That's like saying to the Haitians, "why you assumed that there wouldn't be a earthquake today ?
"
My guess is, the dev team prefers hiding the imbalances behind several curtains of fucking up people's equipment by changing it for
no reason (no suggestions related to this, no justification, no announcement). Instead of really experimenting with it, carefully changing one factor at a time. There wasn't a single balance patch that got it's job done without massive collateral damage. And as always, players have to suck it up when their heirlooms become shit due to collateral damage, even when there is zero balance argument backing the nerf.
Dev team doing it wrong. Not letting people choosing what they want to stop using and begin using after balance changes means inaccurate statistics. The time it takes to react to that kind of change is enormous for an average player, thus the balance mechanism goes extremely slowly (change -> adaptation -> revelation of imbalance -> more accurate change -> adaptation etc.) . The statistics are completely unreliable, as people won't use what they think is what they should use (they got heirloomed X while they think Y is better, but can't change to Y because they got no heirloom refund and the marketplace price difference is not in their favor). Adaptation to change is either very slow or nonexistent, even though there still are imbalances, and so the balancing cycle is broken.
This "no refund" strategy only has negative effects : pissing players off and obfuscating the game balance. Through allowing people to get back heirloom points for all the modified items, the dev team would go a long way towards balancing the game. More freedom means imbalances revealed a lot faster and with less uncertainty.
