Diablo IV Should Not Have Any Powercreep

General Discussion
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I don’t think it’s about power creep. It’s about separating player power from items that enhance specific skills in very specific ways and the very, very strong interactions groups of legendaries can have.

Diablo 2 dodged this pit (either accidentally or by design) by having the generic “+skills” modifier. Buffing the skill itself can make it useful. In Diablo 3, the skill needs supporting items. They added maybe a dozen builds to D2 by buffing skills in the latest patch. In D3, it would have required adding/modifying legendary bonuses or sets.

Diablo 3 can feel real crappy at max level because that one skill you want to use really can’t be used because there are no good builds behind it. While leveling, you can generally use almost any skill you want… until you find a legendary that gives a massive bonus to a particular skill and then you have to use it if you want to level faster. I don’t think this is necessarily bad but there just aren’t enough items to cover every rune for every skill and only a few dozen builds out of the potential thousands wind up being any good. I still have an axe to grind about changing Etched Sigil to be specifically about tornadoes ruining my favorite build in the game (Arcane Torrent/Meteor).

And of course, while some players say “we don’t want power creep!” there will also be people complaining, “stop nerfing the fun builds!” You can’t have both.

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Which is why I think Diablo 4 can greatly benefit from incorporating the already existing factions war of Diablo story and using it as a lore and endgame mechanic

If you are not only fighting against randomly generated dungeons but also for territorial possession and buffs over other players… the stakes become way higher and the game become organically replayable rather than forced “One Up”

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Yah i agree, instead of items that give u power creep, diablo 4 should have items like
" reduces ur dmg by 200%" or “you take 50% more damage from enemies”, and instead paragon that gives u +5 mainstat u will get less paragon that will UBTRACT you mainstat like that to heavily nerf ur character so weak, that will feeel useless and not play it anymore, im down babeee

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I’ll agree that these legendaries broke D3, but they didn’t have to. Where the D3 team went wrong was a couple of things:

  • Making the bonus itself be OP. They started off with each affix on an item providing an equal amount of potential power to the item. You might get 100 main stat or 300 armor, whatever. It was balanced within level brackets and still is as you level. It was also balanced by having a large power budget in the various item tiers from white to legendary, but again, each one had comparable power with the others on the item. The Legendary affix should’ve followed this pattern and it would’ve been fine. This would’ve read like +500 weapon damage (linear scaling) or +5-10% damage (multiplicative) when using X skill, but it wouldn’t give you more power than the +150 main stat that otherwise might have been in that place. They let the legendary affix be OP.
  • Allowing stacking multipliers. It should’ve been kept linear. This exaggerated the effect of the OP bonus with the paragon system (which also should never have happened).
  • Once they were on the treadmill, they didn’t fix it by using broadly defined and better balanced legendary affixes. They doubled down on making a whole long list of skill-specific items.
  • Lastly, they let multipliers multiply with other multipliers creating exponential growth in interactions with things like the set item bonuses. There was literally no mathematical way any other skill/item choice could keep up with the exponential power gain there.

Build-defining legendaries are a great idea, but they have to be implemented with care and with respect for the underlying mathematical balance that keeps the skills balanced and mutually viable as build options. The second they pick one skill and make it too powerful, you lose build diversity.

I disagree. You can make both players happy, but you have to manage the expectation from the beginning. Power creep is a process. If you’re going to avoid it, you must nerf overpowered mechanics within the game to bring them in line with the intended balance. This is necessary to preserve challenge. When mechanics become too powerful, the challenge become trivialized. Game play transforms between something interesting and strategic into a grind of doing repetitive tasks for a long period of time.

The other thing that happens when you nerf is that you preserve build diversity. Nerfing and buffing to maintain the relative parity between skill choices so that you can choose ones that fit your fantasy or your play style or whatever. Often when we hear “stop nerfing the fun builds,” what they really mean is to leave their overpowered, easy play style in place so they can feel more powerful. Everyone likes to feel like a winner, but it destroys build diversity. That’s the expectation that must be explained up front and regularly repeated. “We want all of our skill choices to be viable.”

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66

This is mostly what I was referring to. I’m fine with nerfing overpowered builds and buffing ones that aren’t as strong as intended. The problem comes when someone says “don’t nerf my fun build!” and the “fun build” is 10x stronger than the next one. If you don’t want power creep, let them nerf it.

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Yet PoE is still one of the ARPGs with the larger player base at this moment.

The only way to prevent power creep from happening is to stop updating the game.

And I can say that it is unnecessary to make the number small as long as scaling happened.

Power creep is power creep. Don’t try to justify it, and it happened without increasing the character level.

There is nothing unhealthy about it.

False. Try to look around the D3 forum here and you can see many people complaining about S26 theme because it lack of power creep theme compared to previous seasons.

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Players != quality.

That is obvious nonsense. Power creeping is an active process, it doesnt just magically happen.

Season themes are not so much power creep as it is borrowed power. It always goes back to the start, so the creeping does not happen there. Still bad of course.

But no wonder, after you scared away everyone who dislike the current state of things, that the people who remain, are the ones who do like the current state of things, and cry when they dont get their overpowered toys.

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yea i guess there are always people who need win buttons and big numbers to have fun and these are the people still playing this game :x
and people who have to in order to pay their rent (rip rhykker xD)

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Power creep is inevitable in all games like Diablo. So D4 is no different as far as power creep.

The difference though with D4 would be how high the power creep climbs as well as how fast it climbs. As long as it is a slow power creep then there is nothing wrong with that at all.

The reason why power creep cannot be eliminated is due to the fact that players love to see their current characters getting stronger. Even if it is only in the smallest of percentages. Or growing in new ways that isn’t related to power. Without seeing any improvement in our characters in D4 past a certain point will probably mean that after we are through playing all of the viable builds we are through playing D4. I don’t think that Blizz would want that.

PoE 2 will no doubt be a competitor, although I am kind of worried since I haven’t heard anything new about PoE 2. Has its development slowed down a lot. If it has then it won’t be releasing around the time of D4. It might release about a year or two later than D4 which could hurt it. More so if D4 becomes the game it deserves to be which is a smashing success.

D3’s power creep came about due to how they changed the sets. In their eyes there has to be only one piece of gear that occupies each slot and it must be a set. Whereas D4 can have it be a mix of things. Also as long as you don’t have to have the BiS gear to clear the endgame then we will be fine.

Now if we are competing on the leader boards or wanting to achieve a goal in D4 that only the absolute best gear in the game can give then we would need all BiS gear in every slot. What I am saying is that at times a game will force you to do something that you don’t want to do because that is the only way to do it. In this case it would be okay for that to happen. You cannot get rid of BiS gear due to the fact that games work with numbers so it is bound to happen to D4. Even though there could even be strong alternatives to BiS gear that would work in almost all but the most extreme cases.

Another thing with D3 is that it loves to shake up the meta from time to time. D4 from time to time might do that as well. Depending on what is considered meta though. If the meta is not important the majority of the time then shaking up the meta won’t be needed.

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Getting more powerful is not the same as power creep. Of course we will be more powerful at lvl 60 than lvl 1.

Heck, even infinite power is not the same as power creep, although it is horrible (maybe even worse than power creep) and should not happen.

Basically this yeah. Well, also legendaries.
We can all go back and read the patchnotes over the years.
100% changed to 300%, 300% changed to 600% and so on.
That is power creep.

Indeed, that is an important part of creating more viable build options. And is of course directly related to the “endless difficulty scaling” of D3. Difficulty has to stop somewhere (and yes, technically D3 difficulty stops at GR150, but only after all that insane power creep that got us there). The top difficulty should be reachable with the gear that exists in the game at day 1 (not reachable day 1 of course, since lvling up, finding items etc. takes time).

Yeah, that is much of the cause behind the power creep. Flavor of the Month design.
To be fair, you can have Flavor of the Month design without having power creep. It can happen through borrowed power, or it can happen by nerfing last months top builds instead of buffing other builds above it.
Not that it should happen of course; Flavor of the month is terrible game design.
You also change the meta by improving balance. No need to replace the meta builds. Balance it so there are more meta builds instead.

If there are thousands of viable builds, you wont be done anytime soon.

If the growth is not power related, by definition it cant be power creep. So once again, it is not impossible at all to eliminate power creep. And yeah, as many people have proposed over the years, you can still have endless non-power growth systems for people who love collecting cosmetic cat pictures or whatever.

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Without power creep, your character never improves.

I don’t want a static character, thanks.

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Of course it does.
It just doesn’t slide down a slippery slope of power.

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If it does, then it is not “no powercreep.” It is simply very small increments.

+.0000000000000000000001 != 0.

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75

Getting power from lvl 1 to whatever max lvl (including items along the way) is is not power creep. Just power growth.

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As for the whole “power creep is unavoidable” stuff that people throw around in here, Genshin Impact is an interesting case, it is a freaking pay to win game, with constant patches. It “should” suffer from absurd amounts of power creep considering the kind of game it is.
But for the most part, all the new power is horizontal progression.
Characters rarely gets more powerful after they are released. Many of the earliest released characters are still among the strongest today, and not at all because they have been raised up by power creep.
That sure doesnt mean there is no power progression however, the game has tons and tons of grind for power, through all kinds of progression systems.

Now, horizontal progression can itself lead to some vertical progression ; the more stuff you can combine, the more likely it is to see combinations that rise above the rest; and the devs hesitance to nerf buff existing characters unfortunately also goes the other way;: with a hesitance to nerf stuff. But anyway, that doesnt change that power creep is not much of a thing.

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You know what else you can do to shake up the meta? Nerf stuff.

This is a situation very similar to a person standing in front of a pet.

If the person isn’t confident the animal will recognize that and snap or scratch the person. The person will keep being afraid and just toss toys and treats at the animal to keep it satisfied.

A confident person can grab the animal, pet it, massage it, even play with their jaw and teeth and they will love it and not hurt the person.

Blizzard is not confident. They keep throwing buffs and new powerful toys at you and you become spoiled, fat and lazy. And when the every dare to put their hand close to you to take away a toy, you will snap. So they won’t.

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Ain’t both are power creep somewhat? I mean Diablo 2 had some capped difficulty so it was horizontal power growth, expansion pack didn’t change things much beside numbers and available synergy or aura abilities. Diablo 3 at vanilla supposed to shift your character from crowd control heavy to damage dealer as you upgrade so it was somewhat horizontal too then RoS arrived which made the whole progress and power creep vertical.

With each installment expansion pack, there would be a power creep to set new targets so players intrigued to get back to the game again. It’s kind of required to keep the playerbase lively. One of the reasons for that being ARPGs have no precision control as a genre. You can’t go too far with interesting game design for replayability when dice rolls are decisive, not the player.

Also your next post will be the 14k, so grats. Also I forgot to ask if you were to pick between two, which would be your favorite model? Continuation of horizontal power progress or some vertical spikes sprinkled around?

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Horizontal progression can’t be power creep because the power doesn’t increase
There are just more options to be equally powerful
And that’s what expansions should do in a game like that

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Diablo 2 failed it to become a vertical thrive then. Because some runewords have no competition at certain slots at all. Hur hur. Joke aside, it really had a bad impact if not for the different purpose and tasks that game offer.

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Horizontal progression is not power creep. How could it be, your power doesnt really grow in the first place. Just more options for replaying.

D2 LoD added stuff like runewords, charms etc. Those were vertical progression.

If you switch from CC to dmg because it makes you more powerful, then surely it is vertical progression?

Doesn’t have to.
The new targets can be horizontal progression, like adding new classes.

Dice rolls play very little role in Diablo combat tbh. THere are some proc/crit chances of course, but given the speed of attacks etc. these games are at the very low end of RNG in combat compared to many RPGs, especially many CRPGs and JRPGs.

Not that dice rolls run counter to replayability. The RNG in item drops is a large part of what makes A-RGPs replayable.
The entire Rogue-like/lite genre is build on RNG power.

I am not at all against vertical power.
As said many times, also in this thread as far as I recall, adding the ability to cube 3 legendary items in D3 would not have to be power creep. It added new build choices. A good addition to the game in theory (the rest of the cube not so much; as the legendary upgrading was bad). That is fine, I want patches and expansions to add new ways to grow your power. Both horizontal and vertical.
BUT, every single time that you add new ways to grow player power vertically, you need to rebalance the entire game around it.
If you add Charms and they increase player power by 10%, then buff monsters by 10% across the board. Otherwise you get what we usually get from power creep; old content becomes invalidated. Lvling disappears, Torment 1-15 disappears, etc.

So all in all, most of the time, add horizontal power, and then once in a while, such as in major expansions or patches, you can add some vertical progression too, but it is best to cluster them, since you have to rebalance the game each time, and that takes resources. Seems better to not attempt to do that every 3 month, and only do it with an expansion.

The problematic power creep in D3 did not come from the 3 lgendaries in cube. It came from “Oh, this item now increases dmg by 600% instead of 100%”. No new feature was added, no new choices, no new gameplay. Numbers just went up.

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