
Originally Posted by
Shurrikhan
Back, sorry; I hadn't seen your response earlier.
First, the affordance I was speaking of was the ability to trade excess healing for extra damage. That would not be changed by ED being a 395 potency GCD so long as it remained a spender, not a generator.
But, your 395 potency GCD ED wasn't an spender/option; it was a generator, a step to getting access to your heals, not a means of trading them out.
If balanced, then, the maximum performance from something with cost (a trade) and something without cost (no choice, no trade) would not be the same. Present ED requires an consumption of (healing) resource, excessive though it might otherwise have been. Your suggested ED, since you've used it only as a generator, does not.
Consider, for instance: in a given possible buff, extra potency awarded through Third Eye and extra potency awarded through SAM's every GCD would not always have the same output. Theirs could only be the same if every situation, every fight, allowed one to fully maximize the potency from Third Eye (i.e., to mitigate raid damage precisely every 15 seconds).
Because that will not typically be true, and balance tends instead to target the average situation (note the SCH's rDPS would be overtuned if we were to consider it as balanced for zero ED usage, meaning that most of that damage is truly extra), the maximum performance of the context-dependent capacity will be higher than that of a universal one.
Put more simply, if you make a contributing tool baseline/inescapable/non-optional, you have to budget the job's baseline power for it. Otherwise, you're just slapping an rDPS buff onto the already rDPS-strongest healer, at cost to choice and skill-gap. Unlike the previous choice, that would not be a unique affordance, but simply a tuning error.