[GFree]

First off, a little intro. I'm just in the Bronze leagues, I panic, I'm slow to react and sometimes I don't scout enough. However, I love watching replays and I like to believe in scouting and positioning. So I'll be posting some reports regarding my opinions on things. Would love feedback regarding my points. This was prewritten on another forum but I didn't get any good feedback (I got trolled).

Report 0001 - Impacts of a faster Hallucination.

Recently with the PTR 1.2 patch, it's fairly obvious Blizzard wants to have Hallucination used in regular play, so I thought I'd take a careful look into what their proposed changes would mean for the metagame.

First off, let's take a look at Hallucination as an ability, costing 50 more energy than Forcefield, and 25 more energy than Guardian Shield, not many Protoss players feel there are many situations where Hallucination would be a worthy tradeoff for the other 2 spells that the Sentry is capable of.

Hallucination has many applications on paper, so let's take a look at a few.

Uses

Scouting: Simply because you can make (a hallucination of) the fastest unit in the Protoss arsenal, the Phoenix, you can easily fly over your opponent's base early on to get a good scout. Now the benefit of this is that the Protoss player gets a chance to make a more informed decision about how he/she wants to approach the mid-game, whether to expand, tech or attack. However, I feel that for this to be effective, one would need to research Hallucination before Warpgate or you'd be behind in terms of your mid-game strategy. The timing of the first Sentry would probably be the most crucial issue to address because we need to think about being safe against any early pushes. More than likely, you'd make a few more units before Hallucination research starts, and it's equally likely that it'd be mostly Zealots. The 100/100 cost means that unless you make another Zealot, Hallucination will still wait until after a few Stalkers, which is an interesting point in itself because you want to line up the completion of the research with at least one Sentry being able to cast Hallucination immediately so you'd need to cram a Sentry in at some point early on to save up energy. It is possible we might see Hallucination being used more often though in 1.2, possibly followed up with 3 Gates, into expand or tech, but unlikely, any offense. However, I don't think this will necessarily be popular, but it will give Protoss another option to open with.

Meatshields: Hallucinations take 200% damage (though Immortals DO have Hardened Shell so they take 20 capped) so in most situations I feel the energy would be better spent on Forcefields and Guardian Shields. However, as players understand the game better, we may see people abusing target priority with Hallucinations.

Spotting: Since we can Hallucinate flying units, it is possible to use Hallucination well with Blink Stalkers for early aggressive options. Would probably only be effective in the PvT and PvP matchup because the current metagame tends to not have spotting structures around their bases due to Collosi and Observers giving vision later on for large Protoss armies to take out buildings in an attempt to bait a confrontation. However, this early aggression would be very gas heavy, so assuming it's even possible, you wouldn't have many Sentries if your opponent attempted any early aggression. As for late game high ground spotting, we have better options, Observers, Collosi and if the 1.2 patch is to remain the same, Phoenixes and Void Rays, as they might see more use.

So now that we've looked at the possible benefits of Hallucination, let's look at it's downsides.

Tradeoff

Smaller Army: Without Warpgate tech, units will take a much longer time to be produced (10 seconds each if I'm not mistaken). Less units plus the extra gas used up (Hallucination would probably only be significant early unless people are using them as meatshields) that reduces our Sentry count means that the Protoss player might end up very vulnerable to early pressure. More gateways might make up for this, but it may not hold off very early timing pushes.

Reinforcement: Aggression is less likely to be sustainable since units take longer to be produced and still need to travel. However, this should only be a problem early on. Warpgate would be researched ASAP.

Late Tech: This is crucial. We might end up going for a more 'effective' tech path, but the combination of a smaller army due to lack of Warpgate and the lack of Sentries due to all the teching (Hallucination + Getting your T2 upon scouting) might prove fatal.


My conclusion: I still think Warpgate would be the preferred opening but early Blink Stalker/Hallucination aggression might punish Terrans who go for fast Factory openings and might give more aggressive openings against Toss which can delay Collosi tech, and later on, be supported by Stargate units (if your opponent went for more Immortals) or Robo units (if your opponent went for more Gateway compositions to defend). Generally I don't feel this would affect the PvZ matchup as Protoss usually want to be able to be constantly aggressive against Zerg.

So yeah, feel free to give me your opinions on my points. Be gentle =p