Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
There are other examples we don't see either. They experimented with adding Blessed Shield to Rolands for instance, but the result proved too taxing for the servers - Rolands' lightning-fast attack speed combined with that splitting rune and resource-free BS from Gyrfalcon meant thousands of effects being generated on screen at once, and they ultimately had to roll that back.

Which leads me of course to another point - some abilities are just plain cool, so you want them to be in the game, but making them so powerful that everyone considers them viable has deleterious effects. Leaving them weaker and niche keeps them around and fun for those who want to play for fun, while letting them be safely ignored by those with more of a progression focus in mind.
That's a legitimate reason to change builds, but they totally did that, with, for example, Carnevil, which used to spawn a dart for every fetish you had, as opposed to now where only 5 of your fetishes will fire a dart. I seems like if they were concerned about corpse spiders flooding the server with computational load, they could make it an small radius AoE, and keep the spiders all in a clump. There's no reason each one has to be treated as its own sprite. How the skill looks on the screen and how it's resolved by the server don't need to be that tightly coupled.