This post will contain analysis on this replay: http://drop.sc/93331. Feel free to download and take a look for yourself, draw your own conclusions and give me feedback. Any amount of doing so is appreciated. Both comments on this blog, and emails sent to ebonwumon@depotwarehouse.net are fantastic.

After I started out in Platinum league, rather demolishing the competition (going with an 80% w/l ratio for a total of about 35 games a few days) my MMR seems to finally have caught up with me and I'm losing almost all my games. My ranking plummeted, and now I'm at a very close risk of dropping out of the Top 50, and I'm also woefully unable to even spend my bonus pool, which has accumulated up to over 80. Of particular issue is my TvZ, specifically mid-game muta/ling/bling.

The opening I'm usually most comfortable with against zerg is a reactor-hellion expand, and it usually works pretty well. My opponents are often unprepared, or on maps like metalopolis, even with spine crawler preparation they have issues fending off the 4-8 early hellions that usually end up killing a significant amount of drones.

This usually puts me in a 2-base worker lead of about 6 harvesters, which at this point in a game vs. a zerg, I feel like it's a good thing. My macro in the early game can slip slightly while micro-ing hellions, but nothing too significant. By the time I'm done my earlygame harass, I have two fully functional bases, with SCVs spread between them if not fully saturated. I'm pumping marauders out of the tech-labbed barracks, which stim should be nearly completed on, as I started it not long after pushing out with the first batch of hellions. This whole time I've also been continually producing hellions which leaves me with a formidible marauder hellion force, with stim and a few marines mixed in. I'll then proceed to push with this force, and usually it does a good amount of damage. The marauders can tank the spinecrawlers and the queens, the hellions roast zerglings and drones and I can either take the game there, or a really sizeable advantage, compounding on my early harass. Or I can lose it all for relatively no damage. This is what has been happening lately, and I'm not sure what the remedy for that is.

Generally what happens, on an unsuccessful push, is I'll go in there, marauders sent in first and they'll start working down spinecrawlers, with the hellions behind roasting lings that run up. However, the zerg takes this opportunity and flees up the ramp with his drones and lings, leaving me with a slightly weakend force from the spinecrawlers/queens I've just killed. If I retreat, his lings run out, surround me and kill me. I'm behind now. In order to prevent being behind, I have to kill more drones, because the zerg will have macro'd between my previous push and this one. So I run up the ramp, and all my forces die, without killing drones, or maybe getting lucky and roasting a couple.

This is where my game starts to fall apart. I've still got a pretty good economy, usually on par with the zerg, so while I've lost that force it's not the end of the world. I usually go up to 2 or 3 factory and 3 or 4 barracks and start producing marine tank. On metalopolis recently I love building a supply depot wall, that forces lings and banelings to either run around and take a few extra tank shots, or crash into it and waste precious banelings.

I feel this wall with tanks behind it gives me a sense of control. The lings surely wouldn't be stupid enough to just run in and fight the tanks, especially behind a wall. Surely I'll win. Tanks have splash damage. Right? Right?

Wrong. Then he does. He just prances up with ling/bling ignoring the tank fire and just kills everything. Then mutas fly by and clean up the rest, leaving me feeling helpless and wanting to punch every zerg in the face. It generally leaves me helpless in terms of what to do? If I go thors, to help deal with the mutas, lings destroy them and that's a giant investment down the drain to a tier one. My tanks are too vulnerable to the lings, and my bio are too vulnerable to the blings, and I just don't seem to have the APM to target banelings with tanks, split marines and stim and fight all at once. Even if I was to try and attempt to do it, I always seem to do it in the wrong order. Split marines? Okay banelings are already here, good luck targetfiring. Target-fire? Okay banelings died, but one outlier made it through, your whole clumped up army is now dead. And anything that's not dead, the Mutas ensure will very soon be dead.

I think my goal for the rest of the week is to commit to a couple games, maybe even grab a practice partner off ladder and try out some new builds vs. zerg, perhaps losing the hellion-marauder opening. Perhaps if I 2rax pressure with marines, or 1 rax fe with a bunch of marine-tank medivac I might be able to handle the ling/bling/muta. I hope. Damn this game.