Quote Originally Posted by Sebazy View Post
You couldn't simply heal through most failures with little more than a regen like you can now.
In fairness: Add a Cure II and you probably already got someone from 1 to 100, erasing any non-lethal punishment for failure.

Which, IMO, is a pretty big issue. Non-lethal damage is so easily erased that it's not a very good punishment for mechanical failure and prone to be ignored if used. As the healer saying goes: The only HP that matters is the last. Healer resources aren't exactly scarce either - All that time and Mana spent DPSing could just as well be used for fixing mechanical mistakes and that's a _lot_ of leeway a group potentially has.

Making a proper difficulty curve under such circumstances is probably not easy, because whether a mechanic can be ignored or not is largely binary and that leaves you with much less tools to scale difficulty. I'd not go as far as to say this is the only reason difficulty spikes, but I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a connection.