Quote Originally Posted by Lambdafish View Post
More challenging =/= More punishing
Unfortunately the two equate in a trinity game, because you have a role dedicated to recovery. If mechanics aren't punishing, said role will just make them trivial - to the point some groups even ignore the first optical sight in A11S to push more DPS.

That's also why so many mechanics get ignored - The mechanics aren't punishing enough to prevent the healer from erasing them. Likewise, sacrifice cheese strategies rely on raise. As a consequence, just throwing a lot of mechanics at you doesn't make a fight more challenging - You need punishing mechanics that a healer can't erase. Damage down debuffs coupled with hard enrages. Insta-death. Vulnerability stacks that lead to insta-death later on. Falling off the platform without raise ability.

The stronger healers, the more punishing you need to make mechanics to matter. You can see it easily when you look at the extreme cases:
- With no healers, the damage you take sticks, so even small accumulations of damage from failed mechanics matter, because they add up. Even if a failed mechanic only results in 1 damage, it can threaten you if it happens often enough. So you can create challenge by simply adding more mechanics with varying punishments.
- With healers able to heal everyone to full every nanosecond for hours on end, you can forget about every mechanic that doesn't cause an instant kill or wipe directly or indirectly. Every mechanic less punishing than that is null, so you can't create challenge with them.

It's not quite as black and white in the game, naturally, but that's the basic dynamic behind healers and creating challenge via mechanics.