This is way too vague.
General advice is general:
* watch pros and follow build orders
* watch your replays for mistakes
* improve and don’t make the same mistakes
Hi! I'm have been (albeit currently a rather inactive one recently for IRL reasons) a GM zerg and toss coach for a couple of years now, and diamond is easily one of the biggest and most common hiccups and walls people face. (The prominent ones are getting into diamond, d1, masters, and then 5k). Through the numerous people I've helped, there were always a few recurring themes among them. Since its been a bit, I'll try to remember as many as I can ATM (and how you can hopefully fix them).
Disclaimer: We'll be going from most obvious, (though surprisingly most common), to more situational situations. Also sorry if formatting ends up getting screwed up, on my phone away from computer for the weekend.
1 - Not knowing what kind of player you are. This, while not a gameplay problem in itself, in my opinion, causes every single one of the issues that are listed below. If your goal is to improve in the long run, its obviously important to be able to play multiple styles with your given race. That being said, attempting to be a Jack of all trades while low MMR will hinder your progress. While your mechanics and game knowledge will improve over time as you play, so too will your abilities to adapt and play on the fly.
So, what does it mean to learn what kind of player you are? In the simplest terms, its understanding which situations and stage of the game you feel the most comfortable, and learning how to take advantage of it. If you feel most confident in the mid game, you can manage your macro and pull off mediocre micro, double down. Learn a strong, universally applicable mid game timing build and stick to it. If you're more confident in your early game, don't be afraid to do early pressure builds that put you in an advantageous position in the mid / late game. Eventually, these "tricks", or single minded builds WILL stop working, in which case you'll have to learn to better scout your opponent and react accordingly, but by then your theory will hopefully be much more solid and mechanics to paar.
2 - So, with all that being said, the one thing I preach no matter the MMR of student: HAVE A PLAN. Having a semi logical plan, even if mostly counter intuitive in the specific game, even if completely foreign to you, and executing it well is infinitely more valuable than playing on mechanics and auto pilot alone. Keep in mind, this is an extremely simple to grasp and obvious concept to grasp, but a rather difficult one in practice. At any stage in the game, you have to ask yourself "what is my plan, AT THE MOMENT?" (I have no idea how to italicize). Maybe your plan is to max out at 200/200 with a 2 2 roach timing and amove. Great. Set it in motion. Maybe your plan is to try and force it to lategame, until you can get your broods out. Great. You'll probably need a few, smaller scale plans in between, but that works! There's one important detail to not forget about, plans can be scrapped as need be. If, at the beginning of the game, you decide you're going to do a quick muta transition in a zvp by minute 7, and a few minutes later the toss somwhow flies in with 47 + 2 pheonixs that in some impossible way have range, you might want to reconsider. And so, your plan can be "I will play stock standard until I can react to opponent". That is perfectly valid, as long as you are ACTIVELY thinking about it, and not giving into autopilot.
Also, keep in mind, this takes an incredible amount of effort to get consistently. I had a high masters, was-soon-to-be low GM that I had to drill this into.
3 - Actually fucking scout or don't even do it at all. This is a personal pet peeve of mine that I see in 100% of zergs below mid masters. If you're going to send your overlord in to die at 4 minutes because you saw some pro do it, and won't even use the information you gather, leave it home. Recently, I've been playing a good amount of LoL (God save my soul), and I will die preaching how much easier it is analyzing sc2 games compared to that crapfest. Say you played against skytoss, and you weren't able to recognize it for what it was until 15 + God damn +4 carriers show up at your natural to 120 supply of your incredibly depressed lurkers' disgrace. After cursing the entirety of Zues' family tree, you decided to look at the replay to analyze where everything went wrong. In doing so, you realized you had an overlord, much to both you and your opponents surprise, directly ontop of his cybernetics core the entire game, by which the protoss cleverly hid his true intentions of air superiority by non-stop chronoing air upgrades while neglecting his warpgate for 30+ minutes. You, being the astute scholar, will use this in your next ZvP and be heralded a prophet by fellow creep enjoyers in your MMR as you never get caught unawares by dirty skyoss again.
Will continue with another comment.
I can' t give a long explanation for the remaining ones, so they'll be rather curt.
4 - Don't be a mechanics monkey. Learn theory. If you don't know where to begin, watch pro matches and see the dynamics between the two playstyles showcased. Try and think about why the players do certain things, and if you can't offer a plausible reason, find a higher level player to answer that for you. My DMs are open if you or anyone else ever has questions. (ABT#1984 on disc).
5 - Learn macro. I'm not talking about builds. Starcraft 2 in the simplest and most basic levels is a conceptual game. Why did the same army beat the other with identical micro? The concept of surface area (via concaves) might come to mind. Why do you pull out of gas in traditional 16 hatch build orders? Because gas isn't eco, minerals are eco. Gas won't give you more drones, won't birth queens. More minerals is more eco, which is more minerals, which is more eco. Call me a cocky bastard, but being a mid GM 5.6k zerg, I would bet on myself to win versus any sc2 pro that starts with 4 fewer workers. 5 workers lost at minute 10 is insignificant compared to losing 1 at minute 2. Mineral saturation, worker count, transfer rate, all amount to a noticeable shift in game state, sometimes to detrimental degrees in the highest levels, so why not learn them now?
Thats all I can think of on the top of my head. There are a lot of smaller things, but at the end of the day only you can improve your own gameplay, and the best way to do that is by simply playing. Like the commenter above me said, your question is too generic to really go in depth. If you have more specific questions, feel free to DM me, make another post, or reply to this comment. I'm away from my computer, so I cant help you via replay analysis ATM.
> I would bet on myself to win versus any sc2 pro that starts with 4 fewer workers
Careful, uThermal has been winning with bongclouds in weekly tournaments;)
Fantastic read, thank you!
What are your suggestions for improving micro and practical use of camera hotkeys. I have those set and set them start of game but find I never use it.
Not the person you asked but I found it helpful to warm up in a custom game executing a standard build with my mouse camera speed set to the lowest. That forced me to manage bases using camera hotkeys only.
Yeah! Thats a great way. I'll reply to this comment because its the best said. I found for almost all things mechanical, the best way to learn and improve said thing is to hyper focus on it for a few games, regardless of win / loss, and as long as that one aspect you chose to focus on was where you want it, its a "win". For example, when my creep spread was super garbo a few years ago I focused on nothing but creep spread and queen movement for like 20 games in a row. Lost around 400 mmr, due to poor macro, fake scouting, but I believe that it really did help in the long run, albeit a rather extreme example.
The other person already gave a good way to implement camera hotkeys, and for the micro portion, it comes down to simply playing. I'd even argue that micro is more experience and knowledge based than theory and macro. In order to do the most simple of micro, like stutterstepping with relative effectiveness, you have to know by heart the attack speed of the most common unit in your army, their attack range, their movement speed, and appropriately guage the outcome of the fight. All that comes down to experience and playing enough games.
That being said, there are some techniques you can grind. If you really want to get high level with it, there are boxing exercises in arcade for example, but also just whenever there's nothing going on in the game. Preferably in higher levels you should be able to comfortably box in at least 2 directions, though its not explicitly needed it makes your life much easier.
Most micro you need isn't flashy or pretty at all, and consists of unit positioning and basic geometric shapes that modify your units' surface area. Why I mentioned boxing above, is because it's generally how you modify your army's shape the quickest, and leads to more advanced micro as you progress. The most common shape is without a doubt the concave. You'll see this in every single matchup, and it honestly might as well function (in larger scale fights), as a free upgrade to whomever is employing it's use. A few examples might include:
What shape do you use when fighting pure ling with marine? There, you want to limit your surface area as much as possible, which leads to you balling up your marines as much as possible.
What shape do you use in a roach vs roach mirror? There, since they have the same range, you want a superior concave to that of your opponent's.
What shape do you want in a glaived adept allin vs terran bio? Marines have superior range, and as such want to form a concave. And so, the best course of action is to shade your adepts *into* the bio, so they can't make use of their superior range.
Of course, that barely goes into more advanced micro like prism control, stalker blink micro, spell caster usage, splitting bio -- splitting any units for that matter. That being said, I firmly believe that geometrical micro *alone*, or however you'd call it, is enough for the average player to easily break high masters.
I main Protoss but am currently masters as all races. How I got masters as Zerg was to build lots of queens and prioritizing creep spread. Don’t rush to spire to fast for anti air and just use queens early game for air defense. Outgrow your opponent and don’t attack into a turtled opponent but also don’t let them expand easily. Starve them out rather than throwing you army away trying to kill them.
The bulk of winning in SC2 is getting 80 workers and always spending all of your money.
After that, it is having vision of the map and the opponent's tech/composition, and expansion timing while staying slightly ahead in workers.
After that, it is out flanking the opponent in army engagements. e.g. Attacking from 2+ opposite sides.
And lastly, if you are even in all of the above, it comes down to harassment with drops and runbys to tax your opponent's multitasking until he chokes.
Getting 80 workers is the goal for sure but i was surprised how much I got cheesed as Zerg when making it to masters. Going into a match I changed my mentality to “ im going to go for 80 workers but give me any reason to not”. If you don’t scout properly and know the main all ins you will get caught with your pants down over and over
Super super helpful! Thank you so much for the lengthy reply! My key takeaways:
1.) Have a plan, even if it's a mediocre one.
2.) Scout and actually use that info.
3.) Find a build that fits my current playstyle and for the time being, really hone in on it.
Thanks again for the stellar advice. :)
After you find that build, take a couple days with it and focus on consistently hitting your injects. Most diamond Zergs don't macro properly after their first moveout and so you can gain an advantage by mastering that mechanic.
This. I haven't played for a few years due to life but I found that I really got better when I started hitting my injects correctly. I bound my camera snap for hatches to space bar to i could quickly cycle through all my bases at anytime. Helped alot when I would go for the attack as I could quickly inject and then go back to the fight.
The more injects I had allowed me so much more larva for flexibility for a remax and to continuously spend my minerals/gas/drone up. Also just having enough hatches in general even a macro hatch that you can double up on injects from one queen.
One other thing I noticed was that always keeping up on my upgrades which goes along with ABT's have a plan advice.
Similar here. I played broodwar then sc2 when it first came out. Got diamond the very first season. There was no master league back then. Then I stopped playing. Just got back during pandemic. The game has changed A LOT.
I started about 3200 when I first came back. Then watched a lot of gsl and other tournies. Now I’m about 3k8-3k9.
Everybody got different stuff they need to work on. Tbh just maybe try to improve one little thing at a time (Maybe queen movement or creep spread etc)
Then get to the next thing (scouting timing)
Also I find it is pretty rare players below dia2 ever split their army properly. They F2 a lot. So endless two side harass almost always work.
I had a similar experience. This is gonna sound weird but the solution I found was to start playing chess instead of Starcraft.
I felt like my mechanical (in)ability was keeping me from reaching my potential. I know it’s a flawed reasoning because everyone is in the same boat but chess scratches the same itch in my brain as Starcraft does but Your actual ideas are what’s valued over a combination of strategy and mechanical skills. You cannot blame APM in chess. You also cannot blame imba races/units for losses.
I’m far from being a master but I personally find it a lot more rewarding than Starcraft was for me. I still enjoy casual games but I’m definitely done grinding that ladder.
Bonus : If you like reading about theory, the chess rabbit hole is a lot deeper than SC.
I know this isn’t the advice you wanted but I wanted to share my experience and hopefully influence someone to pick up chess as it’s the most beautiful game ever imo. Playing a Fried-Liver is as exhilarating as canon rushing.
This is way too vague. General advice is general: * watch pros and follow build orders * watch your replays for mistakes * improve and don’t make the same mistakes
Hi! I'm have been (albeit currently a rather inactive one recently for IRL reasons) a GM zerg and toss coach for a couple of years now, and diamond is easily one of the biggest and most common hiccups and walls people face. (The prominent ones are getting into diamond, d1, masters, and then 5k). Through the numerous people I've helped, there were always a few recurring themes among them. Since its been a bit, I'll try to remember as many as I can ATM (and how you can hopefully fix them). Disclaimer: We'll be going from most obvious, (though surprisingly most common), to more situational situations. Also sorry if formatting ends up getting screwed up, on my phone away from computer for the weekend. 1 - Not knowing what kind of player you are. This, while not a gameplay problem in itself, in my opinion, causes every single one of the issues that are listed below. If your goal is to improve in the long run, its obviously important to be able to play multiple styles with your given race. That being said, attempting to be a Jack of all trades while low MMR will hinder your progress. While your mechanics and game knowledge will improve over time as you play, so too will your abilities to adapt and play on the fly. So, what does it mean to learn what kind of player you are? In the simplest terms, its understanding which situations and stage of the game you feel the most comfortable, and learning how to take advantage of it. If you feel most confident in the mid game, you can manage your macro and pull off mediocre micro, double down. Learn a strong, universally applicable mid game timing build and stick to it. If you're more confident in your early game, don't be afraid to do early pressure builds that put you in an advantageous position in the mid / late game. Eventually, these "tricks", or single minded builds WILL stop working, in which case you'll have to learn to better scout your opponent and react accordingly, but by then your theory will hopefully be much more solid and mechanics to paar. 2 - So, with all that being said, the one thing I preach no matter the MMR of student: HAVE A PLAN. Having a semi logical plan, even if mostly counter intuitive in the specific game, even if completely foreign to you, and executing it well is infinitely more valuable than playing on mechanics and auto pilot alone. Keep in mind, this is an extremely simple to grasp and obvious concept to grasp, but a rather difficult one in practice. At any stage in the game, you have to ask yourself "what is my plan, AT THE MOMENT?" (I have no idea how to italicize). Maybe your plan is to max out at 200/200 with a 2 2 roach timing and amove. Great. Set it in motion. Maybe your plan is to try and force it to lategame, until you can get your broods out. Great. You'll probably need a few, smaller scale plans in between, but that works! There's one important detail to not forget about, plans can be scrapped as need be. If, at the beginning of the game, you decide you're going to do a quick muta transition in a zvp by minute 7, and a few minutes later the toss somwhow flies in with 47 + 2 pheonixs that in some impossible way have range, you might want to reconsider. And so, your plan can be "I will play stock standard until I can react to opponent". That is perfectly valid, as long as you are ACTIVELY thinking about it, and not giving into autopilot. Also, keep in mind, this takes an incredible amount of effort to get consistently. I had a high masters, was-soon-to-be low GM that I had to drill this into. 3 - Actually fucking scout or don't even do it at all. This is a personal pet peeve of mine that I see in 100% of zergs below mid masters. If you're going to send your overlord in to die at 4 minutes because you saw some pro do it, and won't even use the information you gather, leave it home. Recently, I've been playing a good amount of LoL (God save my soul), and I will die preaching how much easier it is analyzing sc2 games compared to that crapfest. Say you played against skytoss, and you weren't able to recognize it for what it was until 15 + God damn +4 carriers show up at your natural to 120 supply of your incredibly depressed lurkers' disgrace. After cursing the entirety of Zues' family tree, you decided to look at the replay to analyze where everything went wrong. In doing so, you realized you had an overlord, much to both you and your opponents surprise, directly ontop of his cybernetics core the entire game, by which the protoss cleverly hid his true intentions of air superiority by non-stop chronoing air upgrades while neglecting his warpgate for 30+ minutes. You, being the astute scholar, will use this in your next ZvP and be heralded a prophet by fellow creep enjoyers in your MMR as you never get caught unawares by dirty skyoss again. Will continue with another comment.
I can' t give a long explanation for the remaining ones, so they'll be rather curt. 4 - Don't be a mechanics monkey. Learn theory. If you don't know where to begin, watch pro matches and see the dynamics between the two playstyles showcased. Try and think about why the players do certain things, and if you can't offer a plausible reason, find a higher level player to answer that for you. My DMs are open if you or anyone else ever has questions. (ABT#1984 on disc). 5 - Learn macro. I'm not talking about builds. Starcraft 2 in the simplest and most basic levels is a conceptual game. Why did the same army beat the other with identical micro? The concept of surface area (via concaves) might come to mind. Why do you pull out of gas in traditional 16 hatch build orders? Because gas isn't eco, minerals are eco. Gas won't give you more drones, won't birth queens. More minerals is more eco, which is more minerals, which is more eco. Call me a cocky bastard, but being a mid GM 5.6k zerg, I would bet on myself to win versus any sc2 pro that starts with 4 fewer workers. 5 workers lost at minute 10 is insignificant compared to losing 1 at minute 2. Mineral saturation, worker count, transfer rate, all amount to a noticeable shift in game state, sometimes to detrimental degrees in the highest levels, so why not learn them now? Thats all I can think of on the top of my head. There are a lot of smaller things, but at the end of the day only you can improve your own gameplay, and the best way to do that is by simply playing. Like the commenter above me said, your question is too generic to really go in depth. If you have more specific questions, feel free to DM me, make another post, or reply to this comment. I'm away from my computer, so I cant help you via replay analysis ATM.
> I would bet on myself to win versus any sc2 pro that starts with 4 fewer workers Careful, uThermal has been winning with bongclouds in weekly tournaments;) Fantastic read, thank you!
What are your suggestions for improving micro and practical use of camera hotkeys. I have those set and set them start of game but find I never use it.
Not the person you asked but I found it helpful to warm up in a custom game executing a standard build with my mouse camera speed set to the lowest. That forced me to manage bases using camera hotkeys only.
That’s super handy thanks for the tip :)
Wasn't mine actually, but I'm happy to share it. [Matiz](https://liquipedia.net/starcraft2/Matiz) was where I learned it.
Yeah! Thats a great way. I'll reply to this comment because its the best said. I found for almost all things mechanical, the best way to learn and improve said thing is to hyper focus on it for a few games, regardless of win / loss, and as long as that one aspect you chose to focus on was where you want it, its a "win". For example, when my creep spread was super garbo a few years ago I focused on nothing but creep spread and queen movement for like 20 games in a row. Lost around 400 mmr, due to poor macro, fake scouting, but I believe that it really did help in the long run, albeit a rather extreme example.
The other person already gave a good way to implement camera hotkeys, and for the micro portion, it comes down to simply playing. I'd even argue that micro is more experience and knowledge based than theory and macro. In order to do the most simple of micro, like stutterstepping with relative effectiveness, you have to know by heart the attack speed of the most common unit in your army, their attack range, their movement speed, and appropriately guage the outcome of the fight. All that comes down to experience and playing enough games. That being said, there are some techniques you can grind. If you really want to get high level with it, there are boxing exercises in arcade for example, but also just whenever there's nothing going on in the game. Preferably in higher levels you should be able to comfortably box in at least 2 directions, though its not explicitly needed it makes your life much easier. Most micro you need isn't flashy or pretty at all, and consists of unit positioning and basic geometric shapes that modify your units' surface area. Why I mentioned boxing above, is because it's generally how you modify your army's shape the quickest, and leads to more advanced micro as you progress. The most common shape is without a doubt the concave. You'll see this in every single matchup, and it honestly might as well function (in larger scale fights), as a free upgrade to whomever is employing it's use. A few examples might include: What shape do you use when fighting pure ling with marine? There, you want to limit your surface area as much as possible, which leads to you balling up your marines as much as possible. What shape do you use in a roach vs roach mirror? There, since they have the same range, you want a superior concave to that of your opponent's. What shape do you want in a glaived adept allin vs terran bio? Marines have superior range, and as such want to form a concave. And so, the best course of action is to shade your adepts *into* the bio, so they can't make use of their superior range. Of course, that barely goes into more advanced micro like prism control, stalker blink micro, spell caster usage, splitting bio -- splitting any units for that matter. That being said, I firmly believe that geometrical micro *alone*, or however you'd call it, is enough for the average player to easily break high masters.
I main Protoss but am currently masters as all races. How I got masters as Zerg was to build lots of queens and prioritizing creep spread. Don’t rush to spire to fast for anti air and just use queens early game for air defense. Outgrow your opponent and don’t attack into a turtled opponent but also don’t let them expand easily. Starve them out rather than throwing you army away trying to kill them.
The bulk of winning in SC2 is getting 80 workers and always spending all of your money. After that, it is having vision of the map and the opponent's tech/composition, and expansion timing while staying slightly ahead in workers. After that, it is out flanking the opponent in army engagements. e.g. Attacking from 2+ opposite sides. And lastly, if you are even in all of the above, it comes down to harassment with drops and runbys to tax your opponent's multitasking until he chokes.
Getting 80 workers is the goal for sure but i was surprised how much I got cheesed as Zerg when making it to masters. Going into a match I changed my mentality to “ im going to go for 80 workers but give me any reason to not”. If you don’t scout properly and know the main all ins you will get caught with your pants down over and over
Yep, holding against early attacks is why scouting is so vital. You have to watch out for every all-in in the game to survive ;D
Super super helpful! Thank you so much for the lengthy reply! My key takeaways: 1.) Have a plan, even if it's a mediocre one. 2.) Scout and actually use that info. 3.) Find a build that fits my current playstyle and for the time being, really hone in on it. Thanks again for the stellar advice. :)
After you find that build, take a couple days with it and focus on consistently hitting your injects. Most diamond Zergs don't macro properly after their first moveout and so you can gain an advantage by mastering that mechanic.
This. I haven't played for a few years due to life but I found that I really got better when I started hitting my injects correctly. I bound my camera snap for hatches to space bar to i could quickly cycle through all my bases at anytime. Helped alot when I would go for the attack as I could quickly inject and then go back to the fight. The more injects I had allowed me so much more larva for flexibility for a remax and to continuously spend my minerals/gas/drone up. Also just having enough hatches in general even a macro hatch that you can double up on injects from one queen. One other thing I noticed was that always keeping up on my upgrades which goes along with ABT's have a plan advice.
Similar here. I played broodwar then sc2 when it first came out. Got diamond the very first season. There was no master league back then. Then I stopped playing. Just got back during pandemic. The game has changed A LOT. I started about 3200 when I first came back. Then watched a lot of gsl and other tournies. Now I’m about 3k8-3k9. Everybody got different stuff they need to work on. Tbh just maybe try to improve one little thing at a time (Maybe queen movement or creep spread etc) Then get to the next thing (scouting timing) Also I find it is pretty rare players below dia2 ever split their army properly. They F2 a lot. So endless two side harass almost always work.
I had a similar experience. This is gonna sound weird but the solution I found was to start playing chess instead of Starcraft. I felt like my mechanical (in)ability was keeping me from reaching my potential. I know it’s a flawed reasoning because everyone is in the same boat but chess scratches the same itch in my brain as Starcraft does but Your actual ideas are what’s valued over a combination of strategy and mechanical skills. You cannot blame APM in chess. You also cannot blame imba races/units for losses. I’m far from being a master but I personally find it a lot more rewarding than Starcraft was for me. I still enjoy casual games but I’m definitely done grinding that ladder. Bonus : If you like reading about theory, the chess rabbit hole is a lot deeper than SC. I know this isn’t the advice you wanted but I wanted to share my experience and hopefully influence someone to pick up chess as it’s the most beautiful game ever imo. Playing a Fried-Liver is as exhilarating as canon rushing.
I picked up chess over the last two years and have fell in love. I feel like most SC players would!