Immortal & VR: too much of hard-counter?

[Norfindel]

Immortals are kinda cool, but they can be more of a liability than an asset against Terran. On paper, it looks like it counters tanks/marauders pretty hard, but in actuality, they have a difficult time dealing with marauders and almost never reach the tanks due to the meatshields in front (eg marine/hellion/marauders). So in actuality, you are doing yourself a disservice by building immortals against Terran mech.

The marauder vs immortal dynamic is especially egregious. Marauders beat immortals for better than cost once you hit critical mass, which is around 12 or so. Throw in stim and you can easily take out 1.2x to 1.4x the cost of immortals. Versus a decent player who microes his marauders, going zlot/immortal is the worst decision you can make. Immortals are too slow to catch kiting marauders while zealots will never do any damage because of concussive shells.

That's exactly what it happened in one of my games. I readed someone saying Immortals own Marauders. Zealots are supposed to be effective too, and also against Marines. So, i had my Chargelots + Immortals vs an army of M&M and 2 or 3 Siege Tanks. My army evaporated almost instantly.
I think i'll return to the old good Chargelot+Sentry+Stalker.

Colossi with range is just too late to deal with this kind of attack.

[Raif]

Norfindel I'm curious how many Clots and Immortals did you have? ratio like?

[Norfindel]

Oops, cannot view the replay anymore, but there where a bunch of Zealots, some Stalkers, and like 4 or 5 Immortals vs a bunch of M&M, with like 2 or 3 Siege Tanks behind. I think that the Marauders slowed down the Zealots enough for the Tanks to get at least a free hit, and his unit didn't seem to be affected too much by the Tank splash. Once the Zealots were gone, the Immortals followed really quickly.

I think that the Immortal is just not a reliable unit. Sure, it deals tons of damage to armored units, and takes a maximum 10 dmg while it has shields, but any ranged low-tier unit will kill the shields really fast, and then the immortal will die to any kind of unit.

I think it would be much better to have a reliable meatshield, by giving it some starting shield armor. Of course, the damage vs armored would need to lower to compensate, but the idea would be that other units can deal damage for a longer time, because the immortal is shielding them from damage.

If the enemy goes heavy on Roaches, Ultralisks, Siege Tanks, Thors, and the like, of course, but if there are enough ranged units with at least normal speed attacks, it's far easier to focus fire on a few Immortals, than to do the same with a ton of Marauders or Roaches, and the damage dealed to the few Immortals is going to be huge and kill it very fast.

[minerals]

I want to see a strat with mass Immortals. Like 50 of them.

[Norfindel]

I want to see a strat with mass Immortals. Like 50 of them.

Not going to happend. They cost 250m 100g, and are produced from Robotics, and are destroyed by early-game units.

I would prefer them to be a reliable, hard-to-kill meatshield, than to have a huge bonus vs armored. Then they would be useful in most situations, and would have clear gameplay mechanics.

[Hoywolf]

Sounds like what we have to deal with our roaches. Mara just seem to rip them apart and both the roach and immortals function is to tank... Its really weird that there are anti tank attacks =\

overall immortals are still very good, roaches have a hard time destroying them lose about 50% of their damage to the shield and attack very slow. it forces me to make more sling to deal with them, and its not such a great use of my larvae.

[mythology]

It seems to me like there are some problems with this units. They're too specific, and would be difficult to use in some common situations. For example:

Immortal
This expensive unit is meant to be countered by low-tier units. It's very powerfull against armored units, but it's attack is much less effective against non-armored, only 40% effective. In an scenario where there are many units in battle, it's very difficult to force the Immortals to attack the armored units, unless there are obvious candidates within range, like Siege Tanks and Colossi. But in a battle against lots of smaller units, like mixed infantry, or Roaches mixed with other units, it's a different story. The slow movement speed doesn't helps.
It's shield mechanic is very interenting, but once the shields are gone, the unit will follow.
Basically, when there's a mixed army, it's shift-attacking all the armored units, or accept the randomness of what it's shooting at.

Void Ray
This unit is intended to destroy armored units and buildings, and is hard-countered by light anti-air units when charged, and by everything with and anti-air attack when uncharged. It's not even good against armored units when uncharged, unless you have enough of them to lose few until they get charged. This is too drastic, as the unit is quite useless when uncharged and very powerful when fully charged, at least vs armored/buildings.

What do you think?

saying the immortal is specific is right on vs zerg as it specifically is a zerg killer.

if a zerg player never got air, the protoss player could just mass nothing but immortals and overcome the majority of zerg ground mixes.

the only zerg ground unit that stands a chance is the hydralisk.

just 1 more reason i miss the lurker who i bet could slice up those immortals easy.

but i don't have a problem with this. it just makes a zerg player micro better then everyone else to try and win.

[DemolitionSquid]

saying the immortal is specific is right on vs zerg as it specifically is a zerg killer.

if a zerg player never got air, the protoss player could just mass nothing but immortals and overcome the majority of zerg ground mixes.

the only zerg ground unit that stands a chance is the hydralisk.

just 1 more reason i miss the lurker who i bet could slice up those immortals easy.

but i don't have a problem with this. it just makes a zerg player micro better then everyone else to try and win.

WTF?

Immortals drop like flies to Zerglings. Its not a fair battle at all.

[Norfindel]

WTF?

Immortals drop like flies to Zerglings. Its not a fair battle at all.

^This

Immortals in PvZ are good against Roaches, Ultralisks and Banelings, and i think that's all.

[mythology]

here are some ratio's
7 zerglings for every 1 immortal
3 roaches for every 1 immortal
2.5 hydras for every 1 immortal
22 banelings to kill 1 immortal

this is just 1 type vs 1 type though.

immortals do drop like flies but that's with support. and the number of immortals is a factor.

whats the most immortals you even seen in 1 game?