EPTI hear people on all sides on the isle when discussing SC2 balance go: 'ooh infestors are imbalanced, they buffed them and zerg are now stronger and the other side go - well use ghosts to beat them and before it was a discussion about High Templars and Ghosts both protoss players and terran players arguing which is more OP or more easy to use.
I'd have to say they are all right and wrong at the same time. The fact that everyone looks at the game from their own race perspective is blinding everyone quite a bit to the obvious imbalance that is smart casting. Yes ladies and gentlemen I'm going to argue the fact that Infestors, Ghosts, Sentries and all other caster units are imbalanced is because of smart casting.
Lets go back to Starcraft: Brood War to help us with this analysis. As you remember storm did 110 damage over 3 seconds in BW, a devastating spell and one that at newbie levels was always OP. Until you actually got a lot better at BW and probably watches some PRO games you would be under the impression that storm was imbalanced because its so strong, unless you were trying to use it yourself of course. This is what I mean by race specific balance whines and not looking at the problem at its roots.
If you were playing Zerg in BW storm was OP, if you were playing Terran storm was OP as well, if you were playing Protoss and Zerg Terran siege tanks were OP and if you played Protoss, zerg dark swarm was OP. This was all true until you tried the different races yourself and find out its not so OP as you thought.
Everyone is again right and wrong at the same time, because even though realistically the spells and some units were OP the fact that no one can use them to their full extent made them balanced.
Remember the game where JangBi had the whole screen covered with storms destroying all of Nada's tanks, well that was skill and that was excitement, it was something special that not only can non pro not do it, but even pro players weren't able to do it. Even Bisu's storms were quite on that mark.
Again this leads us back to Starcraft 2 and its smart casting. I will bet everyone that if smart casting was not available infestors would actually become balanced and there would even be an outcry to buff them as they will look too weak.
I don't want this to trigger SC2 automation discussion on things like MBS, unlimited unit selection, auto-casting because lets be reasonable Blizzard will never remove those and there would be an outcry from casual players about it. But its quite reasonable to demand from Blizzard to at least remove smart casting because it won't really make casual players worse, since casual players use spellcasters only sporadically anyways, but what this will do is increase the skill ceiling at the top in the professional world.
This won't make SC2 unplayable for casual players, it certainly won't make SC2 skill-wise on par with Brood War, but I think cutting smart casting will make the game more enjoyable for spectators and more challenging for pros, but not only that it will actually balance out the various spell casters and spells right now by making them potent as they currently are, but more challenging to execute.
I feel that if SC2 is to really succeed as an E-sports it needs to be more challenging and the one way to do that that wont hurt the play of the average gamer and sales of SC2 or promotion of SC2 to new audiences, but actually help it is by removing smart casting which will make watching SC2 even more enjoyable and make all of us all be excited once again, since Brood War about things that pros can do and we can't. As it is right now I can place the perfect storms and perfect fungal growths as good as any pro player can and a lot of times even better.
Please be sure to talk about smart casting only and not balance or other automation talk. Thank you.
EDIT: Bonus content: Imagine if Brood War had smart casting. Now no amount or rationalizing or spinning it around will make SC2 casting not easy and the sooner we realize this and get Blizzard to fix the problem the better. And I've already made the point that removing smart casting won't hurt the game availability and easiness for new and casual gamers. The effect will mostly be at the top levels and would actually require skill to cast spells.
