Even if the game is made harder, it’s still just like making a really easy game a bit less easy. It’s still going to be easy, and almost ANY functional complexity being removed from the game is bad, imo, when what it needs is more complexity.
Also, adding complexity to a hard game doesn’t make it frustrating. Complexity gives you more to learn, more to master, and therefore more reasons to practice and actually play the game. When you start removing complexity, you start removing value. If there’s a reason to use that complexity then there’s more reason for the game to be hard. And the kind of ‘hardness’ they’re adding to the game is also entirely fake difficulty. They are not making the minions AI better or giving us better reasons to strategise, they’re just making everything hit harder and tightening our resource management restrictions.
I don’t see how the changes to heal can add ANY mechanical complexity that wasn’t there before. How do I feel like any less of a dispenser when all I’ll be able to do is dispense heals with the new system? How is it more difficult when I no longer need to even factor in the placement of my tiles or care about my spacing and positioning anymore, or the positioning of my teammates? I can feel like a real icon of succor to my party with heal tiles as they are right now.
I get that my stance might seem unreasonable or like I’m pushing for the game to be needlessly hardcore, but one thing I really can’t abide is seeing games strip away mechanical complexity when it doesn’t need to be stripped. It leads to a slippery slope where we end up with abominations like Pokemon Let’s Go and cheapens the integrity of game designers trusting their players to figure stuff out and get invested in their mechanics.