Starcraft 2 – My diamond quest

Starcraft 2 rox but why do I suck so much?  I’ve been a gold/platinum player forever and will probably never reach diamond in lifetime.  I guess I can attribute this to my 50 peak APM, my inability to micro properly, and my penchant for cheese tactics.

I’m trying to improve my repertoire of Protoss strategies for 1v1 and 2v2 which primarily consists of 2 gate zealot rushes, standard 4 gate builds, fast dts, or cannon rushes.  I’m finding that going outside of these  is pretty difficult.  Trying things like  standard builds off of 8 pylon only work well if the opponent doesn’t scout you or rush you so  I guess it’s another form of cheese.  Switching to a toss 1/1/1 build with gateway, robo, starport is too gas intensive without 2 basing first.  Forge FE could work in 1v1, but in 2v2 it’s easily overcome by an early scout and rush.  There must be something more.  When I find something I’ll let you know.  For now, I’m just glad I moved past the “mass void rays” strategy which dominates lower level matches and have become so good a cheese that I can now defend against it.

Ok, maybe my limitation isn’t in the strategy but rather the execution of it.  How do pros have 200+APMs on a consistent basis?  That’s just ridiculous!  Do they all remap the keys using the new vanilla shortcuts?  Do they have special keyboards?  I was watching NaDa play last night on his live stream and his use of the location hotkeys was incredible.  My fingers don’t even reach the f5-f8 keys without leaving home so how does he do it so fast AND micro his units?

I feel that overall, the weakness in my game is in the early to mid game; around 3-7 minutes.  I’m always wanting to produce more probes and get more minerals and gas rather than build fighting units.  Maybe that’s the Chinese in me or my MS in Finance that’s urging me to build a solid base before pushing out.  In anycase, I’m pretty sure that I need to work on cutting production at the right time and doing calculated timing pushes.

Micro, Macro, Micro, Macro, Micro, Macro.  I can never get a rhythm down.  I find myself spending so much time in a micro battle that I end up having 500 unspent resources or no supply because I forgot to build pylons.  What’s the trick?  The gods of oGs and TeamLiquid do all this multitasking and strategy with ease.  Their replays make the game seem so simple.  Argh.  So frustrating that I know some of the things I need to work on, but it seems pretty impossible for a mere mortal like me.

If you have any suggestions for me to try, I’d love to hear it.

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