What the heck is "Power Creep"

I hear this term being used all the time and i feel like no one actually knows what it is. I dont, can someone explain it to me? My understanding of Power Creep is basically burst damage? Idk no idea

No. It’s the relative raising of numbers, variables and utility of a hero’s kit, done to balance against the increased power of another character.

So - say they increase survivability by making healing stronger, it unbalances the game. So instead of undoing that buff - they increase damage just as much.

That’s power creep

It’s not always as straight forward as damage or healing numbers, sometimes it’s as simple as removing casting times from a characters kit to make their attacks more immediate, or changing how health stacking works so that people can’t get the benefit of armor under health… there’s a lot that can contribute to power creep.

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So power creep is increased damage to outdo buffs or nerfs to other heros? Did that happen recenty? Are people saying there will be a power creep because of the nerfs to orissa? Is that whats happening?

powercreeep is when you have trash heros like tracer or soldier, when they were a monster heros some seasson ago.

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What? That didnt make alot of sense

It’s been happening since day 1 essentially. Anytime you introduce a new character or change a given mechanic, it’ll affect how that character interacts with the rest of the cast and how the rest of the cast interacts with the given character who has been given an unbalanced kit.

It’s just not as universally acknowledged as maybe it should be.

Those three videos are a good start on what is power creep, what causes power creep, and how you can slow down it’s inevitable approach.

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Power creep is essentially when something new is released that completely outclasses or overpowers previously released content / something.

So for example, Sigma is an example of Tank power creep because he can do things by himself that other tanks can only do individually.

This can also be used when they give a character a rekit and the rekit version of the character is better than other heroes in the same role.

It can essentially be thought of as damage/ability power inflation over a hero roster, although that’s not an accurate term in describing how and why power creep happens. The idea is that non-OP characters get buffed to deal with an OP character/s rather than the OP character/s being nerfed to be balanced with the hero roster.

powercreep is basically older things get way weaker with addition of new and stronger things.

Power creep is just an increase in the average power level of competitive elements in a game. The causes for power creep vary, but usually it stems from new content releases. In Overwatch’s context, that would mean a new character being released who’s stronger than the rest, and other characters therefore needing buffs to match that new benchmark for power level.

Has there been an increase in power though? Ive been playing since beta and ive been outputting similar damage numbers then as i do now.

Soldier was good, now w/o number buff in comparison he’s bad. That’s the best example.

Another example is Tracer used to be annoying enough to pierce through 1-healer’s healing amount on her own, now she get a falloff buff and still can’t against half of the healer roster on her own (at non-melee range, ofc).

I might add u might wanna check shield-dmg per game, that number definitely went up. So that’s why u did similar normal dmg. (Plus enemy total health didn’t creep over the years)

Zorek gave more of a symptom than a definition. Through the addition of new heroes and the buffing of other heroes (power creep), Tracer and Soldier have gone from meta dps picks to kinda weak, despite being about as strong now as they were then.

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Thats actaully a pretty good example. They did make tracer stronger and ita barely helped. Maybe they need to tone down healing

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Welcome to the conversation that’s been going on since before Goats was a thing.

Have you ever seen the Star Wars franchise? Remember in the first film, dudes could maybe move stuff with their minds and that was it?

Decades later we have Jedi and Sith lifting entire ships and even fleets, they can even stop death.

That’s it. The new releases create new powers (or increase said powers) that make the old ones look quaint by comparison.

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Power Creep: another made up word to define a thing that didn’t need defining.

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No, not really, at least not to an extreme. I forgot to mention that in my previous message, but while Overwatch has certainly seen its share of overpowered new characters, they eventually tend to get nerfed into something closer to the existing norm rather than everything else getting buffed.

One point of potential confusion, though, is that the introduction of new characters over time naturally expands the bounds of what is possible. For example, while Moira’s overall power level was not necessarily superior to everyone else’s at her release, she was capable of healing more than anyone else, and subsequent new support releases were closer to Moira’s level of healing.

Sometimes expanding those bounds can indirectly weaken things that relied on the old ones, such as in the case where Soldier simply didn’t do enough damage to overcome healing anymore. This isn’t exactly power creep, per se, but it’s a changing environment. People more accurately labeled that example as “healing creep,” i.e. an increase in overall healing output rather than overall power.

Honestly thats what i was thinking to haha