Power creep may be good or bad, but you can't deny it happened! Any old-timers want to share

well i play the game since nemesis / domination which is now many years ago... If i compare those days with today... hell what a big difference its like two different games. On the other hand its alot smoother / easier and more entertaining, i dont like all the changes but 80% of the changes i like and power creep is one reason...



My biggest concert is relataed to IIQ ... atm its more rewarding to farm a low tier map then chain t14-16 maps ( no elder / shaper ping pong ) which is just wrong... atleast make it even better make it more worth to farm high content

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adghar wrote:

Top kek. I farmed Piety all day as my endgame when she was the Final Boss, and I have never even so much as seen the Shaper nor half his Guardians.

I'm about 20/80 on whether or not I should engage you in deep and serious discussion... judging by your comments it would be very hard to believe you ever played POE 0.9.3. I'm going to quote, again, a post from earlier in this thread:

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Koksii wrote:

Who is denying that it happened? They added tons of more multipliers, ascendancies, shaper items, stronger uniques in general, abyss jewels, buffed the entire passivetree, added OP corruptions, increased the dmg of skills overall, while monsters stayed the same since 2.0 - except map boss HP. List goes on.

To expand on his "list goes on:" extra loot from strongboxes, shrines, rogue exiles, beyond bosses. poe.xyz.is emerging from obscurity and transforming into poe.trade and more elite players entering the playerbase and saturating the market with GG gear for pennies. Literally the base damage of everything in the game being buffed over time. LITERALLY.

It's quite interesting that someone could conceivably think "knowledge" has the power to grant all the power of Ascendancies, shaper items, ............................ etc.

EDIT: Oh yes, and DPS-increasing utility flasks! Always something more to forget was buffed.

Ok, so you can't really compare the difficulty of the endgame encounters. I hope someone who killed dominus or piety before and killed uber elder or shaper and guardians now can tell whether the new final bosses are harder as encounters than old final bosses. The earliest version of the game I played was the one when piety was the final act boss (I have no idea what number it was), but I never reached far, I stopped somewhere around cruel, playing self-imposed ssf hardcore. The early game back then sure felt much harder, but I was way less experienced and played a self-made build with no trading. I am pretty sure that if I played the game the way I do now, it would be significantly easier.

A lot of the things you mentioned are really true, they added a bunch of extra damage and stuff, but they also nerfed some old op builds, mechanics and items, and they also added new endgame bosses who were designed with all player power creep in mind.

Again, I don't think that the game would be much easier to a new player now than it used to be before. Earlier acts, sure, but then they would have to deal with stuff like innocense fight, kitava fight etc. something that even some of the more experienced players struggled with at first (I remember quite a few innocence complaint threads when the new acts just appeared).

Again, only a percentage of players ever reach Shaper, even with all new ascendancies, damage multipliers etc. You can say that Uber is gated, but it's not true regarding the shaper fight, since you can just buy the set and kill him at any point in time, and the set is not that expensive for a non-casual player.

So I don't think that overall the game became much easier, people are just compairing wrong parts of the game and fail to understand that you should compare stages of the game, not specific bosses, since it should be obvious that dominus isn't going to be as strong relatively as he used to be before, since he isn't the final boss anymore.

However, there was one change that I personally felt and which I dislike - the game got A LOT faster, which to me cheapens the experience. It felt more smooth before, and now it is basically a race with road bumps in form of certain bosses.

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adghar wrote:

I love how I explicitly say it could be good or bad and people instantly assume I'm complaining :P

Yes, but given a choice, more often than not humans are more pessimistic than optimistic. In PoE, I personally view power creep as bad overall. I understand the "carrot and stick" principle of thinking that in order to survive long term as a viable game GGG has to keep increasing the size of the "carrot" that we are chasing, even if that is just an illusion. So GGG increases our speed running and mob clearing capability from old to current PoE and then they just move the goal posts farther away (increased the xp required going from 90 to 100) so that in the end we aren't (most of us) getting to level 100 faster. It's all about human perception and the psychology of motivation to keep us playing today. I'm sure GGG has read that book and is careful to take PoE down the path that leads to more total players and thus more mtx sales. Following the money trail is GGG's goal (as it is with all for profit companies).

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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Shagsbeard wrote:

I remember Trials of Atlantis in Dark Age of Camelot... killed that game for many of us. Power creep. It doesn't always work.

PoE is doing it similarly, but in smaller steps. It's smoothed out by the three month cycle. Players get used to the idea. It's here, but it doesn't seem to be as bad for some reason.

Your going up in my estimation, Not only a daoc mention but one pointing out that ToA had a pretty profound impact on the playerbase.

It had the same impact that the decision to not have a 3rd realm had on Warhammer Online.

Warhammer online had so many problems I don't think it ever got to the stage where no third faction was actually a problem, if it was finished on release I think they would have come to realise that no third had very major implications for how fun the pvp was.

GW2 got it right at least

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KillerKrug wrote:

My biggest concert is relataed to IIQ ... atm its more rewarding to farm a low tier map then chain t14-16 maps ( no elder / shaper ping pong ) which is just wrong... atleast make it even better make it more worth to farm high content

Similarly, just the other day, I was thinking that PoE is probably the only ARPG (or similar game) I've played where "gold find" (IIQ) is more important than "magic find" (IIR).

I don't remember seeing normal (i.e. non-bot) players value currency over actual item drops in a "loot game" before, ever. There's indeed something wrong with that.

Oldschool piety was harder then ubber elder, because you can't telegraph a crit triple-shock multiproj shotgun lightning ball.

Peace,

-Boem-

Everything gets faster and faster - quicker clear speeds, quicker deaths - as it gets faster I find it gets less enjoyable. In 2012 I enjoyed slogging through the game at a slow steady pace, but now even the league is designed around breakneck speeds and clearing within a time limit.

Hoping the next league doesn't force this kind of play - I know not everyone wants to take their time and smell the roses but there must be....dozens of us? :)

I can only agree with the general sentiment expressed by some of the OG's here. Yes power creep happened, big time. Already wrote in other threads about it a gazillion times. I loved the slow methodical nature of poe in the early days. Feel sad when i just crush all the stuff without any consideration for placement or danger. Despite all the modifiers and layers upon layers - the game is more brain dead than ever.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Warhammer online had so many problems I don't think it ever got to the stage where no third faction was actually a problem, if it was finished on release I think they would have come to realise that no third had very major implications for how fun the pvp was.

GW2 got it right at least

Such a shame really... The pvp in War was awesome. I do miss it still and compare other pvp games to it. :P GW2 got some things right but I could never really get into it. My wife's and my last foray in WoW burned us out on MMO's I think.