[famsytron]

Paladin is back with his bi-weekly interview series, this time with Australia's world renowned x5.PiG.

The two discuss the recent World Championship Series and it's format and some of the issues players have been vocal about over the past few weeks. Additionally, PiG delves into what it is like having his girlfriend as his manager and how much of an influence she has in his professional gaming career.


Paladin: You competed in Showmatches at HoTS launch, was it competitive or just trying out the new strategies?
x5.PiG: It was a bit of both. It was meant to be for fun and to show off the new units and put on a show. But the best shows always involve actual competition. Personally I felt the funnest game to watch wouldn't involve new units much at all so I went for a standard muta-lingbane and decided to showcase a fast burrow hyper-aggressive build one game and just standard mutalingbane with the new micro vs widow-mines. There were some points where I maybe could have finished the games sooner but continued on to to try and make use of new units and whatnot but overall it was quite competitive.

Maynarde decided to make use of the resume from replay feature, do you feel that this could have a place in competitive play, or coaching?
Yeah the resume from replay acts as a failsafe due to the online nature of the game. It's already been used multiple times in many international tournaments to save games that have dropped. It's a really good feature for that.

As for coaching and practice it's an invaluable feature for practicing a specific problem over and over again until it's perfected out.

Fancy things like lategame army control can now be easily practiced over and over again in an actual game situation.

This makes it one of the coolest and most innovative tools for players.

Talking new, Zerg units in HoTS, Viper, Swarm Hosts do you feel they have assimilated into the Zerg builds?
The new units have definitely found their main places for the moment. Both excel in ZvP where they are mainstays of the lategame. In ZvT swarm-hosts and vipers have found great success vs mech, but players are still struggling to make use of them in the fast-paced game vs bio compositions. In ZvZ the new mutalisk is so powerful that it tends to be the centrepiece of the matchup and so there's very little room for other units to make any appearance. However with the strength of the new spore crawler some infestor-hydra compositions have been somewhat viable and mutalisk players have begun transitioning into swarm hosts to counter this. The viper is largely unused except for in the very rare game where roach-hydra ends up facing roach-hydra.

Do you get as frustrated with Mutalisks as Terran and Protoss players do?
I do get frustrated with the strength of them in that it eonholes players into a muta-centric style in ZvZ. This limits variablity of builds to an extent and so gets boring. That being said there are still dozens of strong earlygame plays and even things like double-upgrade zerglings can deter mutalisk play. I don't think Terran and Protoss really can get too frustrated with the new mutalisks because despite their power their are readily available hard-counters in the form of widow-mines, Thors and the new extra-range Pheonix with range upgrade.

To read the entire interview, please click HERE!