Check out more about Protoss concepts - ruclips.net/video/fd9NnBAlHH8/видео.html Why Skytoss is a problem - ruclips.net/video/bjurICCIk1I/видео.html Timecodes: 00:00 What's it about 00:19 The issues with Protoss Race 01:15 Race Design in StarCraft 2 02:13 Why Protoss is both Weak and OP 04:40 What's the main problem with Protoss and how to fix it
Every Protoss ground unit does big, slow damage. None are fast firing. It means small Protoss armies get overwhelmed easily so they have to remain with the deathball.
I remember, when I was just entering Starcraft, I started playing protoss for their aesthetics and the feeling that it heavily relies on casters in order to win fights. I wish they had more ability variety instead of that deathball tactic
@@yangpaan453 Or play a game that discourage deathballing by other means instead of artificially limiting it with arbitrarily small unit groups and terrible pathfinding. If "it takes skill" to just move your army from one point of the map to the other and place them there, it's not a good game.
@@TyphoonJig It is not a good game because you cant select your entire army supply in one click and attack move it across the map? That is just the opinion of someone who simply cant handle having a high APM. Having to group you marines in 1 group to be able to stim them and control your medics along with them is real skill. You cant complain that something is not hard because it is not dumbed down for you.
Terran is insanely supply efficient in the late game, with 160 army supply because of all the orbitals and MULEs, whereas toss is often stuck at 130 with worse eco
@@quentinsimon9434chronoboost gets outscaled late game. You cannot compete with 4+ orbitals spamming mules ever. Marauders beat all their robo units very easily and as he said, collosi is like the weakest backbone unit in the game. Skytoss has been nerfed so many times because casuals don't know how to micro. Protoss is harder to play as you climb higher and get better players as every loss in the early and mid game is really costly. Think of it like Garen in League of Legends. Easy to play and pick up at lower levels, very hard to pay at higher levels
This reminds me of the mothership core, and why it was a weird addition in the first place Originally, it was supposed to help Protoss in the early game because back then, Zealots and Stalkers were too weak to hold off attacks from Terran and Zerg. But instead of buffing Zealots and Stalkers, they added a new unit that you can only get one of that is decent, but it didn't fix much. They eventually removed the mothership core and buffed Zealots and Stalkers, but both still feel way too weak compared to marines and banes even in the late game. I think Warp Gate ultimately breaks Protoss as a race, as it breaks the balance of Gateway/Tier 1 units
Pretty much, yeah. Protoss offense is fine, as long as you have a proxy pylon or something. Aggressive early-game warp gate is generally pretty strong. But warp gate isn't much of a defensive advantage, because it mostly just gets your units across the map faster. Mothership core was originally envisioned as a defensive unit to give protoss back the defender's advantage that other races have, but Blizzard never really managed to make it function that way, and it became yet another offensive tool in an arsenal that was already fine. Someone else above mentioned that at some point the community was pushing for buffing zealots and stalkers and pushing warp gate to tier 3, and... yeah, thinking about it, that would probably help.
MSC got basically replaced with Shield Overcharge, which was honestly a pretty good move. Protoss's big issue is Warpgate being basically Tier 1, negating one of the few defender's advantage SC2 has: Reinforcement time. Unlike everyone else, Warpgate means that Protoss can effectively have production appear in your front door instead of having to walk across the map. If Gateway tech was strong at home, they'd be even more snowball-y smashing in bases, so they really couldn't afford for them to be that powerful. Compare to have insane it would be if Immortals could reinforce from a forwards pylon. Combined with a strange lack of powerful late game casters, P's unit compositions are a bit ironically fragile for the high tech aliens.
Zerg have powerful fast travel options in the form of Nydus Networks and Nydus Worms, but they are balanced by being restricted to Lair tech. Imagine Nydus being available without requiring Lair.
Lair tech isn't really a big restriction. It just seems like it is because of how most zerg players prioritize eco over tech, but actually you can get a Nydus very quickly if you just don't stop mining gas.
The nexus's recall range used to be much bigger than it is now. Ive always played Terran because I love how they are only limited by how fast you want to burn out your wrists. One protoss player proxied a nexus beneath my ledge in the main in the fog, then recalled his army right onto the ledge. I watched the replay and admired his creativity. Now I am sad because I wish so badly that someone had done that against Idra in a pro game. The sale wouldve been unbelievable.
@@cannogabang1999 Someone used it on me a long time ago. I did see a video with PiG where he was doing a florencio showcase with it. The player called me a "piss sad round eye" at the end before I gg'd so I don't think it was florencio. Best insult ever.
because the zergling no matter the level or stage of the game is still the 'base' zerg unit. Protoss can skip gateways entirely. Beyond that just race differences. Protoss generally focuses more on counters by...building an archon which has advantage against all zerg units. zerg's strategy is much more 'I just have more stuff' instead of better/specific stuff. Making each faction's most generic 'base' unit similar ruins the uniqueness of the races
@@matthewshuck5190 man... you can skip gates entirelly? Are you abronze league hero? XDDD In all other cases you are just dead. Also how is zealot similiar to zergling except that they are both melee? Zealot is a tank/frontline, while ling is swarmer/skirmisher unit. Also archon is a mid game unit which is not viable at mass the moment lurkers/broods are out. Which is fine. If protoss mass only archons early you can counter him with Hydras no problem. SC2 is higly complex and quite well balanced game. every unit has counter. you can see ppl whiining about imba almost equally from the 3 races.
I've stopped playing SC2 Years ago, fell back into the rabbit hole recently, glad to see some things never change and that despite having stats to prove Toss is on the weaker side of the balance people still call it broken and OP years after years for decades
majority of players are average to low skill. At low skill its easier to manage toss buildings and also tpss units are bulkier leading to more A move victories. I play all 3 races and by far I feel that if you are toss and slightly out of possition you can lose while as terran def is easier, as zerg its very fast to move around.
@@ixirion when I stopped playing (during the voidray meta) Protoss made up about 40-50% of gm depending on server, low gm was basically purely skytoss and cannon rushing Protoss players, for the few years before that Protoss was also over represented in gm specifically low-mid gm . Protoss is under represented in high gm/high tournament level players
You failed to mention that protoss units always cost more not only in both minerals and gas, but also in supply, which means Zergs and terrans still have more units in the lategame. Also protoss has been repeatedly nerfed for a long time, it was a running joke in my friend group, that in legacy of the void, the protoss expansion, Protoss was the weakest race. I honestly think that the identity of Protoss as "the lategame race" was very healthy, because the protoss army is also very slow, so it's relatively easy to punish it by surrounding or outmaneuvering it and then it basically becomes a positioning battle. The problem of course is if that is not possible, but I believe it can be achieved. For me personally, I stopped playing when Zerg became the best lategame race. Such a drastic shift in identity of races shouldn't be done in any game imo.
how is zerg the best lategame race? because serral makes it look that way? then you have Maru's that fight as 3-4base terran vs 5-6base zerg and still make favourable trades with ghosts like there's tomorrow
@@schippes24 I'm not a specialist in TvZ, maybe terrans are better, ghosts are certainly a good unit. I was specifically referring to PvZ and basically the infestors and vipers that can ruin a lategame protoss in a straight engagement.
Don't worry. Theorycraft whiners, like the guy who made this video are largely ignored nowdays. Changes have been few and very small,a s they should in a 12 year old game
no they need to to finaly dont have nightmer abaut terran who all but all but rly all build are hell for protos and only way is skytos, canon rush or say good bye to enemy eco by spam adepts and HTemplars in enemy base
yep, terran lose 1/3 army oh no anyway zerg lose 4/5 army, oh no anyway protos lose 2 immortal. gg xd like that micro is insane if ypu not do one of to stupid build like carriers rush
@@Darlf_Sevil fr, like when I play Zerg I can just throw my army at my enemy to save supply for new units, but when I play protoss, I can't throw money at the problem
There's just a lot wrong with Protoss. Now, the idea behind them I think was actually really cool. They were designed to be strong but micro-intensive in battle. Zerg was supposed to be micro-intensive in economy with Queens and creep tumors and all that, while Terran was in the middle. And so Protoss got caster units incredibly early. But, unfortunately, this concept doesn't scale well. Trying to get the maximum potential out of adepts, stalkers, and sentries quickly becomes inefficient when compared to a bio ball or zerg run in. They could find ways to buff those units so it does become efficient. But doing that would also mean Warpgate / Prism drops become more powerful. So, you can't do that. Which leaves ground Toss to instead trade up to bigger units to micro like disruptors and high templar, and babysitting colossus. While not using the high cost early units effectively anymore. So that huge swath of actually fairly skill intensive units gets turned to chaff, to be replaced with units that are largely less engaging but necessary to win actual fights. Or, they abandon ground and take an even worst solution, going into skytoss. Which is another issue, because it roughly mirrors the same pattern of problems. Phoenixes and oracles are arguably the best designed and microable early air units in the game. But they don't scale well either (though oracles do transition to detector/scouts) meaning the toss player must rely on the big dumb but strong carriers, void rays, and tempests. This is noticeably completely backwards from how other races are structured. Early zerg is largely a move, with you know, a few ravagers to mix things up. And marines and marauders have some micro, but they don't really get the boost until stim and medivacs get added to the mix. But then they expand their micro options with the game usually pushing the best players toward adding additional caster units and creating multiple strike forces to hit at separate times. It's sad to say since Toss is my favorite race. But I really do think it needed a whole rework from the ground up. The theory of a race that is battle micro focused from the start with less emphasis on economic mechanics isn't terrible. But the way to do that needed to be to start a little more than the other races and expand them further over time, rather than to narrow them.
Yeah, its really weird how Protoss has a bunch of relatively weak early game casters and strong A-move late game units, vs T and Z having basic combat units that get boosted by late game casters. And P's one late game caster (Mothership) being way too limited to be useful.
@@Appletank8 IMO, here's how I think they should have themed each race. Terran is defensive heavy, in that they should be building forward bunkers/planetary fortresses and setting up good siege tank + lib area denials, i.e. win by strategy. Zerg is attrition, they macro easy but units are inefficient, so their strategy is to attack in waves to wear down the opponent. Protoss is micro heavy, they should have all of their abilities unlocked (Stalkers with blink), but are much less effective until they research (blink is half the range with double the CD until normal research). Also, you should be able to "unsummon" warp gate units at a pylon, as a way to heal them. It's really weird to see damaged units last the entire game Zerg should really not have Vipers and Infestors, I'd argue that their abilities are a bit better than High Templars
The problem is that they gave Terran and Zerg all of the actually good toys and spellcasters and were afraid of making Protoss strong. And to be fair to Blizzard, EVERY TIME Protoss got something good, they broke the game. It's just been a constant swing of too strong and too weak. It's funny to see the difference when you go back to SC1 - Protoss had THE BEST casters in the game and their A-movers all hit really, really hard. But they were all terribly slow and vulnerable. The fast protoss units didn't hit hard. It was good balance. SC2, for whatever reason, never gave Protoss good, new spells outside of the Mothership but the history of that unit speaks for itself. Protoss was doomed from the start... doomed from the first mass Void Ray cheese in WoL Beta.
I usually agree with your takes, but not on this one. You make it sound like the protoss race is in dire need of a rework, which it isnt imo. It just got nerfed harder than it should've been (debate if it should have been nerfed at all). There are some minor issues, but not with the race in total. In my opinion (I have low league friends, I play at low master level), the protoss race as a whole is fine. I don't think their late game is unbeatable at any level. The boring skytoss vs. Zerg stalemate wasn't always won by protoss, zerg has big chances with infestors and vipers. What needs to be said is that the ground toss is very hard to play in the late game at my skill level, because of high lurker count or tank/ghost (the ghost is still a ridiculous unit) The only big design flaw is in my opinion the disruptor. It's a bad concept, as you just hope you hit a lucky shot. You can't really do anything except hope your opponent messes up. If he micros well, you loose everything, if they make one mistake, they loose everything. I believe there should be other options for the disruptor. Also, especially with the current map pool, protoss is just generally underwhelming. But I think that could be fixed with minor tweaks etc. Don't really see the total design flaw though Thoughts? And sorry for writing this much lol
Honestly I think Templar should have been what Disruptors get used for, except EMP makes it very difficult to actually use them. Wonder if hiding them in Prisms will ever become a thing.
@@Appletank8 yeah I agree. don't know if you are being sarcastic but the templar warp prism strat is being used by high level players. The problem is just that ghost emp is significantly easier to use than HT. So at the same skill level, you can emp but can't really do the warpprism strat
@@mEtil5656 Mostly it's just that 90% of the time I see Disruptors being used than HTs, despite how good people are at dodging them now at the high level.
because Zerglings cannot attack into a Cannon fortified base (if you take your bases carefully with your main army standing next to it its impossible for a Zerg to attack in, and then again lings aren't free) because Swarm Hosts open up a possibility of counter attacking because you just tell your opponent you spend a lot of money on unit that fights every 30 seconds because Brood Lords are artillery units, therefore weak when fighting anything head-on, and can't attack air Cheap =/= free. And even if Zerg had realistically free units, no amount of units with the 200 cap will prevent a huge deathball army or skytoss from killing you in the first place unless youll manage to force out a basetrade
Zerg late game is the strongest late game because of its casters and broodlords. It just takes a lot of control, so casuals do not get it. That is one of the reasons why Zerg is dominant in high level.
Zerg has "free units" because Terran/Toss have insane defensive capabilities. You'll never break a sky-toss or mech player with hydra/lurker/viper. Their units and base defenses are simply too cost effective. Without broodlords and swarm hosts you'd lose to these compositions every time. Also..i'd literally trade both the broodlord/swarm host for either carriers or battlecruisers; free units aren't that great.
@@Konranjyoutai well... basically almost every time when I see a late PvZ programe then I see skytoss loosing slowly against Zerg with a spore crawler forest and viper/corruptor/brood lord blob. And if accidentally both armies are zeroed Zerg just instantly rebuild it's army with infinite amount of lings... which eats everything instantly with upgrades.
protoss was designed to have the most value per mineral spent, quality > quantity. if you let them expand and macro and build a bazillion units they can literally attack move and win, like in lower elos
Yeah but in reality, it ain't. 4 Full upgrade lings beat a full upgraded Zelot. Mass marine beat mass zelot with equal minerals spent even without micro. Hydra cost less than the stalker but is superior in every way, but mobility ... and so on. Even more widowmines have extra shield dmg, ghosts can counter everything toss has.. it's just sad. Zerg main speaking BTW.
@@Lmaokekw975 Given that protoss units are more cost-effective early-mid game, how should one approach it? Shouldn't protoss ideally perma-pressure to stall enemy expansion and use, say, blink sentry prism to stay flexible for offense, worker pickoffs and backdoor intercept which would cost the enemy low invest return ressources? And then fast expand to quickly pump tech? Toss lategame is just too inflexible, and templars against BL corruptor meatball and mass BC is outspokenly tough.
@@Wabbelpaddel the thing is, you can't be out on the map as a Protoss because if you're getting dropped, or getting run by'ed you're losing a base or two, tons of probes and tech in a matter of second while the opponent can easily defend at home. Besides, Protoss units aren't even that efficient in early game or mid game, it's only when you start getting storm, disruptors and collosi that Protoss starts to handle fights equally as well as the other two races sadly. This leads to Protoss either relying on gimmicks or allins as mentioned in the video. Sadly, everytime an all in is brought to the table blizzard gets it down with the nerf hammer without even leaving time for zergs and Terrans to adapt and overcome.
The answer as to why Protoss is weak on the pro level is very very VERY simple. They nerfed Zealots to the grave. Remember +30 chargelots? Yeah, give Protoss back their original ICONIC unit, just this one singular buff, and Protoss would be highly competitive again.
And nerf Ling/Bane. It's so fucking ignorant that Zergs complain about Protoss being a no brain, no micro race but ling/bane is literally invalidates all ground armies unless you have damn near perfect splits and good positioning and AoE but even good splits usually results in an even trade and zerg pushing creep and economy more. Ergo ur fucked.
I'd second the idea of boosting zealots (as a very casual terran) *IF* at the same time airtoss was slightly nerfed (my favorite: limit tempest range a bit which is INSANELY long: there are some maps where it's possible to place tempest in areas inaccessible by ground, out of range of missile turrets, but in range of tempests so that a protos can take out half of a terran's base completely unbothered until the terran can produce vikings)
@@morgwai667 by the time toss has tempests you should already have starport and counters ready - unless he was cheesing you with some kind of proxy / tempest rush or something
I feel like Astrea summed it up very well in one of his interviews. The whole race seems to be balanced around the disruptor (and other gimmicky units). Redesigning these and then rebalancing the race afterwards would be the right way imo.
Unfortunately i feel with the leve of support we got its unrealistic to expect. Best we can hope for is small changes, that might make the balance a bit better, step by step.
@@ElfosDeMordor I think it was in one of those snippets they showed in between matches at Katowice this year. "Which unit would you remove from the game and why?" was the question and Astrea answered "Disruptor" and said because it's of its terrible influence on game design and balancing.
Toss issues all stem from the warp-in mechanic. Gateway units are balanced around potential rushes and timings using warp-in which negates most defenders advantage. To achieve this balance, Toss T1 units are tuned comparatively weak so that they don't kill zergs and terrans too easily with rushes and timings. But with weak T1 units, toss needs strong T2 units to survive the mid game. Disruptors, Colossi, Voidrays, Templar etc are very strong but only work as part of a big group where they can be protected - ie the deathball. The highly concentrated army (the deathball) is straightforward to control but difficult to control against. Below pro level, it's frustrating to play against and at pro level it doesn't provide the Toss players enough opportunities to express their skill through superior control.
lmao " protoss race needs rework". and whos gonn "work" on it? Starcraft II is an abbandoned project and nothing will change about gameplay unless community hands blizzard a patch or update on a silver plate.
VEry good analysis. I think on of the things contributing to the Protoss balance problems was LotV, since when the game starts much faster with much stronger economy, getting to death balls or huge timing attacks much faster then before. In earlier times, the beefy early and mid game units of Protoss would give you value for a longer time, allowing you get ahead of the opponent through good trades.
They could start by giving Zealots more movement speed, they just get kitted by terrant marauders slow or vaporized by banes. As for Collosus maybe a faster building time and make the viper harpoon drag Massive units halfway distance like it doesn't make sense that a freaking Mothership be dragged by a plane size bug xD
Yeah, I actually think Zealots need a movement speed buff. It would allow Protoss players to buy a bit more time on defense as well as more options when counterattacking.
No. Protoss needs rework. What you’re suggesting is the balance the game with only battles in mind. But high level StarCraft doesn’t work that way. At the high level, there’s really no OP units. It’s all about OP timing. There’s a reason why the gateway units are dogshit. Because in the past when they were somewhat decent, the mid-early game timing attack and all-ins of protoss are insanely good. I always takes Maru’s 3-peat year as example of how broken the toss is. That year, Protoss got buff, particularly stalker got a DPH buff. It was a miserable year for Terran as the number of GM Terran dropped to historic low(at the time), because of the improved stalker sniping ability made TvP unplayable for a lot of ppl since the early game protoss pressure its unstoppable. There was just no way for Terran to make a tank without losing 10 marines, or worse in the early game. Protoss would just snowball into a win if they didnt get a gg earlier. However, Maru still won it all, because of his perfect execution of TY’s proxy rack essentially nullified Protoss early aggression, and made the MvP matchup favors Maru because Terran has the superior production if done right. The changes on battle units alone isn’t the answer. Major overhaul is needed.
@@Telopead There is 0 chance that Blizzard will actually do a major overhaul. Would this be perfect? Yes, but we will never get it. That's why we should take a look at what is possible. Tweaking the numbers on units is possible. I like the idea of giving Zealots more speed. In lower level games that isn't much of an isuse, because there is very little kiting. In high level games the Zealots gets stronger, by making him suck less vs marauders. While at the same time making him not that much stronger in a "real" combat. Toss will just loose less zealots in a chase / kiting scenario.
@@wedgeantilles8575 I would agree with a speed buff of some sort for zealot. Imo maruaders should be countered more easily considering how easily they shut down colossus. The tradeoff should be made more fair.
I'm not a very experienced player so take this with a spoonful of salt, but I think the warp-in mechanic, cool as it is, is actually part of the problem. Protoss is the only race capable of instantly mass producing units, without delay, anywhere on the map where they have power. Practically a single pylon or warp prism erases or drastically reduces the defender's advantage. It's like a proxy without actually having to commit to a proxy. This means that if gateway units were actually powerful, protoss would be completely broken. As a consequence gateway units, while still individually strong, overall aren't as good as equal tier zerg and terran armies, which is why protoss needs to rely on wonky shit, or somehow survive until mass carriers.
I think protoss can spiral way to quick out of control and punishes way to hard which will not happen on pro lvl but will destroy casual players and thats why it is so hated
Used to be protos would saturate 1 base 4 gate and A- move to win a lot of games. The race does not teach macro that well because of its simplistic and qol features. If you were a low zerg you got 4 gated and if could not manage your larva , you had no notion of timings , you were just dead on arrival. As a zerg I spend 2 yrs learning timings for every cheese under the sun , before I got to some macro proteases, that actually played for macro rather than all ins or weak time pushes.
It is easier for low level players to get value, but at high level the tools T and Z have outclass P's when micro'd properly. So it depends on what you prioritize.
Protoss is the most rock-paper-scissors race. It lacks a solid gateway army base, Zeolots are melee, Stalkers are fragile. Gateway units lose straight up vs Terran and Zerg base armies so leans heavily on tech units like storm or colossus to bridge the gap. This puts all your eggs in one basket because if your colossus or storms die you loose, incentivizing the ball to protect them. And sometimes you just lose because you went colossus and the zerg went spire...should have built a stargate cause now you build-order lost. This sort of adds to the above, toss lacks flexible defenders advantage, Terran has bunkers, range, tanks and terrain. Zerg has Queens and speed on creep. Toss only has a shield battery. The solution to toss is to give them a real defenders advantage and a solid gateway army. Either baseline or via T1 upgrade give the units/buildings within the radius of a nexus a buff like shield armor. Next, Move the immortal to the gateway, with stats adjusted accordingly, to give toss an actual power unit in gateway that challenges other armies on the ground, with this stalkers can do more vs light units to give some answer to build order loss. My 2cent rambllings.
Protoss is broken because their most iconic technology breaks a fundamental rule of RTS games. Warp Gate breaks the principle of defender's advantage. Distance -and specifically map traversal time and reinforcement time- favor the defender with crucial extra time to react. Zealots and Stalkers cannot be allowed to be too strong because of that. Sentries were designed as defensive spellcasters, with forcefield specifically existing to block the ramp to the main base with 1 cast. High Templar lost their energy upgrade because of that. If it can warp in, it needs to gather energy or be a mediocre fighting unit. It was never about lategame or early game or micro. Protoss is the race with teleportation as one of its core mechanics. The only way to strengthen their defense without adding to their offense is global cooldown abilities. Recall, nexus overcharge, pylon overcharge, and shield battery overcharge. Protoss have always been the problem child because map size affects them the least. Either warp in units at the front, or recall an entire army back to defend; protoss units have the option to just not traverse the map but appear where needed. This problem has been known since the 4gate rush in 2010.
For the supposedly "technologically superior" race, they have the worst casters. Take a look at their baseline caster, the sentry. Yeah, guardian shield is pretty good against Terran, but decent Terran players can just focus down the sentry with a stim. It's also stupidly expensive and other races have been given way too many tools to fight the forcefields. Hallucination is a scouting tool, period. Now compare that to the baseline Zerg caster, the queen, who can do it all, give you more larva, more vision, keep units alive AND defend AND attack. They had to nerf transfuse. Next, the Oracle. They have some decent potential at the start of the game, but fall off pretty quickly as the game progresses. Revelation is good in the very early game, mediocre mid and lategame, and a must only in the uberlategame IF you went tempests and need detection. The Terran Raven in the other hand can harass without exposing itself, delete a key unit from battle which as we saw, is crippling for Protoss, increase dps of the Terran army by 5,000% with one point and click, and is a detector, just permanently. The Zerg aerial caster, the Overseer costs zero supply so you can theorically build as many as you like, is a detector, provides decent scouting with changelings which players below GM won't be able to perfectly snipe every single time, and contamination is mildly useful. Finally, their big tamale, the High Templar. Feedback was nerfed to the ground because "it's supposed to take out energy, not deal damage", so their only useful skill is psionic storm which is good, don't get me wrong, AoE spell damage to any target is always useful... until you compare them with the Terran Ghost. The ghost is hands down, unarguably better than the HT in literally every single aspect, it's not even a contest, it's a straight up upgrade. EMP doesn't require research unlike storm, cannot be kited, if you get hit you take 100% of the damage no questions asked, it's AoE and got recently buffed right off the bat, takes out energy AND shields (which for Protoss might as well be HP) AND for some reason also decloaks, talk about overloaded. And that's only one skill, next you have snipe, which while not as good vs Protoss (still can take out HT), it negates literally every single lategame unit Zerg has. Lurkers? Snipe. Broodlords? Snipe. Vipers? Snipe. Infestors? Snipe. Ultras? Snipe. Cloak is a nice to have and it's the only ability that requires researching, can help them get out of bad spots if the opponent doesn't have permanent detection, and they even can land nukes. Not to mention they have a POWERFUL auto attack with very good range AND can take 5 banelings to the face thanks to being blessed with the unarguably best tag in the game, psionic, extra damage from literally nothing. HT throw water balloons and are made out of paper. Oh did I forget to mention Terran capital ships, the Battlecruisers, are energyless casters that can teleport to ltierally anywhere in the map, and have a "delete this" skill, while the Protoss carrier has one skill that is its only means of attack? And what does Zerg get? TWO lategame casters, Infestors and Vipers. Infestors can turn the tide with a well aimed fungal growth, that has had to be nerfed several times, from being a "I win you lose" instant root, to the still powerful form we know today. Infested Terran were so brutally powerful they had to be deleted and replaced with the pretty crappy microbial shroud, but neural parasite is still an amazing skill that has turned games. Then the Viper, which is a caster good against everything. Heavy units? Just abduct into Lurkers/Corruptors, so powerful it had to be nerfed. Sieged or clumped up units? Blinding cloud neutralises all damage. Clumped up airtoss? Throw a few parasitic bombs at them. They can also replenish their energy rather fast. Mothership is just a -400/-400 so not even going to bother with a unit that takes 3 and a half years to build, and gets abducted and destroyed in the first 5 seconds of a battle. I would rather have the core back.
Protoss seems obliterated by a 1base Zerg rush swarmhost+nydus Seems dumb but every Time you rush your pool to make 6 lings, protoss wall himself and then can't handle 3-4 teleporting sh
Generally agree with much that was said in the video, but would also like to add at least one additional point here. Protoss' reliance on higher-strength, but lower-cost, units also means that there is far less of an ability to cheaply scout, which reduces the fog of war and randomness. Zerg has arguably the best scouting unit in the game and has total vision over everywhere they have creep spread + overlords. Terran has potentially the second best scouting unit in the game, sensor towers, and scans. While Protoss does have hallucinations for scouting, which is a very good ability, all other methods of scouting that Protoss has are much more cost-prohibitive than the other two races and hurt quite a bit more if the scouting units are lost. Both Zerg and Terran have some of the best tools to reduce randomness in matchups, which is a quality that's extremely favorable for top players who have a good chance at winning tournaments.
@@Framidan are you kiddin? teran have sensor towers/scans + Raven. observer cost shtiton of gas + stops your robo from producing. Its also easily sniped or by several towers cut from observing at all. As zerg you can make overssers everywhere on the map. terran scans whenever he needs. Its quite a fun if you dont have observer to run into cloacked/burrowed unit. if you drag it with army it runs ahead and gets killed etc.
@@ixirion scan aren't free, and you don't build sensor towers until midgame at least, ravens are good, but you need starport with the tech lab, that slows your stim and combat shield, and also it cost a lot of gas
Protoss is one of the most unique of the three in two negative ways. They have the worst base structure. Terran build extra command centers for orbital scans or defensive fortresses. Zerg build macro hatches for more unit production. The utility of nexus is so basic, and covered by one at each base, that you don't really see toss building extra. Most importantly is map vision. At the highest levels, toss have garbage vision compared to T & Z. Terran have scans and sensor towers, zerg have tumors. Both don't cut into their supply for map vision. Both provide massive map vision in the hands of the experts. Toss gets the shit observer. A supply costing, non-trivial gas sucking unit that won't have the coverage of the competitors and won't last long at the highest levels.
@@blessyou3999 I'm not getting into a pointless "is protoss OP or UP?" debate with you. I'm talking about tippy top one in a million pro players and the observed distinctions I see. I don't play SC anymore and wasn't good when I did. I watch it a lot, especially tournaments. It's annoying to watch the best toss professionals in the world play against Z and T players that are at their level.
On a global scale, i think its fair that the easiest race is also the weakest at higher levels. However it does truly suck for the viewer to watch competitive starcraft and not having a nice distribution across tournament top 8s
There is contradiction there, that also means it is hardest to win with at higher levels so which is it? Hardest or easiest, so where is fairness here. You are basically saying it is fair for race to be weak because it is a bit easier on low levels.
protoss are fun to play but a pain to balance.. for real.. the problem here is balance. you have a full power glass canon xD they are strong but really weak against fast counters.. and their main weakness is the money.. you need a ton of money to rearm your army.. while a zerg player needs a moment.. and little money.. but if protoss became cheaper they must become weaker.. and nobody wants that.. every protoss player loves the air bullshit xD they can stomp you with air units fast.. and you cant do aything if they are victorious in the first figth.. however.. if they lose.. they lose the match.. cuz after 1 lose.. they take so much time to recover that they just lose the game..
Ahhh this reminds me of so many years of theorycrafting and proposals to the toss race (Random here BTW) At some point I remember reading ideas about making warpgate Tier 3 and allowing to buff the T1 at somepoint which had quite a bit of traction in team liquid, going as far as making test maps Then dragoons instead of stalkers which to some degree got implemented when they changed the attack speed and actual damage value of stalkers Nerfed tanks so the robo units were good therefore effing mech in WOL only to buff mines later on to have more damage vs shields Khaydarin removed due to warp in storms killing quick harass that got fixed by the oracle in Hots (to some degree) Colli doing less damage overall to make it good only against light, therefore cursing it against bio since mauraders suddenly took half damage, I still disagree with this particular change as I never have liked disruptors Charge damage on zealots nerf anyone? I remember I think it was your video explaining how they went from strong units to screwed damage wise by the change which you could completely feel in a PvT against running bio Feedback doing half damage to avoid energy snipping Etc, etc, etc. Toss is sadly trapped in between ZvT since changing them would completely screw the balance that the other races have between them, change one thing in toss and you have to fix the other races acordingly, so its easier to keep toss ina weird match after they had to learn their race 3 different times rather than fixing it and basically restarting the balance changes. Reminds me a bit of WC3 where I dont remember which race was left in the dust so the other 3 could fight.
I sweat to God, I left my own comment before. If Protoss, was given, the +30 dmg chargelots back, at the PRO level, things would instantly change, without touching anything else on the race. This one simple revert. Zealots are meant to be strong, yet got hammered to the grave. They give us more speed on the Zealots, wooptyfuckingdo.
@@JohnMelon I think the idea should be different. Zerglings should be nerfed to some degree like adrino should do 1 more dmg and maybe a little less att.movement speed. Same for terran bio- a little percentage of att speed less. Zealots charge may give + 5 charge dmg and 20 extra shields for 2 sec. Atm bio/zeg can kill zealots and basses way too fast to be fair. Probably 20% more hp on Nexus, Pylon will be ok.
Yep, I`ve been saying since the game launch that Zealots need a buff. Both zerglings and marines are great units, Zealots are mostly dead weight except for meatshields and some niche uses.
protoss to me has always seemed to have the shallowest skill curve, i.e. easier to play but less max power potential, which causes it to be overpowered below the pro-level and underpowered at the pro level. kinda like stunlock rogues in wow vanilla, any moron can play it but a solid pro knows how to easily handle one
As a Zerg player I do think Protoss needs a buff of some sort, as it seems slightly unpowered at the highest levels. I just don’t quite trust Blizzard and what’s left of the sc2 balance team not to fuck it up. I don’t think the other races needs nerfs, I just think Protoss needs something new, but a rework is probably unrealistic. I feel like Terran is definitely the race with the highest potential and is the strongest, but to me it also seems like the mechanically hardest to play.
And when you waste your time gaming some other people become millioners in real life and oppress you to pay food, rent and taxes to them. Gamers are patetic!
@@Konranjyoutai maybe it is. But it doesnt make any difference for the arguments. We are stuck at you having the opinion of zerg being the most difficult and me the most easy. I could argue that you are the proof of it having plus 4.7k mmr
@@anderandersson5229 Haha what? Me being Tier 1 masters is proof Zerg is overpowered? You can go on any youtube channel covering sc2 and find one of my games brother. If Zerg was overpowered I wouldn't constantly see players with 30% winratios in TvP and PvT and then 70% winratio as TvZ or PvZ. Literally never see it on another Zerg account but its literally every other T or P player.
Tbh the problem is that the gap between casual and pros is so vast that buffs or nerfs that would benefit casuals would be a detriment to pros and vice versa. The recent lowering of target priority for intercepters for instance, on paper it means your units will target the carrier instead of the interceptors allowing them to kill the important unit. The problem is that it allows protoss to kite any player on A-Move because now units will try to follow the carrier instead of dealing with the interceptors. Ofc it requires micro on the protoss' part but the chasing player will very likely lose more units in the process. And even reverting that won't change much because it would mean we'd get back to the first problem of units targeting interceptors and never killing the carrier.
First of all I think it all begins with LotV. It became such a hard and complexe game to balance with their need to add so much new stuff for the Protoss campaign. Imo you would have to go back to HotS and do adjustments from there. Remove the fast economy concept, because it all often ends up being a matter of how many workers you can kill and let players focus on real strategies depending on the match up and maps. From this point Protoss would need to be redesigned, and still gl with that.
killing workers is s strategy, but yes now is to fast llike befor terrans and zergs do faster first workers protect and protos turn nexsus into free pain for all enemy on big area, so attack like that need big army and if you lose it well , now i send one empty prism who die to enemy base 2 another full of Htemplars to main and easy take all workers and spawn some adepts to do some random dmg stuf and run templars and prism, all cost me 250 minerals from one trap prism and some adepts who alos kill some enemy back to base, if i lose another prism oh no i send more and more until enemy dont have money even for workers, but they can do the same and is who first do it in this time sadly, not a option for a game just you must do it
was playing sc2 years ago 8hours a day grinding master trying to get into gm but stopped with LotV cause it was too much effort to stay good but man, love your videos they are bringing back so many late night memorys. good times;D
Problem I always had and will have with Protoss at this point is exacly the low level superiority. Protoss units, especially air (and yes I'm currently looking at Void Rays) are stupidly powerful in low level matches.
I've been saying this for so long, so glad someone took the time to articulate and made a video about it protoss is the only race that seemingly can't win with ONLY macro and straight up fights at a HIGH LEVEL, your win depends on luck ( Hogwarts level spell casting ) or out witting your opponent ( deemed cheese most of the times ) In a recent thread someone discussed one of the key problems that makes this hard to balance - the warp prism - i.e. to say the ability to subvert defenders advantage what do i mean ? if we buff base units, warping them into someone's main makes it too difficult to deal with in the mid - late game so keeping them crappy is only way to keep that in check; IMO remove the warp prism and buff / introduce some better gateway / mid game units this would make wins / losses feel a lot more fair since now you can't just warp in and destroy an enemies base BUT you can also simply fight a straight up like the other races can In your other video you addressed the reaver vs disruptor, I actually think the reavor is superior since it a bit less reliant on luck even though you'd have to babysit the unit To detractors of spell casting being somewhat reliant on luck - you have to make a prediction on where enemy units will be and cast your spell if they move in accordance with your prediction; your predictions are based off your experience with how other people play the race for sure but things like anti-mirco etc ( them just not moving their units ) or just them behaving differently can punish this concept; ( finally also I think Terrans need an AOE damaging spell - bring back seeker missile for terrans or something akin to it )
Blizzard nerfed every Protoss units inviability, it's low skill Terran and Zergs crying about not knowing how to play the game the completely destroyed the competitiveness of literally a 1/3 of players. If anyone thinks Protoss is balanced needs to get themselves checked.
I think Protoss is a powerful race but it is very unflexible. Your phrase that units become not up to date quickly, is the right conclusion. To make Protoss flexible we need a Disruption Web for Phoenix from Broodwar :). The ground army of Protoss is strong enough, but air army is inflexible and Tempests can't compensate this.
Yo, I never knew Destiny was an SC2 player. I only learned about him recently. Not really related to the topic of your video I know, but it was just something I noticed
Poor Protoss, the scrubkillers of Starcraft and a terrible place to be: casual players hate you for your guts, competitive players mock you as they effortless beat your gimmicks (while at the same time block any buffs because they secretly don't want to have a fair fight), design minded players dislike you for your flaws and the game developers throw you under the bus because for their mediocre minds the opinions of bad players matter more than facts. Nothing to do, better switch to Zerg (because screw unsufferable Terran players), win and say you would like to play Protoss but Blizzard does not let you.
Warp in mechanism -> gateway units had to be horribly weak -> robo/stargate units were designed into pivots of the protoss army (unlike Brood War, in which all robo/stargate productions, except the carrier, are supporting units) -> army have to move around the core units and consequently in chunks
The idea of the Protoss was to be an Ultra-technological race, PERIOD. Second, they were supposed to be the most "TANK" race in the game with their incredibly strong shields, just like in Starcraft 1, and very expensive in terms of resources, and if the protoss were left to expand they would be an unstoppable snowball. , which is ACCORDING TO LORE. The problem is what ruined the game is trying to FORCE the races into competition, where changes change everything, leaving ALL UNITS the same, which is TOTAL SHIT.
When I play Protos, Terran players always kill me by attacking me around the 4-5 minute mark with marrines and tanks and sometimes with maruders. By this time I can’t even get a colossus out.
that's not true about the supply , terran is the only race that can fund a 200supply army because of mules which is underutilized , and zerg is the only race that can go over the 200suply mark but that's even more underutilized...
As a casual I can't really comment with any actual credibility, but I've always felt that Protoss in SC2 was the least forgiving to mistakes. You lose one key unit and that can swing the game against you. Zerg seems the most forgiving as they don't see to have as many situations where losing one key unit is as huge of a deal as you frequently see with Protoss, such as an immortal, disruptor, or colossus, or letting lings slip past your wall. Terran have the issue with having medivacs shot out of the sky as well as clumps of marines hit by some banelings from a control mistake or not looking. Zerg seems least effected by the potential of large swings in the game from small mistakes. My casual opinion.
Is this a bronze player's joke? I main Zerg, play majority random, and I couldn't agree less with your opinion. Not only do I disagree, it feels apparently analyzed by someone with bias or considerably weak understanding of the strengths/weaknesses of the other 2 races. If you're losing games in low masters or below, I hate to be this guy, but it is 100% a skill issue. SC2 does not award you wins for how you THINK the game should be played, it awards you wins based on your game knowledge/scouting info, ability to correctly counter your opponents composition, finding ways to gain advantage through worker harassment, or by adequately denying your opponents to do these things (there's much more, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave it there). Watch your replays, see what you did wrong, and don't suck on this RUclips copium as a proper example for your shortfalls
I really cant understand why my supposed powerful cost-efficient army is incredibly easy countered by the enemy, regardless my micro, how my massive AOE units are utterly destroyed by some basic units (yes, I'm talking to you, beautiful but stupidly useless colossus), how I'm preparing my skytoss but suddenly the enemy rushes me with 180 mutas on minute 3, while I barely have a phoenix. And theres is still people who says Protoss OP 🙄. That race REALLY needs some rework
In short, Protoss has low skill ceiling, so lower level players can easily reach its maximum potential and top level players cannot do better than other race after hitting the skill ceiling. You can ask Maru or Serral to play Protoss and they won't be any better than the top Protoss players now, because their superior skills are limited by Protoss skill ceiling. What Protoss need is units that are more microable. Protoss units are mostly slow and clunky, they cannot keep up with zerglings runby or terran bio drops. That's why they need tools like recall and battery to defend. But in the end, the race with more mobility can make the play, force trades or recalls. Protoss are stuck with reacting or just straight up cheese to avoid such scenarios.
So much misinformation in this video. "Unlike Terran and Zerg, Protoss relies on a few AOE units" Uhm, tanks, ghosts libs + bio? Uhm, infestor, viper + whatever the zerg wants? Warp prism is a gimmick? Are you kidding me? Nydus is way better than a prism and terran has medivacs... Finally, the issue of winning the game with a lucky move when your opponent's attention is misplaced is true for all three races: disruptor and storm, widow mine drops or a nuke, bane run bys or money fungals. I know you need to create entertaining content, but to think you really shouldnt pretend that you can explain why Protoss is broken in a 6 minute video. This is Zerg Cabal propaganda.
IMO Warp gate and mothership are the main reasons sc2 protoss sucks. Warp gate = units have to be weaker. Compare to SC1 where Zealot and Dragoon is viable the entire game. Mothership = death ball. Arbiters were way cooler and encouraged splitting the army. It's really sad because Blizzard could have easily patched it. But I guess there's no way they'd remove warp gate, right? They could buff gateway units and make warp gate late game only (e.g. lock behind templar archives, idk).
Here is how Protoss can be both amazing/infuriating, but be sh*t at high tier. They have a simple rush unit all low level Protoss is skytoss ONLY, or Protoss ball. So any Terran or Zerg players climbing the ladder gets tons of experience, to the point where most high level players could play protoss as a second race. The people who fight them throughout the ladder know what units to target, what units are important, what their range is, what the build order is. Meanwhile the Protoss players either think "if I win with this going up the ladder, I can use it at high level" or they try to branch out and get thwack by Terran/zerg players who already have established ways to destroy much scarier protoss.
This game has become so tired, so stale and it seems obvious Blizzard don't really care anymore. The game is so old that they really need to be thinking about StarCraft III. At Plat and below it's become unplayable. Every match is just a repetitive mass air arms race, or it's just a cheese fest or T1 all-in to stop that from happening. Absolutely tedious and no longer fun, every match ends the same way, half the tech tree is redundant and you don't need to scout because you already know what's happening. If I'm playing a team game and there's more than one Protoss on the opposite team, I toss up whether or not to just quit because it 100% will just be Carrier spam that sets your PC on fire. You don't even get cannon rushing half as much as you used to, and DT Warp Prism rushes either. I don't mind those because those happen due to you being stupid and not paying attention. Carrier spam is so easy you could train a chimp to do it, it's boring turtling and utterly unstoppable when it happens. The Colossus is also absolute dog crap. It's only good against Marines and only after being upgraded.
... thers a lot that is wrong with your initial statement SUpply cap, balances the entire game for out play end game, like brood war one. Each unit has a supply cost, that is roughly balanced to its work use and value. Most units are pretty close to tehir actual work value. What you have is often just bad choices by players. If I were to realyl think about imbalance. Zealots late game of significantly less value because they do not have any extra benefit like the bast mineral unit costs of zerg or terran units, which should be addressed, Base mineral cost units should be roughly balanced. Zerg - Zergling Gets. Normal upgrades 3/3 Gets a speed augmentation, Gets a life augmentation, Gets Adrenal glands so it hits, much faster between attacks, which is huge. Terran - Marine Gets. Normal upgrades, 3/3, Gets Stimp pack, A massive hp increase. Terran also has hellions, with blue flame, trasnformation, and normal upgrades, in some cases even an armor boost, or special mech combo upgrades, ie servos. Terran has two units which only cost minerals, attacking. Zerg has 1 unit whihc only cost minerals, attacking. Protoss has 1 unit which only cost minerals, attacking. All the base units of all the species have various attack upgrdes which is typically two. Depending on the current patch. Zealot: only has charge. Proposed change to Zealot lategame via another upgrade is a melee/psi blade enhancement for bonus damage to armour and biological life forms. THis owuld balance them in lien with late game, making the melee unit cost so much more if it does connect. The speed of terran stim + concussive shells, ot a melee unit makes the so called powerful melee warrior, a paper doll and not worth its value lat game. Zealot diminishes towards the end game. Peopel cna often udner value the power ofa protss army but its uspply cost is reltively on par... 40 zealots should feel like 80 marines, or 160 lings. each without special upgrades, be fairly close to 1 on 1. Proposed changes is charge turns into a dark templar blink attack, so the distance can be zeroed, unless they are udner a debuff. range 3/4 or something. + 3 to bio and armour, effective worth 6 damage since they do do a double attack naturally. Zealots supported by a sentry are a bit more effective... but meh... Late game zealot doesn't match well with zerglings and marines. Technically golden armada is sc2, so its protoss world, so peopel shoudl go air as protoss but ther was some blatent imbalances in the initial release of protoss, Such as void rays, killing you instantly with no real means of defending a early void rush, since they oculd pre charge or charge, up and since hte beam is constant damage, out damage, everything killing entire bases in basically a few seconds, its what turned me off of sc2 competitive play, since it was a pretty obvious oversight. Offer protss a 100/ 150 mineral unit for flying... that can do damage with out vespene could be interesting... but meh.. onyl real imbalance ,and structural build systems and defence. Meh...
Sc2 steered away from the logic of sc1 broodwar. Basically re-inventing the wheel ( not good) In broodwar pvz toss has to scout with corsair and turtle 🐢 up until strong enough (legs and ht) to expand because zerglings and hyrdas. In pvt because terrans defense is godmode toss is the aggressor in the matchup and terran has to turtle until they get their defenses up to expand and get a 3rd and fourth, etc. In sc2 you can see how that's not the case. Giving terran the aggressive behavior when they have excellent defense mechanics is the dumbest thing ever because it creates this dynamic. I can attack you toss but you can't attack me and base trading is way more forgiving I'm broodwar pvt. I'm only 3300 mmr but I open up with zlot and 2 stalker every game. 13 pylon and 14 gate and 17 gate. Chronoboost and go to terrans door because allowing terran to expand without pressure is dumb in my opinion.
Seems like a reasonable explanation. It indeed feel like the game can tip more easily with protoss in a match both for or against the protoss player, it's a top heavy race :). Still it does not need major change, balance still seems quite close to where it needs to be. I do think the colossus or sentry/ravager might need a tweak to be more balanced. Maybe make so force field cost a bit less mana, or make so ravager bile cool down longer be upgradeable to reduce it back. Otherwise colossus could either have another +1 range, a tiny bit more movement speed or a tiny bit more damage against units that are not light units (I would not advise HoTS level at all, but there is room there since it was halves if I recall correctly).
Ultimately, at high levels of play, the winning side (in an equal skill match) will be the one with the higher power ceiling with micro and the least vulnerability to the same. Protoss have at best equal to Zerg/Terran levels of micro power, while being more vulnerable to micro. A mistake by the P player or really good play by their opponent ends the match right there, because of that situation. At casual and lower levels of play (even up into tournament rankings!) the consistency of said peak performance micro is so small that the raw numbers game favors the Protoss. Thus you have a race that serves as a beef gate to winning tournaments. Either you can consistently out play the Protoss at micro, or you _will_ lose to them. But peak performance Protoss doesn't measure up to their opponents top level of play (Outside of Mirror matches, which will always be pure skill naturally.) in terms of power. At to top of the heap, 0.1% changes make all the difference. The only dodge to the problem is having a separate non-tournament rules balance set, which is a non-starter for E-sports inherently as it alienates the target audience.
Euhhh zerg is broken...Zerg macro : inject *6 then you're still at 200 army and let's push again by the swarm.... Terran player's needs huge respect because awesome macro and micro...when zerg can just have in 35 sec 200 army supply after loose the 25en fight of the game then win
I play StarCraft since 1998. Just take a look at KESPA tournaments and who won the most - Terrans and Zergs. Their wining is pure comedy. Artosis is laughing stock for nearly 20 years now and he thinks he should win every game if not then it's rigged.
Ey! This is blizzard on 2014, how we can make everybody buy lotv after 3 years of baguette? No problem, buff zerg and terran: protosses will buy "their" expansion. The ultimate micro experience 😂
yep, protoss is quite bad designed. Units that are very low DPS and decent HP with mediocre mobility for like double price of their counterpart, dying in every straight up 1 on 1 fight (or 1 on 2 if counterpart costs half), units that have decent (not even great) damage output, but are fragile and quite immobile, units that have high output, but again way less survivability and mobility than counterparts and often doesnt do anything without being micro'd around. And then there is a void ray which is just all-round good unit that can be a-moved. Albeit again, expensive. Then some units have upgrades that makes them really good, but most of those abilities requires a lot of micro to even work. Generally protoss require insane ammount of micro to be competitive, costs a ton and damage of their core units is laughable, but abilities can be insanely good to balance the fact they have (as straight up fighting units) worst army of all races. Then there is a problem - Low level people dont micro at all and let protoss get all the money they want and build voidray carrier deathball that would require manual targeting to defeat (or opponent doing the same with battlecruisers). In mid to high level game where protoss start to micro (they have to) and actively do upgrades (without them toss army is trash, whereas other can still work) they can dominate and when they do, it doesnt even look fair. In top level where even Terran players start to micro, attack multiple fronts and generally start playing good (not just stim a-move) and Zerg have enought attention and speed to do something else than creep and injects (otherwise cant keep up with unti production), it puts so high strain on protoss player that he would have to be way faster and better to compete. Hence one of few things protoss can do is rely on gimmicks, creative strategies and all-ins.
in my ranking (platin 1) and below, race doesnt matter. If I play Protoss, I lose at most versus Zerg, and think terra is imba, because marines, marauders and medivacs crushes everything. On the other side, people in global chats flame that Protoss is OP if they are playing Terran. Usually... people flame about every race, because no one want or has time to play a lot of games each day to become better. So ive no experience in master, grandmaster or Proplaying, but I see progamers like Harstem who can beat Zerg players like Serral.
It's so easy to fix zerg balance. Give queens auto cast healing, and just make hatcheries produce more larva. That doesn't affect the top level, which is already does it perfectly, and fixes the lower levels where zerg players are taxed much worse than other races. I don't know how to fix PvT. P is unviable at the top level, even against players who are visible worse, controlling less units, less army value etc. But lower level terrans are so whiny and less skilled by comparison that it seems unfair.
Not gonna lie, everyone is a cry baby and half the people complaining deserved it. Really don't feel bad for people who say that shit on stream over a video game. Tired of people with 75% win rate v toss saying they are imba, learn to scout sac a overlord use a scan and don't die cause you don't know comp. Was only every true in WOL, talk about a move imba let's talk nydus and swarm host in hots.
**The irony that SC 1 is more balanced than SC 2 😂. Those were the days when races really had a definition to them. Protoss weak early, strong late. Zerg, the opposite. Terran in the middle**
I mean... I just cant understand the salt. There's no imbalance, there's no op's... IT's just a matter of being or not a good player. I mean, if your play against me, I'll loose no matter the race y play. If you play against... uThermal, ie, you'll loose no matter the race you both choose. i just see adults crying, and it's very ridiculous.It's not unfair someone wins you, maybe youre not talented for the game or the other person simply plays better than you. Grow up.
Completely quit the game and now playing Brood War. 3 minute DT Shrine and 4 minute void rays. I have to have a cyclone, raven, and enough infantry to push it back by 4 fucking minutes. Game is dead
Protoss race is not broken. "Broken" term is reserved for zerg during that cursed patch in Heart of the Swarm. Now that was broken state. I recall Protoss had annoying strategy in "Hots", where they would rush oracles. Oracles would melt marines, and they could kill queens if macro correctly.
protoss to me has always been a weak race. Sure death balls are deathballs, but... you have to be allowed to get to that point first. Protoss units are expensive, have high hp but generally low dps. Meaning that they're just expensive most of the time. And they don't even really have any macro to back up such expensive units.
Check out more about Protoss concepts - ruclips.net/video/fd9NnBAlHH8/видео.html
Why Skytoss is a problem - ruclips.net/video/bjurICCIk1I/видео.html
Timecodes:
00:00 What's it about
00:19 The issues with Protoss Race
01:15 Race Design in StarCraft 2
02:13 Why Protoss is both Weak and OP
04:40 What's the main problem with Protoss and how to fix it
Protoss has a bit less depth. High skilled players for zerg and terran can squeeze more from it than protoss.
Bruh, as a protoss player. Our Ground units are too expensive for little damage and little tankiness. THey suck hard.
@@ralphwarom2514 What about OP Protoss Ball😁
I actually felt really bad for Creator when I saw that clip live. He was so distraught :/
Never seen any players that freaked out lol. Did he need the tournament money for rent or something? Lol.
never feel bad for protoss players.
@@bananian he's always been an extremely emotional player.
@No Fun Really? Dude Terran is the most IMBA race. MMM destroys all of P units. MMM is meant for zerg, the game is broken.
@@etishbite456 it is a bit ridiculous how much damage marines put out.
Every Protoss ground unit does big, slow damage. None are fast firing. It means small Protoss armies get overwhelmed easily so they have to remain with the deathball.
Only exceptions to this as phoenix and carrier. One of those obviously isn't a midgame unit and the other is a strong opener for a reason
@@elliejohnson2786 as protos i want carriers delete from this game, alos crusiers
a+ click = gg. no skill race
@@davidmp8539 yes terran are no skill :p
@@Darlf_Sevil terran full micro and multitask
I remember, when I was just entering Starcraft, I started playing protoss for their aesthetics and the feeling that it heavily relies on casters in order to win fights. I wish they had more ability variety instead of that deathball tactic
I did the same lol
Play broodwar, no deathball garbage in that game. Actually takes skill to control your whole army.
Bruh I can't play well using skytoss imagine playing having to press lots of buttons lol
@@yangpaan453 Or play a game that discourage deathballing by other means instead of artificially limiting it with arbitrarily small unit groups and terrible pathfinding. If "it takes skill" to just move your army from one point of the map to the other and place them there, it's not a good game.
@@TyphoonJig It is not a good game because you cant select your entire army supply in one click and attack move it across the map? That is just the opinion of someone who simply cant handle having a high APM. Having to group you marines in 1 group to be able to stim them and control your medics along with them is real skill. You cant complain that something is not hard because it is not dumbed down for you.
Terran is insanely supply efficient in the late game, with 160 army supply because of all the orbitals and MULEs, whereas toss is often stuck at 130 with worse eco
same with chronoboost, but units and much stronger for protoss and easy to play.
@@quentinsimon9434are battlecruisers/tors hard for you
@@quentinsimon9434chronoboost gets outscaled late game. You cannot compete with 4+ orbitals spamming mules ever. Marauders beat all their robo units very easily and as he said, collosi is like the weakest backbone unit in the game. Skytoss has been nerfed so many times because casuals don't know how to micro. Protoss is harder to play as you climb higher and get better players as every loss in the early and mid game is really costly. Think of it like Garen in League of Legends. Easy to play and pick up at lower levels, very hard to pay at higher levels
@@raptorate2872 lol @ using a league example. utter pleb playing a shit game (lol) and defending a gimmicky overpowered race (protoss)
@@quentinsimon9434what makes it easier to play?
This reminds me of the mothership core, and why it was a weird addition in the first place
Originally, it was supposed to help Protoss in the early game because back then, Zealots and Stalkers were too weak to hold off attacks from Terran and Zerg. But instead of buffing Zealots and Stalkers, they added a new unit that you can only get one of that is decent, but it didn't fix much. They eventually removed the mothership core and buffed Zealots and Stalkers, but both still feel way too weak compared to marines and banes even in the late game. I think Warp Gate ultimately breaks Protoss as a race, as it breaks the balance of Gateway/Tier 1 units
Pretty much, yeah. Protoss offense is fine, as long as you have a proxy pylon or something. Aggressive early-game warp gate is generally pretty strong. But warp gate isn't much of a defensive advantage, because it mostly just gets your units across the map faster. Mothership core was originally envisioned as a defensive unit to give protoss back the defender's advantage that other races have, but Blizzard never really managed to make it function that way, and it became yet another offensive tool in an arsenal that was already fine.
Someone else above mentioned that at some point the community was pushing for buffing zealots and stalkers and pushing warp gate to tier 3, and... yeah, thinking about it, that would probably help.
MSC got basically replaced with Shield Overcharge, which was honestly a pretty good move.
Protoss's big issue is Warpgate being basically Tier 1, negating one of the few defender's advantage SC2 has: Reinforcement time. Unlike everyone else, Warpgate means that Protoss can effectively have production appear in your front door instead of having to walk across the map. If Gateway tech was strong at home, they'd be even more snowball-y smashing in bases, so they really couldn't afford for them to be that powerful. Compare to have insane it would be if Immortals could reinforce from a forwards pylon.
Combined with a strange lack of powerful late game casters, P's unit compositions are a bit ironically fragile for the high tech aliens.
Zerg have powerful fast travel options in the form of Nydus Networks and Nydus Worms, but they are balanced by being restricted to Lair tech. Imagine Nydus being available without requiring Lair.
Lair tech isn't really a big restriction. It just seems like it is because of how most zerg players prioritize eco over tech, but actually you can get a Nydus very quickly if you just don't stop mining gas.
On the "stalkers are too weak", just remember this:
Queens have more HP, more DPS, and can heal. And cost NO GAS.
Stalkers are wayyyyyyyy too weak.
The nexus's recall range used to be much bigger than it is now. Ive always played Terran because I love how they are only limited by how fast you want to burn out your wrists. One protoss player proxied a nexus beneath my ledge in the main in the fog, then recalled his army right onto the ledge. I watched the replay and admired his creativity. Now I am sad because I wish so badly that someone had done that against Idra in a pro game. The sale wouldve been unbelievable.
Is that Florencio proxy Nexus lol
@@cannogabang1999 Someone used it on me a long time ago. I did see a video with PiG where he was doing a florencio showcase with it. The player called me a "piss sad round eye" at the end before I gg'd so I don't think it was florencio. Best insult ever.
the hallucinated army did its job ;)
Why not add some T2 or T3 upgrades to zealot and stalkers like the adrenal one for zerglings
they should nerf adrino instead.
@@ixirion good point
Because Zerg and Terran will cry about it.
because the zergling no matter the level or stage of the game is still the 'base' zerg unit. Protoss can skip gateways entirely. Beyond that just race differences. Protoss generally focuses more on counters by...building an archon which has advantage against all zerg units. zerg's strategy is much more 'I just have more stuff' instead of better/specific stuff. Making each faction's most generic 'base' unit similar ruins the uniqueness of the races
@@matthewshuck5190 man... you can skip gates entirelly? Are you abronze league hero? XDDD In all other cases you are just dead. Also how is zealot similiar to zergling except that they are both melee? Zealot is a tank/frontline, while ling is swarmer/skirmisher unit. Also archon is a mid game unit which is not viable at mass the moment lurkers/broods are out. Which is fine. If protoss mass only archons early you can counter him with Hydras no problem. SC2 is higly complex and quite well balanced game. every unit has counter. you can see ppl whiining about imba almost equally from the 3 races.
lol the destiny rage
I've stopped playing SC2 Years ago, fell back into the rabbit hole recently, glad to see some things never change and that despite having stats to prove Toss is on the weaker side of the balance people still call it broken and OP years after years for decades
majority of players are average to low skill. At low skill its easier to manage toss buildings and also tpss units are bulkier leading to more A move victories. I play all 3 races and by far I feel that if you are toss and slightly out of possition you can lose while as terran def is easier, as zerg its very fast to move around.
like how basically every single GM player is protoss? lol
@@tim1259 What do you mean? Do you have some statistics I dont know about?
Zerg and Terran are so OP it made me quit. I have more fun playing Broodwar.
@@ixirion when I stopped playing (during the voidray meta) Protoss made up about 40-50% of gm depending on server, low gm was basically purely skytoss and cannon rushing Protoss players, for the few years before that Protoss was also over represented in gm specifically low-mid gm . Protoss is under represented in high gm/high tournament level players
This is why we have *"Beating grandmasters with stupid stuffs"*
So we can fully explore the hidden potential of Protoss 🤣
Lol, funny to find you here fellow Miofa
You failed to mention that protoss units always cost more not only in both minerals and gas, but also in supply, which means Zergs and terrans still have more units in the lategame. Also protoss has been repeatedly nerfed for a long time, it was a running joke in my friend group, that in legacy of the void, the protoss expansion, Protoss was the weakest race. I honestly think that the identity of Protoss as "the lategame race" was very healthy, because the protoss army is also very slow, so it's relatively easy to punish it by surrounding or outmaneuvering it and then it basically becomes a positioning battle. The problem of course is if that is not possible, but I believe it can be achieved.
For me personally, I stopped playing when Zerg became the best lategame race. Such a drastic shift in identity of races shouldn't be done in any game imo.
how is zerg the best lategame race? because serral makes it look that way? then you have Maru's that fight as 3-4base terran vs 5-6base zerg and still make favourable trades with ghosts like there's tomorrow
@@schippes24 I'm not a specialist in TvZ, maybe terrans are better, ghosts are certainly a good unit. I was specifically referring to PvZ and basically the infestors and vipers that can ruin a lategame protoss in a straight engagement.
I love how drops are considered a super important and viable strategy for terran, but are a gimmick for protoss
Conclusion: Protoss needs a redesign!
me, a protoss player: ah s***, here we go again...
Don't worry. Theorycraft whiners, like the guy who made this video are largely ignored nowdays. Changes have been few and very small,a s they should in a 12 year old game
no they need to to finaly dont have nightmer abaut terran who all but all but rly all build are hell for protos and only way is skytos, canon rush or say good bye to enemy eco by spam adepts and HTemplars in enemy base
You know this guy is a high tier grandmaster right?
As far as I've seen, Protoss has the lowest win rate pretty much every year in the big tournaments.
yep, terran lose 1/3 army oh no anyway
zerg lose 4/5 army, oh no anyway
protos lose 2 immortal. gg
xd like that micro is insane if ypu not do one of to stupid build like carriers rush
@@Darlf_Sevil fr, like when I play Zerg I can just throw my army at my enemy to save supply for new units, but when I play protoss, I can't throw money at the problem
There's just a lot wrong with Protoss. Now, the idea behind them I think was actually really cool. They were designed to be strong but micro-intensive in battle. Zerg was supposed to be micro-intensive in economy with Queens and creep tumors and all that, while Terran was in the middle. And so Protoss got caster units incredibly early. But, unfortunately, this concept doesn't scale well. Trying to get the maximum potential out of adepts, stalkers, and sentries quickly becomes inefficient when compared to a bio ball or zerg run in. They could find ways to buff those units so it does become efficient. But doing that would also mean Warpgate / Prism drops become more powerful. So, you can't do that. Which leaves ground Toss to instead trade up to bigger units to micro like disruptors and high templar, and babysitting colossus. While not using the high cost early units effectively anymore. So that huge swath of actually fairly skill intensive units gets turned to chaff, to be replaced with units that are largely less engaging but necessary to win actual fights.
Or, they abandon ground and take an even worst solution, going into skytoss. Which is another issue, because it roughly mirrors the same pattern of problems. Phoenixes and oracles are arguably the best designed and microable early air units in the game. But they don't scale well either (though oracles do transition to detector/scouts) meaning the toss player must rely on the big dumb but strong carriers, void rays, and tempests.
This is noticeably completely backwards from how other races are structured. Early zerg is largely a move, with you know, a few ravagers to mix things up. And marines and marauders have some micro, but they don't really get the boost until stim and medivacs get added to the mix. But then they expand their micro options with the game usually pushing the best players toward adding additional caster units and creating multiple strike forces to hit at separate times.
It's sad to say since Toss is my favorite race. But I really do think it needed a whole rework from the ground up. The theory of a race that is battle micro focused from the start with less emphasis on economic mechanics isn't terrible. But the way to do that needed to be to start a little more than the other races and expand them further over time, rather than to narrow them.
right, the carriers should be the ones micro-intensives and the early game units, not so much, its backwards
Yeah, its really weird how Protoss has a bunch of relatively weak early game casters and strong A-move late game units, vs T and Z having basic combat units that get boosted by late game casters. And P's one late game caster (Mothership) being way too limited to be useful.
@@Appletank8 IMO, here's how I think they should have themed each race.
Terran is defensive heavy, in that they should be building forward bunkers/planetary fortresses and setting up good siege tank + lib area denials, i.e. win by strategy.
Zerg is attrition, they macro easy but units are inefficient, so their strategy is to attack in waves to wear down the opponent.
Protoss is micro heavy, they should have all of their abilities unlocked (Stalkers with blink), but are much less effective until they research (blink is half the range with double the CD until normal research). Also, you should be able to "unsummon" warp gate units at a pylon, as a way to heal them. It's really weird to see damaged units last the entire game
Zerg should really not have Vipers and Infestors, I'd argue that their abilities are a bit better than High Templars
Tldr, youre mom
The problem is that they gave Terran and Zerg all of the actually good toys and spellcasters and were afraid of making Protoss strong. And to be fair to Blizzard, EVERY TIME Protoss got something good, they broke the game. It's just been a constant swing of too strong and too weak.
It's funny to see the difference when you go back to SC1 - Protoss had THE BEST casters in the game and their A-movers all hit really, really hard. But they were all terribly slow and vulnerable. The fast protoss units didn't hit hard. It was good balance. SC2, for whatever reason, never gave Protoss good, new spells outside of the Mothership but the history of that unit speaks for itself. Protoss was doomed from the start... doomed from the first mass Void Ray cheese in WoL Beta.
I usually agree with your takes, but not on this one. You make it sound like the protoss race is in dire need of a rework, which it isnt imo. It just got nerfed harder than it should've been (debate if it should have been nerfed at all). There are some minor issues, but not with the race in total. In my opinion (I have low league friends, I play at low master level), the protoss race as a whole is fine. I don't think their late game is unbeatable at any level. The boring skytoss vs. Zerg stalemate wasn't always won by protoss, zerg has big chances with infestors and vipers.
What needs to be said is that the ground toss is very hard to play in the late game at my skill level, because of high lurker count or tank/ghost (the ghost is still a ridiculous unit)
The only big design flaw is in my opinion the disruptor. It's a bad concept, as you just hope you hit a lucky shot. You can't really do anything except hope your opponent messes up. If he micros well, you loose everything, if they make one mistake, they loose everything. I believe there should be other options for the disruptor.
Also, especially with the current map pool, protoss is just generally underwhelming. But I think that could be fixed with minor tweaks etc. Don't really see the total design flaw though
Thoughts? And sorry for writing this much lol
Also when you think about it protoss has only been nerfed in the last few patches, right? Except the void rework maybe?
Honestly I think Templar should have been what Disruptors get used for, except EMP makes it very difficult to actually use them. Wonder if hiding them in Prisms will ever become a thing.
@@Appletank8 yeah I agree. don't know if you are being sarcastic but the templar warp prism strat is being used by high level players. The problem is just that ghost emp is significantly easier to use than HT. So at the same skill level, you can emp but can't really do the warpprism strat
@@mEtil5656
Mostly it's just that 90% of the time I see Disruptors being used than HTs, despite how good people are at dodging them now at the high level.
disruptors were never meant to be used ofensively, kinda sad that toss players have resorted to apm-checking their oponents with it
"Hard to win with, easy to lose to." -Protoss.
hard to win,easy to lose*
@@jbosssenpai3266 wrong
@@XpomAE get to my level then you can tell me that im wrong. cry me a river
@@jbosssenpai3266 i don't want to be on such low lovel of understanding jokes
@@jbosssenpai3266 btw make your comments less toxic, otherwise youtube shows them only to me
Oh well... if Protoss was designed for a late game race then why Zerg have a lot of free units?
because Zerglings cannot attack into a Cannon fortified base (if you take your bases carefully with your main army standing next to it its impossible for a Zerg to attack in, and then again lings aren't free)
because Swarm Hosts open up a possibility of counter attacking because you just tell your opponent you spend a lot of money on unit that fights every 30 seconds
because Brood Lords are artillery units, therefore weak when fighting anything head-on, and can't attack air
Cheap =/= free. And even if Zerg had realistically free units, no amount of units with the 200 cap will prevent a huge deathball army or skytoss from killing you in the first place unless youll manage to force out a basetrade
Zerg late game is the strongest late game because of its casters and broodlords. It just takes a lot of control, so casuals do not get it. That is one of the reasons why Zerg is dominant in high level.
Zerg has "free units" because Terran/Toss have insane defensive capabilities. You'll never break a sky-toss or mech player with hydra/lurker/viper. Their units and base defenses are simply too cost effective. Without broodlords and swarm hosts you'd lose to these compositions every time. Also..i'd literally trade both the broodlord/swarm host for either carriers or battlecruisers; free units aren't that great.
@@Konranjyoutai well... basically almost every time when I see a late PvZ programe then I see skytoss loosing slowly against Zerg with a spore crawler forest and viper/corruptor/brood lord blob. And if accidentally both armies are zeroed Zerg just instantly rebuild it's army with infinite amount of lings... which eats everything instantly with upgrades.
@@saxus whatever nerds I don't care about a game like StarCraft I know WW3 will break out soon.
protoss was designed to have the most value per mineral spent, quality > quantity. if you let them expand and macro and build a bazillion units they can literally attack move and win, like in lower elos
Yeah but in reality, it ain't. 4 Full upgrade lings beat a full upgraded Zelot. Mass marine beat mass zelot with equal minerals spent even without micro. Hydra cost less than the stalker but is superior in every way, but mobility ... and so on. Even more widowmines have extra shield dmg, ghosts can counter everything toss has.. it's just sad. Zerg main speaking BTW.
@@Lmaokekw975 Given that protoss units are more cost-effective early-mid game, how should one approach it?
Shouldn't protoss ideally perma-pressure to stall enemy expansion and use, say, blink sentry prism to stay flexible for offense, worker pickoffs and backdoor intercept which would cost the enemy low invest return ressources?
And then fast expand to quickly pump tech?
Toss lategame is just too inflexible, and templars against BL corruptor meatball and mass BC is outspokenly tough.
@@Wabbelpaddel the thing is, you can't be out on the map as a Protoss because if you're getting dropped, or getting run by'ed you're losing a base or two, tons of probes and tech in a matter of second while the opponent can easily defend at home.
Besides, Protoss units aren't even that efficient in early game or mid game, it's only when you start getting storm, disruptors and collosi that Protoss starts to handle fights equally as well as the other two races sadly.
This leads to Protoss either relying on gimmicks or allins as mentioned in the video. Sadly, everytime an all in is brought to the table blizzard gets it down with the nerf hammer without even leaving time for zergs and Terrans to adapt and overcome.
@@Lmaokekw975 Lol disruptors destroy everithing in the ground and no air composition can beat Skytoss
@@Lmaokekw975 "Every way but mobility". Yo, when talking about a unit with blink, that "but mobility" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The answer as to why Protoss is weak on the pro level is very very VERY simple. They nerfed Zealots to the grave. Remember +30 chargelots? Yeah, give Protoss back their original ICONIC unit, just this one singular buff, and Protoss would be highly competitive again.
And nerf Ling/Bane. It's so fucking ignorant that Zergs complain about Protoss being a no brain, no micro race but ling/bane is literally invalidates all ground armies unless you have damn near perfect splits and good positioning and AoE but even good splits usually results in an even trade and zerg pushing creep and economy more. Ergo ur fucked.
At least against bio ffs, like now they are cannon fodder 90% of times.
Flesh melts from energy beams, metal armor withstands it 🤷♂️
I'd second the idea of boosting zealots (as a very casual terran) *IF* at the same time airtoss was slightly nerfed (my favorite: limit tempest range a bit which is INSANELY long: there are some maps where it's possible to place tempest in areas inaccessible by ground, out of range of missile turrets, but in range of tempests so that a protos can take out half of a terran's base completely unbothered until the terran can produce vikings)
and buff skytoss while at it
@@morgwai667 by the time toss has tempests you should already have starport and counters ready - unless he was cheesing you with some kind of proxy / tempest rush or something
They have lasers, ofcourse they’re OP
Frickin lasers man
I feel like Astrea summed it up very well in one of his interviews. The whole race seems to be balanced around the disruptor (and other gimmicky units). Redesigning these and then rebalancing the race afterwards would be the right way imo.
Unfortunately i feel with the leve of support we got its unrealistic to expect. Best we can hope for is small changes, that might make the balance a bit better, step by step.
Which interview?
@@ElfosDeMordor I think it was in one of those snippets they showed in between matches at Katowice this year. "Which unit would you remove from the game and why?" was the question and Astrea answered "Disruptor" and said because it's of its terrible influence on game design and balancing.
The whole race is based around that because it's really the only unit Terran doesn't have a hard (and I mean HARD) counter to (idk about Zerg)
Toss issues all stem from the warp-in mechanic.
Gateway units are balanced around potential rushes and timings using warp-in which negates most defenders advantage. To achieve this balance, Toss T1 units are tuned comparatively weak so that they don't kill zergs and terrans too easily with rushes and timings.
But with weak T1 units, toss needs strong T2 units to survive the mid game. Disruptors, Colossi, Voidrays, Templar etc are very strong but only work as part of a big group where they can be protected - ie the deathball.
The highly concentrated army (the deathball) is straightforward to control but difficult to control against. Below pro level, it's frustrating to play against and at pro level it doesn't provide the Toss players enough opportunities to express their skill through superior control.
I like that thought on the colossus, It's indeed underpowered
I say we go back to WoL, flat 15 dmg +2/upgrade instead of this bonus vs. light. Maybe not 15, perhaps 12; just needs a buff.
@@scottevensen2615honestly WoL/HotS feels just so much better gameplay-wise
The problem here is that strong pro players can beat protoss deathballs whereas the average player cannot due to the amount of micro that is needed.
Bring back Arbiter. Remove mothership.
Yeah it would be cool to see, but not sure if it can fit the current metagame
It would break the meta. with multiple arbiters, protoss could just recall all over the map, allowing it to have control over the whole map.
Make toss even stronger?
Stasis field sounds too OP to me...
@@lvo9197 and?
lmao " protoss race needs rework". and whos gonn "work" on it? Starcraft II is an abbandoned project and nothing will change about gameplay unless community hands blizzard a patch or update on a silver plate.
VEry good analysis. I think on of the things contributing to the Protoss balance problems was LotV, since when the game starts much faster with much stronger economy, getting to death balls or huge timing attacks much faster then before. In earlier times, the beefy early and mid game units of Protoss would give you value for a longer time, allowing you get ahead of the opponent through good trades.
They could start by giving Zealots more movement speed, they just get kitted by terrant marauders slow or vaporized by banes. As for Collosus maybe a faster building time and make the viper harpoon drag Massive units halfway distance like it doesn't make sense that a freaking Mothership be dragged by a plane size bug xD
Yeah, I actually think Zealots need a movement speed buff. It would allow Protoss players to buy a bit more time on defense as well as more options when counterattacking.
No. Protoss needs rework.
What you’re suggesting is the balance the game with only battles in mind. But high level StarCraft doesn’t work that way.
At the high level, there’s really no OP units. It’s all about OP timing. There’s a reason why the gateway units are dogshit. Because in the past when they were somewhat decent, the mid-early game timing attack and all-ins of protoss are insanely good.
I always takes Maru’s 3-peat year as example of how broken the toss is.
That year, Protoss got buff, particularly stalker got a DPH buff. It was a miserable year for Terran as the number of GM Terran dropped to historic low(at the time), because of the improved stalker sniping ability made TvP unplayable for a lot of ppl since the early game protoss pressure its unstoppable. There was just no way for Terran to make a tank without losing 10 marines, or worse in the early game. Protoss would just snowball into a win if they didnt get a gg earlier.
However, Maru still won it all, because of his perfect execution of TY’s proxy rack essentially nullified Protoss early aggression, and made the MvP matchup favors Maru because Terran has the superior production if done right.
The changes on battle units alone isn’t the answer. Major overhaul is needed.
@@Telopead There is 0 chance that Blizzard will actually do a major overhaul.
Would this be perfect? Yes, but we will never get it.
That's why we should take a look at what is possible. Tweaking the numbers on units is possible.
I like the idea of giving Zealots more speed.
In lower level games that isn't much of an isuse, because there is very little kiting.
In high level games the Zealots gets stronger, by making him suck less vs marauders. While at the same time making him not that much stronger in a "real" combat. Toss will just loose less zealots in a chase / kiting scenario.
@@wedgeantilles8575 I would agree with a speed buff of some sort for zealot. Imo maruaders should be countered more easily considering how easily they shut down colossus. The tradeoff should be made more fair.
Bring back dark archon... 😏
I'm not a very experienced player so take this with a spoonful of salt, but I think the warp-in mechanic, cool as it is, is actually part of the problem. Protoss is the only race capable of instantly mass producing units, without delay, anywhere on the map where they have power. Practically a single pylon or warp prism erases or drastically reduces the defender's advantage. It's like a proxy without actually having to commit to a proxy. This means that if gateway units were actually powerful, protoss would be completely broken. As a consequence gateway units, while still individually strong, overall aren't as good as equal tier zerg and terran armies, which is why protoss needs to rely on wonky shit, or somehow survive until mass carriers.
Protoss is the only race that has had every unit except their workers nerfed/changed/reworked.
This is the dumbest comment i've ever read. You should go watch some Beta/first six months of WOL Sc2. No unit is the same.
I think protoss can spiral way to quick out of control and punishes way to hard which will not happen on pro lvl but will destroy casual players and thats why it is so hated
Used to be protos would saturate 1 base 4 gate and A- move to win a lot of games. The race does not teach macro that well because of its simplistic and qol features.
If you were a low zerg you got 4 gated and if could not manage your larva , you had no notion of timings , you were just dead on arrival.
As a zerg I spend 2 yrs learning timings for every cheese under the sun , before I got to some macro proteases, that actually played for macro rather than all ins or weak time pushes.
Game is abandoned by devs xD tournaments are slashed so even pro scene is shrinking xD there wont be any fix lol
The community and ESL still works on balance patches as Blizzard agreed to outsource that to us
According to this video, Protoss is both OP and not OP enough. So it's balanced?
Sooo If I am too fat but also very tall am I balanced as well? xD
It is easier for low level players to get value, but at high level the tools T and Z have outclass P's when micro'd properly. So it depends on what you prioritize.
Protoss is the most rock-paper-scissors race. It lacks a solid gateway army base, Zeolots are melee, Stalkers are fragile. Gateway units lose straight up vs Terran and Zerg base armies so leans heavily on tech units like storm or colossus to bridge the gap.
This puts all your eggs in one basket because if your colossus or storms die you loose, incentivizing the ball to protect them. And sometimes you just lose because you went colossus and the zerg went spire...should have built a stargate cause now you build-order lost.
This sort of adds to the above, toss lacks flexible defenders advantage, Terran has bunkers, range, tanks and terrain. Zerg has Queens and speed on creep. Toss only has a shield battery.
The solution to toss is to give them a real defenders advantage and a solid gateway army. Either baseline or via T1 upgrade give the units/buildings within the radius of a nexus a buff like shield armor. Next, Move the immortal to the gateway, with stats adjusted accordingly, to give toss an actual power unit in gateway that challenges other armies on the ground, with this stalkers can do more vs light units to give some answer to build order loss.
My 2cent rambllings.
Really though how can you not like protoss after that LotV intro cinematic?
Protoss is broken because their most iconic technology breaks a fundamental rule of RTS games. Warp Gate breaks the principle of defender's advantage. Distance -and specifically map traversal time and reinforcement time- favor the defender with crucial extra time to react. Zealots and Stalkers cannot be allowed to be too strong because of that. Sentries were designed as defensive spellcasters, with forcefield specifically existing to block the ramp to the main base with 1 cast. High Templar lost their energy upgrade because of that. If it can warp in, it needs to gather energy or be a mediocre fighting unit.
It was never about lategame or early game or micro. Protoss is the race with teleportation as one of its core mechanics. The only way to strengthen their defense without adding to their offense is global cooldown abilities. Recall, nexus overcharge, pylon overcharge, and shield battery overcharge. Protoss have always been the problem child because map size affects them the least. Either warp in units at the front, or recall an entire army back to defend; protoss units have the option to just not traverse the map but appear where needed. This problem has been known since the 4gate rush in 2010.
For the supposedly "technologically superior" race, they have the worst casters.
Take a look at their baseline caster, the sentry. Yeah, guardian shield is pretty good against Terran, but decent Terran players can just focus down the sentry with a stim. It's also stupidly expensive and other races have been given way too many tools to fight the forcefields. Hallucination is a scouting tool, period. Now compare that to the baseline Zerg caster, the queen, who can do it all, give you more larva, more vision, keep units alive AND defend AND attack. They had to nerf transfuse.
Next, the Oracle. They have some decent potential at the start of the game, but fall off pretty quickly as the game progresses. Revelation is good in the very early game, mediocre mid and lategame, and a must only in the uberlategame IF you went tempests and need detection. The Terran Raven in the other hand can harass without exposing itself, delete a key unit from battle which as we saw, is crippling for Protoss, increase dps of the Terran army by 5,000% with one point and click, and is a detector, just permanently. The Zerg aerial caster, the Overseer costs zero supply so you can theorically build as many as you like, is a detector, provides decent scouting with changelings which players below GM won't be able to perfectly snipe every single time, and contamination is mildly useful.
Finally, their big tamale, the High Templar. Feedback was nerfed to the ground because "it's supposed to take out energy, not deal damage", so their only useful skill is psionic storm which is good, don't get me wrong, AoE spell damage to any target is always useful... until you compare them with the Terran Ghost. The ghost is hands down, unarguably better than the HT in literally every single aspect, it's not even a contest, it's a straight up upgrade. EMP doesn't require research unlike storm, cannot be kited, if you get hit you take 100% of the damage no questions asked, it's AoE and got recently buffed right off the bat, takes out energy AND shields (which for Protoss might as well be HP) AND for some reason also decloaks, talk about overloaded. And that's only one skill, next you have snipe, which while not as good vs Protoss (still can take out HT), it negates literally every single lategame unit Zerg has. Lurkers? Snipe. Broodlords? Snipe. Vipers? Snipe. Infestors? Snipe. Ultras? Snipe. Cloak is a nice to have and it's the only ability that requires researching, can help them get out of bad spots if the opponent doesn't have permanent detection, and they even can land nukes. Not to mention they have a POWERFUL auto attack with very good range AND can take 5 banelings to the face thanks to being blessed with the unarguably best tag in the game, psionic, extra damage from literally nothing. HT throw water balloons and are made out of paper. Oh did I forget to mention Terran capital ships, the Battlecruisers, are energyless casters that can teleport to ltierally anywhere in the map, and have a "delete this" skill, while the Protoss carrier has one skill that is its only means of attack?
And what does Zerg get? TWO lategame casters, Infestors and Vipers. Infestors can turn the tide with a well aimed fungal growth, that has had to be nerfed several times, from being a "I win you lose" instant root, to the still powerful form we know today. Infested Terran were so brutally powerful they had to be deleted and replaced with the pretty crappy microbial shroud, but neural parasite is still an amazing skill that has turned games. Then the Viper, which is a caster good against everything. Heavy units? Just abduct into Lurkers/Corruptors, so powerful it had to be nerfed. Sieged or clumped up units? Blinding cloud neutralises all damage. Clumped up airtoss? Throw a few parasitic bombs at them. They can also replenish their energy rather fast.
Mothership is just a -400/-400 so not even going to bother with a unit that takes 3 and a half years to build, and gets abducted and destroyed in the first 5 seconds of a battle. I would rather have the core back.
Protoss doesn't win tournaments cuz at the pro level, zerg is most OP.
terran
Protoss seems obliterated by a 1base Zerg rush swarmhost+nydus
Seems dumb but every Time you rush your pool to make 6 lings, protoss wall himself and then can't handle 3-4 teleporting sh
Yeah it does work well until GM league, that's a nasty strategy
Was not expecting to see my favourite black female streamer, Destiny, in this video! Female empowerment has gone a long way.
Amazin
Generally agree with much that was said in the video, but would also like to add at least one additional point here. Protoss' reliance on higher-strength, but lower-cost, units also means that there is far less of an ability to cheaply scout, which reduces the fog of war and randomness. Zerg has arguably the best scouting unit in the game and has total vision over everywhere they have creep spread + overlords. Terran has potentially the second best scouting unit in the game, sensor towers, and scans. While Protoss does have hallucinations for scouting, which is a very good ability, all other methods of scouting that Protoss has are much more cost-prohibitive than the other two races and hurt quite a bit more if the scouting units are lost. Both Zerg and Terran have some of the best tools to reduce randomness in matchups, which is a quality that's extremely favorable for top players who have a good chance at winning tournaments.
You forgot that the observer is fucking insane, actually terran has the worst sistem to detect enemies.
Don't forget about the pillars in almost every map, just so the overlords can safely scout your entrance
@@Framidan are you kiddin? teran have sensor towers/scans + Raven. observer cost shtiton of gas + stops your robo from producing. Its also easily sniped or by several towers cut from observing at all. As zerg you can make overssers everywhere on the map. terran scans whenever he needs. Its quite a fun if you dont have observer to run into cloacked/burrowed unit. if you drag it with army it runs ahead and gets killed etc.
@@ixirion scan aren't free, and you don't build sensor towers until midgame at least, ravens are good, but you need starport with the tech lab, that slows your stim and combat shield, and also it cost a lot of gas
@@Framidan well man. nothing is trully free. and scouting early game is SCV/probe. So you preffer your scan to cost 25/75 or 50 energy?
Protoss is one of the most unique of the three in two negative ways.
They have the worst base structure. Terran build extra command centers for orbital scans or defensive fortresses. Zerg build macro hatches for more unit production. The utility of nexus is so basic, and covered by one at each base, that you don't really see toss building extra.
Most importantly is map vision. At the highest levels, toss have garbage vision compared to T & Z. Terran have scans and sensor towers, zerg have tumors. Both don't cut into their supply for map vision. Both provide massive map vision in the hands of the experts. Toss gets the shit observer. A supply costing, non-trivial gas sucking unit that won't have the coverage of the competitors and won't last long at the highest levels.
warp - mechanics is not good?
1 Probe builds several buildings without mining loss?
almost immediately units?
vision therefore oracle.
@@blessyou3999 I'm not getting into a pointless "is protoss OP or UP?" debate with you. I'm talking about tippy top one in a million pro players and the observed distinctions I see.
I don't play SC anymore and wasn't good when I did. I watch it a lot, especially tournaments. It's annoying to watch the best toss professionals in the world play against Z and T players that are at their level.
On a global scale, i think its fair that the easiest race is also the weakest at higher levels. However it does truly suck for the viewer to watch competitive starcraft and not having a nice distribution across tournament top 8s
this is sadly true
There is contradiction there, that also means it is hardest to win with at higher levels so which is it? Hardest or easiest, so where is fairness here. You are basically saying it is fair for race to be weak because it is a bit easier on low levels.
protoss are fun to play but a pain to balance.. for real.. the problem here is balance. you have a full power glass canon xD they are strong but really weak against fast counters.. and their main weakness is the money.. you need a ton of money to rearm your army.. while a zerg player needs a moment.. and little money.. but if protoss became cheaper they must become weaker.. and nobody wants that.. every protoss player loves the air bullshit xD they can stomp you with air units fast.. and you cant do aything if they are victorious in the first figth.. however.. if they lose.. they lose the match.. cuz after 1 lose.. they take so much time to recover that they just lose the game..
Ahhh this reminds me of so many years of theorycrafting and proposals to the toss race (Random here BTW)
At some point I remember reading ideas about making warpgate Tier 3 and allowing to buff the T1 at somepoint which had quite a bit of traction in team liquid, going as far as making test maps
Then dragoons instead of stalkers which to some degree got implemented when they changed the attack speed and actual damage value of stalkers
Nerfed tanks so the robo units were good therefore effing mech in WOL only to buff mines later on to have more damage vs shields
Khaydarin removed due to warp in storms killing quick harass that got fixed by the oracle in Hots (to some degree)
Colli doing less damage overall to make it good only against light, therefore cursing it against bio since mauraders suddenly took half damage, I still disagree with this particular change as I never have liked disruptors
Charge damage on zealots nerf anyone? I remember I think it was your video explaining how they went from strong units to screwed damage wise by the change which you could completely feel in a PvT against running bio
Feedback doing half damage to avoid energy snipping
Etc, etc, etc. Toss is sadly trapped in between ZvT since changing them would completely screw the balance that the other races have between them, change one thing in toss and you have to fix the other races acordingly, so its easier to keep toss ina weird match after they had to learn their race 3 different times rather than fixing it and basically restarting the balance changes. Reminds me a bit of WC3 where I dont remember which race was left in the dust so the other 3 could fight.
I sweat to God, I left my own comment before. If Protoss, was given, the +30 dmg chargelots back, at the PRO level, things would instantly change, without touching anything else on the race. This one simple revert. Zealots are meant to be strong, yet got hammered to the grave. They give us more speed on the Zealots, wooptyfuckingdo.
@@JohnMelon I think the idea should be different. Zerglings should be nerfed to some degree like adrino should do 1 more dmg and maybe a little less att.movement speed. Same for terran bio- a little percentage of att speed less. Zealots charge may give + 5 charge dmg and 20 extra shields for 2 sec. Atm bio/zeg can kill zealots and basses way too fast to be fair. Probably 20% more hp on Nexus, Pylon will be ok.
Yep, I`ve been saying since the game launch that Zealots need a buff.
Both zerglings and marines are great units, Zealots are mostly dead weight except for meatshields and some niche uses.
@@ixirion 20% more HP on pylons could be disgusting in cannon rushes. Extensive testing would have to be done.
@@tatsunithelennyking2540 true. ok. Nexus only is more viable
protoss to me has always seemed to have the shallowest skill curve, i.e. easier to play but less max power potential, which causes it to be overpowered below the pro-level and underpowered at the pro level. kinda like stunlock rogues in wow vanilla, any moron can play it but a solid pro knows how to easily handle one
As a Zerg player I do think Protoss needs a buff of some sort, as it seems slightly unpowered at the highest levels. I just don’t quite trust Blizzard and what’s left of the sc2 balance team not to fuck it up. I don’t think the other races needs nerfs, I just think Protoss needs something new, but a rework is probably unrealistic.
I feel like Terran is definitely the race with the highest potential and is the strongest, but to me it also seems like the mechanically hardest to play.
toss needs mechanics to make plays.
just buffing stats would be unattractive for ladder/casual. think specifically of GM or tournament qualifiers.
seeing destiny on starcraft again made me shed a tear
And when you waste your time gaming some other people become millioners in real life and oppress you to pay food, rent and taxes to them. Gamers are patetic!
Zerg is the most op race. Very simple to play.
Spreading creep tumors is more micro than most Terran/Toss players do in the entire game.
@@Konranjyoutai killing creep tumors then? Zerg is the easiest race in my opinion. Spreading creep and injecting larvaes goes a long way
@@anderandersson5229 Well your opinion must be based on low league information. What mmr are you? I'm currently 4.7k.
@@Konranjyoutai maybe it is. But it doesnt make any difference for the arguments.
We are stuck at you having the opinion of zerg being the most difficult and me the most easy.
I could argue that you are the proof of it having plus 4.7k mmr
@@anderandersson5229
Haha what? Me being Tier 1 masters is proof Zerg is overpowered? You can go on any youtube channel covering sc2 and find one of my games brother. If Zerg was overpowered I wouldn't constantly see players with 30% winratios in TvP and PvT and then 70% winratio as TvZ or PvZ. Literally never see it on another Zerg account but its literally every other T or P player.
Tbh the problem is that the gap between casual and pros is so vast that buffs or nerfs that would benefit casuals would be a detriment to pros and vice versa.
The recent lowering of target priority for intercepters for instance, on paper it means your units will target the carrier instead of the interceptors allowing them to kill the important unit. The problem is that it allows protoss to kite any player on A-Move because now units will try to follow the carrier instead of dealing with the interceptors.
Ofc it requires micro on the protoss' part but the chasing player will very likely lose more units in the process. And even reverting that won't change much because it would mean we'd get back to the first problem of units targeting interceptors and never killing the carrier.
Protos is so OP that Serral just walks all over it with a 70+ win rate against them.
First of all I think it all begins with LotV.
It became such a hard and complexe game to balance with their need to add so much new stuff for the Protoss campaign.
Imo you would have to go back to HotS and do adjustments from there.
Remove the fast economy concept, because it all often ends up being a matter of how many workers you can kill and let players focus on real strategies depending on the match up and maps.
From this point Protoss would need to be redesigned, and still gl with that.
killing workers is s strategy, but yes now is to fast llike befor terrans and zergs do faster first workers protect and protos turn nexsus into free pain for all enemy on big area, so attack like that need big army and if you lose it well , now i send one empty prism who die to enemy base 2 another full of Htemplars to main and easy take all workers and spawn some adepts to do some random dmg stuf and run templars and prism, all cost me 250 minerals from one trap prism and some adepts who alos kill some enemy back to base, if i lose another prism oh no i send more and more until enemy dont have money even for workers, but they can do the same and is who first do it in this time sadly, not a option for a game just you must do it
m core back i think repair protos after economy slow, like give a time to build a army
was playing sc2 years ago 8hours a day grinding master trying to get into gm but stopped with LotV cause it was too much effort to stay good but man, love your videos they are bringing back so many late night memorys. good times;D
Protoss is the weakest race objectively, people just get butt hurt when they lose to a death ball and cry unfair no skill! But they're wrong.
thank you
Problem I always had and will have with Protoss at this point is exacly the low level superiority.
Protoss units, especially air (and yes I'm currently looking at Void Rays) are stupidly powerful in low level matches.
Nah Protoss is the only race that can lose a match by losing one unit or base
im glad you included my gorilla f2 video XD i feel honored
I've been saying this for so long, so glad someone took the time to articulate and made a video about it
protoss is the only race that seemingly can't win with ONLY macro and straight up fights at a HIGH LEVEL, your win depends on luck ( Hogwarts level spell casting ) or out witting your opponent ( deemed cheese most of the times )
In a recent thread someone discussed one of the key problems that makes this hard to balance - the warp prism - i.e. to say the ability to subvert defenders advantage
what do i mean ? if we buff base units, warping them into someone's main makes it too difficult to deal with in the mid - late game so keeping them crappy is only way to keep that in check;
IMO remove the warp prism and buff / introduce some better gateway / mid game units
this would make wins / losses feel a lot more fair since now you can't just warp in and destroy an enemies base BUT you can also simply fight a straight up like the other races can
In your other video you addressed the reaver vs disruptor, I actually think the reavor is superior since it a bit less reliant on luck even though you'd have to babysit the unit
To detractors of spell casting being somewhat reliant on luck - you have to make a prediction on where enemy units will be and cast your spell if they move in accordance with your prediction; your predictions are based off your experience with how other people play the race for sure but things like anti-mirco etc ( them just not moving their units ) or just them behaving differently can punish this concept;
( finally also I think Terrans need an AOE damaging spell - bring back seeker missile for terrans or something akin to it )
Blizzard nerfed every Protoss units inviability, it's low skill Terran and Zergs crying about not knowing how to play the game the completely destroyed the competitiveness of literally a 1/3 of players. If anyone thinks Protoss is balanced needs to get themselves checked.
I think Protoss is a powerful race but it is very unflexible. Your phrase that units become not up to date quickly, is the right conclusion. To make Protoss flexible we need a Disruption Web for Phoenix from Broodwar :). The ground army of Protoss is strong enough, but air army is inflexible and Tempests can't compensate this.
Yo, I never knew Destiny was an SC2 player. I only learned about him recently. Not really related to the topic of your video I know, but it was just something I noticed
Bro protoss literally the weakest race in the game lol😂
2:22 - damn, that moment when Medoed just grabs a little shuteye after a-clicking opponent base with golden armada. What joyous days those were
the funny thing he's main race choice used to be (and still is, if I am not wrong) zergs.
Poor Protoss, the scrubkillers of Starcraft and a terrible place to be: casual players hate you for your guts, competitive players mock you as they effortless beat your gimmicks (while at the same time block any buffs because they secretly don't want to have a fair fight), design minded players dislike you for your flaws and the game developers throw you under the bus because for their mediocre minds the opinions of bad players matter more than facts.
Nothing to do, better switch to Zerg (because screw unsufferable Terran players), win and say you would like to play Protoss but Blizzard does not let you.
Welp, lore-wise Protoss should be F2 A race...
I think the only race that shouldn't be a move in lore would be Terrans. Zerg are the definition of a move lol
Uhh Aiur woud like a word. Zerg is the F2 race here.
All right, I stand corrected. Protoss should be just summon golden armada, click planet cracker ability race.
Warp in mechanism -> gateway units had to be horribly weak -> robo/stargate units were designed into pivots of the protoss army (unlike Brood War, in which all robo/stargate productions, except the carrier, are supporting units) -> army have to move around the core units and consequently in chunks
The idea of the Protoss was to be an Ultra-technological race, PERIOD.
Second, they were supposed to be the most "TANK" race in the game with their incredibly strong shields, just like in Starcraft 1, and very expensive in terms of resources, and if the protoss were left to expand they would be an unstoppable snowball. , which is ACCORDING TO LORE.
The problem is what ruined the game is trying to FORCE the races into competition, where changes change everything, leaving ALL UNITS the same, which is TOTAL SHIT.
Relax Maru shows the balance 🤣🤣🤣
When I play Protos, Terran players always kill me by attacking me around the 4-5 minute mark with marrines and tanks and sometimes with maruders. By this time I can’t even get a colossus out.
I just play protoss cause it looks cool.
that's not true about the supply , terran is the only race that can fund a 200supply army because of mules which is underutilized , and zerg is the only race that can go over the 200suply mark but that's even more underutilized...
As a casual I can't really comment with any actual credibility, but I've always felt that Protoss in SC2 was the least forgiving to mistakes. You lose one key unit and that can swing the game against you. Zerg seems the most forgiving as they don't see to have as many situations where losing one key unit is as huge of a deal as you frequently see with Protoss, such as an immortal, disruptor, or colossus, or letting lings slip past your wall. Terran have the issue with having medivacs shot out of the sky as well as clumps of marines hit by some banelings from a control mistake or not looking.
Zerg seems least effected by the potential of large swings in the game from small mistakes. My casual opinion.
Protoss players complain that the race is too weak. Asked why they don't play T or Z, they say "that's too hard".
Is this a bronze player's joke? I main Zerg, play majority random, and I couldn't agree less with your opinion.
Not only do I disagree, it feels apparently analyzed by someone with bias or considerably weak understanding of the strengths/weaknesses of the other 2 races.
If you're losing games in low masters or below, I hate to be this guy, but it is 100% a skill issue. SC2 does not award you wins for how you THINK the game should be played, it awards you wins based on your game knowledge/scouting info, ability to correctly counter your opponents composition, finding ways to gain advantage through worker harassment, or by adequately denying your opponents to do these things (there's much more, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave it there).
Watch your replays, see what you did wrong, and don't suck on this RUclips copium as a proper example for your shortfalls
I really cant understand why my supposed powerful cost-efficient army is incredibly easy countered by the enemy, regardless my micro, how my massive AOE units are utterly destroyed by some basic units (yes, I'm talking to you, beautiful but stupidly useless colossus), how I'm preparing my skytoss but suddenly the enemy rushes me with 180 mutas on minute 3, while I barely have a phoenix. And theres is still people who says Protoss OP 🙄. That race REALLY needs some rework
In short, Protoss has low skill ceiling, so lower level players can easily reach its maximum potential and top level players cannot do better than other race after hitting the skill ceiling. You can ask Maru or Serral to play Protoss and they won't be any better than the top Protoss players now, because their superior skills are limited by Protoss skill ceiling.
What Protoss need is units that are more microable. Protoss units are mostly slow and clunky, they cannot keep up with zerglings runby or terran bio drops. That's why they need tools like recall and battery to defend. But in the end, the race with more mobility can make the play, force trades or recalls. Protoss are stuck with reacting or just straight up cheese to avoid such scenarios.
i feel like toss skill ceiling is equal to zerg
So much misinformation in this video. "Unlike Terran and Zerg, Protoss relies on a few AOE units" Uhm, tanks, ghosts libs + bio? Uhm, infestor, viper + whatever the zerg wants?
Warp prism is a gimmick? Are you kidding me? Nydus is way better than a prism and terran has medivacs...
Finally, the issue of winning the game with a lucky move when your opponent's attention is misplaced is true for all three races: disruptor and storm, widow mine drops or a nuke, bane run bys or money fungals.
I know you need to create entertaining content, but to think you really shouldnt pretend that you can explain why Protoss is broken in a 6 minute video. This is Zerg Cabal propaganda.
IMO Warp gate and mothership are the main reasons sc2 protoss sucks.
Warp gate = units have to be weaker. Compare to SC1 where Zealot and Dragoon is viable the entire game.
Mothership = death ball. Arbiters were way cooler and encouraged splitting the army.
It's really sad because Blizzard could have easily patched it. But I guess there's no way they'd remove warp gate, right? They could buff gateway units and make warp gate late game only (e.g. lock behind templar archives, idk).
Here is how Protoss can be both amazing/infuriating, but be sh*t at high tier.
They have a simple rush unit all low level Protoss is skytoss ONLY, or Protoss ball. So any Terran or Zerg players climbing the ladder gets tons of experience, to the point where most high level players could play protoss as a second race. The people who fight them throughout the ladder know what units to target, what units are important, what their range is, what the build order is.
Meanwhile the Protoss players either think "if I win with this going up the ladder, I can use it at high level" or they try to branch out and get thwack by Terran/zerg players who already have established ways to destroy much scarier protoss.
This game has become so tired, so stale and it seems obvious Blizzard don't really care anymore. The game is so old that they really need to be thinking about StarCraft III.
At Plat and below it's become unplayable. Every match is just a repetitive mass air arms race, or it's just a cheese fest or T1 all-in to stop that from happening. Absolutely tedious and no longer fun, every match ends the same way, half the tech tree is redundant and you don't need to scout because you already know what's happening. If I'm playing a team game and there's more than one Protoss on the opposite team, I toss up whether or not to just quit because it 100% will just be Carrier spam that sets your PC on fire.
You don't even get cannon rushing half as much as you used to, and DT Warp Prism rushes either. I don't mind those because those happen due to you being stupid and not paying attention. Carrier spam is so easy you could train a chimp to do it, it's boring turtling and utterly unstoppable when it happens.
The Colossus is also absolute dog crap. It's only good against Marines and only after being upgraded.
... thers a lot that is wrong with your initial statement
SUpply cap, balances the entire game for out play end game, like brood war one. Each unit has a supply cost, that is roughly balanced to its work use and value. Most units are pretty close to tehir actual work value.
What you have is often just bad choices by players.
If I were to realyl think about imbalance.
Zealots late game of significantly less value because they do not have any extra benefit like the bast mineral unit costs of zerg or terran units, which should be addressed, Base mineral cost units should be roughly balanced.
Zerg - Zergling Gets. Normal upgrades 3/3 Gets a speed augmentation, Gets a life augmentation, Gets Adrenal glands so it hits, much faster between attacks, which is huge.
Terran - Marine Gets. Normal upgrades, 3/3, Gets Stimp pack, A massive hp increase. Terran also has hellions, with blue flame, trasnformation, and normal upgrades, in some cases even an armor boost, or special mech combo upgrades, ie servos.
Terran has two units which only cost minerals, attacking.
Zerg has 1 unit whihc only cost minerals, attacking.
Protoss has 1 unit which only cost minerals, attacking. All the base units of all the species have various attack upgrdes which is typically two. Depending on the current patch.
Zealot: only has charge.
Proposed change to Zealot lategame via another upgrade is a melee/psi blade enhancement for bonus damage to armour and biological life forms. THis owuld balance them in lien with late game, making the melee unit cost so much more if it does connect. The speed of terran stim + concussive shells, ot a melee unit makes the so called powerful melee warrior, a paper doll and not worth its value lat game. Zealot diminishes towards the end game. Peopel cna often udner value the power ofa protss army but its uspply cost is reltively on par... 40 zealots should feel like 80 marines, or 160 lings. each without special upgrades, be fairly close to 1 on 1.
Proposed changes is charge turns into a dark templar blink attack, so the distance can be zeroed, unless they are udner a debuff. range 3/4 or something. + 3 to bio and armour, effective worth 6 damage since they do do a double attack naturally. Zealots supported by a sentry are a bit more effective... but meh...
Late game zealot doesn't match well with zerglings and marines.
Technically golden armada is sc2, so its protoss world, so peopel shoudl go air as protoss but ther was some blatent imbalances in the initial release of protoss, Such as void rays, killing you instantly with no real means of defending a early void rush, since they oculd pre charge or charge, up and since hte beam is constant damage, out damage, everything killing entire bases in basically a few seconds, its what turned me off of sc2 competitive play, since it was a pretty obvious oversight. Offer protss a 100/ 150 mineral unit for flying... that can do damage with out vespene could be interesting... but meh.. onyl real imbalance ,and structural build systems and defence. Meh...
Sc2 steered away from the logic of sc1 broodwar. Basically re-inventing the wheel ( not good)
In broodwar pvz toss has to scout with corsair and turtle 🐢 up until strong enough (legs and ht) to expand because zerglings and hyrdas.
In pvt because terrans defense is godmode toss is the aggressor in the matchup and terran has to turtle until they get their defenses up to expand and get a 3rd and fourth, etc.
In sc2 you can see how that's not the case. Giving terran the aggressive behavior when they have excellent defense mechanics is the dumbest thing ever because it creates this dynamic.
I can attack you toss but you can't attack me and base trading is way more forgiving I'm broodwar pvt.
I'm only 3300 mmr but I open up with zlot and 2 stalker every game. 13 pylon and 14 gate and 17 gate. Chronoboost and go to terrans door because allowing terran to expand without pressure is dumb in my opinion.
Seems like a reasonable explanation. It indeed feel like the game can tip more easily with protoss in a match both for or against the protoss player, it's a top heavy race :). Still it does not need major change, balance still seems quite close to where it needs to be. I do think the colossus or sentry/ravager might need a tweak to be more balanced. Maybe make so force field cost a bit less mana, or make so ravager bile cool down longer be upgradeable to reduce it back. Otherwise colossus could either have another +1 range, a tiny bit more movement speed or a tiny bit more damage against units that are not light units (I would not advise HoTS level at all, but there is room there since it was halves if I recall correctly).
Ultimately, at high levels of play, the winning side (in an equal skill match) will be the one with the higher power ceiling with micro and the least vulnerability to the same. Protoss have at best equal to Zerg/Terran levels of micro power, while being more vulnerable to micro. A mistake by the P player or really good play by their opponent ends the match right there, because of that situation. At casual and lower levels of play (even up into tournament rankings!) the consistency of said peak performance micro is so small that the raw numbers game favors the Protoss. Thus you have a race that serves as a beef gate to winning tournaments. Either you can consistently out play the Protoss at micro, or you _will_ lose to them. But peak performance Protoss doesn't measure up to their opponents top level of play (Outside of Mirror matches, which will always be pure skill naturally.) in terms of power. At to top of the heap, 0.1% changes make all the difference.
The only dodge to the problem is having a separate non-tournament rules balance set, which is a non-starter for E-sports inherently as it alienates the target audience.
Euhhh zerg is broken...Zerg macro : inject *6 then you're still at 200 army and let's push again by the swarm....
Terran player's needs huge respect because awesome macro and micro...when zerg can just have in 35 sec 200 army supply after loose the 25en fight of the game then win
I play StarCraft since 1998. Just take a look at KESPA tournaments and who won the most - Terrans and Zergs. Their wining is pure comedy. Artosis is laughing stock for nearly 20 years now and he thinks he should win every game if not then it's rigged.
Ey! This is blizzard on 2014, how we can make everybody buy lotv after 3 years of baguette? No problem, buff zerg and terran: protosses will buy "their" expansion.
The ultimate micro experience 😂
yep, protoss is quite bad designed. Units that are very low DPS and decent HP with mediocre mobility for like double price of their counterpart, dying in every straight up 1 on 1 fight (or 1 on 2 if counterpart costs half), units that have decent (not even great) damage output, but are fragile and quite immobile, units that have high output, but again way less survivability and mobility than counterparts and often doesnt do anything without being micro'd around. And then there is a void ray which is just all-round good unit that can be a-moved. Albeit again, expensive. Then some units have upgrades that makes them really good, but most of those abilities requires a lot of micro to even work. Generally protoss require insane ammount of micro to be competitive, costs a ton and damage of their core units is laughable, but abilities can be insanely good to balance the fact they have (as straight up fighting units) worst army of all races.
Then there is a problem - Low level people dont micro at all and let protoss get all the money they want and build voidray carrier deathball that would require manual targeting to defeat (or opponent doing the same with battlecruisers). In mid to high level game where protoss start to micro (they have to) and actively do upgrades (without them toss army is trash, whereas other can still work) they can dominate and when they do, it doesnt even look fair. In top level where even Terran players start to micro, attack multiple fronts and generally start playing good (not just stim a-move) and Zerg have enought attention and speed to do something else than creep and injects (otherwise cant keep up with unti production), it puts so high strain on protoss player that he would have to be way faster and better to compete. Hence one of few things protoss can do is rely on gimmicks, creative strategies and all-ins.
in my ranking (platin 1) and below, race doesnt matter. If I play Protoss, I lose at most versus Zerg, and think terra is imba, because marines, marauders and medivacs crushes everything. On the other side, people in global chats flame that Protoss is OP if they are playing Terran. Usually... people flame about every race, because no one want or has time to play a lot of games each day to become better. So ive no experience in master, grandmaster or Proplaying, but I see progamers like Harstem who can beat Zerg players like Serral.
What they did for the cyclone they should of done for the stalker. It needs a higher Fire rate.
It's so easy to fix zerg balance. Give queens auto cast healing, and just make hatcheries produce more larva. That doesn't affect the top level, which is already does it perfectly, and fixes the lower levels where zerg players are taxed much worse than other races. I don't know how to fix PvT. P is unviable at the top level, even against players who are visible worse, controlling less units, less army value etc. But lower level terrans are so whiny and less skilled by comparison that it seems unfair.
Not gonna lie, everyone is a cry baby and half the people complaining deserved it. Really don't feel bad for people who say that shit on stream over a video game. Tired of people with 75% win rate v toss saying they are imba, learn to scout sac a overlord use a scan and don't die cause you don't know comp. Was only every true in WOL, talk about a move imba let's talk nydus and swarm host in hots.
**The irony that SC 1 is more balanced than SC 2 😂. Those were the days when races really had a definition to them. Protoss weak early, strong late. Zerg, the opposite. Terran in the middle**
I mean... I just cant understand the salt. There's no imbalance, there's no op's... IT's just a matter of being or not a good player. I mean, if your play against me, I'll loose no matter the race y play. If you play against... uThermal, ie, you'll loose no matter the race you both choose. i just see adults crying, and it's very ridiculous.It's not unfair someone wins you, maybe youre not talented for the game or the other person simply plays better than you. Grow up.
Completely quit the game and now playing Brood War. 3 minute DT Shrine and 4 minute void rays. I have to have a cyclone, raven, and enough infantry to push it back by 4 fucking minutes. Game is dead
Protoss race is not broken. "Broken" term is reserved for zerg during that cursed patch in Heart of the Swarm. Now that was broken state.
I recall Protoss had annoying strategy in "Hots", where they would rush oracles. Oracles would melt marines, and they could kill queens if macro correctly.
The game is probably the most balanced it has ever been atm.
protoss to me has always been a weak race. Sure death balls are deathballs, but... you have to be allowed to get to that point first.
Protoss units are expensive, have high hp but generally low dps. Meaning that they're just expensive most of the time. And they don't even really have any macro to back up such expensive units.