In a sense the series is a victim of the fact that skilled players can beat the game naked SL1 since at that point it doesn't really matter to the devs whether one spell is just 25% worse than the competition in every way.
I've always maintained that balancing a game based on extremely experienced and highly skilled players is the epitome of dumb unless that's the primary type of player you're catering to, for example in some online shooter that only a few hundred people play anymore.
Yet, time after time, developers get their feelings hurt and/or feel that weaknesses in their game have been humiliatingly exposed by someone with the reflexes of a secretary bird who's been playing their game for 4,000 hours. That type of player will dominate no matter how you tinker with your game, so it's futile to even try to bring them in line. Not even GRS being "OP" was ever an actual problem for such players—and low-skill players weren't going to win much anyway.
There is, I suppose, a case to be made if tons of low-skill players were OHKOing each other with GRS. Probably that was exactly what was happening, but all things considered, who gives a damn? Even pre-nerf, you'd have been better off with Dark Orb in PvE anyway, which is what I care about (in this context, that is). It just annoys me that the Resonant line remains nerfed in PvE as well, meaning there's rarely ever a reason to use it unless you're LARPing a dark priest who strictly eschews wizard-flavored magic. Even versus bosses, you are better off just using Dark Orb, taking slightly longer, and saving yourself tens of thousands of souls.
