Thursday, June 6, 2013

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How to Become Better in Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm

Here's a few steps for you, when one gets boring, move onto a different one.
1. Watch streams. First person views of a game mean so much more than a casted view without any fog of war and with casters putting ideas in your head. You get a better handle on what players actually see and the decisions they make based on that. You see where they set their rallies, how they spend their apm, and how they spend their money, and it gives you a better grasp on how to do that yourself.
2. Practice. Potentially boring to do, but necessary. You won't get better until you stop getting supply blocked. You won't get better until you start hitting injects and spreading creep. You won't get better until you can learn economy management, gas timings, drone windows, and how to manage your larvae. To start off, you might want to practice you mechanics against a very easy computer. Computers on this difficulty rarely (if ever) attack, and so you are free to focus on everything that you need to. Once you start to get better mechanics, move onto the ladder where you can practice your mechanics against pressure builds and incorporate scouting and reactionary play into your game. I would recommend that you avoid any computer above the very easy difficulty. Medium-Very Hard computers are so unlike humans that they can actually reinforce your bad habits, and insane computers take it to another level by cheating (they get more resources per drone carry than you do). If you feel you want to step up your practice, take it to the ladder.
3. Theorycrafting. Many people scoff at this for some reason, but top players do this all the time. The only way to learn something new, and the best way to surprise your opponent, is to hit him with something he has never seen before. Sometimes, out of the box strategies are a bad idea, but after awhile you might find something new that works, and suddenly you can incorporate it into the build you're already using to add versatility to it. A month down the road your ZvX might look so different from the meta-ZvX that you will never have to worry about getting metagamed on the ladder again! This is personally how I feel when I play ZvP, as I play such a quirky style that I know my opponent will never guess what's coming unless he has played me before.
These are 3 things that will all make you better if you invest time into it. The greatest thing about step 3 is that you don't even need a computer to do it! Some of the best strategies I've made have been while I was at work bored out of my mind and just thinking Starcraft. I get home and put my strategy to the test, and lo and behold it works (or it doesn't and I learn something new about the game anyways). Above all, the best way to get better at this game is just to invest the time into it. Everybody has a skill cap that they will hit, and many people have natural skill that others do not. Think of this game as similar to learning a musical instrument - if you practice it every day you'll improve. If you practice it once a week, you'll maintain your skill. If you practice it once a month, you'll forget everything you've learned every single time you play, and it will be like starting over every time.
Keep in mind that even though I am in Masters, I still do all 3 of these things - including step 2. I regularly play custom games against bronze players where instead of playing normally, I mass queens and play 100% defensively while I focus on creeping up the map and hitting my injects perfectly. I also will play games against very easy computers where I try to learn new openings so that I can keep opponents guessing if I play them more than once. Surprisingly enough, the difference between an 11 overpool 18 hatch build, a 15 pool 17 hatch build, and a 15 hatch 16 pool build can be so significant that it messes up your entire mid and late game simply because of overlord, queen, gas, and drone timings. I regularly run different openings, different midgame gas timings, and different queen counts against very easy computers so that these can all feel comfortable to me, and so that in the heat of queen/hellion micro against another masters player I won't forget to hit my overlord timing due to an unfamiliarity with my opening.
I also regularly watch professionals stream. When I am stuck in a matchup, or I feel hopeless, I turn off the game and I turn on my favorite zerg stream (sometimes a VOD) and I just watch. Not only is it comforting to see someone steamrolling their way through ladder with zerg, but I also pick up tiny little things that improve my game which I had forgotten or simply hadn't thought of. It's not until you get good at this game that you start to realize how bad you really are.
Starcraft 2 Guides can be very useful to boost your gaming experience and can teach you how to play your race, how the top players are rocking the game and the best strategies that would help you go pro in Starcraft 2. There are a few good free strategies and guides available, but if you want the whole package and have a few dollars to spare, these premium guides are definitely the right way to go.

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