What is the best way to pick off banelings with zerglings?

Question

In ZvZ, I put all my zerglings on a hotkey. As my opponent has banelings, I want to send a single ling to pick it off. The problem is that the single ling is still a part of my control group and I often issue a new command before he picks off the baneling.

What is the best technique for doing this well? I can think of a few options but I am interested in hearing something better:

1. Don't hotkey the units in this engagement. The problems with this are:
   1. I cannot double-tap the control group to set the camera on the battle easily.
   2. It means more manual selection of units to micro, which is not good when I am microing both banelings and lings. Because I use grid hotkey layout, the key to morph into a baneling is the same as the key to explode a baneling. That means it's very important that I keep banes separate from lings in my selections.
2. Hotkey normally, send the single ling to pick off the baneling, and consciously don't re-issue commands to the control group until the baneling pick-off mission is complete. I think this is just difficult to execute, but maybe it just takes practice?
3. Do the standard "send a unit in a control group to do something, and remove it from the control group" motion: Send the whole control group to target the baneling, shift-click a single ling, re-hotkey, and move away. This is dangerous when you're hanging so close to banelings though and it usually causes me to just fail entirely at the objective.

Answer 1

You can do something like pre-emptively assign a ling to hotkeys 9,0 and order them to follow another ling in your 1 group. Then when you want to pick off a baneling hit 9 and right click and order 1 away.

The only issue is if the ling the one in 9 is following dies, the 9 ling will stop following your pack around. Also, if you engage in combat and retreat, the following ling won't retreat until the ling its protecting is a significant distance away, which will probably get it killed. Against banelings this might be a good thing, however.

Answer 2

Similar to your #3, but less dangerous. Only works if you're being actively chased by the banelings or they're in aggro range:

Select your entire group. While holding shift, alternately click one zergling out of your control group (from the wireframes at the bottom, obviously) and right click an area to move on the map (new waypoint for the group). This will result in you "leaving behind" one ling at every waypoint. The uncontrolled single lings will aggro the banelings.

Note that if you leave your waypoints too close together your single lings will bunch up when aggroing and possibly get splash killed, so give them space. If you have speed you may be able to run circles around the banelings with this method, aggroing in a ling at a time.

Answer 3

I would personally divide my zerglings into two seperate hotkey groups at a ratio of about 8:1 or so. Then I would take the smaller hotkeyed group and attempt to do your solution #3. That way if you fail and accidentally sac your entire group rather than just the single ling, you've only lost about an eighth of your original force.