Fungals, FF, Storms, and Smart-casting

Opening Comparison:
-Nukes- If AoE damage is more easily available, the damage will necessarily be decreased per shot/spell.

Smart-casting- by design spells are more easily available. Therefore, damage is nerfed to individual spells. (See original beta EMP and Storm nerfs.) We don't keep the same spell and it's now smarter. The spell itself must be changed (nerfed) in order to be 'smart.'

Four Implications/ Consequences:

1) Smart-casting, not necessarily easier (or not easy enough for that casual player).
a) We've simply raised the bar for how many storms must be cast in order to get a similar swing in the battle. The spell has been diluted from a few powerful spells to many weaker spells due to smart-casting. The casting requirement has actually gone up to get equivalent game changing damage. It might be somewhat easier, but probably not for the sort of player that couldn't be bothered to get off one or two storms in BW.

b) Also some incentive lost to learn how to cast spells because individually the damage spells don't feel powerful. Learning how to storm faster is addicting in BW because they're so powerful.

2) Diminished Decision Making
-Change from high impact damage, concentrated in limited areas to spells evenly distributed on the screen/ army.
-Fewer spells cast overall, need to make the few count.
-Uneven unit movement (BW) creates targets. Uniform unit movement (SC2) where you place the spell on the army doesn't matter so much. Just place lots of them.

3) Diminished Harassment Potential
-Storm drops/ harassment requires highly concentrated spells in specific locations. With smart-casting, the spell is balanced around the spell easily saturating the entire screen.
-Therefore, storm drops don't work as well as in BW. (This is one of the harass units/ non-deathball units that Blizzard is searching for and it's right under their noses.)
-Yes there is some players that harass, but it's not as prevalent.
-Possibly further issues on how easily warp-prisms can be sniped. Not entirely sure, but smart-casting is a major cause I would argue.

4) Mundane Spell-casting
-Anything in LR should be taken with a grain of salt, but as a whole people are far less in awe of spells and can be even derisive of caster hype over good spell casting. People know about the spam clicking.
-Smart-casting spell difficulty is a fairly linear increase.
-Without spell-casting, the difficulty is exponential. The excitement is comparably exponential because many, many spells casted is a rare, special event.
-Spells also retain their damage and are therefore all the more exciting.

Final Thoughts
-4 Story House Analogy
- Wire-frame casting, Clone casting, and Magic Box casting.
-Smart-casting is actually slower than Magic Box casting which is simultaneous casting. (aka it is a feature that actually gets in the way of the better players.) I suppose the closest you can get is shift-click casting, but it's still sequential casting.

Spells on Defence
-I actually am starting to think that non-smart-casting allows damage spells to be better for defence. It is far better on defence to have a couple AoE damage spells that immediately knocks out a cluster of the raiders rather than equally damaging the entire raiding force, but killing nothing outright.

It is the same reason why target firing is so effective and why you want to pull back damaged units. Damaging 10 units equally that continue firing is less strong than killing two units completely so there is only 8 firing back. Damaged units do as much units as full health damage, so it is better to kill a few than damage all, but kill none. Smart-casting units are balanced around how easy it is to get off all the spells in a hurry so the individual spell damage is less and it is harder to kill units outright.

Without smart-casting, I'm starting to think, spell-casters would actually operate better outside of the deathball and be able to hold their own behind defensive positions in outlying expansions.

-Unit Design- microbility is limited. (See this blog A-Move By Design if you're unsure what I mean. I now have a tldr version.) In short. The issue is burst damage and how quickly a unit can transition from attacking and moving.
-Therefore, to make units interesting, spells and abilities are added to even greater numbers of units.

-Spells/Abilities in Question: Fungal, Forcefield, Graviton Beam, Time Warp, Concussive Shell, and Vortex (although Vortex is unique.)
-BW has same sorts of spells, but they do not dominate the game-play near as much because it's harder to use.

-Smart casting creates a compositional imbalance for these sorts of spells where they have too great an impact on the game-play

- Who Controls Your Army? These spells are primarily about you controlling your opponent's units rather than you control your own units better while I control my units better. The more dominant these sorts of spells are in game-play, the more frustrating the game becomes. Too much control of your units goes to your opponent.

-Spell Domination is the Problem The spells themselves may not be bad, but smart-casting makes it too dominant regardless of whether the game has balanced with this in mind. I mean, I guess SC2 could turn into just a game of Casters preventing each others armies from moving. But I feel this would ultimately be dissatisfying.

Concussive Shell
I never really talked about the marauder, but a passive slow ability is no good in my opinion. It directly impacts the other players ability to micro without gaining any appreciable micro by the Terran. Yes it's easier to stutter step that way, but a far superior method is to play with burst damage, and the delay between attacking and moving again. This allows the Terran unit to micro better, but allows their opponent to continue micro-ing. Passive slow abilities diminishes micro in one of the worst possible way. Think about it this way- stalker vs marine micro in the early game. How can the Terran counter? Just upgrade a spell and buy your way past the micro war and you can now trap retreating stalkers with a slow. Not much additional micro required.

I briefly mentioned WoW and MOBA games in the problem of clutter. Here it is expanded.

WoW example:
Blizzcon 2011 Tourney

There's a lot of spells going down, but it's difficult to discern the individual parts of the battle beyond that there are a lot of spells.

League of Legends example

Specifically Team Fights. I say this as someone who plays League of Legends, but Team Fights are very cluttered due to the number of spells and abilities going down. When I first started, I'd actually lose track of where my character was. Maybe for that reason I, to this day, prefer ranged units that stay on the periphery of the battle. You can tell that spells are going down, but if you sit down and are a casual or have never played, Team Fights are going to look extremely confusing. 30:40 is another Team Fight

In both cases, you can learn what's going on. But it's not as easy to just pick up watching due to the amount of stuff going on. It's just a bit overwhelming.

-Spells are good, but add extra information. Therefore diminishing returns for every extra spells we add.
-We could probably add 10 attack-retreat type micro for every 1 spell simply in regards to clarity.
-Important for spectating- that spells are obvious what they do, rather than have weird buffs and debuffs. (Devourers and Consume.)

-The number of spells in BW is deceptive as many were not used frequently. This is actually a good thing for view-ability/ clarity. (I used BW spells as non-examples!!!)
-Adding more spells to make things more interesting, combined with smart-casting leads to a very cluttered viewing experience.

-Spells that look very similar- Protoss Bubbles (The Disco race according to ) -FF, Graviton, Time Warp, Guardian Shield.
-FF, Corruption, and Blinding Cloud- all green spells. Corruption in particular is VERY hard to see. And Corruption spell is very difficult to tell what it does differently from other spells just by watching the screen and having no prior knowledge. Fungal and Storm require no prior knowledge to tell what the spell does.

Storm Comparison
I forgot to compare these in my video.

A further thing that adds to the clutter is simply the opaqueness of Psionic Storm. Old as Beta critique. But you simply cannot tell what is underneath. It's a minor issue, but it does contribute to the clutter given how many can be thrown down in a hurry.

The mothership' problem is not smart-casting. Its problem is it is TOO rare and TOO powerful. This is nothing new as it goes back to the old 'hero unit' complaint. It's bad not due to balance. It's bad because it swings the battle too much one way or the other depending on whether Vortex goes off for the Protoss or whether Neural uses it against the Protoss. Although admittedly, Zerg no longer even needs to counter Neural Vortex the Protoss. But the alternative is almost worse- the game grinding to halt as try to adjust and re-adjust to exactly the right position.

It has become a linchpin unit and its use or misuse swings the battle too far in any direction. This doesn't create an exciting situation because it actually promotes caution and passivity. The players know the power and how fast the battle can swing due to Vortex. Therefore, the engagement is delayed and they reposition. And delay again and reposition. And so on, and so on. You don't want to make a gutsy move with the mother ship. It's slow and there is only one of it and it takes a long time to rebuild and it's expensive. You want to sit there on top of your one army and play it safe and engage only when you have everything just right.

Similarly, as Zerg, you don't want to make a gutsy move. The Vortex could swallow up half your army (or 2-3 Broodlords that Zerg is better at spreading) and have a bunch of Archons thrown into the toilet. So they sit there behind Broodlord-Infestor cautiously poking around, adjusting and re-adjusting their line. The game comes to a grinding halt with a big stand-off.

It's not ballsy unit and it doesn't promote ballsy play. It's a slow unit that promotes passivity. Hero units have no place and Starcraft and should be stricken out or cut apart and divided into multiple ships with with limited power. I'm glad to see Browder wants to nerf it to oblivion, because this unit needs to disappear and fast.