Is power creep a concern? [Merged]

[Einsof.1457]

Is anyone else concerned that the game is getting a bit too easy? Things like jade bot cores are contributing to power creep and the trivializing of a lot of content over time. New elites seem to necessarily be more powerful to drive sales of expansions which also contributes. While it's not totally game breaking, I really hope the power creep slows down.  Things I've noticed is that the fractal CMs are much easier than they were a couple years ago, and some raid bosses (even without emboldened) are just embarrassing (cairn and MO to name two). Just a bit concerned by this trend of making the game easier and making gameplay simpler. I don't want to play a homgenized borefest.

Edited August 5, 2022 by Einsof.1457

[Danikat.8537]

Potentially yes it is a concern. I think less so in GW2 than a lot of games because of the focus on horizontal progression (although some games just embrace it and say new levels and gear trivialising older stuff is intended) but it does still happen.

I think Anet are aware of that and have made attempts to address the problem periodically, like the recent updates to early world bosses which gave them more HP and new mechanics so the fights will take longer, and various balance updates which have nerfed some skills, elite specs or whole professions which were considered to be too strong. Whether they've made the right choices or succeeded in their aim is a whole other discussion (and one you'll likely never get consensus on) but it at least shows they're aware power creep can be a problem and want to minimise it.

But I think it's also important to bear in mind that GW2 is a game where player skill counts for a lot, in many cases more than the skills and equipment you're using and that includes familiarity with what you're playing. Things are going to get easier over time not just because changes to the game make our characters stronger but because players know how to use them more effectively.

For example, between the worlds first kill of the revamped Tequatl which took a highly organised and dedicated group and many practice runs and the time when it started to be defeated by the majority of groups attempting the fight there weren't any balance changes, it's simply that more players learned the fight and got the hang of countering the mechanics.

You can see it in single-player games as well. If you restart a game you've been playing for a while you'll probably find it's a lot easier than you remember it, even if there's been no updates at all. The game is the same but you know more about how to play it and you've had more practice so you can do things on the first try that used to take you multiple attempts.

That's a lot harder to fix or prevent. Partially because there's no way to take away players knowledge and partially because I suspect a lot of players and developers wouldn't want to because getting better at a game isn't a bad thing, for a lot of people it's the point of playing it in the first place, even if it does make it easier.

[Valisha.8650]

Go play Harvest Temple CM if you think game is too easy 😜 

[Einsof.1457]

5 minutes ago, Valisha.8650 said:

Go play Harvest Temple CM if you think game is too easy 😜 

Hello, SHE/HER.  HTCM was tuned around current balance/powercreep at the expense of the old. That is an issue. 

Edited August 5, 2022 by Einsof.1457
made sure to use correct pronouns

[Sunchaser.9854]

Im not sure if its power creep or spec creep. But the fact a balance patch meant to "promote" diversity by removing unique buffs and then making mechanist able to ark or get 35k on 0-4 buttons while able to also spec into auto providing boons, might, personal quickness and specs for 100% alacrity.

While my class can at best provide 50% alacrity while having a 10-20 button rotation that includes stat swaps and chaining numerous half second skills to achieve half the result or have 90% of my Condi damage clip if the power mechanist one shot it is jarring. 

 

 

Install arcdps and a lot of players under perform, but mechanist is pretty much tuned around afking frame perfect snowcrows benchmarks by pressing 4 buttons while even missing a third set of ascended weapons to have a weapon slot, making a 300g viper gear cost + 50-100g 3 ascended viper weapon cost  seems a bit absurd. They can achieve twice the results for 1/5th the buttons/effort while providing 2x alacrity and since 60% of their dps is a bot, even if they routinely fail mechanics or go down because they have no raid experience. Its almost impossible for them to fail. 

Its like you have to compete with someone for raid spots who can pretty much ark a whole raid to 25-35k if they want to. While nearly every class has to bum it's way to 15-30k dps while also being only to provide 50% alac by design on a 20 button rotation with weapon and stat swaps and hearing mechs might be able to literally autoattack to 100% alacrity. 

I get build accessibility, but its only 1/9 class instead of 9/9 and 2 other classes got nerfed in the same patch that created rifle mechanist as a meta build. 

It makes you feel like are you're someone competing for slots with a person who has the rotation equivalent of pressing "play song demo" on a electric keyboard while the other person has to keep track of 20 notes, do them in sync in rapid order.

 

Or the song tempo will fall off... and the person pressing demo still gets to provide 2x more alacrity than you for no clear reason. You're competing with raid slots for people who have the game automate itself for them to 35k afk benchmarks while even the average pug dealing 10-30k dps is pretty generous. 70% of open world content with a mechanical in it will have themselves afk themselves to top results. 

I met a couple people in-game who were past warrior or ELE mains who had it worse..

But I can remember them just going. "Wow. This is ridiculously easy mode. It does 3x the damage I used to do and the pet has 40k hp and autos while you're dead... My mesmer used to use 20 button rotations and die like tissue paper for 2-15k dps. And my mech's auto abilities hit for 15k chunks twice a second instead of 264 damage with 500 damage over 10 seconds. This is absolutely absurd balance design. Its not the player carrying the spec. Its the horrendously over tuned auto attack package. " 

Edited August 5, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Ashen.2907]

I think so.

[Hashberry.4510]

I would enjoy parts of the open world having some difficult zones, its pretty dull out there. LI builds, mechs, etc are fine though. Folks with better coordination and ambition to learn have plenty to enjoy with harder specs to master. Being good is its own reward, others don’t have to be bad for us to have fun.

Edited August 5, 2022 by Hashberry.4510

[Dante.1508]

No it actually makes HoT, PoF and living stories actually fun to do now and viable these days.. Before i just stayed away from them.

Edited August 5, 2022 by Dante.1508

[Sunchaser.9854]

I mean.. It's just the design balance is.

AFK mechanist: Can provide 100% alacity and a 35k and 4 button rotation. Can also enter raids as AFK range dps, spec into 100% alacity vs 50% alac on other dps specs.  

I guess it's less of a player issue, but just wanting to see rewards for the content you play rewarded. I think a lot of people who rerolled to mechanist in our guild have either been sad to see how much less reward there are for 10-20 button rotation specs than the 4 button one.

Sure, buttons are buttons, but all that time, those players put in a lot more rewards and just assumed they were getting some reward, instead of dealing half the dps for a autoattack. 

If the aim was to perform underperforming specs or even classes across the board. Couldn't they just do buffs to the underperforming abilities/cds etc? The moves that are actually dps losses. I wouldn't mind if it was say, a 70-90% gap. But the fact that it was balanced about dealing about 95% of snowcrow's top damage for afking, while 80-90% of snowcrow's dps is usually considered a highly experienced player, means they also often practically dps most encounters by design.

Even on many players i've seen who've been raiding or playing for years in gw2. 

In their balance philosophy, they said they wanted to increase build diversity by removing unique boons and nerfing some overly complicated classes.

And i guess that's fair if.. they buffed some of the other options. But i look and apparently a year ago, my class was nerfed to 10 people 50% alac to.. 5 people 50% alac, while mechanist got 5 people 100% alac. In this case, i am doing more rotations to achieve half the results and boon uptime. It seems to be a paradox.

Do twice as much work for half the achievable result and being punished for just picking a fun class on a character selection screen? 

tl;dr: When one class afks to twice the results for half the work. It can kinda feels like the game punishes you for playing the classes that you want to play. (And effort doesn't even always mean reward, or even let you achieve the same result. 

100% alacity + Might for afking Beats 50% alac with 20 buttons. 2x the rewards. For. Going afk. 😕

I get at least achieving the same result or at least 10% better or equal.. But why do they get to have 100% alacity on a auto afk 35k dps builg? They have 3 prime choices in one spec, all fueled by a auto attack robot that hits for most of their dps. The best of every world.. while everyone else pays the cost to achieve half of what they provide automatically.) 

Edited August 5, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Labjax.2465]

I think it depends entirely on what Anet's design goals are. If they want older content to be the same difficulty, then it's a concern. If they want older content to be a little bit easier and newer content to be tuned a little bit harder, then power creep can make that happen without directly nerfing older content. You could imagine this might get out of hand over enough time, but they don't seem to be afraid to just nerf player power and eat the negative feedback. So they will probably just adjust if they think stuff is getting out of hand.

[Lottie.5370]

9 hours ago, Valisha.8650 said:

Go play Harvest Temple CM if you think game is too easy 😜 

 

"Go do the hardest content in the game that only like 100-150 people have managed to clear if you think the game is too easy"

 

Yeah, that's a... good argument? 🤔

 

The fact is that power creep has made old content trivial (like dungeons, to name one), and the overall higher DPS numbers have made fights/raids/fractals much easier. That said, it's not exactly new with EoD, and I don't think they should alter any existing content - there's still a lot of people that do struggle with it.

 

The way they've designed the latest content having many difficulty modes is pretty good - e.g. there's story instance, normal strike and strike CMs - something to cater to everyone.

[itspomf.9523]

Been a legitimate problem since Heart of Thorns first dropped in 2015, and has only gotten worse since (Firebrand got nerfed shortly before/after release, as surely everyone recalls the 40k Burning damage builds).

Overall?  I wouldn't say "easier" isn't bad, but a lot of things could either be brought up (or down) to more sane levels ... or we could admit that the overabundance of boons is getting problematic.  Ran a Boss Blitz today on an already tanky necromancer build and had 100% uptime of all boons and basically spent the time just faffing around healing people who were getting dropped by the boss.

And to put it out there 25 Might is +750 (30 x 25) Power and Condition Damage, which is honestly about a 38% to 75% uplift on output, if you take the "average" player into account.  That's a ton, even before you factor in the recent changes to Fury, Precision, and critical hit availability as a result.

Edited August 6, 2022 by itspomf.9523

[Labjax.2465]

10 minutes ago, itspomf.9523 said:

Been a legitimate problem since Heart of Thorns first dropped in 2015, and has only gotten worse since (Firebrand got nerfed shortly before/after release, as surely everyone recalls the 40k Burning damage builds).

Overall?  I wouldn't say "easier" isn't bad, but a lot of things could either be brought up (or down) to more sane levels ... or we could admit that the overabundance of boons is getting problematic.  Ran a Boss Blitz today on an already tanky necromancer build and had 100% uptime of all boons and basically spent the time just faffing around healing people who were getting dropped by the boss.

And to put it out there 25 Might is +750 (30 x 25) Power and Condition Damage, which is honestly about a 38% to 75% uplift on output, if you take the "average" player into account.  That's a ton, even before you factor in the recent changes to Fury, Precision, and critical hit availability as a result.

Boon dependence is such an annoying part of this game for me. I'm realizing one of the main reasons I have a hard time enjoying instanced PvE content. So many roles are just "boon uptime with DPS" or "boon uptime with heals." I can only guess some people enjoy that, I find it to be some of the most tedious gameplay, watching boon timing to make sure they stay up, on top of it on an overcrowded buff bar.

I was realizing recently that's part of why I've enjoyed more traditional trinity healing roles because they are situational and reactive, rather than static rotations.

Loosely related, I was looking at how to enjoy ranger more and trying out this metagame alac heal druid build and it said, like, your main priority is to keep up 25 stacks of might LOL. I'm like, what even are this game and its builds. How do you call a build heal alac and then say it's about keeping might up. It does heals and alac too, but like, what does might have to do with that, ya know. I forget how weird this game is sometimes.

[Firebeard.1746]

I don't really feel like there's power creep. I just think players get better and bored. I do think we get some new outliers from time to time, but for the most part, anet has been nerfing old elite specs or core to encourage playing new specs when expansions come, so that illusion we're getting stronger exists. Case and point, I don't think anything power DPS is benching above 40k now, I believe we had a few specs that could bench well above 40k before some of the balance passes they've done in the last couple years. 

Really, I think Anet needs some dynamic content that scales with your skill somehow, but gives higher rewards for players as they do the higher levels. That way people who really like pushing things will stop making these posts whenever they're bored. 

Edited August 6, 2022 by Firebeard.1746

[Susy.7529]

Ah, the more powercreep the better for me, but there is still too little powercreep here. 

I'll start to aknowledge powercreep only when we'll be able to breeze through HT cm with random pugs who never did it before.

Edited August 6, 2022 by Susy.7529

[Obtena.7952]

The biggest concern is the increase in weapon coefficients we are seeing with Ranger and Mesmer. I expect more for the rest of the classes in the next few patches. I don't really get what problem that is solving, but it's easy to see the results of it. At least boon spew we have ... you have to build for it and consider it to get it. With the weapons, it's just baked in DPS increase for the whole class. 

Edited August 6, 2022 by Obtena.7952

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

Power creep is definitely a concern, but people are equating the ease of Mechanist with an increase in power.  That's... not what it is.  Power creep is the increase in overall performance by increasing the numbers themselves (DPS, health).  Arguably feature creep is also a form of power creep, in which the sheer number of things that can be done at the same time can also be increased.  What the mechanist has is a low skill floor to doing decent damage.  I hear a lot of debates about the numbers (21k, 23k, 28k depending on circumstances) of the LI build, but nobody is talking about the high-impact builds.  Power mechanist does 36k DPS while cycling through kits and pressing 8 buttons.  Condi mechanist does 37.8k DPS with a two-kit piano rotation that I'm not even going to try to attempt.  Now, those numbers are quite decent, but on Snowcrows right now we have 42k untamed, 39k specter, 39k bladesworn, 38k harbinger, weaver, mirage, and 37k renegade, soulbeast, virtuoso, and catalyst.  The only profession that cannot either exceed or match the Mozart rotation of the engineer is Guardian, at 36k for firebrand (with teammates) and 35k willbender solo.

As the game itself goes, there's been two big moves recently.  One that increased power, and one that decreased power.  The removal for unique buffs from professions has resulted in a severe decrease in strike damage, and a more minor decrease in condition damage.  If you consider solo play a factor (which I do), then the proliferation of jade bot offensive and defensive buffs was a massive increase in power.  Solo and Yolo play received a massive buff from this, since solo boon capping gives players significant damage (at least +50%) and survival increases (at least 33%) without having to choose build your toon around boons and sacrifice raw damage bonuses.  Though this part is debatable, since organized groups that boon spam haven't been significantly improved with these buffs.

 

[Dawdler.8521]

Member when the group had to stop, stack up and blast combo fields to stack boons?

WvW members.

PvE sure as kitten dont.

[Bakeneko.5826]

1 hour ago, Obtena.7952 said:

The biggest concern is the increase in weapon coefficients we are seeing with Ranger and Mesmer. I expect more for the rest of the classes in the next few patches. I don't really get what problem that is solving, but it's easy to see the results of it. At least boon spew we have ... you have to build for it and consider it to get it. With the weapons, it's just baked in DPS increase for the whole class. 

unless it ele staff, then it gets more nerfs

[Asum.4960]

I can only recommend browsing the wiki skill histories for an insight into the ever marching powercreep. 

 

Looking at Whirling Axe's history for example, it went from 20 second CD with a 2.85 coefficient to 15 second CD (with a 50% movespeed increase) and a 8.388 coefficient over the years, tripling it's base damage output (much, much further multiplied by drastically higher boon access these days).

Maul went from a 0.8 coefficient on a 6 second CD on 3 targets in a 120 range, to a 1.75 coefficient on a 4 second CD with added instant CD reset on Hilt Bash on 5 targets in a 220 range, which also applies 5 Vuln and increases the damage of the next attack by 50%.

It's pretty easy to see why the core game especially has mobs instantly evaporate with single button presses these days. 

 

Much of the supposedly ever-green through scaling content has been invalidated by powercreep, as well as the entirety of core/ow in it's function to teach it's players the game and it's mechanics - which is imo a lot more harmful than it's impact on high end content. 

 

Even not considering Elite Specs and new additions like Jade Bot Cores, powercreep isn't remotely new nor has it ever slowed down.

[Mungrul.9358]

It also doesn't help that the balance team balance around community requests instead of what's best for the game.

 

Because one profession is capable of providing 100% uptime of a beneficial effect, representatives of other professions will start campaigning for their profession to have the same equivalent buff, until you get to the god-awful, boon-prevalent balance state we currently have.

 

In effect, those who play high-end content have actually made that "high-end" content easier by making all professions easier to play through constant campaigning for what they see as balance.

 

If I was in control, I'd ignore the players, take a look at all professions and nerf them all down to the same level as the current weakest profession, then look at ways of removing a lot of the support that has crept in over time. ESPECIALLY for professions that can build purely for damage while also providing incredibly effective support.

[Dante.1508]

16 hours ago, Mungrul.9358 said:

It also doesn't help that the balance team balance around community requests instead of what's best for the game.

 

Because one profession is capable of providing 100% uptime of a beneficial effect, representatives of other professions will start campaigning for their profession to have the same equivalent buff, until you get to the god-awful, boon-prevalent balance state we currently have.

 

In effect, those who play high-end content have actually made that "high-end" content easier by making all professions easier to play through constant campaigning for what they see as balance.

 

If I was in control, I'd ignore the players, take a look at all professions and nerf them all down to the same level as the current weakest profession, then look at ways of removing a lot of the support that has crept in over time. ESPECIALLY for professions that can build purely for damage while also providing incredibly effective support.

If you were in control the game would die overnight and evaporate.

[chronometria.3708]

22 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

The biggest concern is the increase in weapon coefficients we are seeing with Ranger and Mesmer. I expect more for the rest of the classes in the next few patches. I don't really get what problem that is solving, but it's easy to see the results of it. At least boon spew we have ... you have to build for it and consider it to get it. With the weapons, it's just baked in DPS increase for the whole class. 

Maybe this was because those classes were not doing the damage they were supposed to, due to nerfs - eg one wolf pack etc. In fact, even with these additions, power classes as a whole are fairing poorly compared to condition classes, who need less gear to be optimal.

[Dawdler.8521]

3 hours ago, chronometria.3708 said:

Maybe this was because those classes were not doing the damage they were supposed to, due to nerfs - eg one wolf pack etc. In fact, even with these additions, power classes as a whole are fairing poorly compared to condition classes, who need less gear to be optimal.

Whats a "condition class" in PvE? Does any meta fractal/raiding build run dire or trailblazer? 

[Mungrul.9358]

5 hours ago, Dante.1508 said:

If you were in control the game would die overnight and evaporate.

It probably would, because I'd also delete Guardian and reinstate Monk, while removing the 5 target cap on all skills.