Power Creep - An Opinion, Idea & Breakdown on how to Combat It

One of the things I have greatly enjoyed thus far about the PoE2 teaser's was the idea about consolidating where various stats and power come from.

My personal opinion on the most ideal solution would be for support gems to be like what Jonathan said, modifying skill behaviour and POTENTIALLY increasing player power as a result, but not necessarily just being a more modifier multiplying other more modifiers.

There are a few categories of modifiers I have seen thus far while playing. (not comprehensive, likely more somewhere)
- Base weapon / spell stats
- Modifiers directly on skills themselves: such as VS of Mamba's more poison mod
- Basic increases
- More modifiers: modifying our damage directly
- Damage taken: modifying the damage an enemy takes (wither, shock)
- Resistance related: lowering, penetrating, ignoring
- Double / Triple damage
- Boosted Levels
- Critical Strike
- Cast speed / Attack Speed: dependent on spell & attack base speeds
- Multiple Activations: traps & mines, Ice Nova of Frostbolts repeats, echo on cooldown skills
- DoT multiplier
- Added damage: dependent on damage effectiveness
- More units: in the case of summons or multiple traps / mines

And then the last classification would be things that artificially boost our damage but are damage boosts because they essentially alter the playstyle in some way, such as spell cascade and overlap on certain spells or returning projectiles.

My immediate thought would be to cap any one category of modifiers to elemental resistances current value of 200% (introduced thanks to Doryani's Prototype), and for the numerous sources of more modifiers to be ADDITIVE with each other rather than the current multiplicative.

The current system leaves greatly to be desired when everyone wants a 6/ psuedo 7 or 8 link with 5+ more multipliers of some kind to maximize damage output and 100% of the time being the de-facto support choice for a skill. I believe with a cap of 200% from each source (outside of certain items or skills having their own unique sets) would be an adequate choice considering thats where negative resistances have an existing set cap that doesn't need immediate further thought on "how much is enough".

An example of the above would be:
Shock Base: 50%
Shock Mastery: +15%
Voltaxic Rift: +40%
Final Shock: 105%

Wither Base: 6% per charge, capping at 90%
Nature's Reprisal: +3% per charge
Final Wither: 135%

Combined Damage Taken Modifier: 240%
Capped Value: 200% (chosen since this is the same value currently being used for -200% resistance cap)

These two modifiers are additive in nature because they are "damage taken". My proposition is that the above behaviour be applied to EVERY more modifier in that category, with potentially some even being merged. The power creep is insane and greatly disturbs "variety" of ways to use skills.

An example of More that would be nerfed and treated as coming from the same category would be "Concentrated Effect" & "Controlled Destruction" as both of these gems really should not be multiplying each other as they currently are, and are one of the greatest examples of power creep where the primary goal is to get as many of these kinds of sources as possible rather than fundamentally modify skills damage potential with different behaviour.

I would very much like to see power consolidated into different categories like these and limited to diversify how we play. "More modifiers" are the only category that I know of at present that multiply THEMSELVES with multiple sources. Perhaps such a change could help improve the state of PoE and better combat the million DPS meta.

I would be interested in people's thoughts on the matter (and the dev's), as again I personally would love for an appropriate meta shakeup that both simplifies things and complicates build creation in a healthier way than beating the DPS calculator with "MORE" sticks.

Any more power would be introduced and consolidated in one of the existing or an entirely new category that could more easily be monitored. At the very least, each category could have its own cap and be evaluated differently as well.

PS. sorry if anything's incomplete, sometimes I start writing a different thought and forget another

theres actually a few ways of dealing with power creep but it all boils down to what is the intention of the devs.

if the game is built to be played forever, the devs would always try to make their game scale up to a very high level of power.

there actually is an easy way to deal with power creep.

2 major things:

1. Speed
2. Caps

speed is easily the worst offender in POE. everything scales off speed and if you cant do at least 10 "actions" per second, your build sucks.

D3 hard nerfed speed by 50% very early in game. it's simply is too high of a multiplier.

Grimdawn has a very simple way to balance speed, which is to simply slap a cap. 300% increased attack speed is the hard cap. which is then multiplied by the weapons' base attack speed. a "slow" 2 hander can achieve maybe 3 attacks persecond which is slow in POE terms but it feels more weighty.

as for caps.

having caps is necessary to limit player power. some people hate it as it curbs player creativity and some would even say its a lazy way to balance the game.

to me caps are necessary or else every one is just gonna stack the same stuff over and over again.

in my humble opinion, POE currently is in the state of gluttony. GGG wants players to be creative but wants to have challenging content too. they want to have their cake and eat it too.

i would argue, the harder content you introduce, the more you cut down on build diversity. this is an objective fact. the more challenging the content is, the more you have to optimize. you cant branch out, you cant be a spoony bard. the way multipliers work effectively mean you're throwing a basket of fruits at the enemy vs throwing a few galaxy sized fruits at the enemy.

its just disgusting. and it happened because GGG allowed it to happen.

the counter argument is BS! theres a ton of builds you can do right now that are really good.

this is true, but you cant deny that the builds have to be highly optimized. it is a far cry from how the game was originally marketed where you could be a spell slinging maruader, melee witch. classlessness.

if ggg truly wants to avoid that. POE2 will need a lot of hard caps, diminishing returns.

funnily evasion and armor have diminishing returns. block is simply OP.

GGG created harder content and added AN to kill the players that are unkillable. to kill players that zoomed.

they achieved it but the fact is the ones hurting are the weaker players. the stronger players dont feel it.

that is the divide in the game.

and that divide is here because GGG wanted their players to play forever.

i played this game off and on for a decade.

i have a lot of legacy gear so i kinda am experiencing sunk cost fallacy, if i quit everything i do becomes meaningless. but at the same time GGG has made the game increasingly unfun to play for the "average" player.

if ggg stops introducing player power in poe1 i think i ll finally throw the towel.

everything is by design.

i would argue, player power is not entirely a bad thing. the devs did not need to introduce harder content but they did.

It's a very hard ask, but one that I also hope the devs are thinking about.

Behavior vs "More": this is incredibly difficult to get right. There aren't many behavioral shifts that won't just result in a pseudo-more multiplier. And stacking 5 behavior mods can get....messy and limiting. A great example of this is pierce vs fork vs chain vs. GMp/lmp vs. Volley vs. Barrage vs. Nova lol

I totally agree that speed is the single greatest issue, with crit being a very close second. I don't think 100% crit should be possible. I think there are WAY too many speed multipliers and passive nodes. But I also don't like slow games...

Block is most definitely NOT op. Taking full damage every 4th hit is pretty darn bad. Plus the heavy investment required to cap both attack and spell. There is no avoidance mechanic in PoE that is remotely OP. It's a strong layer when paired with good mitigation, but on its own it's almost useless.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

Block is most definitely NOT op. Taking full damage every 4th hit is pretty darn bad. Plus the heavy investment required to cap both attack and spell. There is no avoidance mechanic in PoE that is remotely OP. It's a strong layer when paired with good mitigation, but on its own it's almost useless.

alone block definitely is not "too OP" but it used to be paired with evasion and dodge, making players virtually unkillable.

even with the smallest amount of block (15% via dual weilding) thats a nice chunk of EHP. i would agree that getting max block does require some passive investments but usually those nodes come with bonuses that would likely be beneficial to your build anyway.

the reason why i would say block is OP, is in poe specifically, block negates all damage. many modern implementations of block, block a set amount of damage but in poe its a flat 0 damage. that's honestly crazy high value.

as for spellblock, i actually feel spell suppression is significant enough that if you have suppression you may choose to ignore spell block.

i might be wrong on this but the huge slams are usually physical attacks, which require armor to reduced, while spells tend to be elemental/chaos which can be reduced. its easier to hit 75% resists compared to 75% phys resist due to how armor works.

also with the anvil and block mastery, its possible to push up the max block chance to 80% thats a good 1/5 rather than 1/4 chance to be hit.

to top it all off, theres tons of "on block" effects that are either defensive OR offensive. heck i would even say that amongst the counter strike trigger gems, risposte is superior over vengeance, where vengeance triggers 40% of the time while risposte triggers on block 3/4 or 4/5 chance which is really good.

i also have bias on block as i tend to use 2handers. non staves 2handers typically have 0% chance to block. not being able to block is a loss of survivability.

even a dual wielder gets 15%, the weakest shield gets 23%

^I'm not gonna lie, and I'm also not gonna dive into the nitty gritty....but almost everything that you wrote is just wrong, or at least 5+ years of obsolete information.

Block is no more powerful than any other mechanic you can get. In fact, it is close to the bottom on effectiveness, even WITH stacking in other defenses. The issue you seem to have is a build without block may work 75%, but a build WITH block as well might net 80% defensive efficiency. That 5% is noticeable but NOT op: it is just standard practice when stacking defenses. When assessing the efficacy and "op-ness" of block, you need to also include the OVERLAP of actual real mitigation defenses and THEIR effectiveness, which is drastically higher both on their own and when stacked.

ANY mitigation is better than block. If you die every 4th (or 5th) hit, its 100% useless. But if you can tank EVERY hit, then we are getting somewhere.

The fact that block is useless WITHOUT heavy investment in both gear and passives, like you also said, is enough to say its not even close to OP. That 15% block from dual wielding you mention? 100% useless and a waste of time. It does absolutely nothing reliable for your character. Not on block effects, not counterattacks, not protection, nothing. This is just straight up mathematical fact.

And your talk of riposte vs vengeance shows how LITTLE experience you have with counterattacks and block in general because you are just....wrong. Riposte is a STRIKE skill (single target), vengeance is a huge AoE. They serve totally different purposes and vengeance is better at everything you mentioned than riposte by many orders of magnitude.

I can sit here and continue to debate why "avoidance" mechanics are never ever ever ever OP, especially in current PoE....but it would be wasted in this conversation. They are GOOD additions, don't get me wrong. But they are NOT anywhere near where you believe them to be.