Bit of a necro, but IMHO, they've not got a hate for casuals. I think they actualy like their players. It's a different malady entirely.
SSG balances for concept, not effect. This is why DDO has creative DPS with outputs 2~3x higher than a simple pure build; a 5% spread between types is considered outrageous in a normal MMO. If you look back at the changes over the years, it's almost never about balancing effect. It's quite often about upholding and enforcing stereotypes; ie. about which classes are doing what.
Basically, if you're playing a "meme", you're fine. If you're not, watch out. Spells on a melee are not kosher; expect a nerf. Tanking as something other than a fat lump of HP & PRR with a giant shield? Nerf is likely. Self-healing on a non-healer? OMG, the horror!
If it was about effect, SSG would not care how it was being done, but about what was achieved. The nerfs would always and only target builds with spectacular results not surprising methods for mundane results.
IMHO, if your build looks like a duck, it better quack. If it barks, don't post it. It will get muzzled for the sanctity of ducks everywhere.
Superficially, I can see where you are going with this line of reasoning but it doesn't hold water. They created some of the kinks and screws and twisty builds with things like handwrap Shifter Barbarians, Dark Hunter rangers that are more rogue/druid than ranger somehow. Sure they give us ways to self heal or group heal and then nerf them. But I don't think its
because they want to force a healer role on certain classes. I think its because they don't want any one character to have ALL the tools. No. Instead with their constant DC increases with each new cap increase they are forcing...
I mean heavily encouraging... specialization. They want each character to be really good at only one thing, semi good at a couple and dreadful at most everything else.
Its obvious just from gearing, just look at all the various stacking bonuses: competence, morale, profane, sacred, insightful, exceptional, quality. I'm sure I'm missing a handful. Got to catch them all like Pokemon. You can gear to be a Jack-of-All-Trades, but you won't be a master of any of them and in this game as it stands today you will struggle not being really good at something in particular.
Funny, I still remember after MotU they said they couldn't raise the Exceptional Bonus to +2 because that was too much, and Exceptional was special. Then they added Insightful Bonuses and more recently Quality. Laughable.
Their problem is that spellcasters by their very nature have a plethora of tools because there is a wide variety of spells. So they are constantly vacillating on how much or on what they want Spellcasters to specialize. For awhile there even melee were being encouraged to specialize more and more... one fighting style, one weapon type, weapon bond so don't switch weapons. Ironically, they've begun opening up on melee choices but at the same time with Sentient Weapons... well you want to use just one weapon as much of the time as possible anyway.
No I see nerfing the group healing as them saying you need to specialize for that and nerfing Dragon Breath as oops casters were getting too good with too many tools at once CC/DPS/Instakill/buffs/healing. They should only be really good at one. Why was Dragonbreath a method they chose to nerf caster DPS? *shrug* maybe because they had just increased our actual spell damage dice in recent years and they were hesitant to undo any of that work? maybe because almost all casters were using it because other caster strikes were crippled on the first ED revamp? Regardless, I still feel they over nerfed it.
