Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
Largely this.

I've said about homogenization many times in the past that the reason we have so much of it is that players asked for it, either indirectly or, in some cases, literally and directly.

With a lot of healing changes, it's because players asked for it either indirectly or directly as well. The reason we're where we are now isn't because the Devs hate the players, their own game, or Healing. It's because, over time, people have either asked for or demanded these changes. Yoshi P's exasperated "We thought this was what you wanted" after P5-8 dropped is kind of proof of that. They've done what they heard players asking for over and over - the 2 min meta, Tank homogenization, etc are also all results of this - and then gave it to them, only to be surprised when the old adage turned out to be true:

Players are REALLY good at identifying problems and REALLY bad at proposing solutions to them.
You know that actually reminded me of a comedy skit about Slytherin someone did several years back that had the quote "Look, you came to me, said you needed a break from studying... I got you petrified for 160 days out of the school year. I'm a good friend. What are you complaining about?"

Basically, yes, there are things that people have complained about over the years, but it is entirely on the design team that their solution to many problems is to just remove it. Astrologian's cards had really not be worked on very much. Outside of the experiment of making Balance a 20% DPS buff during HW and swapping Spear's cooldown reduction to a critical hit buff, nothing else had actually been done to address any concerns of balance. So why was the next step to turn every card into Balance? On the topic of Scholar, Selene had only really undergone a single major change as well when the spell speed/skill speed buffs were replaced with a flat attack speed and Fey Caress. Because Fey Wind was a damage increase, which was becoming increasingly more evident that Selene was effectively the "right" choice every time despite Caress and Silent Dusk being basically decorations on your hotbar, there did need to be some kind of change, but again, that change was to give Selene the French Revolution treatment.

It's giving pre-penicillin era "you scratched your leg? Time to amputate."

I don't understand why we can't actually sit down and try preserving things and experimenting with other approaches before we just chop off the limb. Or perhaps they do experiment and are unable to find a path that works, in which case it would actually be really nice to hear that and learn about what solutions they already tried.