Why is power creep an issue?

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LeajaWijac wrote:

You gotta love all the smug edgelords on here though thinking this game is so insanely hard and not for the casual player lol. All you do is act as a gatekeeper for new players to come in who don't feel welcome because they play a game that is fun to them and GGG nerfs the aspect that was fun to the new player. Brilliant.

Farming lower tier content efficiently is rewarding and fun because you can do it with pretty much any build. There is a lot of strategy in the atlas that is overlooked by most people due to the tunnel vision to T16s.

I miss the days when Ziz and other content creators farmed Dried Lake and low tier maps for hours because it was fun and rewarding. Back then it was expensive to get to high tier maps which allowed for more options in the endgame grind.

Because everything becomes meaningless and a giant pulp of gray nothingness. POE has a million abilities also within monsters and they mean absolutly nothing. Does anyone EVER consider any ability of a rare or even on maps with extra abilities on monsters? Short of a few things like reflect modifiers, nothing means anything. We all just zoom around and one button packs and go "Ooooh" at all the explosions .. and that's it. The same applies to drops. Chests mean nothing at all .. why are they even in the game. Drops are so random, that nothing matters related to them. The only exception being a few rare supertopend boss drops.

GGG wants a few things to be more meaningful .. and I get that. It's far from perfect, but yes, I dreaded the shipwreck cave a bit back a few years due to the flicker strike mobs in there. Nowadays? LOL....

It pretty simple the Devs adding in new chase items/gems/affixes for the players which are more powerful than existing ones either by themselves or in combo with something else.

That means getting the item causes power creep to happen as the player is way more powerful than before.

The solution to power creep is to balance all items and gems combos properly so player power is capped at the level you want it at.


If you are not willing to balance items/gems properly you need to add caps for damage and damage resistance.

It isn't a issue, you know something something playing while watching tv.

They are just shifting the balance again after introducing various elements without making game "harder". The gears must keep grinding.

There isn't a universal right and wrong on this topic. Some players think the point of an ARPG is to sit back and blow up screens. Others believe the point is to engage with content and have to be thoughtful with your actions; power creep removes the need to be thoughtful or even careful.

Neither side is wrong because that is what they find fun, which is really the point of a game.

This is where GGG needs to make a decision because you can't make both sides happy. Is their game just Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start....or do they want it to be closer to their original vision?

They will lose some players no matter what choice they make.

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QNeko wrote:

The best solution I have seen was proposed by BakaManiaK and charlesgael in our guild's Discord:

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They could just make it so that if you kill the boss far too quickly, it drops nothing.

Basically, hit the boss too hard? You destroy your loot.

Hit lightly the boss, then run around him for 5 minutes, before finishing him.
You get your loots. Not sure this is a pleasant solution...

And btw you also get a ban for abusing game mechanics :) Like for the ultimatum run in-and-out the circle ;)

Like they have already written in the manifesto. What reason the designers have to think about new mob/boss mechanics, designs, etc, if the players just zoom-zoom over them and even shred the endgame bosses in seconds?

For me, the overall direction seems to be the right one, even if we can discuss about the details (especially the aisling change.. *grrrrrr*). The meta was kinda narroed down to a couple of builds invented by some pros, which a big fraction of the community simply copied, because they work.

If they now really achive to trim down those power spikes, this could really help in terms of build diversity. If you can decide between support gem A which gives some utility and gem B which means 50% more dps, the decision is kinda clear. But if the difference gets trimmed down to 20%, gem A becomes more of an option because the payoff is lower.

For me as non-meta player who preferes to invent my own builds without caring much about what the streamers play, this could really end up good. If the difference between a good and a godly build narrows down to 5 million vs 10 million dps in stead of 5 million vs 50 million (just used random numbers to illustrate), you could balance the game way smoother. Balances around the godly builds would kick out less good builds.

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kotli wrote:

If you are not willing to balance items/gems properly you need to add caps for damage and damage resistance.

The big problem here would be, that it's kinda hard to calculate the effective dps in order to add in a cap here. flasks, buffs, triggers... there would be so much stuff to keep in mind and so much corner-cases that a dps cap would just result in a contest around who finds the most creative way to circumvent it.

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Ruffleberg wrote:

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I miss the days when Ziz and other content creators farmed Dried Lake and low tier maps for hours because it was fun and rewarding. Back then it was expensive to get to high tier maps which allowed for more options in the endgame grind.

Back then GGG had the vision that high-tier maps were not sustainable unless massive currency investment. Maybe they should go back to that vision, so people dont expect that they are obliged to play in T16.

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lxabear wrote:

Generally speaking power creep is an issue because in order to keep up the creators have to keep coming out with harder mobs and more difficult end game content to keep those that reach that point interested in the game. The more they do this the further away end game content becomes for the "average players" and the more expensive it becomes for the average player in both in game currency and time to reach that point. This encourages RMT to keep up, which in turn continues to increase the gap between the average player and end game players. Making end game content essentially unobtainable for the average player. Then players spend their time copying what other players have done to reach this "goal" instead of playing the game for what it is and creating for themselves. It becomes an endless loop, which is less fun and over too quickly. In addition, players just zip through regular content because they feel like they are missing out on the best parts of the game instead of playing the game for fun.

Usually, I'll scroll right past posts like this. Not the content, the structure. But I am glad I did not. This is actually full of valid points. Pleasantly surprised. Thank you.

The game I have enjoyed most in my life was TERA back in the day with ridiculous hard content. We had a well-trained 5 man group and on our first evening entering Manaya´s Core (hardest instance) we managed, after I 5 trys, reaching the final end boss of it 4 times, to kill 6% of her total health.

We did that every day for 2 weeks in the evening, until we were finally able to down her the first time. No gear improvements, just plain and simple training and getting better mechanically.

As of now, Path of Exile offers those boss-mechanics on a smaller, but existent level. Shaper and Sirus could be beaten on 0 defenses, as you can dodge everything in there if you play it perfectly. I would love to see bosses be harder to kill, with that focus on mechanics behind them so that you profit from good execution.

With intense powercreep there are no mechanics anymore as you oneshot everything. Thats why I genuinely feel stopping powercreep is a good thing. The only problem I have with PoE in that regard is the new feared invitations and Maven, as it is more of a gear-check: The area will be unplayable 2 minutes in and Maven heals up monsters, so there is a threshhold of damage you need to surpass to be able to play it.