A buff is A NERF: The knock on effects of balance changes, the truth about the grade update
I want to preface this with the fact that I hate the grade update along with 99.999....% of players. The goal of this post is to help devs further understand the problems with the grade update (if they don't already) and hopefully convince them to fix it.
Before this update a lot of people used to say devs don't NERF, for better or worse. That's not entirely true though. For every change you make to the game it has a knock on effect which can change the whole game. When surge got a buff, surge use surged, but killshot use fell off. When cheetah got its solo buff, the use of mechs that counter it increased and tank usage fell to the wayside.
After this update though, everyone is asking why you NERFed their favorite mechs. With a single update the script is flipped. Why were the former balance changes acceptable and these ones not? The answer: Relative balance was still maintained. The difference between the best and worst mechs remained mostly the same so it didn't really matter. This update made sweeping changes as opposed to individual item changes, thus the knock on effects of the changes are much greater. And even worse, the intention of the update was to make the difference between the best and worst stuff much greater, which the devs are proud of for some reason, even though the vast majority of players HATE the update.
If I could explain it another way, you would have achieved the same effect had you decided to NERF items based on grade as opposed to applying buffs discriminating based on grade and NERFing the lowest grades the most. It's really a slap in the face to people who enjoyed using that stuff. I probably wouldn't have picked up MA at the time I did if back then lancer couldn't hold its own against old brickhouse.
In reality the only thing that got a true buff was redox. Because of the effects of the update, everything else that isn't legendary got NERFed HARD. This is the truth about balance and the truth about the grade update.
