Steenet

So, I’ve been playing quite some SC2 lately and have been improving quite a bit. I’ve settled on an economic safe buildorder that seems to work out no matter what race I play against. So i started moving up the ladder in silver league. All was looking well when suddenly! my stats had been reset.

Sad as i was i started over. Playing my placement matches i started out vs someone favored (it took a long time to find a match, so probably a silver or gold player but what do i know). I decided that it was time to get into the gold league to prove I had gotten better.
After a pretty one sided fight i was on my way with my first win. After some crazy matches where my opponents tried some very aggressive rushes vs some gold/platinum I ended up playing a platinum zerg (so mirror matchup). With 4-0 i knew that if I won this I would go to platinum and if I lost I would probably go to gold. Either way i was happy, but I could almost taste the platinum. So as all zerg games progress it was a roach/hydra race. I got to expand before him since he wasn’t very aggressive and since I quickly had the larger army he put down a sea of spine crawlers at his natural. I thought i might as well try a nydus sneak to avoid the spine crawlers. So I upgraded overlord speed and rushed in and build a worm in the very far end of his main. Of Course he noticed right away, but JUST before his army could reach the worm my entire army popped out. I won the battle with about 12 units left (1 roach and the rest hydras) and I quickly moved and took out his techtree while more units came through the nydus.

He surrendered and there it was! PLATINUM!

Now playing in the highest tier of SC2 I’m both scared but proud that I’ve improved. I’ll probably face some serious kick-ass playing with the pros, but who cares? The day i end up playing TheLittleOne or some other high ranked player, it’s all worth it!

ps: I think the bonus pool is bugged ;D

ALERT: Get to safety. It’s every man for himself.

I tend to simplify my computer/gaming talk as well when explaining to my non-computer friends

if you don’t know it, visit the xkcd comic.

At first i was thinking “Oh my god, this is just dumb” and “This guy seriously can’t be gold league if I’m silver” .. guess I was right, but I ended up watching the whole thing (only 4½ min) and must admit i was laughing in the end.

“Im gonna try pull some drones off to stop this” … priceless

I actually tend to do 10pool 6 lings and run them at my enemy to see if he would be dumb enough not to get any early defense vs. a zerg. Sometimes it works and the other day some protoss raged at me calling it a “lucky noob rush”. First off, if you call 10pool a rush your just bad, 6pool is a rush. Secondly how can it be “lucky” ? If i attack you with a very small army, and you have nothing to defend, its not luck – you just messed up.

On another note, this SC2 video caught my attention aswell. Neat.

The resent HoN patch brought a new interface both to the main menu as well as the game lobby, but to me the best change was the fix to Legionnaires 3rd skill “Terrify”. Normally when i played Legionnaire i would go spin, taunt, ult and stats for the rest. maybe 1 rank of terrify at level 15 if the enemy team had a blinker i would stop escaping.

Legionnaire now posses the new “Terrifying Charge” skill which lets him move at maximum speed (522) towards an enemy. Upon impact he hits the target for 300% base damage  (at rank 4) and makes all enemies in a 110 degree 240 distance cone attack for half the damage, but 50% more attack speed. The charge breaks if he is stunned, if the target goes into fog, blinks or whatever.

All of the sudden Legionnaire got a useful 3rd skill. This allows him to deal more damage with spins since a follow up with taunt will cause more attacks to hit Legionnaire than before. It also allows him to gank more easily early game before he gets his portalkey.

Some people claim that this is such a buff that you do not need your portalkey, but I disagree. Even a 522 movement speed can’t put you in exactly the right spot at exactly the point in time you want to be there. Often the creepwave pass the enemy heroes and for some reason 3 of them are clumped right next to them and you just want to blink in and hope your team comes to clean up whats left of the slaughter. Therefore a portalkey is still a core item on him, although now you can buy something else than ghostmarchers to catch those running bastards.

To finish off this short post is some video clips from HoN. First one is me playing Legionnaire and it is probably one of my favourite moments. Catching Valkyrie mid-air and taking her head off is such a pleasure.

The last video is not related to the post, but is kinda funny. I’m playing Hellbringer, in a 1750 NO AB game, and getting ganked in the bot lane. Just before i die i manage to get malphas out, and with a little help from my friends i manage to get a hat-trick earning 700-800 gold while dead. Not bad.

I recently got my very own StarCraft 2 betakey, thanks to my former WoW guild leader Tene. I’m very pleased to say that I enjoy it to the fullest.  SC2 is in my opinion SC with a face lift. They added some units, much to my enjoyment, and pimped up the graphics a bit, but other than that it’s pretty much the same good old game.

The new battlenet seems to be working and the new ladder system is very nice. You start out by judging your own skill level. At this point you have 3 selections.

Noob: Not used to RTS games.

Medium: Played quite some RTS games in the past.

Pro: Played RTS games on a competitive level.

This selection is just to give the system an idea where to start off when playing “Placement matches”

At this point I felt a bit scared and selected the Noob level. Although I consider myself a pretty solid computer gamer with good adaptive skills, I’ve never really played RTS games. I’ve always been a FPS kinda guy.

Then the placement matches is up. After the resent account wipe they toned the number of matches down from 10 to 5. This is where battlenet figures out how good you are. You probably start out by playing some newbie, and as you win it matches you vs good opponents. (these are not AI, but real people)

I ended up in the silver league after my placement matches, so smack in the middle. For someone who haven’t played RTS games much its quite rough up there. I win about 50% of my matches, so i guess I’m placed correctly but sometimes people just outclass me.

As a zerg player my most feared opponent is the terran with a MMM build (medivac, marine, marauder).

Its so damn hard to kill, and since the medics has been converted into airships (?!?!) you need some sort of antiair to take out the medic ships before you can deal with all the stimmed psychos. (the medivacs is also drop ships … -.-)  I found the solution though … BANELINGS.

This new zerg unit is a suicide bomber all the way. They just roll oh so pretty into death. Upon impact they explode dealing damage in an area around it. (no friendly fire, so they don’t explode each other .. if they did they would be useless) This way it is possible to blow those god damn marines and marauders all the way to hell before the medivacs get a chance to do anything.

They can also detonate on buildings making a very nice ram to knock down those wall-ins.

Here is some random dude showing how banelings can rip a base apart though the opponent is crap.

And a demo of how 400 banelings can take out 100 vikings.

The best part about banelings – they are cheap as dirt! you morph them out of zerglings and a total cost for 2 banelings is 75 min and 50 gas. If the other person has a cluster of units, these little green lovely guys can easily pay for themselves.

Only thing i miss so far in SC2 is the good old lurkers. From what I hear they are in the game files, but simply not implemented. It might have something to do with hydras being moved to tier 2 (as they are originally morphed from hydras) making them somewhat harder to get and thus misplaced, but i hope blizzard can find room for this lovely unit.

I found this video of 3 marines owning 2 lurkers with insane micro. If the average SC2 player is able to do that just leave the lurkers out. But since i highly doubt it my prayers before bed still go out to my beloved lurkers.

There is some guys on youtube claiming it can’t be done. Even though its quite crazy, heres a video showing you how to…. easy right?