Some tips with the raven

SEEKER MISSILE

This is definitely the most devastating attack the raven has in its arsenal. It damages one or more units by 100 in an area of effect radius. Blizzard realizes this, so they made it costly and time-consuming to research. To research this ability you need a fusion core building and afterwards you can go to the tech lab attached to the starport to research seeker missiles.

In Starcraft 1, the Science Vessel's irradiate ability was very practical against biological units. -- specially with the strategy known as the eraser which SlayerS_BoXeR made very popular. Not everyone used that strategy, so those who didn't use it relied in targeting an enemy unit and hoping anything around it would die. The problem with that is that the enemy can move the affected unit away from the others, and it was a slow process to kill enemy units.

The Seeker Missile is the Hitman in your arsenal. Go in silently, annihilate, and leave. The enemy won't know until it's too late. Basically, the Raven unleashes a missile that will chase a ground or air unit and explode causing a great area of effect. 100 damage to be precise -- and that's quite a lot of damage. this is very usefull in big battles =)

The Awesome-sauce news? The thriller? Let's say you discover the enemy has a group of mobs sitting duck anywhere in his base or anywhere in the map -- scan sweep can make this pretty easy. Move your Raven toward this group, and deploy a Seeker Missile to the center-most unit. As you can see in the video attached to this article, I built 24 marines and set a rally point. I shot a Seeker Missile to the center of that group of 24 marines. 18 marines died, and six survived quite damaged.

Now that's a VERY nice unit to have in your arsenal to cripple your enemy's economy and morale. 18 marines is a total of 900 minerals and a lot of build time wasted. Imagine a group of Zerglings for instance. BOOM, gone. In that sense the Seeker Missile is more effective than the Irradiate ability at killing many units at once, and the good thing is that it is more silent. There is no warning alerting your enemy of this impending attack -- a setback the irradiate ability suffered by displaying a green-cloud surrounding the affected unit. Once the Seeker Missile is deployed it silently annihilates and it is too late to do anything unless the enemy sees the approaching Raven.

You can also use a Raven to annihilate some of the opponent's SCVs/Drones/ Probes with a Seeker Missile (125 energy) and immediately drop one Auto-Turret (50 energy). You can weaken a group of units coming to your base with one of these Ravens before they even get near your base, but it's much better to wait till your units welcome them to make sure his units die.