{"post":{"id":"9561","title":"Sentry","content":"While playing Protoss, there is one unit that you have to take with you to every single battle, and that is Sentry. With a little luck and practice, it can change any fight and ultimately, win the game.\r\n\r\nSentry has three different skills:\r\n<ul>\r\n\t<li>Force Field</li>\r\n\t<li>Guardian Shield</li>\r\n\t<li>Hallucination.</li>\r\n</ul>\r\nWe're going to tak a look at the first two here.\r\n<h2>Use the Guardian Shield</h2>\r\nThe simpler one of these two is Guardian Shield, which <del>provides +2 Armor to nearby</del> reduces incoming damage by 2 to units within the radius of 4.\r\n\r\nNow that might not seem like a lot, but take a look at the damage dealing fom different units. Marines are a perfect example. Even though they cause 6 damage, they can annihilate your forces pretty fast, especially with the Stimpack upgrade.\r\n\r\nBut what if you had Guardian Shield up? That would reduce their damage by whopping 33%! That's like killing one third of them instantly, 18 Marines against the Guardian Shield cause same damage as 12 Marines without it. Now that's a difference, isn't it?\r\n\r\nSame applies against Zergs, where it can give you a bonus against Roaches and Hydras, or even against Mutalisks.\r\n<h2>Force Field or You're Dead</h2>\r\nIf I had to choose one best ability from the whole game, it would be Force Field. It can split army into half, block off reinforcements, prevent the enemy from entering your cliff (or his while you're wrecking his base) or you can just deny escape route of his workers and slaughter them.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://scvrush.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ff_combat1.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-75\" title=\"Force Field - Combat Management\" src=\"http://scvrush.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ff_combat1-300x249.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"249\" /></a>\r\n\r\nOf course there are some cases beyond these; like blocking an army from escaping from the Psionic Storm. But that does require some skill to execute and we're going to cover how to do that in one of the following articles. Right now let's focus on the basics.\r\n<h2>Denying Access Route</h2>\r\nMost basic application of sentry is blocking off the cliff while your enemy is coming at you earlier than you anticipated. This is absolutely amazing defense technique, be it in 1v1 where you're defending against rush, or in 2v2 or 3v3 when multiple players decide to get rid of you and you're waiting for your friends to come for the rescue.\r\n\r\n<a href=\"http://scvrush.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/cliffblock.jpg\"><img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-74\" title=\"Force Field - Cliff Block\" src=\"http://scvrush.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/cliffblock-300x202.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"202\" /></a>\r\n\r\nSecond very useful technique is to enter the base of your enemy, block off the cliff so his army can't get inside and destroy all of his buildings.\r\n<h2>Combat Management</h2>\r\nThis is where Sentries shine the most, two or three Force Fields can effectively block a huge incoming force so you can deal with it more easily. Best example here are Roaches vs Stalkers, as Stalkers have longer range, so when you block off Roaches, you can shoot them, but they can't shoot you that easily.\r\n\r\n<img class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-73\" title=\"Force Field - Choke Block\" src=\"http://scvrush.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ff_choke-300x157.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"157\" />\r\n\r\nSimilar thing applies to playing against Marines and Marauders, where you can split them and pick smaller groups.","image":"/assets/post_default_image.png","tag_list":["protoss","units"]}}