss are offensive rather than defensive is because that is what the design choices of the game makers incentivize for the players to do. Protoss defensive strategies got nerfed because some players chose to use them offensively. They didn’t get properly replaced, just nerfed to the point of unplayable or even taken out altogether. While I do appreciate Oracle stun ability i dont think its enough. R.I.P : Mothership Core Vortex Pylon overcharge
I think the problem is that we've reached the point where protoss cant really compete with other races if they play defensive. For starters vision is super important in order to play defensive, but all of protoss vision requires build time and a massive resource commitment wheras zerg get it for free and terran can use sensor towers in the early game and scans for free in the mid-late game but protoss vision requires supply and robo time or apm / screen time via oracle. Isnt it kinda crazy that other races have cheap / stable vision and protoss is left chronboosting gas heavy supply units to get vision??
I think discussing map vision would have been really interesting. I'm not much of a player, but something I've seen from serral games that seem unique to me is the way he scouts so consistently. It seems that overlords are one of, if not the best early game scouting tools. It seems to me that this scouting ability makes top tier zergs very difficult to aggress early to mid game because they can get vision of everything you do.
Terran and Zerg have vision for free, meaning by units that you have to build anyway like overlords and scans that you have for free. Toss needs units to scout even if you dont want to go air you have to make a starport, oracle or phoenix, thats a huge investment early game!! imagine all those resources focused only on your build order!!
@@venom-gt7rc creep spread is easy the more you do it, to me is natural now. Im a toss player but I can play any race, my favorite second race is Zerg. Fun fact after playing Zerg for a few months I took it to Masters 1, Ive been toss for years and Im stuck in Diamond league.
I'd like to point out, speaking for 2023, that the fact that Maxpax chooses to play online only, is a big aspect of the problem. We have arguably the best Toss opting out of offline events. I'd assume he would win at least one. I'm not saying he would win all major events, but he'd certainly knock out some big names, even if he's not winning he'd still have an impact on the tournaments.
@@henryharjes5799 Artosis is very much more involved in the Korean scene than the European one. It makes sense that is expertise and is opinion are more focused there.
Yeah I never understood that change it's funny because herO came back from military won GSL and dreamhack and they merged protoss sky toss and battery overcharge.
Wow, Artosis. Thank you for gracing us with you knowledge and letting us know that our opinions don't matter. Seriously tho, I get it. You've been at this for a very long time. It doesn't mean that other people can't have good takes. I'll give it a shot. Don't have a masters in SC1/SC2, but I've played both games. I'm a bit older than you and have a masters in nuclear physics. Completly irrelevant, I just like to brag about it. I'm sure you can relate. Anywho. I think vision is a big problem for Toss. T and Z have much, much better options for vision at every point in the game. Scans, Overlords, creep... Medivacs too actually (tanks + Medi sees high ground). Obs is kinds crap - slow, very low HP, comes out of a Robo. The defence / offence players probably has something to do with this. It's just 1 aspect. I remember when Stats and those other dudes you've mentioned were playing at the top of their game and still were getting their asses handed to them especially by Z. Cheers!
I am of the belief that Toss is just fundamentally designed wrong, or, that the journey towards overall balance has created an asymmetry of balance at different phases of the game particularly concerning Protoss. I do not believe that Toss "just happens to" not produce the same caliber and multitude of players as the other two races, two games in a row. I am an ex high GM Toss player, the closest Protoss player that I have ever seen to being "Perfect" as a Toss and the best defensive Toss, especially for his time, was Rain.
Wild to not mention by far the best protoss in the world right now when talking about current players: MaxPax. Even mentioned showtime but not MaxPax for some reason lol
He mentioned showtime cause he was trying to make a point about defensive players. Which clearly didnt work cause we know showtime is not winning anything
The problem is most of the truly "major" tournaments are offline, and Maxpax hasn't attended offline, sure he is a beast online cups but those aren't typically considered to be major tournaments.
Rogue being mentioned as a defensive/lategame Zerg was kinda funny because the man literally just plays the meta. Lategame Zerg OP? That's what he'll do. Roach/Ravager good against Maru. Rogre Zerg comes out.
The main problem that protoss has is that their gateway units dont scale well into the late game, and so when they warp in to replace losses, at almost any point outside the early game, they create an inferior army. This coupled with certain units simply hard countering Protoss too easily (eg: ghost), means that you can destroy a protoss army in the late game, and then mop up the gateway units that replace it too easily.
I would like to point out that those "defensive" Protoss didn't win piss all in the last 5 years either. Good luck playing defensive against Serral and winning championships. Oh that's right. Trap never did. Rain, Stats and Zest haven't since the birthdates of your guys in the chat. Not mentioning s0s even as an honourable mention should be a crime. her0 was favourite to win those tournaments at the time, and he did. Then they nerfed Protoss, and nerfed Protoss again. His playstyle didn't cause inconsistency the nerfs to shield battery and disruptor did.
I fully agree!! Players who can consistently take the initiative in a match will take tournaments, and at the highest level, that ironically translates to players who are best at defending because being able to shut down the full range of possible aggression takes the initiative away from the opponent. I think this also explains the seasons of success for a player like herO in that GSL win after his military service. His success against so many zerg players that season seemed to reside in his ability to dictate the pace of the game without having to commit to a work-or-die push. So while it looked like he was being successful being “aggressive,” in my mind it was actually a case of playing defensive by being active out on the map and slowing the zerg down until he could take a favorable showdown. I wonder if the puzzle that needs solving in PvT is for protoss to figure out a way to play as a zerg would in ZvP: get away with being the greedier player with minimal defensive investment and win with slightly less efficient fights. Which sounds so wrong given the faction’s design as the “elite few,”, but if I look at how terran simply does have more harass and push options, while also having the more efficient late game army in turtled OR split positions, it kind of does look like protoss has to win by simply having more or maxing out faster. - Worthless two cents from a ladder wretch.
I understand and somewhat agree with your point on herO, but how many tournies was herO favored to win and then he get's rock paper scissored by sOs? I'm not even even talking about the famous 100k match either. Also parting at least deserves a mention.
Long story short is protoss doesn't have as many good players as the other races. herO has to carry the meta by himself, he had PartinG doing a lot of the heavy lifting before that. Zest is gone, sOs is gone, Trap is gone, Dear is gone. Trap won 3 super tournaments in a row not that long ago. Maxpax refuses to go to big events so who besides herO has a chance? Stats never has gotten back into shape after returning from the military. Edit: I never think of Rogue as a defensive player. Whenever I think of Rogue I think of him as the most exploitative SC2 player of all time. He just exploited his race's strengths in timings that his race could exploit opponents the most. Rogue was a sharp timing attack abuser in the same way Zest was.
As long as there is warp tech, Protoss design will suck. Units cant be too strong on timing attacks and that makes tier 1 units really, really weak for defensive purposes. No warp tech, legs instead of charge, and make zealots and stalkers stronger. Yes its called BW.
Artosis, let me suggest another possibility for why Toss isn't competitive at the highest levels... SC2 is like chess. As skill was still growing exponentially, both chess and SC2 favored dynamic and daring players. Innovators like Bobby Fisher. Now chess (like SC2) is increasingly mechanical. Is Magnus Carlson better than Fisher was? Yes. But because he can play like a computer. Superior play but boring play. Protoss was and is the "cheesy" race. The race that catches you by surprise. On the lower ladder (like with lower-level chess) that is an advantage. But at the higher levels where everything approaches "optimal", Protoss doesn't have the room to breathe. Very little is a surprise. In my opinion, Astrea is peak Protoss (at least from an entertainment perspective) because he plays at the highest level before things get too mechanical (and where his creativity and daring still have room to breathe). Protoss needs a bit of messiness and imperfection has little room to thrive above that threshold.
So great to see you happy while presenting all this knowledge. I took a long break from starcraft and when i returned i saw some videos av an angry artosis, something i had not seen before. All i remembered was smiles and laughter, hope it continues like in this video and that you have have a good happy life.
What would make Protoss more playable? What if they got some sort of spell like the queen but instead of spawn larva it gave existing mineral patches more total minerals (regrowing used or close to depleted patches bringing them back slowly up to the original amount). It would favor late game builds, so probably slow down the game. They could have a stationary building that is a mix between a bunker and a medevac. It could protect a few units lowering there damage because they are being healed but they would regain health as fast as Zerg, so slowly (maybe 2x Zerg normal heal speed). This would work for mechanical and flying too. They could have a merge like archons for zealots that gives them more health, reflective damage shields (meaning if they are hit by projectiles it also damages the enemies a small amount), but instead of attacking they have a passive area of effect slowing and a small damage over time effect (like a poison, maybe stackable) just being close to enemies. For the sentry revamp the force field, make it damage somehow, maybe make it similar to the auto turret or the removed infested Terran, possibly let your own units enter the field making them like bunkers. Or make it be able to capture enemy units like stasis ward. I feel like Protoss should have a damage, shield energy, and or spell energy increase if they are within the power effect of pylons (maybe choose one and make it a temporary triggered ability/spell). Giving their energy based weapons and shields an additional +1 +0 +1 (up to total +4) (regular armor would be uninfected). Possibly give gateways a reactor like attachment or upgrade, that allows for you to create certain units like a normal gateways (only spawn at the gateway) + continue to allow the regular amount of warp ins.
It is not only right now and not only tournament wins. Protoss has been underperforming consistently in pro play for 5 years (see statistics in Aligulac). That is clearly unbalanced.
If you're a Protoss on equal bases any mistake that costs you probes is way worse than if you were Terran or Zerg. The latter races are able to mitigate or replace losses in a way that if they were in BW it would bust the game completely.
The fact that Stats hasn't been able to qualify for any GSL this season so far despite entering every qualifier is proof to me that macro Protoss play is in a terrible place balance-wise. Thanks Artosis for making this video
Starcraft 2 is not even close to being a balanced game, never was, and never will be. Every race has had periods of being in the gutter. These periods lasted much longer for some races over others. Many players quit and never return during those times, even if their race becomes stronger again. This is why SC2 is in its current state and also why it will never recover. It hasn't helped that the community was always tearing itself apart over balance either.
The best Protoss player ever and a league above everybody else is MaxPax. He mops the floor with Showtime and Reynor, and often wins vs Clem. You should interview him why he is so good and why he don't want to play in offline tournaments so much.
Between season 1 in 2017 and season 2 in 2022, no protoss won a GSL code S. That’s more than 5 years of a 14 year old tournament. It becomes an even higher proportion if I adopt your view and disqualify anything before LotV. In fact, even if I did include pre-LotV, there is still only a period of ~4 years where Protoss was doing well (2013-2017). Before and after that, a Protoss champion was quite rare. This kind of trend can’t be explained away by appealing to personal preferences. More likely there is something about Protoss that makes it more difficult to compete at the highest level. This doesn’t mean that the game is imbalanced. The trend began less than a year after Afreeca took over GSL. Maybe the rules changed in a way that affected Protoss players disproportionately. Maybe the SC2 ladder changed around that time. Or, the most popular explanation, maybe the patches around that time changed something important. Personally, I don’t think it’s a matter of racial balance-at least not an issue that can be fixed with some balance patches. As I said, the 5 year trend wasn’t new. Protoss did well only briefly in the history of GSL. And if you look at SC1, you also see Protoss lagging behind the other races when it comes to the absolute top: there is no Protoss representation among the so-called ‘bonjwas.’ This is why I think the issue began with the concept of Protoss as a race and as a play style. I’m no SC expert, so I wouldn’t dare make any suggestions, but it is true that Starcraft in general has for most of its history seen Protoss denied a spot at the tip top of achievement and play.
one other thing is the second herO figured out how to play a perfect game, he won a championship and then quit using that playstyle go ahead and attack me, "if it would still work he'd keep doing it" no. protoss pros have problems with their thinking about the game and i truly believe that they think they HAVE to attack or they'll be behind, but they really, really don't
I think defensive play is really discouraged from Protoss based on how their late game is, especially against Zerg. A lot of Protoss openers depend on causing lots of economic damage to go into a favorable mid game. If Protoss goes into late game with a similar economy as Zerg, they just lose. Zerg have way too many good counter units that invalidate the most expensive Protoss units. Once Terran gets into ghosts the game completely changes because they essentially erase half of a units HP (and invalidate archons). On top of that, we saw a nerf to two late game Protoss units with the carrier and disruptive changes. So of course the most successful Protoss players right now (Hero and Maxpax) are going to be more offensive players. Defensive Protoss doesn’t work. Even before Stats left to his military service he wasn’t winning top tier tournaments, and he is by far the best defensive Protoss player we have ever had.
As a defensive GM protoss player, I gotta say I actually do perform well againist pro players better than me in tournaments compared to ladder, but I also played over 2000 games to reach that level cause I need to be prepared for any attack.
0:27 what is interesting is that Protoss representation in finals wasn't bad. There were 4 terrans 5 protoss and 7 zergs in finals. protoss just didn't make that last step for some reason.
Protoss is the race that could actually just be entirely overhaul reworked. They just don't have a genuine late game tactic beyond shuttle lots killing workers very well. Thats why they either cheese or agress really early. If protoss doesn't take an early lead, zerg just has so much more to play with. Terran can just turtle and viking kill colossus to a stalemate protoss loses. And in that matchup, the wincon is a stupid stray ruptor shot which will almost never win the game against good micros. Honestly, protoss just needs another unit or make skytoss better. But in reality, they cant give anything to protoss because it's so aggressive and if they have another early game tool, it just kills ladder more and likely changes nothing in the pro scene.
I only disagree with one of your points + the exclusion of MaxPax in the conversation. I think that even with just the 3-4 online Premier tournaments he gets per year, MaxPax has more of a chance to win a Premier tournament than someone like Creator in the 8-10 online + offline events he can compete in. But the main point I disagree with is that while yes, even I don't think herO is necessarily on the 'GOAT' level where we expect him to win everything, he is still literally the only Protoss player to win a $100k+ Premier tournament since the Mothership Core was in the game back in 2017. So while Protoss has lost players like Zest, Neeb, sOs, Stats, Trap, PartinG and even Zoun, literally NONE of them actually burned as bright as herO did in 2022 (since 2017, at least). That said, Protoss didn't win a single Premier tournament last year, let alone Katowice. It's not as if Protoss needs a Katowice-tier Protoss to be able to win non-Katowice tournaments.
I quit watching and playing SC2 once it became obvious Protoss was basically a timing attack race. I prefer macro “control” protoss and it was outclassed by the other races.
Others have better theories than mine, though I feel my theory does add into things. Protoss abilities and mechanics seem to lean towards instant-win cheese. Take, for instance, the infamous Dark Templar. You warp in a few and either it wins the game or...you lose. How about Photon Canons? Either you're in early SC2 and canon rush the zerg ramp or....you never build any more and if that fails you lose. Stalkers, either you crush them with an early blink stalker rush....or you lose. Oracles, you either do enough damage to stay ahead and crush, or its Over. Void Rays, same. Now, how about a Baneling Bust cheese? Its gonna hit something and damage it. Medivac drop, well you can just pick them up and try again in 20 seconds or rejoin the bio ball. So it me, as a non-Protoss Player I see a lot of infuriating cheese coming from the Protoss but if I can get on top of that game's cheese it is an easier win. So if you meet someone random you can cheese it up and win a game, but once you figure that person out, or figure out their cheese. Its over. Maybe its a permanent feature of Protoss, but the Protoss lack strategic Depth atm. Maybe its a mindset thing and Protoss mains can come back. I remember when a Foreigner 'introduced' mech-terran in SC2.
I'm not hearing a coherent thesis here. You're talking about individual players and not the race as a whole and how it fits into the game. I think its more the units and balance than players that are to blame. The other races have been buffed enough that even a Protoss deathball isn't as scary as it once was, and pro tosses ability to gain an early game advantage is limited. People love to go on about SC being balanced but ultimately its not. The best Zerg just has too many advantages, it's their game to lose.
If Terran and Zerg have even a small late game advantage then Protoss is on a timer. That dictates the strategy of going for earlier attacks which then puts Protoss as an attackers disadvantage. So I think the Protoss players are doing the right strategy given the balance. If both sides defend them Protoss would lose in late game. This is why Showtime for example can get to late games but can’t close out enough to win a tournament. And MaxPax is the best Protoss player because he executes the best early and mid game aggressive strategy efficiently and without big mistakes so he has more chances to win through multiple tries at aggression. Ultimately in late game though he will peter out against top ‘defensive’ terrans. If Protoss had a better late game army composition that could go toe to toe they would play more defensively too.
Why won't Starcraft ever be balanced? Because every patch has multiple changes. They need to make smaller patches and see what minor changes do to the game instead of a bunch all at once.
It's an interesting point, but I would love to see you also explaining SOS sucess and maybe considering in MaxPax could become a world champion. Showtime doesn't feel like he can surpass the level of Clem, Serral and Reynor. But MaxPax is still improving and he seems to be getting closer to their level.
That is very true. PartinG rightfully pointed out that the way to play toss is agression. Toss has a harder time sieging up than T and Z. T has huge splash damage with tanks and Z has creep for quick movement. The fix Toss needs on D is a sentry buff. Extra energy, bigger FF, make them armored, and buff guardian shield. (in case idra is watching, that was a joke)
I, as a protoss player, know quite well how to deal with Protoss deadball (skytoss mixed with archon, high templar, colosii) in the other two races. And there are many ways to do it. But I do not know how to efficiently counter protoss deadball as a protoss myself except for going skytoss as well. I think that speaks to limited options protoss has in general.
That doesn't properly explain Protoss' lack of major wins. This isn't about the entire history of SC2, it's not about the last year or two, it's not a comparison of GOATS, and it isn't about this guy's playstyle versus that guy's playstyle. This is about the Legacy of the Void expansion which is what broke the balance against Protoss at the pro level. Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm had balance. Protoss won their share of the large tournaments in those releases. There is a clear dividing line between Protoss winning large championships at a reasonable rate and that being completely shut off with the release of Legacy of the Void. The last good year for Protoss in major championships was the last year of Heart of the Swarm. That's not a coincidence. You can talk about Serral and Maru as the GOATS, but you can also take away their major championships and you still have far more major championships for Terran (TY, Clem, Byun, Cure) and Zerg (Reynor, Dark, Solar, Rogue) than for Protoss (Hero won one, and I think Trap may have won one). The Mothership Core allowed Protoss to move their army out on the map while having okay defense at home. That was taken away with no proper replacement. I knew this when Legacy of the Void was released. I looked at the changes and thought "Protoss aren't going to be able to win anymore" and I was right. We are now on year 7 of Protoss being almost entirely shut out of major championships. The only explanation for such a thing is an imbalance against Protoss. Put the Mothership Core back in, or something equivalent (shield batteries are not), and you would immediately see Protoss win their share of major championships again.
Maybe I'm an idiot but is your point that protoss needs defensive buffs or is that top protoss players just coincidentally happen to be very rarely defensive? I'm surprised you didn't at least address the differences in the races contributing to the caliber of defense each race can play. Terran as a race is basically built from top to bottom to be most easily able to defend, between being able to instantly scan anywhere making it so you don't need detection in position, obviously bunkers (which can be salvaged so in a lot of cases you err on the side of making one if you're not sure what's happening) plus mass repair, planetary fortresses, tanks being very defensive with having long range and high DPS splash as long as they're pre-seiged can defend most ground attacks. And then zerg having queens which are one of the best defensive units in the game means you always have something in position to at least slow down an oracle, banshee, muta attack, liberator. Combine that with the fact that a top tier zerg can pretty much easily get vision with forward overlords, overseers scouting their opponents bases, the way creep works giving vision and ability for units to respond defensively quickly. Honorable mention, the fact that static defense can move. You can also burrow lings randomly around. Top zergs like Serral who know when and what to scout and how to counter are very very difficult to actually surprise to the point you get a free win unlike protoss where you have to put pylons and zealots in random spots. Protoss gets shield batteries/battery overcharge and recall. Recall is almost used more to help with cheesing than actual defense and recall is only useful if you have the units to defend in the first place but they're just not in position, and it can't be used all that often, and only if you happen to have energy for it. And batteries take so long to build and are usually skipped to save minerals unless there's a solid reason to build it. In short Protoss is just not a very defensive race. I think there was some progress made with the recent change allowing archons to actually get through your zealot protected wall gap so you can use them to defend against mutas. For diamond league players like myself that I respect you kind of discounting the tops players from the first 2 or 3 years of SC2 as being meaningful for the discussion, but just for nostalgia, I would say MC was an extremely good defender. So was HuK. MC was one of the most cheese hardered players I'd ever seen because people seemed like they always cheesed him to the point where he had pretty much seen every cheese you could imagine and wasn't a greedy player. My memory of HuK was that he pretty much relied on playing so greedy that his opponent would need to change their game plan to punish him but he would usually barely have the micro to make a hold that most other players would not be able to.
On the surface, I agree with Arty's comment, but I don't think it touches broader aspects of Protoss problem. Yes, on top level, it is true that offensive wins games but defensive wins championships. However, not all races have same instruments for defending. I would very much love to see Maru defending with shield batteries instead of siege tanks and planetary fortresses, or Serral having to spend money on static objects instead of massing universally useful queens. Protoss has to build static objects for defending - at least shield batteries - which are even not good enough for defending against certain types of attack ("hello Sir, mine drop here, your probes will need more than shields") and also needs to spend a lot of money on production structures. That makes him become so far behind an opponent of a different race, but also potentially very much at risk because of the fork in tech after cybercore because opponent can easily adjust on the fly with more universally useful units, while Protoss is locked into a path unless he invests a lot further into different production buildings. So Protoss needs to play defensively, hugging the wall, staying close to batteries and hope he would be able to defend everything and gather enough spellcasters and aoe damaging units. And that's just the start. That is why there aren't many defensive Protoss out there - it is so boring and hard to play. I myself am one of those people. I am aware Artosis doesn't speak for my level, but maybe that's why someone can recognize himself in similar problems. I am mostly diamond player who managed to get into masters 3 occasionaly. I am extremely defensive player even by Stats' standards, I never cheese, I never cannon rush, I never do stupid stuff. However, there are two big problems that occur from that. 1) whenever I am up in league, I need to rethink, reorient and reinvent defensive strategies because I am facing better and better players with tighter and tighter timings 2) the amount of bullsh*t attacking options for the opponent enhance so much without me being able to respond, at least not without playing dozens of games against such opponents Also, the patching contributes to this problem instead of solving it. What was the stated intent of the most recent patch? To stabilize the Protoss in the early game. How was it done? Well, it wasn't, nothing was done. Protoss didn't get any new units, are they able to make a bit more units early in the game, any useful upgrades for early game, no new abilities on their units. However, opponent units got certain new abilities, upgrades or new costs, so on top of everything I had to deal with as a defensive Protoss, Cyclons all-in was added to the list, and 3-rax pushes with some Cyclones mixed in made early Terran agression so much stronger, for example. And don't get me started about what Zerg can throw at me throughout the game...Sure, banelings won't kill all workers at +2, that's why a Zerg will make 2 banelings more. And their abilities to switch to a completely different style of army in a matter of single spawning cycle? Yea, right. Oh, and their Investors™ can now puke the green stuff as soon as they spawn for defensive purposes, let's not forget about that. Long story short, it becomes very frustrating and dishearthening playing defensive macro Protoss as you grind up the ladder. Unlike other races, I cannot pack my shield batteries and redeploy them to use them offensively as I manage to get to the other side of the map, unlike siege tanks, for example. And let's not forget that at the same time when you play PvP, you are immediately in disadvantage against the Protoss who is using some proxy, trickery or some offensive timing strategy. Yes, you can learn to deal with that but its very frustrating and after some time you realize that everyone has good time against you on the ladder, but you have good time only for those few short matches when you learn to deal with all the bull*hit that gets thrown at you, you beat a few people and then the cycle starts again because you are promoted to a new, higher league. All in all, as a defensive Protoss I say it sucks and I think even pro matches show that. Very few people are excited for Stats (maybe me) and his matches, while everyone looks forward to Parting (including me). Sure, maybe Stats will sooner win some tournament, but Parting is still so much more fun to watch. Also, probably no Protoss will win tournaments with this state of SC2 anyway, so let's enjoy a bit at least.
Hero's 2022 is overlooked, he was a favourite and a solid player for almost all that year and lead him up to make semifinals in iem katowice (losing to oliveira). He went from winning Gsl to win overseas at dreamhack atlanta 2022 by beating maru on the finals. I think arti' was a little unfair with him so i wanted to point that out. Plus 2022 and 2023 are the best earning years for hero
And then, everything changed after 5.0.11 patch, and everybody is still trying to ignore this temporal correlation. They nerfed basically every protoss late game composition and then now say, "why there is no defensive protoss." Moreover, disruptor got nerfed with 1 more supply cost which further nerfs late game army power (army will be smaller).
@@mark11tz All races have powerful late-game. Zerg has the best, and TvP late-game is very comparable at the highest level of skill. When Protoss lategame was favored against other races, pros actually had incentive to be more defensive oriented.
@@julianbeatty2909Keep being delusional and be happy. "Protoss lategame was favored against other races" if and only if both players are not pros and do only a-move. What is the late game winrate of PvX throughout all the major tournaments since 2018? There is a reason why attack-oriented protoss pros perform better than defensive pros such as Showtime nowadays. Stastistics ONLY shows the results, which is FACT, and people keep trying to deny it. Especially in PvT, after the patch, it is hard to find a PvT winning game with both side have late-game army. Parting recently won against Byun who refused to transit to late game while Parting already had HTs and colossi, tier 3 units of TWO branches tech. Reynor(P) beat Serral in one late game recently with 150+ more average APM and kept the number of late-game units low and splitted the mid-game units wisely. The key for protoss late game is making both side low-tech. Most recently herO won against Reynor yesterday in Master C 7 Bo7 game by not building a single tier 3 unit except for HTs and DTs while kept denying Reynor's bases. The nerf on 1 supply of disruptors hurts only good defensive players, disencouraging macro plays, and nerf nothing but late-game army.
@@mark11tz You have not read my post clearly. I have said that *when* protoss lategame was favored. That implies that todays lategame is not favorable to Protoss. Protoss Hegemony in the lategame ended when Ghosts got EMP radius buffed. PvZ lategame shifted back and forth, depending on the patch. 5 mineral interceptors during the double/triple sg opener days was probably when Protoss last has hegemony.
Really great analysis! I think maxpax is a great example of what a protoss can do with the game as it stands today ie can take on anyone (maybe only really significantly unfavoured vs serral but that's basically everyone except clem) . It is a shame he can't seem to play offline at the bigger events. He is kind of a mix of some of the recent top 4 tosses RT highlighed super optimising like zest, terrifying blink all ins like prime parting etc. He's also got a quite unique harassing and counter punching style with zealots that works well in all matchups. Basically it shows the tools are there for toss but I still think there could be further tweaks to pvt to make it more stable for toss. Eg more consistent damage for collosus etc particularly after the raven matrix change. Though also maybe just some terran nerfs to emp shield damage or cost/speed you can get libs out
I would only ask for anyone out there that thinks that Zerg are not OP see the masterpiece series between Serral/Clem and Dark/Clem where the terran had to trade x3times better than the other race just to stay alive. Not win. Especially the Clem vs Serral at some point Clem had lost 12k resources while Serral 30+ k and rebuilt his army multiple times. Forgiving as hell considering that Toss and Terran can lose one fight just by one sneaky infestor.
I think a big part of the problem is late game. Protoss late game is weak compared to the others, and has been for years, specially the Zerg tha have had long periods when they were just unbeatable (infestor + overlord anyone). As Protoss are weak late game many players feel the need to end the game in the early to mid game as they feel they have no chance late game. That make them more predictable and opponents geared up to stop their early and mid-game aggression and that made Protoss chances even less and made them even more aggresive and cheesy. And whenever they found some mid-game magic it ended nerfed into the ground (see Disruptors, a unit that almost nobody used unless it was a panic situation until a few players started to use them wisely and win games and others followed suit) So there you have the reason why protoss are early aggressors, because they have no chance otherwise. That's what I have seen at least.
i guess the question is how effective is protoss at being played defensively? i think it'd be hard to argue that zerg isn't a race well-equipped for defensive play.
You ever watched sc2? They fall back to bases and have queens sitting at every checkpoint along the way. Zerg should never have to play defence- but watch serral sometime. Watch how he slowly gives up ground because he doesnt have tech structures or pylons laying around for the demolishing. If he holds out for 20 seconds, he just got a whole new wave of swarm rallying in. That could be like 50 units in late game. Shit, I lost a base on the left? Better spend almost no money to grab two more hatches.
Hi Artosis , i`ve been a big SC2 fan since 2012 but dropped it a few years ago. One thing i always perceived throught the game throughout the expansions in competitive and my games playing as random is that SC2 is like rock paper scissors : ZVT is terran favoured, PVZ is zerg favoured and PVT is terran favoured, just clarifying that this is not always the case but yes what balance changes seems to always gravitate towards. For the defensive points, PVZ was always all win for the protoss since WoL ( immortall all in, 7 gate, 8 gate etc...) but PvT i feel like terran has more tricks in his bag for high level play than protoss, protoss units do not allow for very high micro like terran or even zerg . In the Past terrans would not win a late game against toss , nowadays by reeading the comments that do not seem the case, i feel like the issue is that if you nerf zergs youo screw zvt over, if you nerf terran you screw zvt also , the only way is probably to buff protoss in late game in a way that is not demented like mass carriers a-move free win but i dunno what.
I mean, SOS is unequivocally the greatest StrarCraft II player of all time. As long as you measure by number of successful proxy nexus plays in professional matches.
th-cam.com/video/w7hsngVNwlk/w-d-xo.html
Life is better
He was the King of $100,000 Tournaments but never did much in between. sOs should be discussed here because he's an exception to Artosis' point.
Do other metrics matter?
LMAO
Disruptor: nerf atleast 4 patches in a row.
Collosi: nerfed when disruptors where added. Never regained dps after disruptor nerfs.
High templar feedback dps removal (one of the only ways to properly trade with other races spellcasters, randomly lost 50% of dps, because it wasnt "fun" for the other races.)
Zealots:charge on impact(read more dps) removed, nothing got added.
Immortals: cost increased (added shield autoproc that basically does nothing)
Stalkers: slower attack speed, higher damage, was a nerf too. Attacking slower vs fast attacking units makes them straight up worse, overshooting dps also made them worse. Only vs blinking onto tanks and fighting marauders has it been slightly buffed, yet both those units destroy stalkers insanely hard.
I could talk about carrier dps nerfs. Tempest having lowest dps per resource cost of basically all the tech units in game,
The uselessness of batteries during lategame....
But no... its a skillissue... before all these nerfs protoss was properly competing. After "only aggressive players are left"
The problem : the 'wrong' viewpoint. Like ppl saying warping in is a problem. When the entire purpose of the race is to tech up.... its fine if gateway units arent going toe to toe with other early units. If the actuall tech makes up more then enough for its tech cost.
Right now protoss tech does not make up for its insanely expensive tech cost and unit cost at that tech. (Ie. Collosi techroute = robo, robo bay, thermal lance, collosi cost themselves, attack upgrades) for a unit that gets countered from the air without having anti air. That only deals reall damage to marines zerglings and hydras while having very low hp for such a high tech cost unit. )
you could make a random list like this about any race, but it doesn't matter. Just look at all the protosses in the top 30 in aligulac. None of them(apart from maxpax who doesn't play offline) are good enough to win a world campionship, even with all those nerfs reverted, they would never be on serral or maru's level. Yes the balance currently is far from perfect. And especially pvt is very terran favored, mainly because the early game is absolutely broken, terran has pretty much infinite options and if the protoss makes a tiny mistake, he dies, if he plays perfectly its an even midgame. And lategame is also imba, since nothing beats ghost+range lib. But that is far from the only reason toss isn't winning anything. Just look up liquipedia, almost every toss that has won a tournament in the last couple of years have retired. like how can you say that before the nerfs protoss has been winning some tournaments, so that now that we got some nerfs and every top toss has retired/went to the millitary, the nerfs are the problem. This don't make any sense.
You are right in one aspect tho protoss tech units don't not make up for their cost... against terran. Every tech unit either sucks or has very low impact on the game. Apart from disruptors, every tech units gets hard countered very easily. HTs and archons are useless once ghosts are out, colossi are useless once terran has enough vikings, captial ships also die to vikings or just marines and ghosts, immortals don't do much. It is only disruptors and disruptors, no other unit is worth making.
This isn't the case against zerg, archons, immortals, HTs are always very powerful, even disruptors and colossi are also pretty good... until vipers come out, and we don't need to talk about skytoss too much. And unsurprisingly Protoss isn't doing bad against zerg at all. Before the current patch it was kinda zerg favoured, but only because of the maps, and the op +2 banes. But currently toss is doing very well in zvp.
Your list doesn't even get started. Remember when they took out Khaydarin amulet because they were "free storms" even though they cost 150 gas just to warp in a unit with like 50 HP? Oh yeah well free except the fact that you had to pay to research the upgrade. And you had to build the tech for it in the first place. And they nerfed offensive storms by making them take like 15 seconds to slow warp... but still they never brought the upgrade back.
I think the most head scratching protoss nerf was the adept glave nerf where they basically made it only good for cheesing with instead of just making the adept a better mobile mid game unit against light units like the unit was intended to be with the original glave upgrade.
As you alluded to, the carrier is completely nerfed which is really strange since I don't remember it ever being imbalanced in high level play.
Remember when they just decided to make protoss upgrades take longer because of chrono boost? I remember laughing when they did that because that's the whole point of chrono boost.
I came here to basically post something like this. Remember that stalker fire rate got Nerfed because of the four gate and then even though now the build is not broken like it used to be stalker never got its attack speed back.
The reason that current protoss players are aggressive is because there is no other way for them to win at all. Terran has much better defensive options and Zerg has much better reactive play with fast tech switches and remaxes.
@@norberthiz9318I don’t agree 100% on saying Protoss lacks players that could potentially score a World Series, I think it’s more reasonable to say they lack a player that is goat of the race. Serral, Reynor, Maru, they’re the goats of Terran and Zerg who is favoured in every match essentially and Protoss doesn’t really have that. Opinions about the consistency of Protoss aside, hero and the other Protoss players are too inconsistent to rely on.
However, regarding the chances of Protoss winning a major tournament. The reason why they have yet to see any results is because of that Terran imbalance, you simply can’t get through a tournament without competing against a Terran. Talking about chances, while it is most likely that the goats will win, players like solar and oliveira are still plenty capable of rolling against those odds in a bo7, but the problem occurs when every 1/3 of the time you’re more likely to lose. Protoss will get a few title victories as time allows it, but they are on a bad run with the percentages against them.
@@AnimeFan-wd5pq those 2 things are not mutual exclusive. Protoss does lack absolute top tier players currently(in offline tournaments) and TvP is imbalanced.
Yes Protoss never really had a "goat contender", but currently there aren't even protoss players on solar or olievera's level(apart from Maxpax obv). herO is just so fucking inconsistent its crazy, he just simply throws half his already won games, you just can't rely on a player like him to win tournaments and get deep runs consistantly, and the only other top toss is Classic, who is very good but for some reason he performed very bad lately, he didn't even qualify to katowice, which is not a balance issue.
The thing is when you combine these two, you end up with a Toss not winning anything and never even making a deep run in any tournament. But that is still much more on the fact that no Toss is good enough currently, they wouldn't win anything if balance was perfect. Just remember that the only protoss who made a finals in a premier tournament this year was maxpax, and then he only lost serral 4-2. If Maxpax can make it into a finals and only lose relatievly narrowly to the goat of zvp, then it is not a balance issue primarily. if the other tosses were even close to Maxpax in skill they would make good runs even with the current balance problems.
I feel like you got to ask the question. Is protoss not having success because there are no good defensive protoss players? or are there no defensive protoss players because the other races have a high chance of winning over a defensive protoss in the current state of the late game?
That's a good question. I'd love to see an analysis on that on all tournament games
Precisely. The amount of options for other races makes defensive Protoss play relatively pointless and frustrating.
Game was being balanced with 2 points in mind.
1) Zerg and Terran have to be stronger than Protoss at mid-late and late game.
2) If some race except terran can win with early timing attacks it is bad, and that race have to be nerfed or other races should be buffed at early game.
While offense is always preferred- defenders in this game have an advantage (with exceptions of course). Especially protoss with batteries. So you need to ask- why is the race known for defense losing at defense?
If we look at the pros behind all the winnings, we will find that there is not that many of them. It could literally be just sheer luck that the 5 people capable of winning didn't. Its not like protoss wasn't present. Looking at the runner-ups its 5 protoss, 4 terrans and 7 zergs so what exactly is so imbalanced about all of this?
Content like there where its just you sharing your wisdom/thoughts is some of my favorite stuff you put out
Love the Day 9 style
hey guys, monkey here. I agree
Agreed, these are the videos I care to watch
Yea love to hear the thoughts of the guy that rages all day about sc1.
i feel like artosis dont like protoss.
hehe
i think the balance forced a lot of players to play an agressive protoss style the last few years. since the top tier terrans and zergs dont lose lategame vs P. so i think they are on a clock to finish the game before 200/200 and +3/+3.
yuh i was gonna say, protoss players choosing not to improve defence and try to be more efficient with their practice is no accident
It's just not worth it
the newest Patch helped the situation for PvT massively. before seeing protoss die/ take fatal damage / get behind a lot to the first terran push was just absurdly common, now it feels like the early midgame isnt a knife's edge for toss anymore. PvZ feels quite good, toss wins lategames and midgames well enough, the problem there being Top zergs are Cracked and are super good in ZvP lategame(Especially serral that guy's beyond beastly.) And lategame wise, the ghost nerf and immortal nerfs have made lategame PvT feel nicer. PvP has also improved greatly and we dont have 1 base fests anymore. I think protoss balancewise atm is really good. What is lacking however is Players, Protoss just has not enough Top tier pros. Europe has Maxpax & perhaps showtime, KR has HerO & Classic. Zerg to be fair also has not that many players, but They got Serral, Dark, Scarlett, aka basically among the best players in their reigons/the best.
@@snowdrop9810 I would disagree on that. Ground toss isnt viable once Ghosts are out. Disruptors are still the saving grace that make it possible, even after the supply nerf to it
The reason that aggressive strategies are good on the ladder, but bad in tournaments, is very simple: in a tournament, you are playing against a known opponent from a pool of maybe 8 players; on the ladder, you are playing against an unknown opponent from a pool of hundreds. Aggressive strategies rely heavily on risk-taking, and in the tournament format the risk-taking doesn't pay off because it's too easy to predict what your opponent will do. A defensive player can usually pull out a win by having a good sense of how to prepare their defenses vs this specific opponent, and that's not an advantage they'd have if they played on the ladder. Since the ladder favors risk taking, the top performing league is going to be filled with risk-takers aka aggressive players. Generally, Protoss is better at being aggressive. Both Terran and Zerg are usually the reactive races against Protoss (although in TvP it's a little more complicated than that), which means Protoss gets to dominate Grandmaster league. It's less about balance and more about what strategies are good in what scenarios. Protoss has a lot of strategies that happen to be really good for the ladder scenario, and I happen to think that should be adjusted a little bit. The question remains of if Protoss' defensive styles are strong enough to win championships (in the right hands), and I'd argue that it is: Stats regularly beat some of the most aggressive players such as Byun. The ladder is stuck in a bad scenario where defensive Protoss is very strong, which requires an equally strong macro response from the Terran or Zerg, but you have to balance the possibility of any random allin hitting at any second. The reason that Protoss is good at aggression is the warp-prism negating a lot of the defenders advantage. In a TvZ, a Terran's units have to walk across the map (there is a reinforcement delay), the Zerg is able to cut off reinforcements with counter-attacks, the Zerg can scout what the terran is making and how big his army is -- these aren't limitations that warpgate has. You have no idea what the Protoss will warp in next, you have no idea if he will warp-in or back off and make probes, you have no idea where he will warp in next, etc. Warp gate in combination with the warp prism makes Protoss very good at taking aggressive risks. I think recent changes are headed in the right direction. Warp-gate should be a defensive tool, not an aggressive one, and Protoss should have to move their army on the map like everyone else. The zealot speed buff and creep nerfs helped with this a lot, but I think they need to give the warp prism a reduced warp-in speed. They should probably bump-up the cargo capacity a bit to compensate, because the goal isn't to make the unit useless but to make it less random.
Problem with Toss has always been that they are very bad at absorbing damage compared to other races. Lose a couple pylons and a chunk of your production is going offline. No mitigation for worker kills (MULES, rounds of drones, extra command centers to fly in). Messing up on the defense is much more damaging to protoss than it is to anyone else and something that would be an inconvenience for Zerg is game-ending damage for Toss.
Which is weird, because you would think things like all purpose cannons, shield batteries, and regenning shields on buildings that get upgrades with your units would make them great at defending, but it's just too easy to snipe something here and there against an opponent that has no zoning (creep/tanks/widowmines) or intel (creep, sensor towers, burrowed units, scans, changlings if they aren't watching) outside of an oracle scan that the opponent can see exactly what you've caught and have vision of.
Come on man you Can place Observées all around the Map to get some nice contrôle Map font tell me Toss don't have Intel
The Chronoboost on the Nexus IS super effective to refill a minéral Line as well and maybe if protoss start to put some défensive Nexus to be able to cast more overcharge batterie they will bé able to défend more
Toss got Feedback Storm Colossus and more to zone
They are the race that IS able to get thé more advantage of the terrain and IS the race who should bé able to trade the most efficient
The hardest part for protoss IS to play Split game i think.
@@ChaineRubis Observers take production time, which is contrary to creep and sensor towers, they take away from the army, and chrono is nowhere near as effective as a mule or droning to recover a mineral line.
@@ChaineRubis
"Toss got Feedback Storm Colossus and more to zone"
none of them are zoning tools, they are pokers and increase micro requirements in a fight. Colossus is the closest to a zoning tool in the list, as it has enough range to deter mid range engagements. the only thing that acts a a zoning tool, and it has been modified to act like that in the disruptor, but with the supply cost increase, the army sponge effect and the reduced area of effects.
" They are the race that IS able to get thé more advantage of the terrain and IS the race who should bé able to trade the most efficient "
lol not, terran is the best capitalizing because is the race with the best range and zoning tools. every weird map is advantageous to terran: open space? siege tank map, narrow corridors? siege tank map, a lot of air space? drop or fine a broken siege tank. lots of ramps? put mines there. big main? drops and mines. short maps? 3 barracks. the only weakness is a big map because if dilute the power of zone control. that why zerg always win the big maps.
"The hardest part for protoss IS to play Split game i think."
so, you say that they are really efficient, but if their efficiency is tested, then is the worst race. stop drinking dude. or do you mean splitting armies? because you know, splitting armies depend of the zone control of the parts and the kiting dps in case of engagement. protoss lacks both and that why protoss suffers when it has to split armies.
@@kirito3082 just a perfect exemple of Toss playing well
It had nothing to do with the balance just skill
th-cam.com/video/hxcHzZorn_4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IITq6MDdss32EVQA
@@kirito3082 just a perfect exemple of Toss playing well
It had nothing to do with the balance just skill
th-cam.com/video/hxcHzZorn_4/w-d-xo.htmlsi=IITq6MDdss32EVQA
The reason the top protoss aren't defensive, is because if they don't do early all in / cheese they have no chance in a drawn out game vs terran. If you look at big money games, if it's even through the beginning stage and goes into a late game, I'd give terrans like an 70% winrate, which over 5 or 7 games that's going to be like a 95% series win rate.
This. Yet we keep getting carrier nerfs every patch despite being completely horrid and unusable past master level because silver players whine about them. Unbelievable. Give Protoss SC1 carriers that are actually worth their cost and call it a day
Exactly. It’s a consequence of race design which can’t be easily reworked. A good Terran simply has the tools they need to succeed in the late game. Protoss wins when they force mistakes or catch them off guard with creative weirdness, but reflecting what you said, that’s not as likely to win a bo5 or 7 in big tournaments against skilled players. It’s not even really a balance issue, it’s just how the races play at that top level.
@@goatse9000 One of the key things when we're talking about race design is that the Protoss are designed to be optimized to do one thing well, but also have a blatant achilles heel. This is the biggest component of them dropping off so severely in the highest levels - the highest level players have the ability to target the weak points in the right way, which the lower levels just don't have the micro for.
Basically, the unit design of Protoss means that there are "gaps" in the metaphorical armor that terrans especially can target - if they are good enough. The 'gaps' are structural, so just 'play better lol' doesn't work - the vulnerabilities will be able to be targeted by a sufficiently skilled player.
Ghosts don't help either.
Ironically this is why Raynor is such a good Protoss player - he treats Protoss like he's playing Zerg. Instead of the optimal unit composition, drown your opponent in constant aggression and run-bys while out-expanding the opponent. It says something that Protoss plays better when played as Zerg, than when played in their 'intended' manner.
@wischmopps293 Yeah. Sure. It's not like this problem is endemic to Protoss over not just Starcraft 2 but the original Starcraft as well? We have twenty years of results that say Protoss has a fundamental structural problem in race design.
I bet you play Terran.
Tell this to MaxPax LOL
I think part of the issue is that Protoss's design really does not cater to defensive play as well as the designs of Zerg/Terran.
Warp gate, the rapid shield regen, and the high hp/low dps of most of their units really does not mesh well with a defensive style.
The low dps of protoss units means they need a larger investment to defend something than Terran or Zerg do, as units focusing down workers/tech have more time to deal their damage.
The main defensive tools Protoss has are the shield battery and disruptor, but batteries don't have a lot of HP, and many units can simply overwhelm them with focus fire even in small numbers, and disruptors rely a lot on the opponent's ability/inability to react to them.
By contrast, Terran/Zerg units; particularly Marines, Zerglings, Hydras, Lurkers, and Siege tanks, have extremely high DPS, but low HP, which makes them fantastic on the defense, as units have very little time to deal damage before getting cleared.
Zerg can play very reactively with Larva and creep/overlords/lings to spot for incoming attacks; Terran has scan to scout with no chance of being denied, repair, and specialized units for defense + high DPS units in general, which do well at defending.
As someone else pointed out, vision is also extremely key to playing defensively, and Protoss's vision tools are extremely gas intensive and cost supply and important production time that are very easy to lose due to their short range (Revelation range is too short to get vision vs vikings/vipers, and oracles are extremely fragile and don't see much further than any other unit), while Zerg/Terran have vision tools that are much cheaper and cost no supply that have practically no risk involved due to costing practically nothing and/or having extremely long effective range with scan, sensor towers, changlings/overseers, and creep. That vision advantage makes it easier for them to spot what the opponent is doing, especially in the mid-late game, and react accordingly.
My theory is just that the whole idea of expensive high tech units leads to armies that can't be easily rebuilt.
You go in with robo or stargate but if you lose an engagement you're knocked back to gateway units.
You could build more robos or stargates but the units themselves are also quite expensive and you need the gateways.
This might make defense even more important because losing units is a bigger deal
There are also other issues like worse vision/detection but i think that's the big one
That's also a vital reason why protoss armies have to move around in clumps.
I would furthur trace it back to the warping mechanism. Gateway units were consequently no longer designed as pivots of the protoss ground army like Brood War (cuz otherwise protoss would be OP). They can't do shite without immortals or colossi so they have to stick around.
I would also add the fact that late game Protoss is just less scary now compared to broodwar. Carriers were a threat you needed to take out no matter what because it just didn’t have supply effective counters. Now Terran and Zerg can literally win against straight carriers with mass Viking or corrupter. This in my opinion is what leads to the prevalence of these long late game matches where almost nothing happens. I hate this because it really just kills the entire race design of Protoss units being powerful and technologically more advanced, because if so, then why can a matching supply of corrupters beat carriers?
@@AnimeFan-wd5pq
'' Now Terran and Zerg can literally win against straight carriers with mass Viking or corrupter.''
But above, let's say, NA Gold league, ANY Protoss could have TEMPLAR with STORM in a COMPOSITION with their carriers (instead of straight or ghey carriers) and Zerg/Terran would have a difficult time, RIGHT? Also it's corruptOr, holy pewdiecancer fantards on a stick.
Yep
The high tech expensive units can't be easily rebuilt. They're incredibly easy to pick off for the most part. If you could warpgate at least the robo ones in it might help but still would face similar problems.
Maxpax is not playing offline but if were talking best toss players right now you have mention him, he can play aggressive and defensive in creative ways aswell. Im convinced he is able win any major actually
Dude is amazing but hes not so insane that he would just win anything in front of him.
Isn’t max pax that guy who hides his face
Until he plays an in person tournament his skills will be in question
@@MrShadowbite Like you think hes two asians in a trenchcoated? You think milliseconds of lag are making him exponentially better? Even though lag is usually a double edged sword.
i fully agree im just saying that i think hes capable of it, ofc hed have to prove that he can weather offline situations @@Seldomheardabout
As a Terran player, I had this theory about Protoss pros not winning 3 years ago: it’s because of the macro mechanism.
Main macro mechanism for each race:
- Zerg: larvae and injecting
- Terran: mule and reactor
- toss: boost and warping
Both Zerg and Terran mechanisms are flexible than the toss. With more skills, the production capacity you can squeeze out of a build is significantly larger than that of toss.
In theory toss’s mechanics have just about the same potential, but because of how the gateway units are priced, and how they perform in large group battles relative to their price tag…. Nope.
I still remember when I tried to play toss few years ago, thinking how worthless gateway units were. I mean, the only units worth mass producing in mid game is the stalker. It’s just a dps-nerfed roach that can shoot up. But they cost twice as much.
It’s ridiculous. You meant to climb the tech tree in mid game(gas intensive), and you have these stupid expansive units for map controls/defense?
How many pro games we saw toss lose right after their first batch robo unit came out?
The macro side of toss just can’t keep up with how skill these pros are. Plain and simple.
Toss can only win when the game wasn’t THIS figured out.
The gâteway unit are super effective if use corectly o.O
@@ChaineRubis Not in a long macro games. In those games they become filler while the actual valuable unis like collosus / templar / immortals etc are hard to replace once you lose them.
How do you feel about this take: "Protoss units don't do the things they're intended to do well." Shade doesn't let Adapts escape due to restrictions on re-activating it. Immortals don't fight tanks, because they can't get to tanks. Pheonixies (pheonixi?) get more kills on ground targets than air. ectect
@@dagroth123pheonixes* ;)
@@AloofOof can't really agree, stalkers can do plenty of tank, liberator , brood lord, etc sniping late game
I feel like protoss' biggest advantage has always been warping in on the attack to mitigate defenders advantage. Their strength is attacking. At the very high end, to defend protoss has shield battery and i guess disruptor shots to ward enemies away. Not to mention protoss have the worst time recovering of they take economic damage. Terrans have mule's and zerg can create drones much faster than a toss makes probes. I also feel like protoss spell casting is ultimately weaker. Stasis ward may be AOE but it normally just chunks away the smaller units, meanwhile interference matrix doesnt have to be baited into, can target the most important units (doesnt need aoe) and doesnt make the target invulnerable. Not to mention how anti armor missile and emp just shred a lot of survivability instantly in an aoe and the only counter play is feedback. And zerg have abduct, fungal and neural, once again the only real counter play is feedback. The issue with feedback is that it seemlingly both doesnt do enough damage and has to be preemptive from the squishiest unit on the field
A unit that is squishy, slow and vulnerable to EMP. So you have to have a whole group of them off to the side and micro them in 1 by 1 or try to prism drop them, again somehow avoiding the EMP spam. I don't understand how the entire protoss army can get 50% of its defense deleted by a bunch of tanky sniper boys. Every terran late game nowadays is just ghost micro. I can't.
When I watch the toss v Zerg games the Protoss more times than not has more probes than z has drones. Chronoboost is so strong for probe construction.
@@plopoplapa If you can't execute the templar drop then don't. If only Vsauce didn't talk rubbish because he can't compute, it would have saved many people watching many pointless videos.
Economic damage vs protoss is WAY too debilitating, compared to Terran and especially against Zerg, imo
It's incredibly hard to be a defensive Protoss because you're given almost no tools. Chronoboost is inferior at playing macro games. It's almost useless later in the game, but good early to rush upgrades and do timing attacks. Protoss has flat out the worst detection mechanic and the worst map vision. And whenever Protoss gets a solid defensive option, like the early void ray opening (back when VR's were cheaper), they'll immediately nerf it. Even shield batteries got nerfed. Defense is great if you're trying to get into a macro game, but going late game is almost always a terrible situation for Protoss. They win the vast majority of their games in the midgame.
I actually think Hero is the best Protoss that has a chance of winning a tournament, not necessarily because I disagree with the premise of defense winning championships, but because Protoss defense is so godawful I just don't think it's going to beat anyone.
Detection and scouting are huge problems. Skytoss is supposed to be the tactic of the protoss, but the void ray which was actually good at killing queens is no longer in the game so to speak. I said before- protoss should have sensor towers. That would balance most things i think.
Great format. Especially loved the general discussion about defender's advantage and how its absence resulted in the degenerate ZvZ matchup.
The reason Protoss hasn't won anything is because there are units with abilities that are quite literally designed to counter Protoss and their ability to defend. Ravagers were specifically added to the game to break forcefields from sentries. Sentries, the strongest defensive spellcaster Protoss has, are completely useless now in a defensive situation. You can't block a ramp, you can't prevent your units from being surrounded, and you can't defend against counter-attacks. The incidental "building damage" tacked onto the Ravager bile is even worse. Cannons and batteries aren't effective since you can just bile them down.
Exactly! There's more to it ofcourse but think about what makes terran able to defend this situation, repairable bunkers and siege tanks, protoss has none of this, it's not even comparable.
Maybe its because sentries were the casters that gave you unmatched battlefield manipulation? I mean, you could temporarily "modify the map" with a caster...in a micro intensive RTS where 3-5 seconds means the death of your army. Every protoss used and abused sentries before. I'm glad to see that got a counter.
That being said, people forget that sentries dont only have forcefields. I feel like the unit used to be very good because of forcefields and now that it has counters, players just threw it to the garbage bin. The shield it has gives +2 armor against ranged ( 85% of the units in sc 2), and yet i never see it used in any engagement. Imagine getting Ultra's Chitinous Plating upgrade but for your entire army at any point from min 3 onwards.
Of the things wrong with StarCraft, Sentries are not on that list.
I'd love to see sentries with the shield recharge ability they had in the campaign. Terran has medivacs. Zerg has transfuse. I know shield batteries are a thing, but they are stationary and vulnerable. It doesn't seem that gamebreaking of an ability for what sentries cost in game. It would probably need to be a research on the cyber core to avoid super early shenanigans.
also long range backline ground to ground/air unit like dragoons is missed...stalkers are just trash in that role....but yeah zerg has no business having ravagers...they literally counter siege tanks and practically are better siege tanks that and shoot and move with the army...its ridiculous
@@balanceofjudgement4282 guardian shield isn't used as frequently as it should probably because the revolving array of abilities they manage are pretty intense control wise. I really really wish some of that unit control would be shifted away from active abilities. It may help if that ability gad a much smaller cost to activate and drained energy over time rather than be on a strict timer so that players could use it a head of time and not worry about it. Course it could also help if sentries didn't cost like 100 gas while have TERRIBLE stats even for a caster, no damaging or damage assisting abilities, and hard counters to EVERY ability it has. Forcefield -> massive/bile. Guardian shield -> melee/good targeting. Hallucination -> detection/paying attention.
The sentry could use a rework to help protoss because the sentry is designed forva different era of StarCraft ll
I think this is a great take, and goes hand in hand with the fact that Protoss as a race can’t sit back and take its time. Protoss has no choice but to be agressive from the start to try to slow down Terran and Zerg, because otherwise is gg pretty fast.
I have this theory that missing players like Zest, Trap, sOs, and Parting in top form actually hurts all other competing protoss players as much or more than it helps them to not have to contend with these masters for slots in the playoff brackets. You talked about aggression and made a lot of good points, but you skipped something I know you are aware of which is the limited number of times you can successfully pull out the same timing attack / strategy in a given tournament (and especially against a given opponent during a longer series). Even with Parting, I don't recall him innovating a ton of strategies (ok, the single pylon wall was truly one of kind), but you would see his tactical adaptations for different maps and players, and I still believe that helps other protosses to realize how to turn an advantage into an instant kill in certain scenarios given a particular map pool, player base and metagame.
Protoss relies on a diverse meta, and I believe all protosses benefit when terrans and especially zergs are having to worry about 3-4 different timing attacks or strong pressure builds with solid transitions that are truly deadly. I mean deadly as in even players above your skill level will struggle if they falter at all despite suspecting it may be coming and knowing exactly how to respond, (not just the kind of builds that you can catch someone off guard randomly if they get complacent, forget to scout, etc). Instead, these days it feels like we have 1 or 2 of these kinds of builds per matchup that are actually viable against playoff caliber opponents. Well, more in PvP, lol. Anyway, it seems we are missing these tip top level innovators and refiners who can actually influence the overall meta by showing the entire protoss playerbase what the race is capable of, and also instilling way more uncertainty and challenge into defensive zerg and terran players trying to get through open tournament stages.
You might argue that timings and strong pressure builds are more and more a thing of the past as SC2 matures... but I'll ask you, is this the case in BW? (I don't actually know the answer, mostly kind of curious) And more relevantly, is it even the case for Terran or Zerg? Protoss really seems to be lagging behind in the meta, and while some of that is inevitably going to be about balance and game design, you really can't undersell the loss to the protoss meta from losing these guys who are just absolute crushers. Like ruin your next month because of how badly they beat you in the tournament.
Sincerely,
A Guy in the Comments
Well, from what I've seem from BW games, cheeses or early pushs don't usually win you the game right away. A lot of players can get back at the game without that much effort.
Although a succesfull cheese sure is an advantage to the cheeser, just not game ending.
We all know RT can horse around in his streams, but seeing him address such topics, it amplifies how passionate he is to this game series.
This is why we love Artosis.
RT, the tools protoss has to defend in SC2 are worse than the tools zerg or terran has. It's a weaker race and DEPENDS on outsmarting the opponent with tricks or tactics.
Terran defenses - Siege Tank
Bunker
Planetary
Widow Mine
Liberator
Sensor Tower
Turrets
Supply depot that can raise and lower
Zerg Defenses - Creep, Creep, Creep, CREEP. Not only gives vision and notice of upcoming attacks but also boosts movement speed
- Queens with transfuse
- Spores and Spine crawlers that can reposition
- Overlords for more vision
- Ability to produce mass units quickly in response to seeing an attack coming (with creep and overlords)
- Lurkers
Protoss Defenses - Cannon
- Battery + battery overcharge (frail, limited range, limited duration, requires nexus energy, can be targeted down)
- Disruptor? (expensive, requires high amounts of micro, requires lots of tech, slow, vulnerable)
- Tempest? (only certain builds, nobody weaves a few tempests in for defense.)
- Observer for vision... most pros good enough to spot and destroy them
- NO DOOR. Requires 1 unit to always be standing at the entrance to natural, if the one unit dies the door falls.
- Recall. Amazing defensive tool but does require nexus energy, has a CD, and units arrive awkwardly around nexus.
- Storm. (joke of a spell compared to storm in brood war. In such a fast pace game templar are too slow.)
Now, RT, which race would you like to play to be the best defensive player?
Obviously Terran. Next is Zerg and lastly to no surprise is Protoss with the most awkward exploitable defenses.
I remember when SC2 came out. I was so psyched to the my templar and use storm. To say it was underwhelming is an understatement. Like WTF is this. Where's my storm from SC1?!
@@spokoman23 The templar just cost too much and require too much tech to move THAT slowly and deal that little damage.
Like, the only way to get value is to hit a tight clump of marines or zerglings, like forget about it. Takes like 3 storms to kill a group of vikings or corrupters, by then they've already killed your army.
You know, the same type of caveats you added for Toss also exist for other races. Not saying you’re wrong but that the analysis feels biased without it.
100% agree with RT's points, that's true across all RTS, you can even look at how beasty completely wrecked everyone in AOE4 with very very turtle style play
in SC2 though it's been almost a decade of the state of the game making it completely non-viable to defend with protoss (specially against zerg)... the meta has been "kill them before late game" for a reason, so even a top tier defensive pro-toss would likely be super unstable anyway because past the early game the race is just screwed. There's a lot of stats and trap (at their prime) examples of that.
Even trap was only super successful durnig his period because there was also a surge of terran, PvT is somewhat manageable, PvZ is completely broken
I don't disagree with anything said but I would characterize it slightly differently than 'too few protoss players are willing to grind properly to develop a defensive playstyle' and more 'the fundamental design of protoss makes a defensive playstyle unappealing'.
And I'd say that where the protoss design goes wrong is with the Warpgate. Because Warpgate fundamentally warps the offensive disadvantage. As Artosis said, a properly designed RTS matchup has a decent defenders advantage, such that the offensive player has to make a significant outplay or deception or get lucky to win; otherwise, the defender's advantage will allow the defensive player to gain an economic advantage and eventually grind out a war of attrition. Warpgates alter that in a similar way to how muta/ling alters BW zvz, though to a lesser degree, which fundamentally breaks all protoss matchups, though to a lesser degree. And it's because Warpgate removes almost all of the travel time for new gateway units to reach a battle front, which ordinarily is the largest part of a defender's advantage most of the time. Because that travel time is gone, in order to make all protoss matchups less broken than BW zvz, gateway units have to be balanced around that, which means that they have to be fundamentally weaker than all other equivalent units that will have a travel time to a battle front.
And what that means is that protoss players' basic units are just plain weaker defensively. And it also means that a strong protoss late game army has to be skytoss (unless protoss are given a really strong anti air unit out of robotics, like terran got Goliaths/Thors/Cyclones out of factories). However, most players find losing to skytoss equally if not more annoying than losing to protoss cheese/aggressive builds, so skytoss being really strong rarely lasts longer than a patch or two.
So yeah imo the design of Warpgate means that any balance team has faced 3 bad choices when it comes to protoss: either make protoss strong by making cheese strong, make protoss strong by making skytoss strong, or make protoss weak. Balance has been stuck on option 3 for the last 1-2 years or so. IMO the only way to 'fix' protoss is fix Warpgate so that protoss gateway units can be buffed in compensation and protoss can have a way to win a standard late game besides pure skytoss, or make a really good antiair unit out of robotics so, again, protoss can have a decent lategame besides skytoss.
Probably Protoss would be better if Terran units weren't better in almost all cases.
Yawn
Chargelot timing hit is literally one of the most insane things to ever hit the meta, but Terran is op!
@@richmusick4881He says, being the race with the strongest timing attacks. Stop trolling
@@richmusick4881 as a terran you can literally fuck up everything but cheeses and you will still roll protoss midgame
This might be one of my favorite videos RT. First off I agree with your points but even if I didn't I love the insight and overall concept of this video. I'd actually like to see more like this maybe like diving into specific match ups with what your thoughts are what could be altered to improve overall balance. Just my 2 cents. Love the content as always!
If you want to improve balance you identify the race that loses the most. Then you slightly modify their units and buff them.
You don't look at protoss losing and say- nerfing void rays will make them win more -_-
I love hearing Artosis’ analysis on various StarCraft topics very knowledgeable.
Protoss aren't winning? Step 1- nerf void rays. Step 2- buff other factions. Step 3- profit.
Balance council be like: lets help protoss early game uwu > cyclone insane change
I'd also like to add that a protoss also suffers from its gateway inefficiency built in to compensate for warp gate. Warp ins tend to be much better on the offense than trying to do one on the defense and half the reinforcements get targeted down before they can do anything by Terran bio ball just machine gunning everything down by the time the warp in is complete or you just accept you lost the position and warp in further away. That or the warp gets wrecked by something like ravager bile. Also psystorm is overall less effective with how quickly units move and evade in sc2 whereas in broodwar you could rely on Terran bio being basically useless and slow siege lines to score some pretty devastating hits as vultures and golis struggle to navigate around the tanks. I feel like a shorter duration higher dps storm could help against the zerg and Terran hyper quick bio as honestly collossi feel way too easily sniped by vikings/corruptors/vipers for them to be really effective in the mid to late game and disruptors just feel to swingy for a consistent defense. Also maybe bring back something like maelstrom or maybe a minimum unit number trigger for stasis traps to be less useless against the better zerg/Terran triggering them all with like 1 marine or zergling consistently. Mind you this is speaking as a Terran player and just noticing some holes in the protoss defensive roster.
shorter duration hugher dps storm
they already kind of devour bio and ling bane
terified of what that would do to my zvp
to be fair it would bring terran and zerg out of t1 unit spam in the matchup and i'm not necessarily opposed to it. You can't tell me you don''t feel a little bad for the protoss when they micro their little hearts out with warp prisms, templars colossi juggling and blink micro only to get rolled by a swarm of like 50 banelings that just move commanded forward. Plus I feel like it might expand the usefulness of things like ultras and swarm hosts just to shake things up a bit in the meta. For terran it would definitely force earlier ghosts and maybe counter mass liberator that tends to take over later on and just setting up zones of no if the temps can get their dmg out a bit faster. Maybe see a bit more mech play and sky terran. I guess I just feel like storm was always one of the iconic protoss tools for offense and defense but the current way SC2 is played makes it pretty nonviable to the point that something as inconsistent as disruptor balls is the preferred zoning tool. Maybe not a massive tweak but something just to make it a more viable option for protoss to stock them around in bases as a defensive tool the way they do in SC BW@@sakesaurus
@@uriel005 toss need
1. anything to counter random
2. some early game unit that isn't GARBAGE in mid game (adepts and zealots are really bad)
Then we'll see the oh wow defensive bo and skillsets that usually aren't worth practicing.
problem is the warp gate compensation. On offense having better units to warp in could really break the game as 16 zealots warping into your natural mineral line can already be pretty devastating. The reason I went with high templar for the buff is because at least with them you have to wait on the energy and can't suddenly start warp prisming to each base 2-3 to just ko the entire economy. Or making stalkers as effective as dragoons on top of blink and better pathing ai. overall I think its actually pretty hard to balance them just because of the way warp gate and warp prisms work. You can't go too overboard with it without utterly breaking them on the offensive.@@sakesaurus
@@uriel005 HT's could use a buff you're right, but no idea what to do that wouldn't be awful in terms of counter play like the Storm buff
Rogue being mentionend as a lategame defensive god is just weird. Basically all of his best results have been from brutal, targeted cheeses. His finals vs zest was just a seris of cheeses. His recent gsl win vs creator was through the same. His massive win against classic was with 50% insane all ins. It's just not his defining characteristic, he's always been a god tier tournament player due to strategy.
2021 Code S Season 1 final he won three games with roach ravager all-in vs Maru of all people.
Agree...
Life built his brilliant career on cheese. Ling rushes especially.
Nah, I don't remember exactly, but back when he won his championship, he was unbeatable in the lategame. I remember him being the first to go for massive multitask, completely outplaying everyone. They just could not keep up, not until the rest actually got better.
He has certainly won several tournaments that were actually disappointing despite how cool it is to see absolute dominance, because he just won a Bo5 or Bo7 in the minimum amount of games, only two of which even reached the full midgame. But he has also been one of the most successful defensive lategame zergs, especially during periods of the meta where zerg cheese was not considered viable (or zerg lategame was OP).
Rogue is an absolute killer with cheeses and aggression but he also had an unbeatable late game.
Having a fearsome late game makes your cheeses better. Much better.
This is the same case for Maru.
The core issue is that Gateway units suck.
Gateway units have to suck because of Warp Gate.
We therefore need to improve Gateway units in such a way as to not make warp rushes busted.
Here's the solution.
A brand new upgrade at Templar Archives that says "Units summoned at Gateways deal 10% more damage."
The Protoss can now transition all or some of their Warp Gates BACK into Gateways and then endure the long unit build times to construct a mega army that can actually trade cost efficiently vs Ling Baneling Roach Ravager and Marine Marauder Medivac.
I wouldn't state that so categorically. Stalkers' damage density may be poor in the late game (or, rather, a Bioball's damage density is nuts in the late game), but that is its own problem.
But look at the early game? Terran builds a bunker just to be able to expand. Until you get Medivacs, Stalkers and Adepts can just bully bio with their high health pools, trading shields for Marines. Midgame Blink Stalker pushes are genuinely hard to hold, and Terran needs well-placed Tanks to have a prayer, while Toss' force is just Stalkers and more Stalkers and that gives Terran nightmares.
Gateway units are excellent for as long as engagements are small-medium in size. They lose out against massed MMM, which is just the most dense concentration of ranged dps in the game, and you need AoE to solve that. Same for Zerg, same for Toss. Same for Terran, even.
Would love to hear your thoughts on balance, and maybe even some specific changes, and in general. Protoss feels very limited, while both Zerg and Terran can answer them in many different ways, which makes it very hard for protoss. That is also why, in the past when there were new changes protoss would do well for the first few months, but after Zerg and Terran could come up with a response, protoss would just start to loose mostly everything again, and now, protoss can barely get out of group stages in big tournaments.
Really enjoyed this video.
I think one caveat about defending I'd like to discuss is that there is simply no point in doing it if you're don't have a timing or late-game options. For instance, in the Maru proxy era, (at least from my understanding and memory) Terran players all struggled in that period of time because there just weren't many options beyond proxying games. Playing a defensive, more consistent style would certainly let you get into the mid-game or late-game, but the balance and game understanding at the time would just mean you would start playing at a disadvantage. So from what I understood from watching Maru's games was that he realized that increasing variance as much as possible allowed him to force Protoss players to play defensively and would give him an advantage just from being scared.
This is to say that of course, being strong defensively is an incredibly strong trait in a player. It shows a deep understanding of the current meta game, and allows you to create tempo when you successfully parry an attack while mitigating risk. It also gives opportunities for counterattacks at the opponent's most vulnerable time. But when defending is simply not strong (i.e. an overpowered lategame composition exists like mass ravens, mass carriers, blord infestor, etc), you can't just defend until you win. Rather you're FORCED to take risk, as playing consistently simply puts you at a disadvantage.
Obviously being able to do cheese and lategame play and to just have OLIVEIRA 100 levels of stats across the board is ideal. But depending on the meta, player styles really can clash depending on what's strong and what isn't. It really makes balancing interesting because sometimes a strong strategy can emerge from just being overall weak everywhere else which completely redefines the matchup. So as a balancer you might be left scratching your head where you have to nerf a really strong exploitative strategy, but also encourage other styles of play by buffing? David Kim wins again.
I think it just goes to show how creative pro players like Maru can be when they exploit strategies to the point of seeming imbalanced, even if their race overall is probably weak.
Anyways, thanks for the vid RT, I always love me some RTS theory
Vipers are OP, ultimate late game zerg answer to protoss,too easy to get rid of the strongest protoss units , do you agree RT?
I agree about what you said, but I also have a suspision Stats rise or even Neebs dominion was possible becasue simply the balance was better for Protoss then, specially for "stable" units. And its been nerfed again and again. Now im not sure if its possible for defensive Protoss to be at the top of the top.
ArtosisTV you are asking the wrong question. You should be asking why there are not more defensive Protoss players at any one time. The reason is that if Protoss allow the other two races to go on offense themselves they get crushed. Protoss is simply underpowered, if either of the other two races get control of the game Protoss is almost never able to make a comback. Protoss was nerfed far to hard over the years, zelots lost their damage on the charge, senturies got gutted, and the offensive tools for both Terran and Zerg that being Banelings and Emp are overpowered. Honestly EMP should be totally removed from the game but also skills that disarm or render totally useless other units such as the raven and viper. That or disruptors need to be buffed a lot and Protoss need a viper like unit that can disable the other races most effective units with just a simple click.
"Honeatly, Terrance just needs to be made totally useless and unplayable so Protoss can win"
Protoss has been the underdog for as long as I can remember. Every match is an uphill battle for them.
The disruptor nerf was the dumbest shit blizzard has ever done. It's literally Protoss only answer to roach and bio and now it's insanely easy to dodge at the pro level
Same problem with Broodwar, most of the champions are Terran and Zerg.
Across all competitive games, even in other genres like competitive TCGs or fighting games, on a best-of-1 ladder you only theoretically need to win at least 51% of your games against equally skilled players to gradually move up in rank over time. This is why cheesy, hyper-aggressive strategies work well in that format and not in elimination style tournaments where you need consistent win streaks across multiple opponents and against the same opponents multiple times in a row. When a player is forced to climb through a bracket, banking on high risk, high reward aggressive strategies over and over again is bound to fail eventually when they inevitably run into a player who manages to pick the correct counterplay more often than not. Winning consistently in an elimination tournament setting basically requires minimizing this sort of risky strategic variance and forcing games into scenarios where one player can dominate over and over again through superior fundamentals.
None of the top rated protoss in the world rely on cheese to win. Good theory though lol.
Awesome video! I would love to hear more content like this be it bw or sc2.
Protoss is a huge joke race at low masters and below and its almost impossible to balance it for all levels of play.
Part of the reason so many Protoss are offensive rather than defensive is because that is what the design choices of the game makers incentivize for the players to do.
Protoss defensive strategies got nerfed because some players chose to use them offensively. They didn’t get properly replaced, just nerfed to the point of unplayable or even taken out altogether. While I do appreciate Oracle stun ability i dont think its enough.
R.I.P :
Mothership Core
Vortex
Pylon overcharge
I think the problem is that we've reached the point where protoss cant really compete with other races if they play defensive. For starters vision is super important in order to play defensive, but all of protoss vision requires build time and a massive resource commitment wheras zerg get it for free and terran can use sensor towers in the early game and scans for free in the mid-late game but protoss vision requires supply and robo time or apm / screen time via oracle. Isnt it kinda crazy that other races have cheap / stable vision and protoss is left chronboosting gas heavy supply units to get vision??
I think discussing map vision would have been really interesting. I'm not much of a player, but something I've seen from serral games that seem unique to me is the way he scouts so consistently. It seems that overlords are one of, if not the best early game scouting tools. It seems to me that this scouting ability makes top tier zergs very difficult to aggress early to mid game because they can get vision of everything you do.
@@FennecUser-ky9vr Protoss have excellent early game scouting in both the phoenix and the oracle.
The problem is not really scouting.
Terran and Zerg have vision for free, meaning by units that you have to build anyway like overlords and scans that you have for free. Toss needs units to scout even if you dont want to go air you have to make a starport, oracle or phoenix, thats a huge investment early game!! imagine all those resources focused only on your build order!!
@@jjesl I think he meant creep, not overlords. Creep spread is not easy, though.
@@venom-gt7rc creep spread is easy the more you do it, to me is natural now. Im a toss player but I can play any race, my favorite second race is Zerg. Fun fact after playing Zerg for a few months I took it to Masters 1, Ive been toss for years and Im stuck in Diamond league.
I'd like to point out, speaking for 2023, that the fact that Maxpax chooses to play online only, is a big aspect of the problem. We have arguably the best Toss opting out of offline events. I'd assume he would win at least one. I'm not saying he would win all major events, but he'd certainly knock out some big names, even if he's not winning he'd still have an impact on the tournaments.
Not even mentioning him in the video is odd.
@@henryharjes5799 Artosis is very much more involved in the Korean scene than the European one. It makes sense that is expertise and is opinion are more focused there.
Its almost as if protoss’s best defensive tool (battery overcharged) was nerfed at the beginning of the year
Yeah I never understood that change it's funny because herO came back from military won GSL and dreamhack and they merged protoss sky toss and battery overcharge.
Wow, Artosis. Thank you for gracing us with you knowledge and letting us know that our opinions don't matter. Seriously tho, I get it. You've been at this for a very long time. It doesn't mean that other people can't have good takes.
I'll give it a shot. Don't have a masters in SC1/SC2, but I've played both games. I'm a bit older than you and have a masters in nuclear physics. Completly irrelevant, I just like to brag about it. I'm sure you can relate.
Anywho. I think vision is a big problem for Toss. T and Z have much, much better options for vision at every point in the game. Scans, Overlords, creep... Medivacs too actually (tanks + Medi sees high ground).
Obs is kinds crap - slow, very low HP, comes out of a Robo.
The defence / offence players probably has something to do with this. It's just 1 aspect. I remember when Stats and those other dudes you've mentioned were playing at the top of their game and still were getting their asses handed to them especially by Z.
Cheers!
I am of the belief that Toss is just fundamentally designed wrong, or, that the journey towards overall balance has created an asymmetry of balance at different phases of the game particularly concerning Protoss. I do not believe that Toss "just happens to" not produce the same caliber and multitude of players as the other two races, two games in a row. I am an ex high GM Toss player, the closest Protoss player that I have ever seen to being "Perfect" as a Toss and the best defensive Toss, especially for his time, was Rain.
Wild to not mention by far the best protoss in the world right now when talking about current players: MaxPax. Even mentioned showtime but not MaxPax for some reason lol
He mentioned showtime cause he was trying to make a point about defensive players. Which clearly didnt work cause we know showtime is not winning anything
The MaxPax erasure in this video is deafening
The problem is most of the truly "major" tournaments are offline, and Maxpax hasn't attended offline, sure he is a beast online cups but those aren't typically considered to be major tournaments.
Reynor playing Protoss demonstrates how high the ceiling is for the race.
Exactly.
"If you disagree with me you're just stupid" lmaoo
Rogue being mentioned as a defensive/lategame Zerg was kinda funny because the man literally just plays the meta.
Lategame Zerg OP? That's what he'll do. Roach/Ravager good against Maru. Rogre Zerg comes out.
The main problem that protoss has is that their gateway units dont scale well into the late game, and so when they warp in to replace losses, at almost any point outside the early game, they create an inferior army. This coupled with certain units simply hard countering Protoss too easily (eg: ghost), means that you can destroy a protoss army in the late game, and then mop up the gateway units that replace it too easily.
I would like to point out that those "defensive" Protoss didn't win piss all in the last 5 years either. Good luck playing defensive against Serral and winning championships. Oh that's right. Trap never did. Rain, Stats and Zest haven't since the birthdates of your guys in the chat.
Not mentioning s0s even as an honourable mention should be a crime.
her0 was favourite to win those tournaments at the time, and he did. Then they nerfed Protoss, and nerfed Protoss again. His playstyle didn't cause inconsistency the nerfs to shield battery and disruptor did.
Queen range should never have been buffed.
I fully agree!!
Players who can consistently take the initiative in a match will take tournaments, and at the highest level, that ironically translates to players who are best at defending because being able to shut down the full range of possible aggression takes the initiative away from the opponent.
I think this also explains the seasons of success for a player like herO in that GSL win after his military service. His success against so many zerg players that season seemed to reside in his ability to dictate the pace of the game without having to commit to a work-or-die push. So while it looked like he was being successful being “aggressive,” in my mind it was actually a case of playing defensive by being active out on the map and slowing the zerg down until he could take a favorable showdown.
I wonder if the puzzle that needs solving in PvT is for protoss to figure out a way to play as a zerg would in ZvP: get away with being the greedier player with minimal defensive investment and win with slightly less efficient fights.
Which sounds so wrong given the faction’s design as the “elite few,”, but if I look at how terran simply does have more harass and push options, while also having the more efficient late game army in turtled OR split positions, it kind of does look like protoss has to win by simply having more or maxing out faster.
- Worthless two cents from a ladder wretch.
I understand and somewhat agree with your point on herO, but how many tournies was herO favored to win and then he get's rock paper scissored by sOs? I'm not even even talking about the famous 100k match either. Also parting at least deserves a mention.
Long story short is protoss doesn't have as many good players as the other races. herO has to carry the meta by himself, he had PartinG doing a lot of the heavy lifting before that. Zest is gone, sOs is gone, Trap is gone, Dear is gone. Trap won 3 super tournaments in a row not that long ago. Maxpax refuses to go to big events so who besides herO has a chance? Stats never has gotten back into shape after returning from the military.
Edit: I never think of Rogue as a defensive player. Whenever I think of Rogue I think of him as the most exploitative SC2 player of all time. He just exploited his race's strengths in timings that his race could exploit opponents the most. Rogue was a sharp timing attack abuser in the same way Zest was.
Imagine watching this video, thinking aa, this Artois guy is pretty chill lemme see his stream!
Stream:"777777777""Mario pulled down his"
😂😂😂
As long as there is warp tech, Protoss design will suck. Units cant be too strong on timing attacks and that makes tier 1 units really, really weak for defensive purposes. No warp tech, legs instead of charge, and make zealots and stalkers stronger. Yes its called BW.
Artosis, let me suggest another possibility for why Toss isn't competitive at the highest levels...
SC2 is like chess.
As skill was still growing exponentially, both chess and SC2 favored dynamic and daring players. Innovators like Bobby Fisher.
Now chess (like SC2) is increasingly mechanical. Is Magnus Carlson better than Fisher was? Yes. But because he can play like a computer.
Superior play but boring play.
Protoss was and is the "cheesy" race. The race that catches you by surprise. On the lower ladder (like with lower-level chess) that is an advantage.
But at the higher levels where everything approaches "optimal", Protoss doesn't have the room to breathe. Very little is a surprise.
In my opinion, Astrea is peak Protoss (at least from an entertainment perspective) because he plays at the highest level before things get too mechanical (and where his creativity and daring still have room to breathe).
Protoss needs a bit of messiness and imperfection has little room to thrive above that threshold.
cool take. im a big fan of astrea as well.
Man I just started playing SC2. Having so much fun!
Can you remass worker like zerg when you lost probe ? Do you have mule ?
So great to see you happy while presenting all this knowledge. I took a long break from starcraft and when i returned i saw some videos av an angry artosis, something i had not seen before. All i remembered was smiles and laughter, hope it continues like in this video and that you have have a good happy life.
What would make Protoss more playable? What if they got some sort of spell like the queen but instead of spawn larva it gave existing mineral patches more total minerals (regrowing used or close to depleted patches bringing them back slowly up to the original amount). It would favor late game builds, so probably slow down the game.
They could have a stationary building that is a mix between a bunker and a medevac. It could protect a few units lowering there damage because they are being healed but they would regain health as fast as Zerg, so slowly (maybe 2x Zerg normal heal speed). This would work for mechanical and flying too.
They could have a merge like archons for zealots that gives them more health, reflective damage shields (meaning if they are hit by projectiles it also damages the enemies a small amount), but instead of attacking they have a passive area of effect slowing and a small damage over time effect (like a poison, maybe stackable) just being close to enemies.
For the sentry revamp the force field, make it damage somehow, maybe make it similar to the auto turret or the removed infested Terran, possibly let your own units enter the field making them like bunkers. Or make it be able to capture enemy units like stasis ward.
I feel like Protoss should have a damage, shield energy, and or spell energy increase if they are within the power effect of pylons (maybe choose one and make it a temporary triggered ability/spell). Giving their energy based weapons and shields an additional +1 +0 +1 (up to total +4) (regular armor would be uninfected).
Possibly give gateways a reactor like attachment or upgrade, that allows for you to create certain units like a normal gateways (only spawn at the gateway) + continue to allow the regular amount of warp ins.
It is not only right now and not only tournament wins. Protoss has been underperforming consistently in pro play for 5 years (see statistics in Aligulac). That is clearly unbalanced.
If you're a Protoss on equal bases any mistake that costs you probes is way worse than if you were Terran or Zerg. The latter races are able to mitigate or replace losses in a way that if they were in BW it would bust the game completely.
The fact that Stats hasn't been able to qualify for any GSL this season so far despite entering every qualifier is proof to me that macro Protoss play is in a terrible place balance-wise. Thanks Artosis for making this video
How did SOS not even make this conversation?
Cause arty was trying to hard to make a point about the best being defensive players, ignoring that several championship winners are agressive lol
Even mentioning showtime when he cant win anything lol
Starcraft 2 is not even close to being a balanced game, never was, and never will be. Every race has had periods of being in the gutter. These periods lasted much longer for some races over others. Many players quit and never return during those times, even if their race becomes stronger again. This is why SC2 is in its current state and also why it will never recover. It hasn't helped that the community was always tearing itself apart over balance either.
The best Protoss player ever and a league above everybody else is MaxPax.
He mops the floor with Showtime and Reynor, and often wins vs Clem.
You should interview him why he is so good and why he don't want to play in offline tournaments so much.
Between season 1 in 2017 and season 2 in 2022, no protoss won a GSL code S. That’s more than 5 years of a 14 year old tournament. It becomes an even higher proportion if I adopt your view and disqualify anything before LotV. In fact, even if I did include pre-LotV, there is still only a period of ~4 years where Protoss was doing well (2013-2017). Before and after that, a Protoss champion was quite rare. This kind of trend can’t be explained away by appealing to personal preferences. More likely there is something about Protoss that makes it more difficult to compete at the highest level. This doesn’t mean that the game is imbalanced. The trend began less than a year after Afreeca took over GSL. Maybe the rules changed in a way that affected Protoss players disproportionately. Maybe the SC2 ladder changed around that time. Or, the most popular explanation, maybe the patches around that time changed something important.
Personally, I don’t think it’s a matter of racial balance-at least not an issue that can be fixed with some balance patches. As I said, the 5 year trend wasn’t new. Protoss did well only briefly in the history of GSL. And if you look at SC1, you also see Protoss lagging behind the other races when it comes to the absolute top: there is no Protoss representation among the so-called ‘bonjwas.’ This is why I think the issue began with the concept of Protoss as a race and as a play style. I’m no SC expert, so I wouldn’t dare make any suggestions, but it is true that Starcraft in general has for most of its history seen Protoss denied a spot at the tip top of achievement and play.
one other thing is the second herO figured out how to play a perfect game, he won a championship and then quit using that playstyle
go ahead and attack me, "if it would still work he'd keep doing it"
no. protoss pros have problems with their thinking about the game and i truly believe that
they think they HAVE to attack or they'll be behind, but they really, really don't
I think defensive play is really discouraged from Protoss based on how their late game is, especially against Zerg. A lot of Protoss openers depend on causing lots of economic damage to go into a favorable mid game. If Protoss goes into late game with a similar economy as Zerg, they just lose. Zerg have way too many good counter units that invalidate the most expensive Protoss units. Once Terran gets into ghosts the game completely changes because they essentially erase half of a units HP (and invalidate archons). On top of that, we saw a nerf to two late game Protoss units with the carrier and disruptive changes. So of course the most successful Protoss players right now (Hero and Maxpax) are going to be more offensive players. Defensive Protoss doesn’t work. Even before Stats left to his military service he wasn’t winning top tier tournaments, and he is by far the best defensive Protoss player we have ever had.
Why wasn't protoss winning in the years just before stats left and trap retired? Protoss success disappeared before all the greats did
As a defensive GM protoss player, I gotta say I actually do perform well againist pro players better than me in tournaments compared to ladder, but I also played over 2000 games to reach that level cause I need to be prepared for any attack.
0:27 what is interesting is that Protoss representation in finals wasn't bad. There were 4 terrans 5 protoss and 7 zergs in finals. protoss just didn't make that last step for some reason.
Protoss is the race that could actually just be entirely overhaul reworked. They just don't have a genuine late game tactic beyond shuttle lots killing workers very well. Thats why they either cheese or agress really early. If protoss doesn't take an early lead, zerg just has so much more to play with. Terran can just turtle and viking kill colossus to a stalemate protoss loses. And in that matchup, the wincon is a stupid stray ruptor shot which will almost never win the game against good micros. Honestly, protoss just needs another unit or make skytoss better. But in reality, they cant give anything to protoss because it's so aggressive and if they have another early game tool, it just kills ladder more and likely changes nothing in the pro scene.
I only disagree with one of your points + the exclusion of MaxPax in the conversation. I think that even with just the 3-4 online Premier tournaments he gets per year, MaxPax has more of a chance to win a Premier tournament than someone like Creator in the 8-10 online + offline events he can compete in.
But the main point I disagree with is that while yes, even I don't think herO is necessarily on the 'GOAT' level where we expect him to win everything, he is still literally the only Protoss player to win a $100k+ Premier tournament since the Mothership Core was in the game back in 2017. So while Protoss has lost players like Zest, Neeb, sOs, Stats, Trap, PartinG and even Zoun, literally NONE of them actually burned as bright as herO did in 2022 (since 2017, at least).
That said, Protoss didn't win a single Premier tournament last year, let alone Katowice. It's not as if Protoss needs a Katowice-tier Protoss to be able to win non-Katowice tournaments.
I quit watching and playing SC2 once it became obvious Protoss was basically a timing attack race. I prefer macro “control” protoss and it was outclassed by the other races.
This is why i quit SC2 more than once, once in WOL and once in LOTV.
Others have better theories than mine, though I feel my theory does add into things. Protoss abilities and mechanics seem to lean towards instant-win cheese. Take, for instance, the infamous Dark Templar. You warp in a few and either it wins the game or...you lose. How about Photon Canons? Either you're in early SC2 and canon rush the zerg ramp or....you never build any more and if that fails you lose. Stalkers, either you crush them with an early blink stalker rush....or you lose. Oracles, you either do enough damage to stay ahead and crush, or its Over. Void Rays, same.
Now, how about a Baneling Bust cheese? Its gonna hit something and damage it. Medivac drop, well you can just pick them up and try again in 20 seconds or rejoin the bio ball.
So it me, as a non-Protoss Player I see a lot of infuriating cheese coming from the Protoss but if I can get on top of that game's cheese it is an easier win. So if you meet someone random you can cheese it up and win a game, but once you figure that person out, or figure out their cheese. Its over.
Maybe its a permanent feature of Protoss, but the Protoss lack strategic Depth atm.
Maybe its a mindset thing and Protoss mains can come back. I remember when a Foreigner 'introduced' mech-terran in SC2.
I'm not hearing a coherent thesis here. You're talking about individual players and not the race as a whole and how it fits into the game. I think its more the units and balance than players that are to blame.
The other races have been buffed enough that even a Protoss deathball isn't as scary as it once was, and pro tosses ability to gain an early game advantage is limited. People love to go on about SC being balanced but ultimately its not. The best Zerg just has too many advantages, it's their game to lose.
If Terran and Zerg have even a small late game advantage then Protoss is on a timer. That dictates the strategy of going for earlier attacks which then puts Protoss as an attackers disadvantage. So I think the Protoss players are doing the right strategy given the balance. If both sides defend them Protoss would lose in late game. This is why Showtime for example can get to late games but can’t close out enough to win a tournament. And MaxPax is the best Protoss player because he executes the best early and mid game aggressive strategy efficiently and without big mistakes so he has more chances to win through multiple tries at aggression. Ultimately in late game though he will peter out against top ‘defensive’ terrans. If Protoss had a better late game army composition that could go toe to toe they would play more defensively too.
Why won't Starcraft ever be balanced? Because every patch has multiple changes. They need to make smaller patches and see what minor changes do to the game instead of a bunch all at once.
It's an interesting point, but I would love to see you also explaining SOS sucess and maybe considering in MaxPax could become a world champion. Showtime doesn't feel like he can surpass the level of Clem, Serral and Reynor. But MaxPax is still improving and he seems to be getting closer to their level.
To reduce attacker's disadvantage you'd need to increase size of the map to the point attacker could expand + prepare their own defense
That is very true. PartinG rightfully pointed out that the way to play toss is agression. Toss has a harder time sieging up than T and Z. T has huge splash damage with tanks and Z has creep for quick movement. The fix Toss needs on D is a sentry buff. Extra energy, bigger FF, make them armored, and buff guardian shield. (in case idra is watching, that was a joke)
I agree with you, a sentry buff is long overdue. Ravagers made them pointless
sentry 100% needs buffs, but instead the balance council decided taht the best idea to help protoss is to buff cyclones lmao
You can hardly name a protoss defensive style. Terran turtle, Zerg lurkers. What do protoss has that has edge in defence without much control?
I, as a protoss player, know quite well how to deal with Protoss deadball (skytoss mixed with archon, high templar, colosii) in the other two races. And there are many ways to do it. But I do not know how to efficiently counter protoss deadball as a protoss myself except for going skytoss as well. I think that speaks to limited options protoss has in general.
That doesn't properly explain Protoss' lack of major wins.
This isn't about the entire history of SC2, it's not about the last year or two, it's not a comparison of GOATS, and it isn't about this guy's playstyle versus that guy's playstyle.
This is about the Legacy of the Void expansion which is what broke the balance against Protoss at the pro level. Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm had balance. Protoss won their share of the large tournaments in those releases. There is a clear dividing line between Protoss winning large championships at a reasonable rate and that being completely shut off with the release of Legacy of the Void. The last good year for Protoss in major championships was the last year of Heart of the Swarm. That's not a coincidence.
You can talk about Serral and Maru as the GOATS, but you can also take away their major championships and you still have far more major championships for Terran (TY, Clem, Byun, Cure) and Zerg (Reynor, Dark, Solar, Rogue) than for Protoss (Hero won one, and I think Trap may have won one).
The Mothership Core allowed Protoss to move their army out on the map while having okay defense at home. That was taken away with no proper replacement. I knew this when Legacy of the Void was released. I looked at the changes and thought "Protoss aren't going to be able to win anymore" and I was right.
We are now on year 7 of Protoss being almost entirely shut out of major championships. The only explanation for such a thing is an imbalance against Protoss. Put the Mothership Core back in, or something equivalent (shield batteries are not), and you would immediately see Protoss win their share of major championships again.
Maybe I'm an idiot but is your point that protoss needs defensive buffs or is that top protoss players just coincidentally happen to be very rarely defensive?
I'm surprised you didn't at least address the differences in the races contributing to the caliber of defense each race can play. Terran as a race is basically built from top to bottom to be most easily able to defend, between being able to instantly scan anywhere making it so you don't need detection in position, obviously bunkers (which can be salvaged so in a lot of cases you err on the side of making one if you're not sure what's happening) plus mass repair, planetary fortresses, tanks being very defensive with having long range and high DPS splash as long as they're pre-seiged can defend most ground attacks.
And then zerg having queens which are one of the best defensive units in the game means you always have something in position to at least slow down an oracle, banshee, muta attack, liberator. Combine that with the fact that a top tier zerg can pretty much easily get vision with forward overlords, overseers scouting their opponents bases, the way creep works giving vision and ability for units to respond defensively quickly. Honorable mention, the fact that static defense can move. You can also burrow lings randomly around. Top zergs like Serral who know when and what to scout and how to counter are very very difficult to actually surprise to the point you get a free win unlike protoss where you have to put pylons and zealots in random spots.
Protoss gets shield batteries/battery overcharge and recall. Recall is almost used more to help with cheesing than actual defense and recall is only useful if you have the units to defend in the first place but they're just not in position, and it can't be used all that often, and only if you happen to have energy for it. And batteries take so long to build and are usually skipped to save minerals unless there's a solid reason to build it.
In short Protoss is just not a very defensive race. I think there was some progress made with the recent change allowing archons to actually get through your zealot protected wall gap so you can use them to defend against mutas. For diamond league players like myself that
I respect you kind of discounting the tops players from the first 2 or 3 years of SC2 as being meaningful for the discussion, but just for nostalgia, I would say MC was an extremely good defender. So was HuK. MC was one of the most cheese hardered players I'd ever seen because people seemed like they always cheesed him to the point where he had pretty much seen every cheese you could imagine and wasn't a greedy player. My memory of HuK was that he pretty much relied on playing so greedy that his opponent would need to change their game plan to punish him but he would usually barely have the micro to make a hold that most other players would not be able to.
On the surface, I agree with Arty's comment, but I don't think it touches broader aspects of Protoss problem. Yes, on top level, it is true that offensive wins games but defensive wins championships. However, not all races have same instruments for defending. I would very much love to see Maru defending with shield batteries instead of siege tanks and planetary fortresses, or Serral having to spend money on static objects instead of massing universally useful queens. Protoss has to build static objects for defending - at least shield batteries - which are even not good enough for defending against certain types of attack ("hello Sir, mine drop here, your probes will need more than shields") and also needs to spend a lot of money on production structures. That makes him become so far behind an opponent of a different race, but also potentially very much at risk because of the fork in tech after cybercore because opponent can easily adjust on the fly with more universally useful units, while Protoss is locked into a path unless he invests a lot further into different production buildings. So Protoss needs to play defensively, hugging the wall, staying close to batteries and hope he would be able to defend everything and gather enough spellcasters and aoe damaging units. And that's just the start.
That is why there aren't many defensive Protoss out there - it is so boring and hard to play. I myself am one of those people. I am aware Artosis doesn't speak for my level, but maybe that's why someone can recognize himself in similar problems. I am mostly diamond player who managed to get into masters 3 occasionaly. I am extremely defensive player even by Stats' standards, I never cheese, I never cannon rush, I never do stupid stuff. However, there are two big problems that occur from that.
1) whenever I am up in league, I need to rethink, reorient and reinvent defensive strategies because I am facing better and better players with tighter and tighter timings
2) the amount of bullsh*t attacking options for the opponent enhance so much without me being able to respond, at least not without playing dozens of games against such opponents
Also, the patching contributes to this problem instead of solving it. What was the stated intent of the most recent patch? To stabilize the Protoss in the early game. How was it done? Well, it wasn't, nothing was done. Protoss didn't get any new units, are they able to make a bit more units early in the game, any useful upgrades for early game, no new abilities on their units. However, opponent units got certain new abilities, upgrades or new costs, so on top of everything I had to deal with as a defensive Protoss, Cyclons all-in was added to the list, and 3-rax pushes with some Cyclones mixed in made early Terran agression so much stronger, for example. And don't get me started about what Zerg can throw at me throughout the game...Sure, banelings won't kill all workers at +2, that's why a Zerg will make 2 banelings more. And their abilities to switch to a completely different style of army in a matter of single spawning cycle? Yea, right. Oh, and their Investors™ can now puke the green stuff as soon as they spawn for defensive purposes, let's not forget about that.
Long story short, it becomes very frustrating and dishearthening playing defensive macro Protoss as you grind up the ladder. Unlike other races, I cannot pack my shield batteries and redeploy them to use them offensively as I manage to get to the other side of the map, unlike siege tanks, for example. And let's not forget that at the same time when you play PvP, you are immediately in disadvantage against the Protoss who is using some proxy, trickery or some offensive timing strategy. Yes, you can learn to deal with that but its very frustrating and after some time you realize that everyone has good time against you on the ladder, but you have good time only for those few short matches when you learn to deal with all the bull*hit that gets thrown at you, you beat a few people and then the cycle starts again because you are promoted to a new, higher league.
All in all, as a defensive Protoss I say it sucks and I think even pro matches show that. Very few people are excited for Stats (maybe me) and his matches, while everyone looks forward to Parting (including me). Sure, maybe Stats will sooner win some tournament, but Parting is still so much more fun to watch. Also, probably no Protoss will win tournaments with this state of SC2 anyway, so let's enjoy a bit at least.
Hero's 2022 is overlooked, he was a favourite and a solid player for almost all that year and lead him up to make semifinals in iem katowice (losing to oliveira). He went from winning Gsl to win overseas at dreamhack atlanta 2022 by beating maru on the finals. I think arti' was a little unfair with him so i wanted to point that out. Plus 2022 and 2023 are the best earning years for hero
And then, everything changed after 5.0.11 patch, and everybody is still trying to ignore this temporal correlation. They nerfed basically every protoss late game composition and then now say, "why there is no defensive protoss." Moreover, disruptor got nerfed with 1 more supply cost which further nerfs late game army power (army will be smaller).
@@mark11tz All races have powerful late-game. Zerg has the best, and TvP late-game is very comparable at the highest level of skill. When Protoss lategame was favored against other races, pros actually had incentive to be more defensive oriented.
@@julianbeatty2909Keep being delusional and be happy. "Protoss lategame was favored against other races" if and only if both players are not pros and do only a-move. What is the late game winrate of PvX throughout all the major tournaments since 2018? There is a reason why attack-oriented protoss pros perform better than defensive pros such as Showtime nowadays. Stastistics ONLY shows the results, which is FACT, and people keep trying to deny it.
Especially in PvT, after the patch, it is hard to find a PvT winning game with both side have late-game army.
Parting recently won against Byun who refused to transit to late game while Parting already had HTs and colossi, tier 3 units of TWO branches tech.
Reynor(P) beat Serral in one late game recently with 150+ more average APM and kept the number of late-game units low and splitted the mid-game units wisely. The key for protoss late game is making both side low-tech.
Most recently herO won against Reynor yesterday in Master C 7 Bo7 game by not building a single tier 3 unit except for HTs and DTs while kept denying Reynor's bases.
The nerf on 1 supply of disruptors hurts only good defensive players, disencouraging macro plays, and nerf nothing but late-game army.
@@mark11tz You have not read my post clearly. I have said that *when* protoss lategame was favored. That implies that todays lategame is not favorable to Protoss. Protoss Hegemony in the lategame ended when Ghosts got EMP radius buffed. PvZ lategame shifted back and forth, depending on the patch. 5 mineral interceptors during the double/triple sg opener days was probably when Protoss last has hegemony.
@@julianbeatty2909 Sorry for my misreading.
1:36 its true in war and even sports as well: defense is typically easier than offense.
You forgot Classic. Classic in his prime (right before his military service), he was really good. Also in 2015
Really great analysis! I think maxpax is a great example of what a protoss can do with the game as it stands today ie can take on anyone (maybe only really significantly unfavoured vs serral but that's basically everyone except clem) . It is a shame he can't seem to play offline at the bigger events. He is kind of a mix of some of the recent top 4 tosses RT highlighed super optimising like zest, terrifying blink all ins like prime parting etc. He's also got a quite unique harassing and counter punching style with zealots that works well in all matchups.
Basically it shows the tools are there for toss but I still think there could be further tweaks to pvt to make it more stable for toss. Eg more consistent damage for collosus etc particularly after the raven matrix change. Though also maybe just some terran nerfs to emp shield damage or cost/speed you can get libs out
Thanks for the vid!
Editing feedback: the music at the end about blew out my eardrums, much louder than the rest of the video.
I would only ask for anyone out there that thinks that Zerg are not OP see the masterpiece series between Serral/Clem and Dark/Clem where the terran had to trade x3times better than the other race just to stay alive. Not win. Especially the Clem vs Serral at some point Clem had lost 12k resources while Serral 30+ k and rebuilt his army multiple times. Forgiving as hell considering that Toss and Terran can lose one fight just by one sneaky infestor.
Agree
I think a big part of the problem is late game.
Protoss late game is weak compared to the others, and has been for years, specially the Zerg tha have had long periods when they were just unbeatable (infestor + overlord anyone). As Protoss are weak late game many players feel the need to end the game in the early to mid game as they feel they have no chance late game. That make them more predictable and opponents geared up to stop their early and mid-game aggression and that made Protoss chances even less and made them even more aggresive and cheesy. And whenever they found some mid-game magic it ended nerfed into the ground (see Disruptors, a unit that almost nobody used unless it was a panic situation until a few players started to use them wisely and win games and others followed suit)
So there you have the reason why protoss are early aggressors, because they have no chance otherwise.
That's what I have seen at least.
i guess the question is how effective is protoss at being played defensively? i think it'd be hard to argue that zerg isn't a race well-equipped for defensive play.
You ever watched sc2? They fall back to bases and have queens sitting at every checkpoint along the way.
Zerg should never have to play defence- but watch serral sometime. Watch how he slowly gives up ground because he doesnt have tech structures or pylons laying around for the demolishing. If he holds out for 20 seconds, he just got a whole new wave of swarm rallying in. That could be like 50 units in late game.
Shit, I lost a base on the left? Better spend almost no money to grab two more hatches.
@@Seldomheardabout what in the fuck are you talking about lol
What? With the creep map hack, early Queen defence, and creep speed boost to move armies, i think zerg is very well equipped to play defensive.
@@WeebJail sc2. And you seem kind of dumb for asking.
Hi Artosis , i`ve been a big SC2 fan since 2012 but dropped it a few years ago. One thing i always perceived throught the game throughout the expansions in competitive and my games playing as random is that SC2 is like rock paper scissors : ZVT is terran favoured, PVZ is zerg favoured and PVT is terran favoured, just clarifying that this is not always the case but yes what balance changes seems to always gravitate towards. For the defensive points, PVZ was always all win for the protoss since WoL ( immortall all in, 7 gate, 8 gate etc...) but PvT i feel like terran has more tricks in his bag for high level play than protoss, protoss units do not allow for very high micro like terran or even zerg . In the Past terrans would not win a late game against toss , nowadays by reeading the comments that do not seem the case, i feel like the issue is that if you nerf zergs youo screw zvt over, if you nerf terran you screw zvt also , the only way is probably to buff protoss in late game in a way that is not demented like mass carriers a-move free win but i dunno what.