The damage disparity is pretty much the same actually. I'm not saying SE was successful in reducing it. I'm just saying I can see them hiding behind the excuse that this or that other change would increase it. There are lots of ways to optimize yeah, do does any other job, creating more options for it is just a way to create a wider gap between players. If anything the R3 instant change should've helped with this gap, since some players didn't think R2 on Trance was worth it and would just clip stuff on R3. Now you don't have to do it anymore.

The main gap right now on players is because people either can't do the opener, can't do WW properly or fail in cycling each of SMN's "phases". I have been discussing about that lately on a few discord servers I'm in.