Protoss balance problem?

Hey, i am new to this forum so i apoligize if i posted this in the wrong section.

Anyways, i am a diamond random player on starcraft 2(Rank 33)

What i have realized is that the protoss army is a bit underpowered compared to zergs and definitely terrans. Let me explain why i think so.


here is the problem against a terran

When i am protoss, i always do the 4 warpgate strat. I can have 20 stalkers with Blink upgrade and 4 colosus with upgraded range in 4:32 seconds exactly. That soon in the game that should be a rather dangerous army right? Well it really isn't, not when i still get owned by lets say.. 15 rauders and 10 rines with stim and 6 medavacs. My best race is terran and then zerg comes second. I have not realized any unfair balance problems with terran against zerg or the other way around. To me, that is bs... Protoss units are more expensive therefor should be a better bang for their buck if you know what i mean. I have tried about everything from mass zealots with stalkers and colosus, templars, even a mothership! And still i get owned by mass rauders and rines with 10 medavaks... even if i storm the **** out of the dudes units. I personally realize myself that i can't even remember as hard as i try the last time i lost to a protoss when i was terran.

Has anyone noticed this or is it just with me? Or is there just a strat i need to get down.. If so, Please tell me.


Zerg Problem

I always start out with 3 canons at the enterance to counter fast roach strat, which happens a lot in my league. I then right away get 4 warpgates. I get 20 stalkers with blink, 2 sentries for the force field with 5 imortals in less then 6 minutes. I still get owned by roaches and lings. After they own all of those damn units i get zealots with 5 colosus. That is more effective then anything but you cant forget how raoches slaughter zealots. Soon as that heppends colossus can easily eb countered by lings and roaches.

I played the first starcraft for 8 years and became a very good player with all races. Protoss units have always been a lot more expensive but always has been known to be a great bang for the buck... I just don't feel that they are anymore in starcraft 2. I am hoping for a new patch to maybe change this. I know every patch we get they are either making zealots take longer to make or decreasing the damage done by protoss units! what the hell! They should make them cheaper if they are going to do that crap.

Anyways, thanks for reading my long post. If nobody else knows what i mean, i obviesly need a better Protoss strat. Please if so, fill me in.

thanks.

 

From my limited knowledge of the game so far, I'd like to make a few observations.

Firstly, using the same tactic every time is very inflexible. You've got to scout your opponant, see what they are doing and alter your build as you go.

Collosus aren't the end all unit, especially against Terran. I've found Immortals are a much better tech choice most of the time. Combined with Chargelots, they make a mockery of a Marauder push.

Against early Roaches, go Immortals first with Stalkers. Only after the push has been stopped do you go Collosus (since usually a Zerg player will pump out Hydras or Lings to counter your Immortals and Stalkers).

i've found the only matchup I have issues with is PvP!

 

Although I agree with Andro, I totally agree with your point about Protoss' lack of quality as well. I've noticed this for a long time now...and it actually made me cry at a certain time =(

 

I find that Sentries are really useful against MMM rushes. Four Sentries with Guardian shields can turn the tide of a battle.

But I agree actually, MMM rushes seem overpowered to me. Zeals are made useless by the Marauders and stalkers don't really seem to do much damage. Immortals are strong but it's hard to get them out in numbers before the rush comes.

 

protoss units seem weak (especially zealots and stalkers), i have to agree. I feel that i have to always try harder than "attack move"...which in some cases terran can just attack move with their dam MMM ball.

 

Only thing weak about Protoss is the tactics most of them use, especially in lower leagues. Mass Void Rays? Yeah, just try and stop that with a balanced army. Especially when they've cannoned themselves in so you can't even scout them. Cheap, boring, pointless.

 

That is precisely what i am talking about! I mean it is protoss! They have always been known for "Expensive, but tough" in the 8 years i spent in the previous starcraft... that is not how it is anymore. It is only "Expensive" now.

Stalkers are more expensive then all other units in the beginning of the game and yet they still are easily overpowered by simple forces. Even if you have lots of melee units to back them up.
Stalkers just do not do the right amount of damage for what you pay for!

Terran and zerg are perfectly balanced in my opinion though. They just need to beef up toss units a bit more and make them actually worth the minerals you spend on them.

I wonder if there is a way to request a new patch to fix something like this or try it out for a while if enough people agree. I know they realized that the void ray was over powered and downgraded it.

 

Yep, the only problem is that the zealots and stalkers need to be toughened. 20 rines will gun down 15 zealots before they kill 5 rines wether they got charge or not.

I hate having stalkers and zealots knowing that they aren't a very promising force.
Makes me sad to bro. lol

 

I see where you are coming from. I personally get frustrated when i send a scouter and it gets killed by 10 canons at the beginning of the game, big waist of time. They have downgraded the void rays so 4 void rays will not be capable of killing 7 vikings anymore which is a really great thing in my opinion

They need to stop making patches which make zealots and stalkers take longer to build and make them worth the price. I dont care wether they give them more HP or make them do more damage or maybe a bit of both. They should be a bit more effective then they are especially when they cost the way they do.

 

I have to agree with what's been said so far in general.
I'm generally winning against terran and zerg in my league and have the greatest trouble with pvp matches, but when watching the replays, there are even times where I play at least as well as my opponent and lose nevertheless. In my bracket(got silver today from bronze) it's easy to take risks and expand even when not being 100% able to defend all your bases, due to players not scouting so I win most matches by getting like 4 bases by the time my oponent takes his natural, have like 100 probes and keep making gateways, robos and pumping out upgraded units.
But if my opponent is good and pressure me enough so that we expand at around the same time then I find it quite a tough game to pull through.

However good or bad I do at my level of play though is not so relevant and deffinitely not a reason to call for balance. But how many protoss players have you seen winning those global tournaments? I think only NEXGenious has taken first place as protoss somewhere so far, if I'm not mistaken. Zerg on the other hand are faring quite well, and it's not because roaches got a +1 bonus to range, but because zerg players learned to play the strengths of their race correctly.


Some more specifics that I've noticed:

Against Terran:
-EMP: It's quite retardedly strong against protoss while cast by a unit that has 100hp, cloak and a good attack, especially vs light units. The ability does 100 shield damage against protoss in a 2unit radius and drains all energy.
For the same gas cost and only 100 mineral difference the high templar is retardedly more weak: The storm does 80 damage over 2.4 seconds in a 1.5unit radius(less damage than EMP does against toss instantly, over time, thus partially avoidable and does not drain energy or reveal stealthed units). The HTs do not attack at all and only have 80 hp total(but armor upgrades only benefit half of it). Feedback also drains energy from a single unit and while it's an awsome ability, it's still weaker than EMP(since specialist units without energy are almost as good as dead anyway )

Also terran have the ability to snipe colossi easily with vikings and reactors give them a bonus in pumping out units faster and thus replenishing their forces a little easier.

MM balls generally decimate gateway units and if you back them up with collosi the terran can respond with vikings easily since they usually have the starport tech for medvacs anyway. Add in some banshees to the mix, scan to snipe the observer and then cloak the banshees and then go to town with the protoss army.


These are strained out examples, the situation is not that bad of course, I'm just giving a little bit on an example and deffinitely not taking into consideration the general strategy or how you can outplay your enemy as a protoss.


Against Zerg:
Against players that I've played usually in the ladder they don't spend creep well(or at all!), they don't try to outexpand me and they overreact to small pushes wasting larva on needless stuff. So generally I don't find zerg a tough matchup, but not because zerg are easy but because zerg on my bracket play badly(again my experience is against bronze and silver zerg only). But if zerg know how to play(I've played against a friend of mine) they spread creep, don't overreact to threats, keep up good scouting and can easily outmacro other races.

Zerglings completely dominate stalkers which is fine, but they also kill zealots which is not. A zealot taking 3 hits to kill a zergling needs a total of 12 hits to kill 4 which are the equivelent of his cost in minerals. That means that 4 zerglings surrounding him will take half the time to kill him as he to kill them.


Anyway, I'm typing too long and it's much exxageration in there and too much qq for nothing solid, so here's a few things that would help protoss out a bit:

-Zealot: Either increase their base damage by 1 per hit or make them do 16 damage striking once with 2 damage bonus per upgrade. That way they'll be able to 2shot lings (without +1 weapons in the first case, with +1 in the second) and will make them more effective in the late stages of the game as the armor upgrades will not completely counter the damage upgrade. The second case will make them less effective against immortals and will buff immortal play a lot in PvP since the only ground unit that does full damage against them will be the sentry. Dunno if that's good or bad.

-Stalker: Give them a +1 dmg bonus against armored per upgrade so that they get a little better against armored in the late stages of the game. Which is, from 10(+1) plus 4 vs armored make them 10(+1) plus 4(+1) vs armored, the numbers in parenthesis being the bonus per weapons upgrade.

-Carrier: Change it's upgrade to something at least mildly useful as so far it's quite crap. It would be nice if carriers were a fast unit that would hit and run so interceptors should be thrown instantly do damage and then return as you retreat, but given the current speed, the upgrade is useless. The only thing slower than the carrier is the battlecruiser and that by a marginal amount.
Also either make it more durable or change the damage of interceptors from 5(+1)x2 to 10(+2). As it is now it's getting a huge damage boost per upgrade but is fully countered by armor upgrades. Changing the damage will let 50% of the damage boost per upgrade level bypass armor boosts so making it stronger in attacking in the late stages of the game. Or leave it as it is but increase it's armor by 1 at least as it dies too fast. Or lastly increase it's speed to make it a kiter and have it's upgrade work properly. One of these would be nice an upgrade to have(of course not multiple of them) but I wouldn't know which would be best without making the carrier too good.
-Fleet Beacon: Lower the cost a bit


What I think is the problem with protoss is the early game against terran and the late game against zerg.
Terran MM balls dominate zealot/stalker mixes if they lack a plentiful amount of sentries(sentries do change the battle by a huge margin but force toss to be too gas-heavy in their army composition during the early game). Mid to late game protoss armies are doing quite well against terran.

Against zerg protoss are doing okayish early on(unless zerg go 7rr which is kinda OP right now) and a maxed protoss army kills a maxed zerg army with relative ease. But when protoss are at 200/200 they cannot make anything while zerg can continue to pile larvae in their hatcheries, so the zerg army is many times easier to replenish than the protoss(since at max resources start to stockpile to allow for better army replenishment). (A toss with 4 robos will only be able to start making 4 colossi when his army dies, while a zerg can make any amount of any unit to replenish their army. The only thing a toss can make relatively fast is gateway units given enough gateways).


What is difficult for the protoss to do compared to other races is make enough production buildings to be able to replenish losses fast enough due to the high costs(high unit costs lead to less money leftover to build more production buildings and even if you build them to keep using all of them you need a huge income to support them).


Gonna edit later, got more to add but have visitors

 

Ok, I feel that Blizzard should stop changing the mechanics of StarCraft. They should LOOK AT StarCraft 1 and BUILD OFF IT.

I totally agree with the Ghost vs High Templar. 2 Things

- Weaken EMP: 1.9 radius, 90 damage to shields, drains 150 energy, reveals cloaked units (slightly less duration)
- Strengthen Psi Storm: 96 damage over 2.5 seconds. 2 radius.

High Templar upgrade: +40 energy.

------

Zealot: 60 shields.
Stalker: 11(+1) + 4(+1) per upgrade. so 11 +4 min, 14 + 7 max. Lower shields to 70.
Marauder: 40% slow on the unit it hits. +8 bonus vs armored. 5 Range. 115 hp.

Make Combat Shields Req: +1/2 Infantry armor. Make it more late-game, which makes sense. Also, 100/100 m/g and a longer research time.
Effect: + 10 hp for marine, + 10 hp for Marauder too (theory: the new material can be infused into the maruader's suit quite easily, although it offers less protection than it would a marine, relatively speaking).

 

Whitera did win the HDH invitational once but i haven't heard anything else about that.

Okay i dont really understand what your saying here but if zealots were to 2-shot zerglings then protoss would be really really imba vs zerg... i know that zerglings are kinda imba in the early stage of the game but you just have to make a tight coke with some gateways and cybercores and then put your zealot at the entrance so only 1-2 zerglings can attack the zealot at a time and that would definitaly favour the zealot.

Well i understand that... BUT for an example if you were to go 198/200 army voidrays and you had all the upgrades then when the fight is over you would still have about 24 voidrays left that could run around and kill the zerg base before the zerg can replenish their army and by the time your voidrays got killed i think you've done some serious damage on the zerg base.
another thing is that hatcheries i believe can only stock about 16 larvae in them... and i think there is a reason for that xD

 

Without good use of force field and Gshield, MM's with stim can and still kite the living hell out of zealots even with charge.

Early PVT is usually about getting charge and blink asap and using that effectively with force fields.

This is pretty hard to pull off perfectly if your not a higher level plat or diamond.

Id say Im medium level Platinum Protoss player, and most games I win with zealots with charge, stalkers with blink and Ht's throwing down storms.

I only make colusi if they go into uber turtle up mode. Honestly colusi are too much glass cannons for their price.

 

What you just said is false. You cannot build that army in that time in a standard 1v1 ladder match. Here's proof:

Stalkers are 50 gas each, so 20 of them will bring us to 1000, with no Warp Gate upgrade.
A Twilight Council is needed for Blink, that's 100, so we're up to 1100.
Blink itself is another 150, total rises to 1250.
You're gonna need Warp Gate, that's another 50 gas, so now we have 1300.

Because colossi take 75 seconds to build, it would take five minutes (300 seconds) to build four of them at one robofac, and you only have 272 seconds. And that's after we assume that you don't have to wait for resources and that you already have a robobay up. Since I'm pretending that all these buildings are in place at the very start of the game, I'm not going to count chronoboost. I've already given you a bigger time advantage than chronoboost anyway.

So let's add two robofacs in, those are 100 gas each, so you spend 200 here, and we're at 1500.
Can't build colossi without a robotics support bay, that costs 200, we're at 1700 now.
Now onto the colossi themselves, 200 gas each, so add 800 for a total of 2500 gas.
The range upgrade is another 200, that's 2700 gas.

2700 GAS! Notice that I'm not even counting minerals!

According to the in-game data in replays, a 3-worker geyser yields 112 gas per minute. You have two at your starting point, so even if they had assimilators on them and were fully saturated instantly at the start of the game, you'd only collect 1008 gas in 4:30. If you had an expansion with a nexus and two saturated geysers, your total gas income over 4:30 would only be 2016. And you said you had all that stuff COMPLETED by 4:32, not just that you had enough money to pay for it.

Just to collect enough gas to fuel that operation, even assuming all your buildings were instant-build you'd need to have more than two bases just to collect enough gas in 4:32 to pay for that.

In short, you are clearly lying. You're not a diamond player, because anyone who's played 10 or 20 games would instantly realize that that build is impossible. Prove me wrong by posting a replay.

 

i agree with the guy above me.... i was also like WTF when i saw that post xD

 

Stalkers are 50 gas each, so 20 of them will bring us to 1000, with no Warp Gate upgrade.
A Twilight Council is needed for Blink, that's 100, so we're up to 1100.
Blink itself is another 150, total rises to 1250.
You're gonna need Warp Gate, that's another 50 gas, so now we have 1300.

my mistake i ment 6:32 i thought i fixxed that when i read over my post. I always chrono boost my colosus and i do believe there is a way to get them out faster then i already do. Sorry about the typo

 

Templars in starcraft 2 don't really do anything anymore. They aren't even very effective vs zerg units especially compared to the first starcraft. which really pisses me off.

My whole point is, All units should be able to own as long as you have a whole bunch of them. Stalkers are almost worthless alone compared to all other units. Even if you do back them up with a ****ton of zealots. simple armies will easily over power them.

And for the guy who said stalkers have fast leg speed. Compared to marine and rauders.. they are not that much faster, Not even close. You can pull back but the mmm will be right on there ***. Even if you do take enough time pulling them back. Are you forgetting that rauders slow down units when they fire opon them?

Stalkers are over powered by even zealots and zerglings that have no back up.


i 110% agree with your saying on they should look at the original starcraft balances. That game is perfect in every way, enough to keep people playing it for a decade even with all these new games coming out. Blizzard just ignored that fact and basically changed everything. They have to know that almost just as many people including me play the original starcraft regardless number 2 is out.

All my buddies i've gamed with in Ghost- clan in original starcraft are disapointed in starcraft 2 due tothe balances. I didn't want to say this before because i did not want to offend everyone. But i know that if they made the balance the exact same as original. Pretty much it would put sc1 in the mudd for good.

 

Actually, this happened also in sc1...(goon < zlot/zlings, but those were counters, etc.)

anyways, its time to attack Bliz Forums then!

 

Comparing SC1 unit to SC2 units I notice a big difference in the unit too. Before you could send out your goons and they could pretty much take care of them self’s, now these stalkers are so much weaker. Maybe that was the design of the game that you need to make a mixture of unit to have a deadly army. But as for the cost, it does need to come down a little there just too expensive when to compare what you get.

 

Exactly! i could not agree with you more!!