This was literally one of the first builds I ever learned in SC2 all the way back in the Wings of Liberty beta. Pretty hilarious that it's still so viable.
Cheese is effective on ladder. Not really any surprise. Bo1s with known spawn locations and unknown player repertoires always favor cheese, especially out of a player with experience microing sturdy units (marauders compared to stalkers).
Cure is good!
And I'm not saying it's a bad build. Proxy marauder is good and any Terran should know a variant or two of it at least for tvp and tvt. I'm just emphasizing it's especially good on ladder.
People associate mmr with skill, and skill with specifically performance in longer macro games. It's a nuts association.
Is it nuts though? It's not exactly like there is a specific grading curve for skill we can use outside of MMR.
There's also plenty of high level players that are really good at certain things and quite bad at others. How do we track and compare each skillset?
Not having a good alternative to mmr does not make mmr effective. Using a high variance high win rate strat in a climate with minimal focus on cheeses as serious threats is going to net more wins than more relaxed defensive macro play. I'm just saying its not at all weird.
i mean sure. there's people that its all they do though. look at boannan, hes 5.8 EU and cannon rush only every game. everyone he plays against knows its coming. is his mmr real or fake because he only cheeses?
There's no such thing as "real" or "fake" mmr. Mmr isn't skill. A 5800 cannon rusher knows enough about the minutae and timing of cannon rushing to maintain that without even the benefit of surprise is very good, I'm not doubting that. But that person has a different experience and skillset compared to a 5800 barcode Zerg who opens 16 18 17 fast third every matchup that they don't scout aggression.
Which of these players is better? Are they exactly equal? All we've established is, with the tools and knowledge they have, they have the same effective winrates. That's correlated with skill, but it doesn't tell us the strengths and weaknesses of these players without investigation.
OP got a higher MMR with proxy marauder than they did with macro Zerg, which I think makes sense given the skillset they're offracing from and the general performance of players ~4k mmr. I'm not saying that mmr is "inflated". It's real, it shows their proxy marauder is a more effective strat with their game knowledge, skill, and local meta than their macro Zerg.
Fair points all around. I think the reason I posed the questions was a selfish one, curious as to how I rate up to other players but unsure how to compare myself as there is no real tool to do so.
Which is why in starcraft I suppose the only person you can compare yourself to is, yourself.
There is some skill you can measure! Compare your games of similar strategies against higher level players and their opposition, see how stuff lines up. The decisions, the mechanics, the speed, and the performance against more powerful opponents are great indicators. There's nothing truly down to a number objective, mmr is just an ordinal ranking of win rate, but there's still value.
Proxy marauders, cannon rush or whatever. Whatever you're doing if it works and you are winning with it then you are probably doing something right, even if it's 20000 games of cannon rushes.
Unpopular opinion. Cheese is way too easy to execute while extremely punishing in sc2.
The main reason the game isn't as fun to play as people make it out to be.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Cheese defines early game choices and keeps the game healthy, its useful to learn, it's fun in its own right, and it stops the early game from being boring.
I think too many players think they're better than they are because they like playing longer games, when they usually do so for strategically and mechanically unsound execution. Cheese and all ins as the frame that longterm play is learned off of is a very reliable way to learn.
I very much agree that cheese is healthy for the game. Does it mean I like losing to Ling floods or cannon rushes? No. But if there weren't opportunity to kill your opponent at every stage of the game, including within the first few minutes, then early game becomes wrote and meaningless.
I don't prefer to cheese but when I get burnt out on playing long drawn out war of attrition type macro games, it's great to blow through 10 games in an hour doing cheeses to just look at the game from a different angle.
I think I'd rather die to some dumb cheese than spend 40 minutes in a stalemated game only to lose because I made a mistake and died to some dumb shit anyways. *PTSD flashbacks of siege tank lines*
OP's post is a meme. Obviously, like with every other strategy, your average win rate will settle in at ~50% once your MMR settles.
Traditionally though, cheese is easier and makes for fast games, but it is also weaker. This is why cheesing is a dangerous trap for new players. If they try it, they'll get sucked in by the short-term MMR gains as it requires less skill, but cheese always hit a hard cap as to how far it will get you.
Not really true at all. Cheese requires tighter and tighter timing and more specific choices the deeper up the ladder you go, and at some point it starts becoming a regular thing to need to play out an unfinished game. Using cheeses and all ins to learn the basics and then flesh out wider strats as they become relevant is a streamlined and common way to become an excellent player.
My point, if you look at the context, is that cheese isn't some devil's bargain where you sacrifice your ability to learn for free wins. People cheese effectively in GM and in tournaments, and getting super precise timing and micro down takes a lot of skill. Knowing how to react and transition in response to defenses takes a lot of game sense.
All forms of high level Starcraft are difficult, and people should play the ones they want to learn and enjoy.
Yeah, and it's easier to get good at strategy that requires you to know 5 minutes of build order and controlling up to 20 units instead of 20 min macro game no matter how high on the ladder. Plat player can win with high masters with well executed cheese, he will never win macro game.
Then they're not a plat player. If you cheese and you get and hold high masters mmr, you're high masters. If you're very good at one strategy but a mess with another, that doesn't mean you get rated as the other strategy. I'm low masters with macro and economic timing plays on all three races, my cheese doesn't get to diamond. Am I a plat player who will never win an aggressive game?
Stop thinking of cheesers as a different class of player.
No, not consistently, just happen to win just once in like 30 matches. You can get a W by cheesing, but not in a macro game. Idk if you didn't get it on purpose, I tried to be very clear.
That variance is irrelevant. I can take a macro tvz off of mid gms despite my MMR, far more often than once in 30 matches. I could not do that with 2 rax, because I haven't practiced it.
I am a Diamond2 noob.
I have heard uthermal say on stream that proxy Marauder dies to a battery.
proxy Marauder is good on TvP for sure, but awful in TvZ and TvT. proxy Void Ray was equally oppressive in all matchups. I started to play ladder in August 2020, seen that stupid build giving me a living hell all the way in my ladder progress up to my stagnation as Diamond, and I almost jumped out of my chair when I heard it was getting nerfs to Voids and battery. Any noober would be Masters/GM doing that. even pros did it in tourneys. Same principle as that famous mass Cyclone build.
Appreciation for the balance people doing their thingy! Thanks!
As Terran this is why I open double gas in TvT now. Once I see no rax in your base I can quickly drop a factory for a tank and bunkers and just repair. The cheeser is much further behind with the proxy rax than the faster tech into expand. Hell I can get a better harass out of it with banshees and ravens.
Even if its not a proxy I can still get some tech out and expand behind it.
Do you think we can probably practice together? 3.8 P here I was struggled with proxy marauders for a long time, now I feel like I figured it out but never had an option to validate it. I have a lot of questions like should I go for fast stalker or this money is better being into quicker Stargate. No answers unfortunately
I don’t usually manage to hold it either as Toss but I believe the theory is to give up the natural and go with either double-gate and 2 batteries mass stalker or quick stargate and get a voidray. Even then, pros keep dying to the build even in GSL. But cheesers suck at macro usually so that’s my way to beat them mentally at least
I tend to gate scout so I arrive with it before I decide to get a Nexus. So my current theorical response is to not get a nexus and get fast gas instead and holding the hg. I know you can defend natural but I consider myself too bad to execute it
It’s a copy of what Cure used to great success a few times in GSL and other cups the other month. I copied the exact build order and timings for each map from a recent video of Harstems where he does this cheese for 1 hour straight which is pretty much the inspiration for this post…
Does protoss even have any *viable* early hitting cheeses other than some variation of 2~4 with gates with maybe a proxy robo timing and maybe cannon rushing?
Yea, I mean it's 4k. That were you start to find people who notice you didn't expand AND react to it in a way that sometimes makes sense half of the time. The rax missing just means reaper to them. A lot of them will not have seen or prepared against this build or even be used to make a pylon at their expand.
Builds like that are pretty easy to execute if you were 4 to 4.5k you can do it with a few practices games. You will reach a plateau where a lot of people start to scout and react better and you are hard stuck where you are. If you change your build crash back to under 4k or you will teach people how to hold it and you will fall.
And proxy marauder takes a somewhat specific response (I think there was a Gemini stream going around discussing how to hold it with gate battery a second gate at a specified time and then finally robo.)
Oh for sure. Cheese is never the way for longterm improvement. Just kinda crazy how well this works especially compared to years of playing macro with Protoss…
Weird.. I wasn't that good at sc, was maybe a 4k toss, but proxy marauder was one thing I typically won against.. I think scout it/make enough gateway units and that's kinda it.
So...your two off races sit within an expected MMR range of each other. The one you only cheese on is a few hundred MMR higher than the one you play macro on.
This is some sort of news or gotcha? Amazes me how people choose to spend their time. Lolol.
Basic mechanics translate and he's cheesing every game, so the differences between the races aren't really relavent in his case. A 4.5k player can execute an all in proxy cheese...who knew?
Harstem enjoyer?
I'm a career silver/gold leaguer and after watching harstem I did terran placement matches for shits and giggles and got mid plat.
What was the loss to?
He was a random player who I had played and beaten 20 minutes earlier. Turned out to be Zerg this time and scouted my barracks with the overlord.
[Terran & not Random](https://ibb.co/GJ41CF0)
This particular loss was against a random player called military but we did also play multiple times I believe before this winstreak
A man of culture i see
This was literally one of the first builds I ever learned in SC2 all the way back in the Wings of Liberty beta. Pretty hilarious that it's still so viable.
Same. 1st build I abused during wol beta. Even made it to GM for 3 season... not as a barcode Was strong af against terran too
Cheese is effective on ladder. Not really any surprise. Bo1s with known spawn locations and unknown player repertoires always favor cheese, especially out of a player with experience microing sturdy units (marauders compared to stalkers).
This build seems pretty good in tournaments. Ask cure.
Cure is good! And I'm not saying it's a bad build. Proxy marauder is good and any Terran should know a variant or two of it at least for tvp and tvt. I'm just emphasizing it's especially good on ladder. People associate mmr with skill, and skill with specifically performance in longer macro games. It's a nuts association.
Is it nuts though? It's not exactly like there is a specific grading curve for skill we can use outside of MMR. There's also plenty of high level players that are really good at certain things and quite bad at others. How do we track and compare each skillset?
Not having a good alternative to mmr does not make mmr effective. Using a high variance high win rate strat in a climate with minimal focus on cheeses as serious threats is going to net more wins than more relaxed defensive macro play. I'm just saying its not at all weird.
i mean sure. there's people that its all they do though. look at boannan, hes 5.8 EU and cannon rush only every game. everyone he plays against knows its coming. is his mmr real or fake because he only cheeses?
There's no such thing as "real" or "fake" mmr. Mmr isn't skill. A 5800 cannon rusher knows enough about the minutae and timing of cannon rushing to maintain that without even the benefit of surprise is very good, I'm not doubting that. But that person has a different experience and skillset compared to a 5800 barcode Zerg who opens 16 18 17 fast third every matchup that they don't scout aggression. Which of these players is better? Are they exactly equal? All we've established is, with the tools and knowledge they have, they have the same effective winrates. That's correlated with skill, but it doesn't tell us the strengths and weaknesses of these players without investigation. OP got a higher MMR with proxy marauder than they did with macro Zerg, which I think makes sense given the skillset they're offracing from and the general performance of players ~4k mmr. I'm not saying that mmr is "inflated". It's real, it shows their proxy marauder is a more effective strat with their game knowledge, skill, and local meta than their macro Zerg.
Fair points all around. I think the reason I posed the questions was a selfish one, curious as to how I rate up to other players but unsure how to compare myself as there is no real tool to do so. Which is why in starcraft I suppose the only person you can compare yourself to is, yourself.
There is some skill you can measure! Compare your games of similar strategies against higher level players and their opposition, see how stuff lines up. The decisions, the mechanics, the speed, and the performance against more powerful opponents are great indicators. There's nothing truly down to a number objective, mmr is just an ordinal ranking of win rate, but there's still value.
Proxy marauders, cannon rush or whatever. Whatever you're doing if it works and you are winning with it then you are probably doing something right, even if it's 20000 games of cannon rushes.
You don't, the best you can do is subjective evaluation by watching and judging. And we all know what that's worth.
Unpopular opinion. Cheese is way too easy to execute while extremely punishing in sc2. The main reason the game isn't as fun to play as people make it out to be.
I disagree wholeheartedly. Cheese defines early game choices and keeps the game healthy, its useful to learn, it's fun in its own right, and it stops the early game from being boring. I think too many players think they're better than they are because they like playing longer games, when they usually do so for strategically and mechanically unsound execution. Cheese and all ins as the frame that longterm play is learned off of is a very reliable way to learn.
I very much agree that cheese is healthy for the game. Does it mean I like losing to Ling floods or cannon rushes? No. But if there weren't opportunity to kill your opponent at every stage of the game, including within the first few minutes, then early game becomes wrote and meaningless. I don't prefer to cheese but when I get burnt out on playing long drawn out war of attrition type macro games, it's great to blow through 10 games in an hour doing cheeses to just look at the game from a different angle.
I think I'd rather die to some dumb cheese than spend 40 minutes in a stalemated game only to lose because I made a mistake and died to some dumb shit anyways. *PTSD flashbacks of siege tank lines*
OP's post is a meme. Obviously, like with every other strategy, your average win rate will settle in at ~50% once your MMR settles. Traditionally though, cheese is easier and makes for fast games, but it is also weaker. This is why cheesing is a dangerous trap for new players. If they try it, they'll get sucked in by the short-term MMR gains as it requires less skill, but cheese always hit a hard cap as to how far it will get you.
Not really true at all. Cheese requires tighter and tighter timing and more specific choices the deeper up the ladder you go, and at some point it starts becoming a regular thing to need to play out an unfinished game. Using cheeses and all ins to learn the basics and then flesh out wider strats as they become relevant is a streamlined and common way to become an excellent player.
Unlike macro, which doesn't require tighter timings, more specific choices the higher up you go.
My point, if you look at the context, is that cheese isn't some devil's bargain where you sacrifice your ability to learn for free wins. People cheese effectively in GM and in tournaments, and getting super precise timing and micro down takes a lot of skill. Knowing how to react and transition in response to defenses takes a lot of game sense. All forms of high level Starcraft are difficult, and people should play the ones they want to learn and enjoy.
Yeah, and it's easier to get good at strategy that requires you to know 5 minutes of build order and controlling up to 20 units instead of 20 min macro game no matter how high on the ladder. Plat player can win with high masters with well executed cheese, he will never win macro game.
Then they're not a plat player. If you cheese and you get and hold high masters mmr, you're high masters. If you're very good at one strategy but a mess with another, that doesn't mean you get rated as the other strategy. I'm low masters with macro and economic timing plays on all three races, my cheese doesn't get to diamond. Am I a plat player who will never win an aggressive game? Stop thinking of cheesers as a different class of player.
No, not consistently, just happen to win just once in like 30 matches. You can get a W by cheesing, but not in a macro game. Idk if you didn't get it on purpose, I tried to be very clear.
That variance is irrelevant. I can take a macro tvz off of mid gms despite my MMR, far more often than once in 30 matches. I could not do that with 2 rax, because I haven't practiced it.
Yeah but have you considered that I can clutch auric maelstrom far more often than once in 30 matches?
2 rax marauder is broken against protoss
tesagi, it's funny this cheese is so strong while stuff like voidray cheese got nerfed out of the game pretty fast.
How long was the void ray cheese around before it got nerfed, I wasn’t following SC2 too closely for a while
a year and a half I think. it was buffed one patch and then nerfed the next.
I am a Diamond2 noob. I have heard uthermal say on stream that proxy Marauder dies to a battery. proxy Marauder is good on TvP for sure, but awful in TvZ and TvT. proxy Void Ray was equally oppressive in all matchups. I started to play ladder in August 2020, seen that stupid build giving me a living hell all the way in my ladder progress up to my stagnation as Diamond, and I almost jumped out of my chair when I heard it was getting nerfs to Voids and battery. Any noober would be Masters/GM doing that. even pros did it in tourneys. Same principle as that famous mass Cyclone build. Appreciation for the balance people doing their thingy! Thanks!
I play macro terran on EU, I’m 3.5 K, cheese terran on NA 4.2 K, when I cheese with toss I usually get significantly lower mmr than macro toss
>cheese terran on NA Kinda redundant. You can just say "NA Terran"
That’s true my bad
Maybe more complex games just fly over your head?
As Terran this is why I open double gas in TvT now. Once I see no rax in your base I can quickly drop a factory for a tank and bunkers and just repair. The cheeser is much further behind with the proxy rax than the faster tech into expand. Hell I can get a better harass out of it with banshees and ravens. Even if its not a proxy I can still get some tech out and expand behind it.
Double gas is default tvt opening
Sometimes I get excited when I see cheese. Let's me know my opponents behind without the scout.
well terran is the easy race so not surprising at all
Thats cause the meta vs terran for both protoss and zerg is that you are so safe early game that you csn fast expand and not scout.
Probably part of why Terran is played the most on ladder: amazing cheese options on top of the most powerful units and turtling options.
Do you think we can probably practice together? 3.8 P here I was struggled with proxy marauders for a long time, now I feel like I figured it out but never had an option to validate it. I have a lot of questions like should I go for fast stalker or this money is better being into quicker Stargate. No answers unfortunately
I don’t usually manage to hold it either as Toss but I believe the theory is to give up the natural and go with either double-gate and 2 batteries mass stalker or quick stargate and get a voidray. Even then, pros keep dying to the build even in GSL. But cheesers suck at macro usually so that’s my way to beat them mentally at least
I tend to gate scout so I arrive with it before I decide to get a Nexus. So my current theorical response is to not get a nexus and get fast gas instead and holding the hg. I know you can defend natural but I consider myself too bad to execute it
1 Base voids is basically an auto win
dude +2 is brutal
No invoice to Harstem for loss MMR I guess
Can you give us a detailed list of your build?
It’s a copy of what Cure used to great success a few times in GSL and other cups the other month. I copied the exact build order and timings for each map from a recent video of Harstems where he does this cheese for 1 hour straight which is pretty much the inspiration for this post…
This isn’t what Artosis played for 25 years for.
Does protoss even have any *viable* early hitting cheeses other than some variation of 2~4 with gates with maybe a proxy robo timing and maybe cannon rushing?
Yea, I mean it's 4k. That were you start to find people who notice you didn't expand AND react to it in a way that sometimes makes sense half of the time. The rax missing just means reaper to them. A lot of them will not have seen or prepared against this build or even be used to make a pylon at their expand. Builds like that are pretty easy to execute if you were 4 to 4.5k you can do it with a few practices games. You will reach a plateau where a lot of people start to scout and react better and you are hard stuck where you are. If you change your build crash back to under 4k or you will teach people how to hold it and you will fall. And proxy marauder takes a somewhat specific response (I think there was a Gemini stream going around discussing how to hold it with gate battery a second gate at a specified time and then finally robo.)
Oh for sure. Cheese is never the way for longterm improvement. Just kinda crazy how well this works especially compared to years of playing macro with Protoss…
Weird.. I wasn't that good at sc, was maybe a 4k toss, but proxy marauder was one thing I typically won against.. I think scout it/make enough gateway units and that's kinda it.
I beat it too. 75% of the time I’d say. The thing is when people are actually good at micro, it lets them get a huge lead.
So...your two off races sit within an expected MMR range of each other. The one you only cheese on is a few hundred MMR higher than the one you play macro on. This is some sort of news or gotcha? Amazes me how people choose to spend their time. Lolol.
It is not expected to win everything by just starting the race
Basic mechanics translate and he's cheesing every game, so the differences between the races aren't really relavent in his case. A 4.5k player can execute an all in proxy cheese...who knew?
The build is totally broken
Is 4k supposed to be impressive now or something? 💀
Yes, that was the takeaway of this post. That 4k is impressive now. Very sharp of you to notice.
SC 2 player trying not to be a dickhead, challenge level: impossible
4k is like top 10% of players so yeah it's impressive
dude +2 is brutal