Diablo IV Should Not Have Any Powercreep

General Discussion
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I think the biggest weakness of D3 and the main reason the game is dead is because of powercreep. If you played when RoS was released, you enjoyed the game at it’s peak. At this point we had a fresh start with the newly redesigned game. Tons of viable builds, tons of useful legendaries, and you could even make builds based around individual legendary item effects. Using Stalgard’s Decimator as a Frenzy Barbarian was a literal build. Your damage was mainly coming from the weapon proc. I spent hundreds of hours theorycrafting builds in town back in the day. I loved it.

Fast forward to powercreep hell where we are. There are a handful of cookie-cutter developer-designed builds for each class that are carefully balanced around having one specific item in each gearslot for the build. Zero player choice, at this point we aren’t even the ones playing the game, the devs are playing it for us. There is a vast pool of legendaries, but only like 10% of them are actually used because of powercreep leaving 90% of them behind. They have even left entire builds in the past because they just didn’t feel like including them in the powercreep. The game feels so shallow now.

For Diablo IV, they need to generally maintain the power balance they launch with. As in 2 years later shouldn’t mean we are doing 2000% more damage. When new items are added they should be balanced alongside the already existing items. When new bosses/dungeons or difficulties settings and stuff are added, there should be zero player powercreep.

What is the point of adding harder difficulties if the players get stronger as well? Like oh yeah we are adding hardmode to the game where all monsters have 50% more health, but to compensate, we are buffing all player damage by 50%. Lol what. Diablo 3 has like 99 difficulty settings because they kept adding more difficulties and powercreeping players over and over. I can’t imagine being the guy in the office proposing that. One of the initial designs for rifts was that eventually players would hit a ceiling. Then they kept buffing players to raise that ceiling. What do people clear now, GR 200? Why?

When a new expansion launches, it should not even increase the level cap. With a new expansion, our perfectly rolled amazing GG legendaries/uniques/rares shouldn’t just become vendor trash. It was fine for D3 since as I mentioned, they revamped the entire game. Trashing our old gear was fine because RoS was a fresh game slate. It was like Diablo 3.5.

This game will be competing directly against PoE 2. That is already going to be extremely challenging for Blizzard since PoE 2 has the potential to be the best ARPG of all time. The Blizzard devs need to just wrap their heads around WHY people expect PoE2 to be the best, but people are being cautious and pessimistic about D4.

If D4 can have zero numerical powercreep, or at least extremely limited powercreep, it will be a respectable game. Nobody wants to see another D3 disaster where poorly thought out design just buries an otherwise fun game.

The powercreep they did for D3 was also just creating a lot of busy work for the devs. Rather than having to numerically rebalance the entire game every 3 months, the devs should just be nurturing the game as it is. Maintain the garden of items and builds for the players to enjoy. The only changes should be buffing weak stuff, and nerfing strong stuff.

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:100:
That is terrible design, and should not be repeated.

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Yes (20 characters) :l

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Overpowerness invalidates the dangerousness of the content you are facing and undermines the stakes of the story

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The same way borderlands 3 was ruined lol

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PoE? Power Creep?

:thinking:

As for your answer…Nope. Power creep will come naturally as long as it keeps getting patched up. Don’t forget it also happens in D2 too where your character was dealing around 300+ damage jumped to 10K damage easily after a few patches.

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A lot of people that have left Poe are hoping for it to go back to more modest dps in Poe2

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It seems to be a common desease for arpgs
Wait
That rhymed

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but the powercreep in PoE is something players dislike about the game. Particularly the insane speed nonsense. The game itself has become so fast-paced that it’s pretty much impossible to see anything that is happening on screen. PoE2 is addressing this issue (hopefully) and keeping it much slower. I would say the no powercreep thing definitely applies to PoE2 as well. It would ruin that game eventually.

Talking damage numbers though, it’s still just unnecessary going beyond the thousands-ten thousands. I didn’t play D2 early on, but I can see them needing power creep if damage was that low, just because being around 300 damage wouldnt leave much room for design. A few thousand damage works though.

Powercreep is a thing in card games where they release hundreds of new cards with every set, and they need the cards to be useful within a reasonable design space. It doesn’t belong in games like these. When they come out with patches that suddenly triple player dps, it’s a forced change that is unhealthy for the game.

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Path of Exile and Diablo 3 both have immense power creep. Even Diablo 2 had power creep. Just D2 and PoE is abit close related as their shining combat moment are bosses, where as in Diablo 3 that’s about everything else.

There’s not a single ARPG without power creep in the market. It makes the hero’s story interesting; without the struggle there’d be nothing to play and win for.

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Depends on the powercreep. I think it’s perfectly fine for a game like this to have a good item for fire builds, then eventually they add a great item for fire builds. I should have been more specific in my post.

I mean specifically just increasing player power just for the sake of increasing it like in D3. Like you check the patch notes and half the abilities have had their damage increased by 50%, and the items supporting those abilities have had their effects increased by 50%, and now suddenly these are the best builds, and they keep doing it until once again, most of the items are vendor trash, and there are no creative player builds left.

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D2 and PoE gets you small tests and entirety of D3 is a trial on itself. D3 scaled down by big numbers to determine if effort required and stakes match the power given to the build. It’s not increasing numbers for the sake of increasing numbers. You can’t really measure or gauge human input or risk taken with basic small digit numbers, so the scale had to be larger.
D2 had limited options so it chose to restrict things to give leeways for multitude of approaches for power growth. You may prefer that, but semi-competitive nature of time trials doesn’t fit this model at all.

We have little to no idea about Diablo 4 so it’s too early to speak. Keyed dungeons will have more or less retain this small competitive essence, so I rather leave issues at developers’ hands rather than dictating what should be done like any of us is an expert.

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D2, D3, PoE all do have power creep, although PoE and D3 takes it to a whole new level.
That still doesn’t mean power creep is okay.

Power creep is usually the opposite of struggle though.

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That’s the interesting part. Developers always have to come up with some type of struggle or an interesting mechanic to counter this. It can be about position and collision, wind up on casting, efficiency sustain or something else. Power creep is not always about damage, an ARPG is a good game when it gauges and calculates all the dynamics in it. Otherwise you get something like Clicker Heroes.

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That’s the thing. It didn’t. They added higher Torment levels while buffing players. Then with the Greater Rifts and stuff, the ceiling just kept increasing every time players got buffed. The numbers got bigger, but the difficulty stayed the same, or even just got easier.

How many Horse Phalanx Crusaders are there running around? None as far as I know, even though that used to be one of the best builds. I haven’t played in a while, so idk if they buffed the items for the build. If they do +% player power buffs in patches, they would need to apply it to every single item so that builds dont just die off.

Like imagine if they kept increasing every class’s damage by 50% every patch except for the Barbarian. Eventually the Barbarian would be so bad that it wouldnt be playable. That’s what D3 set powercreep did to builds.

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Play around GR120-130+ then you may have a change of view.

If they’re not around then they deemed not worthy in the standards of developers by the changing variables. If it’s easy to sustain and doesn’t require any risk taking, then it goes down below. If gameplay flow between reflex and commitance is imbalanced, then it goes down again. If a class gets too neglected, then it gets a role into the meta so they have a purpose afterall.

Several builds shared the same or similar fate along the years and it’s no use being bitter about it. In Diablo 2, a Cold Sorceress was the queen of the game back at classic but it can not reliably clear ubers now or solo at all because immunities. However, Cold Sorceress is an amazing build to stack magic find% for and clear non-immune monsters.
In current model of Diablo 3 there are only a few Rift Guardian Killer roles due their bursts being the highest while others only have sweeper or zdps. There are several like this; higher threshold also budge the standards.

Game dynamics and power scale can change when developers’ view of pushing the highest test change as well. Years ago highest push was around GR55 by almost all classes and existing builds without any deep optimization needed; now it’s GR140-150 with a good well optimized build that takes you months.

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but I’m saying GR120-130 or whatever right now wouldnt be more difficult than lets say GR50-60 at some point in the past. In 5 years people could be clearing GR500 just because player power would get buffed so much by then. Then they have to come up with new systems to allow players to skip through hundreds of GR levels to get to GR500 in a reasonable timeframe. That turns into unnecessary busy work for the devs. The increase in GR levels is artificial.

Then the thing about items/builds not being worthy of their standards, whether true or not, that is bad design. There were so many cool legendaries back in the day that were builds on their own. Thunderfury, Shard of Hate, tons more. They are all worthless junk now because they aren’t related to set item builds which have been buffed probably 80 times now.

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Yep, completely pointless.

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Yeah I think power creep sucks. I think Diablo 3 did it way too much. There was even quite a bit power creep in vanilla Diablo 3. 20-30k damage was good for a short while but by the end of vanilla it was 10x that. All that power creep was baked into the game design. It was just nerfs to enemies and buffs to item RNG that allowed you to find more and better affixes and you didn’t need as much defense. That was a bad design but somewhat natural power creep.

Then RoS comes and boosts the power right out of the gate with doubling, tripling or more of primary stat on gear. You got magic items with so much more primary stat that even your semi rare -bi or tri fecta items cannot really compete. IT would have been understandable IF they had done anything to actually improve the itemization but they didn’t. It turned out to be a WoW deal. And then legendary items and set bonuses come into play and we end up in a completely ridiuclous situation. And then augments and cube and legendary gems and its just totally out of hand.

That kind of progression is not fun to me at all. But still, even D2 had some power creep but it also had too much power scaling. Too much scaling I think is a little different than power creep. Even after the power creep was done, D2 had too much power scaling for my taste. I think it would have been better if it had maybe only the exceptional level of gear and an adjustment to drop rates to suit that.

Honestly I think the ebst way to address this problem is to have a durability system basically without the chance to repair. Take items out of circulation naturally. When you want to add new things… this takes all that stuff out of the equation. You don’t have to make the new thing more powerful to make it appealing. Players are always looking for new things and you have introduced a new, new thing that they can find.

Its basically makes items a sort of “long term powerup”. IT lets you keep drop rates high, not have power creep. I’d like to see diablo take that route.

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They won’t. 64 bit integer numbers reached their limit with near GR150. Further increasing this will make Rift Guardian health reach the limit and others have to follow. Nobody would like to fight hundreds of 18 quadrillion health Fallen at GR300+ before a 18 quadrillion health Rift Guardian. Trust me. This removes all this risk taking, threat grades and stakes thing I talked about. They won’t push the technical side of servers further. Upgrading the entire system to 128 bit for one game doesn’t seem like a good decision as there are many use the same random number generator embed into the client.

You can sleep well knowing this.

What? At higher Greater Rifts, stakes get higher and when you make a mistake you get cornered and die with constant gear checks. Don’t tell me it didn’t happen in PoE or D2. D2 Uniques are as much, if not more unforgiving than D3 elites.

You can still use them in LoD or LoN builds, just don’t expect to clear or faceroll GR120 because as I said, passive benefits and lack of interaction is not interesting at their eyes. You have to go all out to make them measly useful and appears community is fixated on efficiency instead of having fun from a game. If not, you can still make use of them by tossing them at your Followers.