Why is power creep an issue?

Powercreep is a problem because if you introduce something new that's more powerful than everything that came before it, then everything that came before it becomes meaningless. Then in order to compensate, everything in the game needs to be buffed to the new level of power, which leads us right back to where we started. This leads to an ever-increasing amount of time needed from the developers to continue to buff everything in the game (to maintain build diversity and meaningful challenge), as the game expands. This might be sustainable, but then it becomes a question of return on investment when evaluating developer time.

I recommend playing one of your favorite offline games, and enable cheats/hacks. Take a game like DOOM Eternal and turn on all the cheats and feel godlike. See how long you feel entertained when you one-shot everything and there's 0 chance of you dying because you're immortal. See how fun that is after about an hour or two.

Ideally with a decently designed end game system it's not.

You can spend some time with no power creep, but this would 1) limit the developers to not adding harder and harder challenges, and 2) would eliminate the sense of progression from players' perspective and they will seek a new game. Look at Diablo 3 - just announced the greatest power creep of all times and I intend to give it a try, after being done with the game for almost two years.

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Ruffleberg wrote:

In the context of PoE, power creep has made all content before T16s a waste of time. There is no point in farming gear earlier because you don't need it to do the content.

These IIQ human bots who are chaining t3 towers all day long will disagree, hehe.

Power creep is not itself a problem.


GGG's solution to it is. There are almost no builds capable of ignoring mechanics and blowing up screens. Top 0.2%.

Instead of setting a cap on progression (X million damage, X effective life pool vs hits and degen), they nerf the ENTIRE spectrum.

Their support gem nerf hit people doing 100k dps just as hard as people doing 100M dps.

The removal of bleed, totem life, minion damage hit builds doing 100k damage as much as builds doing 100M.

That is simply bad design.

They have a stupid reason that doesnt make any logical sense (oh we wanted people to have progression, as if most people are topping 10M dps right now).



Its bad game management.

Real solutions? Cap gem levels, no more level 31 minions. Cap crit multi. No more 750% crit multi doing 50M dps. There will still be room for 99.8% of players to grow.

I can only speak for myself, and to me, PoE is all about progression. The more powerful you get (or the faster you get powerful), the less progression there is. Progression, gearing, building, planning; becoming powerful will always be more fun to me than being powerful.

I'm with Grimro. Playing overpowered broken stuff is the most fun.

Aside from the stuff everyone else posted about why this angle is stupid, there are also these two factors:

1) Most endgame bosses already have their art parts protected by invincibility sequences. There is no amount of DPS and zoom that lets you skip Sirus's monologues, so that's clearly not an issue even at a theoretical level.

2) How often do you go to the museum?
Unless you work in one, it's not going to be nearly as often as the times one kills a boss. Taking something slow and enjoying it is great when done rarely, but when doing the 10th Sirus in the league, the whole "enjoy the part" falls rather flat, given I've already done that 9 times in the past week or so.

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kotli wrote:

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.

So I took a 60% damage nerf for Mageblood, which I will never have, to exist? That enhances my experience so much, thx GGG, thx Chris.

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Judaspriester wrote:

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?

Well maybe because for every player that ZOOMs through that boss there is 10 behind them that will not ZOOM through it and will see everything. By making the top ZOOMER must see everything those 10 behind might not be able to beat the content at all, which is wrong in my opinion.