Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Seen them go back on designs favoring the lowest denominator at almost any expense any time lately?
That would mostly depend on how you define that. For example, unifying the buffs does not favor the lowest denominator, since it favors groups that coordinate their buffs since them being ABLE to be aligned means doing so generates a huge boost in performance over those who do not. That very much does not favor "the lowest denominator".

Melee have been able to do more damage than Ranged for at least 3 expansions now, and it was debatably intended in HW, they just mucked up the tuning on a lot of Jobs. The explicit reasoning for this is "Melee are harder" (even though that's highly debatable these days). The design intent there is to give advantage to the harder thing over the easier thing. That also is not favoring "the lowest denominator", as if the intent was to favor "the lowest denominator", it would be the Ranged allowed to do more damage. And they've stuck with that one for 3 expansions and counting, despite it being entirely ridiculous to do so in this expansion due to the massive hitboxes and reduced positionals in Meleewalker.

BLM is also consistently kept as higher damage output over RDM and SMN because it's harder. It was kept over SMN in ShB (despite SMN being on par with its difficulty) to keep that going. While this one is a two part thing (it's the difficulty argument + the Raise argument), part of that IS the difficulty part, and thus not favoring "the lowest denominator".

They consistently lock really cool rewards (gear, glam, mounts, and minions - all things that are highly desired) behind high end content. This is also not favoring "the lowest denominator" and has been their practice for 5 expansions now.

So clearly, they often stick with things that do not favor "the lowest denominator". What they do and don't stick with seems decided by a blindfolded person throwing at a dartboard, not a preference for "the lowest denominator".