Initially I thought that the sentry wouldn’t be a very good unit, but it turns out I was dreadfully wrong. Its an early caster for Protoss that also has a ranged attack. One of its spells is force field which creates a force field which no units can move through. The important part of this spell is that you can cast it on top of units and those units will get pushed out of the way. If the enemy is running up your ramp you can block your ramp with a force field and split their army in half. Against a marine and marauder army it is very helpful to not only split the army but prevent the half that went up the ramp from going back down. I don’t think people have even thought of half of the possibilities of this spell.

The next most useful spell is guardian shield. While the shield is cast any ranged damaged that hits a friendly unit inside of the shield (its a pretty big shield) will do -2 damage. So if your opponent has a ranged army you can easily take a ton less damage. Instantly useful and pretty straight forward spell. Both of those spells don’t take any research!

The 3rd spell, hallucination, does have to be researched. The spell is basically a copy of the hallucination from the High Templar in the first Starcraft. While the spell wasn’t always that useful in SC I think it has some nice possibilities in SC2. For example the Colossus has a ridiculously high damage output but dies quickly to focus fire. If you have a ton of hallucinations combined with a couple of real Colossi they become much harder to focus.

So with these three spells the sentry is a pretty sweet unit. What pushes it over the top is that the  sentry counters mutalisks. Yes you read that right. The early game caster counters mutalisks in addition to having some sweet spells. The sentry is fairly slow so it doesn’t do well chasing down harassing mutas, but in a straight up fight they do well.

Right now the sentries are seeing a ton of use probably because the stalker is so bad. In most early games the Protoss will make zealots and then have a ton of extra gas for sentries. The number of sentries made will probably go down if stalkers end up getting the improvements that most players think that they should. Overall the sentry is a unit that every Protoss player needs to use and understand if they want to play at a high level.

I got a Starcraft 2 beta key (not sure if it is because of this site or random luck) and have been grinding that for the last week and a half. I’m playing random and doing pretty well (I think top 100 on US server but its hard to say for sure cause the ranking system blows). I’m going to go and write up some of my thoughts and probably throw up some brief videos. Below a brief summary of some of my thoughts:

It is remarkably balanced. I have been very pessimistic about how balanced the game would be at launch but even in the beta it has beaten those standards. There is no single unit massing strategy that is unbeatable. Whenever I lose the game I can identify some major changes I could have made to win the game. The races aren’t perfectly balanced, but at this point there is no dominant strategy.

Probably the biggest reason that there is no single unit dominant strategy is the counter system. When a unit counters something it counters it hard. For example the colossus counters small units (zealots, marines, most of zerg) ridiculously well. Its not imbalanced it just hard counters those units. I don’t think the hard countering is that much harder than SC1 but because people don’t know what they are doing as much it shows up a lot more in SC2.

I really like the graphics. The early game doesn’t look that great, but the battles look really sweet. The explosions and effects really add a lot to the game. The overall production quality of the game is very high (as is usual for a Blizzard game).

Judging by the major changes we have seen in the first few patches I think the game is going to change a lot during the beta. Some units need to be reworked such as the Stalker (the replacement for the dragoon) which is useless in most situations.

A week and a half in and I have already played 175 games proving that I have no life and that this is a really fun game.

Tasteless is doing a great job of casting starcraft in English. Starcraft is an amazing game at a high level even without expert commentary. This is the first attempt by a Korean league to pay for a English caster so we need to support it!  Go watch some of the vods here.

A copy of World In Conflict appeared under out tree so I’ll be checking that out. Right now I think that its going to be a pretty bad game at least from a competative standpoint but we’ll see. Hope you find some nice presents under you tree.

Sorry guys I’m done. I never thought that the videos would grow as much as they did (15K views an episode) but in the end that isn’t enough to make it big. I had a great time making the videos and following Warcraft 3, but it comes to an end. I’ll still play, but I won’t make more videos outside of a short here or there. I might start it up again for Starcraft 2. Thanks for your support without you I would never have made it past episode 5.

gl hf gg

SeeD

Its final’s week so I’m studying instead of making Imba. Check out this tribute by Simon Karlsson.

Check out Grubby vs ToD from the Extreme Masters Season 2 group phase.

Click here to watch episode 29 of Imbalanced.

The player does have full screen but if you prefer the other players you can use these links. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The video covers the first round of the upper and lower brackets at the WC3L finals. SK-Gaming vs World Elite and Beijing E-sports Team vs Meet Your Makers.

If you haven’t yet friend me on facebook or myspace. If you want to see all the best Warcraft 3 news check out my del.icio.us page.

Friday at 4pm ET the next episode will come out. Beware.

I’m very sorry, but with Thanksgiving coming up I can’t finish what I wanted to before I have to leave. I have two episodes nearly ready to get out, but they aren’t up to the quality that I want so I have to put them off until I return from the 5 day break. Part of the reason is that I lost my motivation for a few days after a deal with GGL fell through. I’m sorry but I just can’t manage to finish these. I hope you guys will understand.