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This is something I've been aware of for a while, and I've been wondering if it's worth taking seriously. One of the things that make ZvT quite difficult for Zerg is that tanks, and especially vessels are mechanically more demanding to deal with than they are to use, and I figured one way to offset this would be to use burrow to make it as obnoxious as possible for the Terran player to get full value out of irradiate, and increase the survivability of defilers against tanks.
The first application is just to burrow all but one of your defilers at expansion as well as a handful of lings, so that way the Terran player has to click individually on tiny little black dots to find them, and spend more actions that are not doing real damage (like irradiating several defilers, managing drops, etc.) for relatively little effort on the Zerg's part, since you can use box and the wireframe click to find the defilers quickly enough. Throw a swarm over them, and they become immune to tank fire as well, and far more difficult to irradiate, even if Terran sees the lings and defiler burrowing.
It can also be used during pushes, counter-pushes and drop harass, which is a bit more apm intensive, but has the potential to be even more so for Terran to clean up and possibly game-ending (if his push is delayed for too long, the critical expo is shut down, plagues over depots and production) if he doesn't devote time to it.
Zerg players: Thoughts? Have you tried these kinds of tactics? Did it feel worth it?
Terran players: Have you ever seen this kind of play? What was it like to deal with, or how much would it really bother you?
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2100 zerg here
I do upgrade burrow in ZvT if i feel their vessel count is starting to get higher. Eraser is a very real threat to your drone line, that can be 100% countered with burrow. For 100/100 it's a no brainer for me. As for using burrow with defilers and lings, never would really use it- there is an unburrow lag time, which can spell doom for units when being attacked.
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Don't get eraser'd. Get Burrow.
A few other things you can do besides save your drones:
If you have a clump of units together, and one of them gets irradiated, burrow them, or burrow the irradiated unit. Whichever is easier for you.
If you are defiler pushing up a ramp, you may dark swarm on top of the ramp, and then immediately send units up. The problem is that the defiler is slow and get a long to time squirm around and move off the ramp, so burrowing it can definitely speed up the process.
You can also burrow a bunch of zerglings to catch marines, but I don't recommend this.
Burrowing at an expansion can stop a CC from being built or landing, which can confuse a Terran player for a bit. It's not a sure thing, though.
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^ As Ramiel/Nina said, Burrow for Drones is very very common in ZvT lategame vs. Vessel cloud.
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One cool trick that some of top zergs are using is to burrow a ling under swarm close to the tank line (you can do that for example when sending your 12 lings or w/e for an attack, just burrow one for later) - if terran forgots to remove the detection tanks would prioritizer the burrowed ling over incoming units and you'll basicalyl be able to destroy whole armies of tanks that focus fire one burrowed link under swarms. That's also why when switching to mech in late game terran would usually avoid having detection and only scan when swarms are off.
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Tsunami said burrow is the best spell in the game 20 years ago, so there's that. He also liked queens and defilers a lot.
Actually the worst part about burrow is that once Terran has detection and attacks one zergling, it is maddening to try to unburrow the other zerglings. I can't recall exactly how it works, but I think if you have a mix of unburrowed and burrowed, they try to burrow when you hit burrow. Or maybe it depends on which one is first. Or maybe I have remembered wrong. Either way I remember in my ultra gosu days when terran did nothing but one base medic marine push, I'd have two groups of lings perfectly set up to spring on them, and if they scanned and started killing them, like 3-4 would unburrow and the rest would die burrowing and unborrowing as I tried to rescue them. The sadness I felt I will never forget.
But yeah, 25 minerals for a cloaked scout is pretty good. Put them around the map like observers, that's how they shine the most. It's good of a flanking style of Zerg, so you can do smart army movement to get the perfect flank from multiple sides. The problem is with modern Zerg every corner is cut so tight that even that handful of Zerglings means less drones and slower tech. Lategame it could maybe be useful? But everything can be useful lategame when your metric is what do I do with 4-5 geysers. Burrowing defiler with zergling sounds clever, but probably hurts when you yourself have trouble finding your defiler, unburrowing it, and laying down a dark swarm in the heat of battle. Probably it and all the lings around it die to a volly of tanks 30% of the time and you lose. It's hard enough throwing down those swarms when they're around and sparing a hotkey just for the defiler might be a bit much. You could do 0 and 9 for each natural I guess. 00uw click I don't know. You could try it, but if you have enough time to do that you probably have enough time to hide it under an overlord.
As said, burrow vs eraser is good. Scourge are preferable Same vs reaver drop, since scarab splash doesn't happen, you might lose less in some cases.
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On October 10 2017 07:33 Chef wrote: Tsunami said burrow is the best spell in the game 20 years ago, so there's that. He also liked queens and defilers a lot.
Interesting. Are there any VODs or replays of him?
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On October 10 2017 07:33 Chef wrote: Tsunami said burrow is the best spell in the game 20 years ago, so there's that. He also liked queens and defilers a lot.
Actually the worst part about burrow is that once Terran has detection and attacks one zergling, it is maddening to try to unburrow the other zerglings. Fortunately this is no longer the case, because remastered has the option to have separate hotkeys for burrow/unburrow completely negating this issue, and making burrow as part of some strategies more useful/usable. (As part of the few good things what remastered brought forward.)
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