MaNa's 3gate warp prism all-in (PvP All-In)

Description

It's been a while since I've done an all in build so this will be a bit of a shorter guide as this is a relatively straight forward build that I'll be going over. Since I do want to be sure to cover all areas of Protoss play, I figure I should throw up a guide like this every once and a while. This all-in was shown off to great effect by Liquid'MaNa, a very old school player who remains to be a strong force in the European scene. He actually used it twice in a row in his series vs Drogo and won with it twice which shows how strong of a build it is, especially when left unscouted. For those who favor the intricacies of early game micro, this is also a build that should suit your fancy.

VOD

Replay - Acid Plant LE (92)

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Analysis

Build Explanation

As I stated earlier, this build is about as simple as it gets. I think the only thing more simple than this would be a straight up 4gate. The build starts with a normal two gate opener just like every other PvP build. As a clarification for anyone who was ever unsure of the way to saturate gasses in PvP: what you want to do is rally your probes to make the gasses themselves as a start. The first one will get sent to go mine minerals afterwards but it works out to where the 2nd one will be your 17th probe which means you have 16 on minerals at this point. You then make the gas at 18 supply and you can send that probe that makes the gas to check for a proxy or cannon rush and then use it to make your 2nd gateway. You already have optimal mining on minerals at that point so you don't need it mining anyway. Afterwards, you rally all of the next probes into your gasses until they are full while alternating between them. Send one probe into each gas from the minerals as they finish to make it so there's two mining from each gas when they finish and the 3rd probe should be rallied in afterwards for each. This will leave you with enough minerals and gas to start everything once the Cyber is done no matter what style you are opening for.

Afterwards, you get two stalkers right when the Cyber is done as well as Warp Gate with a chrono on it. You're also making your 3rd pylon on the low ground as a way to fake a normal expansion build. This alone should trip up a lot of players who aren't persistent with their scouting. It's also important to do a low ground pylon block at the natural of the opponent as a way to scout what units they start with. If you want you can also do it at the top of the natural ramp to get a more reliable read so they can't hide anything. Once you see what you need you cancel the pylon. If you see two stalkers then you don't have too much to worry about in terms of immediate aggression since you'll be making stalkers yourself and will always have the defenders advantage. What that does potentially signify though is a desire to be aggressive at some point later on, so it's important to scout around your side of the map for their early probe to see if it proxied anything. If you only see one stalker that meant they went for a stalker/sentry opening which is the least aggressive option. All you need to worry about in this scenario is denying as much scouting as possible. Like I mentioned earlier, some players will be persistent with their scouting and send their probe back after a short while to check if you've expanded. You'll want to keep your stalkers out in the front of your natural to deny that, and then spread them out a bit to try and catch the hallucinated phoenix scout that would be coming across at about 3:50 with a sentry first opener. Adepts are the worst thing you can see since it's the most reliable form of consistent early game scouting at the natural. They can constantly shade in and see if you've expanded or not and also can force you to constantly block the natural ramp with a pylon.

All the while during this you should be making stalkers non-stop after you make your Robo at 28. After the 2nd set of stalkers you will also get your 3rd gateway at 32 supply. Another round of stalkers will follow making a total of six out of the gateways before WG is done. A Warp Prism should be chronod out right when the Robo finishes and then a 38 pylon will go down accompanied by a shield battery in the mineral line to protect vs any oracles. An observer follows the prism just in case of DTs and while the prism is moving across the map you can fit two warp in rounds in which will leave you with a total of 12 stalkers that hit just before 4:40. Anyone who did not scout this should immediately die provided you have some decent micro and don't lose the warp prism. If they did scout it then you'll need to use some nice micro to give yourself an edge, which I'll talk about briefly as well.

Microing with a warp prism

In some situations you will find yourself needing to use some fancy warp prism micro to get yourself out of a rough spot. If your opponent scouts well and gets a good read on what you're doing, they could be in a fairly well defended position. The prism micro allows you to basically have a bunch of mini-blinks with no cool down to force the opponent to reset their shots and keep your stalkers alive longer. You can also dodge stalker shots with this if you are good enough since they are projectiles.

The most efficient way to do quick warp prism micro is the D-Click and right click method. It allows you to perform the least amount of clicks for the same outcome. How it works is you always have the warp prism selected and right click on the stalkers that you want to pick up (usually the ones that are the most injured) and then immediately you press D and click on the warp prism itself. This drops all of the units that are inside directly under the prism and allows you to keep moving the prism the entire time.

Here is an example of me performing that micro and how it can be of use in a fight: Link

Another useful application of this micro technique is performing an elevator maneuver. If you want to catch your opponent by surprise to an even greater extent, then you can bypass their heavily defended front natural entirely by using the warp prism as an elevator into the main base. This has its risks of course as it will leave some stalkers isolated for a time until you can get everything onto the high ground, but if you are able to do so quick enough then you will find yourself in an advantageous position. This can also backfire heavily though if the opponent is well prepared and snipes the warp prism. Generally any time the opponent snipes the prism should lead to a quick de-escalation of the push and most likely a loss, but in this scenario it would be even more game ending. This is done by simply box selecting four stalkers and loading them into the prism and then D-clicking as you get to the high ground and then replicating that until you have all of your stalkers unloaded. You do NOT want to control-click the stalkers or use your control group to select the stalkers since that will make the stalkers you just unloaded go into the warp prism first.

Here's an example of me performing the elevator micro: Link

With just a little bit of implementation of this micro you should find yourself snowballing engagements very heavily and potentially even changing an unwinnable engagement into a winnable one.

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Details

• Created by: Gemini_19    
• Published on: May 20, 2018
• Patch: 4.0.0

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