Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
It's one thing that gets me. All changes to things ultimately stem from player beliefs and behaviors. People then complain about them, of course, but people often WEREN'T using the "interesting" other Cards. Part of that was the RNG nature of it (did you get a Bole when a Tankbuster was coming up or not?), but the two things that always come to mind to me in discussions like this are "Players will optimize the fun out of anything" and "Players are great at finding problems, but often very poor at proposing actually good solutions."

If people had consistently used the non-damage Cards, we'd probably still have them. But PLAYERS, not the Devs, decided damage >>> all (something players still hold to), leading to the nerfs. The Devs prize utility far higher than the players do, even now in the fewer cases it still exists. The only recent example of players actually flipping that script is MCH getting Dismantle back.
Should be noted, the only reason MCH got Dismantle back was because it couldn't justify having both 'less defensive utility than it's counterparts' AND 'less offensive utility than it's counterparts'. Since the devs want to keep it as the 'selfish dps option' of the physranged, it couldn't get back, eg, the old version of Hypercharge (with a new name) that gave a vuln up debuff on enemies. So, defensive it is. Whether we see MCH get more attention in the 6.4 savage is going to be interesting to see, but it definitely saw some more attention in TOP both due to it's lack of raidbuff (party less reliant on 2min windows), and it's lack of raidbuff (less chance of 'miss'ing your raidbuff due to buff cap)

As for 'use the bad cards', I think that's less a case of whether it happened or not, and more a case of perception. The 'top players' would reset runs if they didn't get the Balances they wanted, which gave the impression to the lower skill levels of players that 'Balance is the only useful card'. Was Spire useful? Not really, but it also wasn't as 'dead' as people make it out to be. It was 50% of the combo that made Balance the powerhouse it was, with Ewer also doing the same. If anything, Bole was the 'dead' card, but that doesn't mean that it had to be removed. It could have been retooled to have a damage reflect component, or be 'if something strikes the player with Bole on them, they get a debuff that makes them take more damage', or any number of things. Changing every card to be the same flat 'X% more damage' is the laziest solution imaginable. What part of 'manipulating fate' has every divining card have the same meaning? What card game has every card have the same value? Very fun playing Poker when every card is a King, I'm sure. Every round, a draw because everyone got a 5 of a kind. But at least nobody 'lost' and felt bad, right?

(any vitriolic tone directed at SE's laziness on the topic, not any player)