Artosis talks StarCraft 2: 'Roaches are too strong'

GosuGamers placed Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski up against the wall to discuss StarCraft 2. Find out how to stop the Roach Rush, why he goes random and why each game is quite dynamic.

What are your first impressions of StarCraft 2?
- I love the game so far. It feels really fun and deep. Zerg seem a bit strong right now, but so far I'm really enjoying myself! Right now Zerg's Roaches along with Larva Injection from the Queen is unbelievably strong. The rushes are unreal hard to hold off, so I think they need to be dumbed down a bit to make the game a bit more balanced.

How do you counter the Roach rush?
- You have to defend REALLY, REALLY hard. With zerg, you just make your own roaches (ofcourse^^). With Protoss, it seems you really need some cannons to help your zealots. With Terran, you can hold it off with marauders and if you want, some siege tanks.

I saw a replay of White-Ra doing a Void Ray rush to counter Roaches, have you encountered this, and what do you think of it?
- White-Ra's strategy is about a day behind I believe. I was doing Void Ray rush versus it at first, but the Zergs are learning, and it no longer works well on the US servers.

Which race are you playing?
- Right now I am using random so that I can learn the races reasonably well, but it's impeding my knowledge of the races late game sadly.

Are there any tactics that fascinate you?
- I'm really interested by Protoss and Terran at the moment. Zerg seems kind of straight forward, just use the Queen well and have the right number of units at the right time.

Protoss has all sorts of neat and fun options, and Terran has a ton of tech paths you can follow. Well, thats the way it seems right now at least, certainly many of these things will change in the coming weeks and patches.

For instance, Protoss can "charge" units and upgrades to make them produce 50% faster, making the amounts of timings and build orders go through the roof. Also, there are lots of new mobility factors for them; Blink, the Colossus, warp-gates, Warp Prism, etc.

With Terran, you can go a purely bionic-based game, you can try out mech, you can go for flying units, or mix any of these as you like. There are really a lot of options that seem semi-viable right now, making each game quite dynamic.

What league do you play in, and what rank do you hold?
- I'm leading one of the Platinum Leagues, and since day 1 I've been in first place in overall ELO ladder ranking on the US server.

So Ret and Moon will have a hard time playing you then?
- Hahahaha, the game just came out, and that was simply a fun prediction^^. But, I do plan on playing SC2 a ridiculous amount, so we'll see! =P


What are your favorite units, tactics and matchup?
- Hmm, my favorite units so far have to be the Colossus (so fun!) for protoss, the Viking (omg so fun XD) and the Ghost for terran, and, well, I guess the Roach for Zerg, because its won me so many games hahaha!

My favorite matchup right now is PvZ, its quite challenging, and really fun to use all the different protoss tech to try to battle a good macro zerg. My favorite tactic has to be teching fast in PvZ. Its really fun to try and harass/counter the strong zerg players. My least favorite matchup I think is TvZ. I find it quite hard at the moment, but I figure that will change in a couple days as people figure out more strategies for it. I hate playing with terran against a passive macro style zerg.

Have you played with any of the top foreigners of StarCraft yet?
- Well, I've played pretty much all the best ones on the US server. I haven't played or seen any of the Europeans yet, but I have been discussing strategy and tactics with them on MSN. As for the Asian server, no SC1 pros are playing on it yet, so I suspect the level is quite low.

IdrA is playing SC2. I actually haven't played versus him yet, but we are talking about the game a bit. He is doing quite well from what I've heard.

What's your best moment of StarCraft 2 so far?
- I don't know exactly haha... I've had some really fun games, but nothing too epic I think. Everyone is still in the learning stages right now, so every game is so full of flaws that I guess it would be silly to have a "best moment" yet.