Blizzard has announced the Beta for HoTS will be out in the coming months.

They also have released a new trailer for the game showing off a number of awesome cutscenes and showing the new units mentioned in the previous post in action.

You can watch the trailer below.

There’s also a new trailer for the Blizzard Custom Map, Blizzard DoTA below.

They announced a new WoW expansion (big surprise), details on Diablo III’s Collector’s edition, and more important for us, details on new units from Heart of The Swarm.

Protoss

- The Nexus is given a new ability called Arc Shield, which grants bonus armor to itself and a Photon Cannon like weapon temporarily. This seems to be primarily to give them a counter against early aggression and cheese.

- The Nexus also gains Mass Recall, which works just like the Mothership’s, allowing the Nexus to instantly warp units in the target area to the Nexus.

- The Carrier and Mothership seem to be removed.

New Units

Tempest

A powerful anti air unit using a splash attack, and with a weak anti ground attack.

Oracle

Ability based harassment unit. It’s Entomb command causes the target Mineral field to not be harvested from temporarily. It’s Preordain ability causes the targeted enemy building to show the units or upgrades it is warping in or researching. And finally, it’s Phase Shift causes a building to temporarily be invulnerable, but cannot operate and will also deny any tech tree paths it grants.

Replicant

Can morph into any non massive unit for any of the races, allowing for quick tactical units to be placed on the field.

Terran

Race Changes

- The Reaper no longer has a second attack to quickly take out enemy buildings, but instead will gain life regeneration.

-  Battlecruisers will be able to gain a new upgrade that gives them a temporary boost in movement speed.

- Hellions are able to transform into a fighter mode that deals cleave like damage which is more effective against upgraded biological units such as Charge-Zealots and Speed-Lings.

- Thors are now changed so that you can only have one at a time. It is however a much more powerful Thor, with plenty more HP and a strong new anti ground attack. It does however lose its anti air weapon.

- Ghost’s Cloak is now changed so that it is no longer able to be turned off and on within a moments notice. It instead can be used for a specified amount of time and if used strategically can help save Energy.

New Units

Shredder

A new unit that will deal Area of Effect damage to all enemies nearby, but disables itself if a friendly unit is in range.

Warhound

A Goliath like unit that has a powerful anti air weapon. It’s anti ground weapon is weak, but is somewhat effective against armored units.

Zerg

Race Changes

- The Corruptor loses its Corruption ability and gains a Siphon, which damages the targeted building dealing damage and gives resources to the Zerg player.

- Ultralisks gain a Burrow Charge like ability, allowing them to close in on enemies from underground easily.

- Hydralisks gain a new upgrade to move faster when not on creep.

- Banelings can now move while burrowed, allowing better ambush attacks on enemies.

- The Overseer is removed from the game.

New Units

Viper

The Viper is a new support unit that has 3 new abilities. Blinding Cloud acts like the Defiler’s Dark Swarm, causes all units in the Cloud’s area to only be able to attack at melee range. Abduct allows the Viper to pull the target unit to the location of the Viper, allowing you to drag enemies into dangerous areas. They also gain a one per Viper ability called Ocular Parasite, which acts like Parasite from the original granting permanent shared vision of the target enemy unit.

Swarm Host

Has no attack when above ground, but when Burrowed releases Locusts, a small new unit that acts as a Broodling to pound on enemies and force them to get detection before being overrun.

While we do not currently have many of our own strategies posted from our own members, we would like to help you find strategies and build orders. The most popular site is TeamLiquid.

General

Strategy Overview
Terms & Definitions

1v1

Protoss
Terran
Zerg

2v2

2v2 Overview & Race Team Strategies

From what we do have is written up by our forum member -Spooky- . Here is what he has posted:

General

Analyzing the Races
Harassing Workers
“Win at StarCraft II”
“Win from behind”

Protoss

Photon Cannon Rush
Void Ray Rush

Terran

Marine, Marauder, Medivac Rush

Zerg

None available.

Replays give players an opportunity to look at matches they’ve played to see what went wrong. While you may remember some mistakes you’ve made, you’ll surely find other small things that need correction during most matches. Even if you did everything as quickly and correctly as you could, sometimes a build just can’t build another build. So looking at missed opportunities to turn things around before they went bad is a good thing to look for. Of course, there’s also the fun of seeing how your opponent played and sharing that with friends.

Fortunately, with the way Blizzard designed the replay system you can download other matches from online or from friends and watch them. This is another opportunity to learn from games.

There are people who do “casts”, which is basically them doing commentary on a replay and uploading it online. They typically analyze matches and give tips to players or pinpoint key moments in the match.

Here are a few good sites to check out:

Day[9]’s “Daily” Netcast
Husky’s Youtube Channel
HD’s Youtube Channel

There are plenty of sites online where you can download and watch replays from high level players and the average Joe. While we do not have the space to host these files ourselves, we can point you to a couple of popular sites:

SC2Rep
SC2Replayed

Here are the Building Tech Trees for StarCraft II. Click on the image to see it in its full size.

Protoss

Terran

Zerg