Seriously. No, really.
We’ve been doing some thinking lately as we’ve been handily crushed by opponent after opponent while playing Zerg – which one of these units should we really not be bothering with? Which of our stalwart and slimy army should be left behind in the puddle of goo they came from? Which is simply not worth their weight on the battlefield?
If you’re Zerg, well, your answer might be “all of them”, but then we’d point out that you’re “only” in the Silver league, and what do you know, and you’d shove a finger in our face and then we’d say something we knew was hilarious but would probably regret about your lineage and you’d run off crying.
So, in an effort to spare your delicate and girlish feelings, we have instead chosen to consider the unit problems of other races in Starcraft II – in this case, the Protoss.
As it turns out from our Web surfing, most Protoss units fall into the “good as cannon fodder” or “super-useful” categories. There is only one – the Archon – that is almost universally reviled by Protoss players.
Why?
Well, it turns out the damn thing is useless.
The Archon sounds like a great idea – it’s combination between a High and Dark Templar, so what could possibly go wrong?
A whole bunch.
First off, the Archon is expensive; because it requires you to sacrifice two perfectly good units to make one- and Dark Templars are badass all by themselves. Next, the thing is population-heavy, filling 4 spots in your total unit allotment, and last but not least the Archon is slow a molasses in January on Pluto.
Sure, space-molasses on a now-demoted planet might not be something you want to eat anyway, but trust us, these things are slow. S L O W.
And what do they do when they get where they’re slowly going? Pewpew with a short range Psionic Shockwave. Sure, it hit hard against bio units, but the Archon itself is a bio unit, having a scant few hitpoints under its Protossian shields.
So the thing is slow, with a weapon that is really no good against anything a mid or end-game player is going to field. It costs a stellar amount to create, and doesn’t provide the user with any capabilities that are lacking in other units. Really, these units serve no purpose unless you want to craft yourself an end-game challenge to see just what odds you can overcome, or how many Zerglings you can kill in one go.
Generally, Protoss units stand out for the niche functionality and their overall coolness, but every race has to have a loser unit, one that no other units want to hang out with or take to the party.
The odd thing here is our poor lonely Archon is a combination of two of the coolest units in the Protoss arsenal.
It seems that much as two hot celebrities make an ugly baby, two wicked awesome Starcraft II units make a big useless mess of crap when they get together for freaky Void relations.
Good to know.
