Why is power creep an issue?

Someone here played the now defunct Marvel Heroes?

That game history is an extremely good example of why and how power creep kills a game in the long run if its allowed to go wild and unchecked for long

To put simply, power creep tends to force future content to be always placed in a state that previous content becomes obsolete. As the game keeps growing, the power creep race between the players and the monsters results in a game full of uselessly big numbers, interesting, but obsolete mechanics and in general a game that is very vast, but 99% of it is pointless, a VERY bloated game that constantly points out to the players things could be better, but its not

On MH, the way the game turned into a grindfest of the top 1% of content and the general boredom caused by the way players could uterly obliterate all but that 1% of content(really, people were soloing raids meant for 10 players) caused the game to suffer a slow death(and then the developers attempted to correct things in a single huge patch that alienated the loyal players and nuked what little life the game still had)

Big or small numbers aside, as I think the numbers dont matter at all, the gameplay does - you just described POE for me: interesting, but obsolete mechanics and in general a game that is very vast, but 99% of it is pointless, a VERY bloated game that constantly points out to the players things could be better, but its not

There is no power creep, there were tons of builds in 2.6 doing 100M dps.

The largest nerf in POE history was the double dip ailment nerf, and the average character today is FAR FAR FAR below the pre-nerf capabilities.

For gods sakes, look at the gear on this 2.6 build doing 134 million shaper DPS.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1769788

Aside from the chest which is just a good ES roll, those are all 5c items. The weapons even then were only 2 to 3 chaos.

Try to build a 134 million dps build today and tell me how many EX it costs.


Path of nerfs is real, there is overall nerf creep not power creep.

my take is i love power it's the whole reason to get stronger. makes sense right?
sure i don't think power should be too easily to get. but it's needed in order to enjoy an action rpg. without power what's the point in getting better gear and gain more power?