I've been watching a lot of Winter's casts lately and I've noticed nearly every game the zerg get ultralisks. I've heard a lot of people saying that ultras are generally pretty bad and inefficient. Why are the pros making them?
Edit: I realize that I'm not tracking which players specifically are doing this, so it might just be one person consistently doing it.
I'm pretty new, started last year but took a long break. I've been watching Winter's bronze to GM from 2022, and have gotten to 2,346 MMR, and gold 3.
This match was going pretty even, Marines marauders and medivacs vs my roach Hydra. I was having a hard time pushing through his tanks on the high ground, and he also started making thors. I decided to make 2 vipers, and consumed on my gas extractors (idk if that's the best choice to consume, is there like a list of best to worst consume options?).
In the first engagement he pushed with MMM and a thor. He was starting to lose the battle, and the thor was about to get away, but I abducted it into my army and killed it. I don't think it had that much impact, but that was the first time I killed a unit with abduct. Sadly, one of the vipers died. I built 3 more to go up to 4.
Later on, I tried a push into his base and threw down 4 blinding clouds in the area. I killed all of his thors and most of his Marines, leaving only a dozen left, yet I still lost pretty much all my roaches and hydras. I still had a ton of larvae and resources left though, so I quickly remaxxed. Didn't lose any vipers too!
He went on the offensive with some Marines and medivacs. Only my roaches were done training, so I had no AA apart from parasitic bombs. I managed to land one when they packed up the Marines, which brought them down to almost no health. I managed to get off another one, which killed 2 medivacs with all hands on board.
Then, I went to deal the final blow. They had gotten back to 4 thors, but had no other support. Blinding clouds meant they didn't do much damage to my ground army, but I mismicrod my low health vipers and 3 died. After the thors died, there was nowhere near enough of his army left to defend, so he surrendered.
I'm pretty proud of keeping the vipers alive through several battles and managing to make use of all of their abilities.