I feel like early in the game they had a good hand in the power budget with characters like Silver Wolf, Luocha, Blade, etc... They were strong characters but had limitations that left room for future characters to compete without having to break the power ceiling. However, I don't know what changed when they released Ruam Mei and Acheron but whatever it was made them throw any notion of balance out the window. It was from then on that every new support had to have the equivalent of 3 different characters in their kit and every DPS had to be able to do twice the damage of the previous one with half the investment.
Yeah, 100% agreed. Maybe it's because ruan sold so well that they were like "well I guess this is what the playerbase is okay with", but it still is unfortunate either way.
I would argue that the first case of serious powercreep came from DHIL. He was a bigger power leap comparatively at launch than than Ruan Mei was when she released. It was the first time we saw a character easily doing multiple hundreds of thousands of damage. She was very good at the time, but her value was nowhere near what it has become over time. For example basically all the break related parts of her kit were mostly just for some extra survivability rather than being an entire extra window of damage for superbreak teams like it is now. Also I'd like to add the main reason I mention DHIL is because powercreep was not even in the cards for discussion until his release. At that point people started to talk about how he was very powerful, and they were worried that this would start a trend of insane powercreep.
@@Sakamoto_1535E3 Ratio was and still is good, but what really pushed him above and beyond was Robin, when he came out he was interchangeable with DHIL depending on the fight.
Thank god you didn’t view SW falling off being due to Boothill,FF, and Feixiao, because with all due respect this is a dumb way of thinking yet it’s so common. SW literally did not fall off because of implant or even weakness ignore, that was never the reason, you could argue it took away some of her uniqueness but thats all. Reason is simply other supports do her main job better (make dps do more damage) whether those teams have a dps with weakness ignore/implant, or not, other supports basically fit like a glove in their best teams and have almost no issues. SW was kinda doomed from the get go, the more dps and RESISTANCES (not weaknesses) you covered with other dps you pulled, the lower her value would be.
I noticed this when people talked about Fugue. Her kit seems pretty straightfoward. She gives break damage boost and super break damage. Her multipliers are good and she seems fun and interesting to slot into different teams. But every time she came up, there were a million reasons she sucks. "Can't use DDD on her", "She gives no speed boost like RM", "her def shred isn't that good" and I'm like, how can any character even compete with the current powerhouse supports without just having a "you win" skill button?
@@nationalgeografic7687 Yes, I know HMC exists, that's my point. The requirement for Fugue to be considered "useful" or "meta" at all is way too high, because HMC is already so good that it makes her look neutered by comparison. And as such, hoyo keeps overloading their characters with busted kits to sell them.
i just found it funny how fugue was actually supposed to be a hmc substitute/only a sidegrade when literally 3.0 will most definitely abandon superbreak from the meta almost entirely because of archetype changes in endgame content. Which makes the situation even worse for her. And hoyo expects people to buy into pulling for her when its strategically an L 😂
it's such a shame. I see why the developers are doing this they've dug themselves into a hole they can't get out of that easily, but damn it devs just try to, my e2 Acheron obliterates all the content with max points or low cycles. The inflation isn't working it just makes the other team archetypes unusable without having a wallet. PLEASE I JUST WANNA USE MY DOT TEAM AGAIN
@@lazaruslong697he is objectively right though, all three game modes are in favor of dot right now with svarog having both electric and wind weakness, apoc first side having a dot buff, and the whole pf being dot related
@jp-dx6829 That may be true for the current instance of those modes, but what about the next? As soon as those buffs switch, DoT will most likely become as irrelevant and niche as it always has been. Not saying you can't use it, but boy, does it suck in comparison to anything else. You know, even a broken clock is right twice a day kind of situation...
I think what makes difficultly feel more oppressive in HSR is that so many bosses and challenges are designed with two or three specific characters in mind. The moment you don’t have one, it’s incredibly hard to compensate because there’s no 4 star equivalent or team alt. While Genshin does in fact make bosses and challenges that clearly lean in specific character promotions, you still make ten other teams to kill that boss. Even if you have the character designed for the challenge, you run their 4th best team and find success cause the other units still compensate for their premium counterparts in some shape or fashion. That new Monkey Boss without Rappa just kinda sucks to deal with. 😅
@@leeminhyung167 Hoolay only has 3 options to fight him with which is Yunli Firefly and Feixiao and two of those have team comps that require certain characters.
I think part of this inflation comes from the fact that it seems they didn't really have fully fleshed out archetypes at the release of 1.0 and took it upon themselves to create distinct playstyles for 2.0. So characters who released during the 2.X series belong to these individual archetypes and feel so much stronger and due to have a playstyle that is actually supported by the game while others don't. And they need to inflate these HP values because once you assemble all the pieces of one of these teams, the amount of damage you can generate is insane compared to your 1.X DPS who don't seem to really have any homes. Individual power budgets wouldn't be so bad if older units were also given the same level of care and attention, but we all know that Hoyo rarely goes back and uplifts older units directly.
I definitely agree with this. Like in seele's case, there's no team that can be built around an "extra turn on kill" because it's so 1 dimensional - she kills, or she doesn't. All you can do for her is buff damage and literally nothing else. Compare that to the recent fua characters where they are all synergistic with each other and it's a night and day difference.
@@fl2ur I agree as well and I have hope in the future that perhaps we'll see older units continue to get uplifted - take Topaz and JY for example, who struggled with meta relevance upon their release but with the synergistic teams shot to relevancy. Even Seele has hope of being 'redeemed' in the event a unit able to buff her damage to insane heights based off speed were to exist, as even at E0 she has a 25% speed increase in her kit, or a unit who buffs a character's damage based off having less hits, to make her ult possibly nuke harder. The ONLY unit who I can still see struggling even with the addition of a dedicated support is Yanqing since SO much of his kit is reliant on him not taking damage AND his buffs only lasting 1 turn anyways. Even with insane supports like Sunday and Robin out there, he has so little to properly convert into damage that it's hard to imagine a balanced support existing that wouldn't make other units be TOO strong.
I agree with this. Before Sunday I didnt even know what a good jy team would be (I dont have sparkle) and the same applies to my Blade and Jingliu that cannot use the same Support 2.x units use to even close to the similar effect unless you pull for supp eidelons. Sundays kit is so loaded and the AV on summon and cleanse fixes the major issue that was in JY Design that he is actually one of my favorite units now after being benched for a Year. Lmao. At this point we will have kit designs so bloated and fight enimies with an HP Pool of an aeon before we reach anything close to an aeon (like 6.0 endgame or smth). These 1.x units have so many random limitations and punishable Designs but so little room to actually reign the Benefit of it. Like Blade solo sustain, and the Hp drain on your Team with jingliu does also very little than force you to run a sustain on low invest.
I feel like they could drop new sig lightcones that directly target a 5 star unit. Maybe make it so only THEY can use it so that way for people like seele they can make changes to their entire kit just from the lightcone basically giving them a direct buff and they can't be sued for that (because a big reason they don't change kits directly is because legally they can be sued in some countries) you can simply just not use or pull the lightcone nullifying any lawsuits. They could change seele entire gimmick to make her more modern. And still make money from it because players have to summon for a new lightcone if they want to use their seele at her new best.
Part of the issue is how quick they were to treat game mechanics like inconveniences. Weaknesses annoying? All type toughness damage (rip Silver Wolf). Energy annoying? Unique energy mechanics/innate ER mechs. Having your enemies attack too annoying? Advanced Forward. The only balancing route they left themselves is damage, unlike Genshin where they have elements and reactions.
This I definitely think is one of the problems, how they essentially disrespect and break, their own game mechanics. It's cool and novel and even a relief at first, but then in the long run it leaves you nothing to overcome. Part of the fun is in figuring out how to work around the limitations set up with what you have, but then they just decided to hand you the solution on a silver platter. I remember how in the beginning I wished I could bring one more character because I needed a certain element, but couldn't replace anyone on the team or else they'd either die or take forever to kill the enemy. Which led to wishing more characters would do more things. And that's the route they went. I wonder what would've happened instead if we could've brought a team of five instead, but each character was limited to one or two things, and no character did the same two things. Maybe some overlap, like say how Clara and Yunli both are physical destruction and counterattack, but then one of them lands bleed and the other deals extra break dmg or smthn instead. Or one counters when they're hit themselves (and has increased aggro working as a pseudo sustain like a tank/bruiser) and the other counters when others are hit. Instead of ending up with, "X, but better." Point is, they ran out of creativity in terms of gameplay and resorted to the laziest solutions possible by basically just removing their own limitations. With summons we're now getting that fifth team member ON TOP of already bloated kits instead😮 I'm getting more and more convinced I should just quit the community and return to the true single player experience and just enjoy the game for the story and not worry about the characters, because everywhere this seems to be all people talk about and it's so very VERY depressing...😑
I agree, also the paths the characters follow have lost quite a bit of their uniqueness (aside of the Lightcones they have available) because many characters now seems to dip into different paths.
@@writerducky2589 yeah.. i mean the best thing you can do in any hoyo game is distance yourself from the community lmao. On topic tho, i do remember how hard it was for me to beat any penacony boss ever. I played hsr from the start but then paused it like a patch before penacony, and then came back to to after the main storyline was finished... 2.3 i think? Or even 2.4. Either way, you can imagine how fucked i was by missing all the penacony characters. I think the only one i accidentally pulled was sparkle (which worked perfectly with my DHIL at least). And then... The Aventurine boss. Dude. When i tell you, i could not freaking beat him for the life of me. I think that lasted until they added the casual boss mode, and at that same time i also got Huohuo. AND DUDE. THE SUNDAY BOSS. When i tell you i couldn't beat him unless i got Aventurine i'm not joking. I only beat him last patch, during Aventurine and Acheron's rerun. Since i got Aventurine... AND OMG the way i troubled to even get past Argenti before that Sunday confrontation is crazy. Like be so fr. It really puts into perspective how if you just decide not to pull for certain units, you're screwed. Good luck to those accounts who try a "can you beat hsr without pulling" challenge. The answer is no!!!!
@@eherden2169this....100% agree with this. All the sustainer now either have to dmg or buff the others in addition to healing. All the debuffers(nihility) are also dps of a different kind. The 3 main damage types being destruction, hunt and erudition are all continously powercrept relying on applying there own debuffs in the form of weakness implants or ignoring toughness. That paths make no sense now story wise and game play wise.
Don't know about the Chinese community, but in global there's the pervasive problem of any new character who is not direct and clear powercreep being called mid, ez skip, poor investment, etc. Hoyo's going to sell you the characters you want to buy. "Skip Lingsha, she's a Gallagher sidegrade." "Only reason to pull Fugue is in case you want to run break and RMC on the same floor." "You can skip Robin, she's a Ruan Mei sidegrade and only better for FUA (lol)". Even with kits as bloated as Sunday, you still have some saying it's better to skip and get his rerun because he just doesn't push the envelope as much RIGHT NOW. You also have some content creators / so-called "meta experts" setting 0 cycles as the standard. Even if very few players will ever reach that standard there's still the wider expectation of "If this character can't clear in 1-2 cycles they've fallen off". Which is why you now see Acheron being ragged on, whereas in my personal observations I've yet to see any indication she can't clear MoC12. Or you have some loonies calling Firefly a "fraud DPS" because "she can't 0-cycle without S5 DanceDanceDance". My only hope is that the current HP inflation was done by Hoyo to kill the expectation of 0 cycling for non-whales, because despite all of the recent complaints about powercreep I don't see anything to suggest that the current community is going to do anything but further enable it with their pulling/spending habits. In any case, pulling for meta seems like the most miserable way to play this game. Your characters aren't "investments" when a full endgame clear gives you 2% of the pulls needed to guarantee an E0S0. As much as it might suck to see 33/36 stars in MOC, I'll just ignore it if the current trend keeps up. I grew up too poor for keeping on a gacha treadmill to seem like a good use of my money.
Best take right here. People only care about powercreep when it's their favorite character. Then you have these 0-cycle addicts setting it as the standard for determining the values of new units. "B-but if the new characters need 3 cycles to clear on average investment then they're gonna be worse in the future", okay here's the thing, it WON'T be a problem if the powercreep slows down, or even plateaus. How do we slow down powercreep? By having BALANCED, or even MID units! Stop wanting new characters to be broken, people. Ffs.
@@itsarches People say they want mid units until it's their favorite units and then won't pull them anymore because of people online and the fanbase. Just look at Jiaoqiu who's arguably the best debuffer right now but (guinaifen sidegrade / 5 star guinaifen). Sunday is also mid apparently too.
@@hellonyancat666If JQ launched mid, barely any tears would have been shed over him since he isn’t TOO popular, if someone like FF launched mid or had glaring issues, she would have the been the clown of the town because her fanbase is massive (and easily triggered) and everyone would have been mad at hoyo because she is not good or as good as say acheron at the time, popularity really matters you see? If some random unit from 3.X gets a mid kit or even just balanced kit, people might celebrate this as hoyo slowing down powercreep, but if say castorice or Mydei have a mid kit people will be lamenting that these characters got the short end of the stick and “does hoyo not want our money?” kind of arguments will start.
Even rn people are literally calling Aglaea mid, she's gonna end up like Mid Yuan. When both of them are really good characters?!! Idc about all of this I'm still picking up Boothill when his rerun comes. He may not be Firefly but still good enough for me.
Expand your mind please. Who is responsible for the players acting like this? Hoyover is. They cultured their audience to fear pulling a character that isn't OP. Why? Because they've showed, time and time again, that they powercreep and will NEVER directly buff a character. Hoyoverse created this with their choices. People wouldn't act like this if Hoyoverse buffed older characters or created more balanced, unique kits. Can't blame a consumer for acting like this, ESPECIALLY if they spend money.
Basically every update cycles: 1. Stronger new character 2. The new character shred everything 3. The enemies is "stronger" So the new character doesn't shred as much 4. New even stronger character 5. Repeat the 2. And it will keep going. This is a REAL problem. In the future, the new dps will casually deal 3 million damage to deal 28% in MoC. The problem is that mihoyo's target on the new character is the powers. They're not priotizing on implementing unique character mechanic. It's just like, "this unit is strong, just use it!" Instead of "this unit is strong IF [blablabla] and also this unit only using it's full potential if [blablavla] but [blablabla] which is hard to use, but reward you for a great strength if used correctly" They just don't! The new unit are just free dps spike and they're even THAT easy to use
One of the biggest problems is that people can't tell the difference between powercreep and meta. Firefly is OP, right? What if I tell you that HYV put puppet trio in (LITERALLY) every other MoC since her release? That's called the meta, not powercreep. Firefly loses a lot of performance each time puppet trio isn't in MoC, from 0-1 cycles to 3-4 cycles. HYV keeps putting wind-weak enemies for Feixiao, keeps putting fire-weak enemies for Lingsha (which is one of the reasons why she's so much better than Gallagher right now), etc. Feixiao isn't necessarily better than Firefly and Firefly isn't necessarily better than Acheron. The exact lineup dictates what's better and thus meta, but the meta always change. HYV just happens to heavily favor the recently released characters. Dendro also was heavily favored in Genshin the whole 3.X era, and it fell off a bit since 4.X started, not even a need for new DPS units to come out for that to happen. Nilou was perceived as being insanely good in any AoE lineup and now she's barely viable since 4.X, not even a joke. Note I'm not arguing there isn't powercreep, like obviously 1.X units got powercrept. But sometimes it's also way overblown because people can't tell the difference between powercreep and meta.
@osmano8498true, firefly was strong but depending on enemies she can be replaced by Himeko which is an permanent banner, people just trying to justify their mistakes of don’t know how to build a team without searching on youtube or chatgpt, I don’t have fugue, jiaoqui or lingha which are like the present characters for meta because I know fugue and lingsha aren’t 100% necessary to build a team, even jiaoqui who is one of the best to boost Acheron active ability is not 100% necessary. Not everything need to be 0 cycle, one get nothing by showing off the 0 cycle to random people on internet.
Ruan Mei was their first true overtuned release, she has so many stuff in her kit you could almost swear you are reading seperate kits. but that aside, 2.x was the version of them pushing archetypes and selling teams instead of individual characters like 1.x which contributed to powercreep as it meant your character wasnt at it best without X and Y ( try playing Fei without Robin or Firefly without Ruan Mei ) while 1.x chars already dont have dedicated supports like Blade and JL I noticed that ever since Robin and HMC released is when HP inflation became a thing, i genuinly believe that if it wasn't for both we wouldn't be in this situation right now. Robin is simply way too strong for this game's health as a singular unit, something even Ruan Mei before her didn't do. same thing for HMC despite being a free unit as with basically no investement you're outdamaging most crit DPS's with a average investement On that topic, i feel like it's less units being overall ''overloaded'' and more so Harmonies specifically being overloaded, overbloated and overtuned all at once while doing things Nihilities really should be doing not them. Ruan Mei has so many stuff in her kit she might as well be 3 character kits at once ( why does a Harmony unit have res pen in her base kit as well as knockback after breaking ? thats the most nihility thing ive ever read ), Robin's 100% teamwide AA was always gonna be a problem and im surpised NO ONE saw it coming not mentioning the overtuned damage buffs and Sunday is a Bronya promax that feels more so overloaded than overtuned ( he still is overtuned ) but im positive my opinion will change as soon as we get summon DPSs, Sparkle is the only actually balanced Harmony as she sticks to her gimmick and look at her now losing to two characters not even supposed to buff her archetype due to how overtuned they are. on the other side we have JQ who might be the most balanced 2.x unit as he just.... makes enemies take more damage while doing small damage. Black Swan does DoT and amps damage by def shredding and vunlerability. what im trying to say is that Harmonies are always overtuned and doing way too much to the point where you never really need a 4star or a nihility unless you don't have them. ofc there are exception like Aven's shields being too strong while being easily refreshable or Feixiao having rainbow toughness ignore for seemingly no reason but these are'nt reasons that ''hurt'' the game compared to the teamwide buffers I think 3.x is when they will try to ''fix'' powercreep if JY is any indication especially if you've seen the dreams, as it seems HP inflation is simply them overcorrecting for the mistake they've done with Robin and Superbreak. or of course they could just double down on it and drive HP inflation to the moon.
@@vampiranya9939Fugue isnt much of a Replacement for HMC for all the Characters. She isnt noticable better than HMC for FF and more of a Sidegrade. Also especially for HMC they needed a Replacement sooner or Later since he will Change its Path in 3.0 you cant make the MC a Staple for Multiple Archetypes since you cant use him in only 1 Team.
@@stormgalaxypegasusthere arent any Gachas were this is Reality. HI3, Bleach Brave Souls,FGO all Gachas i played that have a Mechanic to make older Units stronger but even with this Upgrades there Miles behind current and still not a real Competition.
@@pein4332 I hope so... Acheron(the most hyped character of all time) rerun selling criminally low and hoyo getting no tga(hsr wasn't even nominated at anything for tga, that's underwhelming for a company like hoyo and the fact game is still not even 2 year old imo, whereas genshin still stands somehow)/way less rewards than usual this year awakens them a bit And yeah, I REALLY hope they try to fix our dissatisfaction with Penacony(2.x) arc, they just need to want to fix it.
@@dreamsandhopes6802 in HSR your lifespan as a top dps is shorter than the time it takes for you to rerun, this happened to everyone. By the time acheron reran, Yunli, FF, Boothill and Fei were all either strictly better or situationally better at equal investment.
Also one thing I dislike in hsr compared to other turn based games or turn based gacha games i played (fgo, e7, r1999 or magia) is that all of its major end game mode revolve around time/turn limit instead of actually clearing the content. Like lets take moc, apoc or pf for example. Remove their turn limit and suddenly the game mode becomes extremely easy, just use a healer+shielder and become immortal. The real challenge is the timer and enemy hp meanwhile boss gimmicks more serve as an obstacle to your damage race. Thats why they have to rely a lot more on hp scaling enemy more or designing units that do more damage instead far more than any of these where they can go around introducing new gimmicks and units that counter those gimmicks Also as someone who has played other turn based games, having a two button gameplay really feels like limiting the creativity of the kits in this game even though i would say they have done excellent job so far with this limitation
I actually have a video discussing the timed end game stuff being a problem! It's a few videos back called "HSR Needs new end game". Really, I feel adding more diversity to the end game would go a long way to making everything feel better.
I really wish HSR had something like Mane Bulletin. It's great for allowing players with moderate investment to get all the rewards while giving a near unlimited score ceiling for the whales and hardcore community to flex their rosters and skills. It lets your sustain and damage mitigation units shine as the boss gets tougher and tougher, and if they tied it to a number of enemy actions, it could even give delay and slow a relevant role in the meta again.
Agree the super basic 3 button gameplay is holding it back, the fact that we dont even have a simple “block” button… the most basic of basic turn based combat mechanics
@@Carlisho If we add a block mechanic for our chars, then the enemies will also have the right to block our dmg too making the game more RNG and frustating. Even if blocking does half the dmg, it hurts all chars. If the enemies block, all dmg you deal will be heavily lost.
I think kit bloat is okay, but the bloat must be "directed". Like we mention Sunday, but as absurd as his kit is, it has a clear identity, with him having all of his buffs being single target and his ult encouraging only skilling your hypercarry. Yes he is absolutely broken with what he does but there are tons of teams that do not mesh well with what he does, and there is a good chance not all summon comps will actually run Sunday despite his power level. The problem comes with characters like Robin or Fei Xiao, where the limitations were clearly not thought through. Robin's energy demands have tons of workaround, and Fei Xiao being a single target might be a joke at this point, with her damage profile and frequency of attack. Currently, any type of content can be cleared by them and any unit that attacks frequently can become an indirect buff to the team. It becomes very hard to design enemies or characters that could not play into this kind of team archetype. Hopefully summons are not a "I do everything, but with more damage" kind of deal, or else it's looking grim.
Agreed with a lot of this, though I do want to add on that being bloated/broken can bring characters outside of their intended niche - like how robin is usable literally everywhere, and how sunday despite being intended for summons is also usable everywhere bronya is, feixiao(like you said) can be used anywhere that you have a fast attacking unit(hello summons lmao)
Feixiao can't even 2c or barely the content tailored for her (current MoC first half) assuming no signature and no E1 Robin.. what's the issue here exactly? Yeah she's absolutely insane in 0c strategies, but how is that any relevant for the average playerbase? She's not any stronger than Acheron/FF except when the content is obviously tailored for her
Sunday completely making sparkle out of existence (useless) even in her niche despite he being summons harmony 😂. See how that's not overtune when he taking another limited harmony who released in the same patched. But anyways, Sparkle is a mid units who failed to buff hypercarry teams to be as good as Ruan Mei ( break team), Robin ( FUA team) and now Sunday with future Rememberance team. Even he is better for sp hungry dps😂 which should be sparkle bread and butter. You will see how low sparkle usage from now on in endgame due to how weak she is even Bronya got more usage than her despite being a standard unit.
One day, after dinner, while my younger sister and I were lounging about in Mr. Gopher Wood's yard, we spotted a fledgling Charmony Dove all on its own. That baby bird was tiny, it didn't even have all of its feathers, and it couldn't sing. When we found it, it was already on its last breath, having fallen into a shrub - probably abandoned by its parents. We decided to build a nest for it right there and then. However, thinking back, that winter was unusually cold, with fierce winds at night in the yard, not to mention the many poisonous bugs and wild beasts in the vicinity... It was clear that if we left the fledgling in the yard, it stood no chance of surviving until spring. So, I suggested we take it inside, place it on the shelf by the window, and asked the adults to fashion a cage for it. We decided that when it regained its strength enough to spread its wings, we would release it back into the wild. The tragic part - something that we'd never considered - was that this bird's fate had already been determined long before this moment... Its destiny was determined by our momentary whim. Now, I pass the power of choice to you all. Faced with this situation, what choice would you make? Stick to the original plan, and build a nest with soft net where the Charmony Dove fell? Or build a cage for it, and feed it, giving it the utmost care from within the warmth of a home? I eagerly await your answer.
One day, after ninja eating time, while my fellow ninja apprentice and I were practising resting ninjutsu in Master Hakobune’s ninja training field, our enhanced ninja senses spotted a Ninja Initiate Charmony Dove all on its own. That ninja initiate was tiny, it didn't even have a ninjutsu of its own, and it couldn't do any ninja techniques. When we found it, it was already on its last ninja breath, having fallen into a ninja training shrub - probably after making a mistake during ninjutsu training. We decided to become it’s ninja masters and train it right there and then. However, thinking back, that ninja winter was unusually cold, with fierce winds at night in the ninja training field, not to mention the many evil fiendlings in the vicinity... It was clear that if we left the ninja initiate in the ninja training field, it stood no chance of surviving ninja training. So, I suggested we take it inside, place it on the ninja shelf by the window, and talk-no-jutsu the adults into creating a ninja training cage for it. We decided that when it regained its ninjutsu power enough to graduate from being a ninja initiate, we would release it back into the ninja wilds. The tragic part - something that we'd never considered - was that this ninja initiate’s path of the ninja had already been determined long before this moment... Its path of the ninja was determined by our momentary whim. Now, I pass the Dazzling Ninjutsu Technique: Choice, to you all. Faced with this situation, what path of the ninja would you take? Stick to the original ninja plan, and build a futon with soft net where NInja Initiate Charmony Dove fell? Or build a ninja training cage for it, and teach it everything you know about being a ninja from within the warmth of a home? I eagerly await your ninja answers..
With each update, HSR becomes more and more like HI3 in terms of rapid meta changes and apparent powercreep. At this point, all you can expect is a stronger DPS or harmony support in the next two patches. And it's not just a bloat problem where characters are doing too much, it's also a base multipliers that are increasing to the point where you have a character doing more damage with their skill than a 1.x character's ultimate.
WIDE SUNDAY. The real problem is it makes the game boring. Part of the appeal of Star Rail is being a turn based RPG. I have a 9/10 traces Serval, and she is a liability in Stage 3 AS. Stage 3!! Blaznana has way too much HP. Meanwhile my Rappa with LC is so overtuned that she eats Blaznana for breakfast even in Stage 4. These 4-star units are supposed to compensate for things you don't have, not be completely unusable. It makes me question whether it's even worth it to log onto this game every day, instead of just logging on when story drops, do that, and then disregard all the battle content. It's not interesting in a RPG when my only choice is to throw new or meta units at content, regardless of how you interact with boss mechanics.
I remember Zajef talking about HSR before it released and how he thought the powercreep would be way worse simply because HSR is a turn-based RPG. Turns out he was completely right.
Turn based still can avoid powercreep fiesta, if they focused more on decision making in combat, rather than characters pure number/raw power. Look at Summoners War, 10 years old units are still kicking hard in PvP or PvE. It's not that turn based that powercreep-y, it's just Hoyo sucks at designing turn based games
@@lycerisrico8943 Im pretty sure those units have super awakening which boost their skills and stats, beside summoner wars has no pity on their summons unless you buy the 5* scroll and even with that you can’t select the monster or element you want, in term of pure number and raw power summoner wars also have that problem because of revenge and additional turn proc, if you are lucky you might have 5 extra turn and that extra turn can change the fight which make pvp very rng, imagine you are winning and suddenly your opponent get 10 extra turn and 5 revenge that will turn the fight for your enemy favor
One problem I see is a new player getting into the game, playing through the story. Maybe they read the story carefully, or maybe they just skim through it or use autoclicker. Whatever the case, they may for example see Kafka in the story and think to themselves "Hey, I really like Kafka, her banner is there and I'm gonna roll for her," and they use up 120+ pulls only to find out Kafka has been powercrept long ago.
That's a really good point, it's kinda unfortunate that new players can get stuck in the situation of wanting to pull for older characters but they're not super worth it anymore
@@TOTGodofWar i think that you re right, powercreep is not the word to define what happened to kafka and the dots, they where just left behind, there aren´t characters that can do better than her, but the enemies just can obliterate you easily
@@dew332 Right now in D.o.Ts situation there are only 2 premium D.o.T characters. While Huo Huo and Ruan Mei are very nice, neither apply a D.o.T of their own naturally. I'm leaning more toward Huo Huo being replaced in that comp in the future.
Yeah, Penacony had its moments but the story as a whole was kinda of a mess with a LOT of plot points not really conecting or being resolved off-screen (Aventurine being saved by Argenti, Robin whole character arc, the IPC plans to Penacony, Sparkles, etc...).
@@Truck-kun11 LOL... I'm not all the way through Penacony and I cannot figure WTF is going on. And this is coming from someone who has read Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the first 4 books of Wheel of Time... I don't struggle with complex plots.... I struggle when they just aren't explained. I'm sure the story is beautiful, but I cannot figure it out. Why is the cornerstone so important to an IPC member? Why did Sunday try to kill Aventurine? If you die in the dream world do you die IRL? My personal favorite: What is the Watch Maker's Legacy? I hear that term once per cut scene and I have NO IDEA what it is.... and somehow the Express Crew and Acheron are after it... and never bother explaining it... Dear, HOYO: If it's so central to the plot, at least show me a picture of the thing, or explain it. Just have a 10 second cut-scene of Sunday glancing at the Watch Maker's Legacy so I know what it is. It isn't hard to write this stuff and yet, Hoyo just cannot help themselves. It's just dialogue dump after dialogue dump.
@@John_II Honestly, as much as I loved Penacony, I have to agree that the story had too many subplots going on and not well directed as it could’ve been, but the bar was quite low when Luofu previously wasn’t so… memorable either. Not until you go back to the Luofu that they improved a lot on the story and forward. I’m really hoping in 3.0, they improve their story direction because that’s personally the thing I like critiquing the most when there’s quite a lot of gacha games out there with good story writing. I STILL want them to address Trailblazer’s and Kafka’s past at some point since that’s been one of the biggest hinted plot points in the game and we haven’t visited it for some time.
@@John_II most of these questions are answered in the story lol, albeit the Sunday wanting to kill Aventurine is a bit odd, it is still explained why Same with the cornerstone, I don't think it was explained before in-game??? But basically without spoiling you it is a source of a certain power for the Stonehearts, you're not supposed to know what the Watch Maker's legacy is, and it will get revealed don't worry, however it's exactly why everyone is after it. No one knows what it is, but it was stated in the invitation so it must be important, potentially dangerous, potentially amazing for negotiations, whichever it is, and Sunday looking at the Watch Maker's legacy,,, eh you'll see and, while a bit annoying, the last question, whether if you die in a dream you die IRL is answered in both the main mission and unvoiced missions, however they pay mor attention to it in one of the unvoiced mission rather than the main story
As someone that has been playing gachas for close to a decade at this point, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with this. But honestly, it surprises me that this has to be even said! I'll just call the beast by it's name: This is just by the numbers powercreep. More multipliers, more kit features, more text. These are pretty good indicators for increased strength of characters. And inflated enemy stats are soon to follow, so they can match those stronger characters. This relationship between ally and enemy strength has been known for a long time! I'm honestly a bit confused why people seem to not understand this point. But I have to remember that people that play Hoyo games have very little interaction with the greater gacha space, so they are having these conversations for the first time. In that light, it makes sense that we'll retread old ground here. But that ties to a greater point here I think: While we have been in a gacha popularity boom, "quality gachas" still very much remain gachas using very much the same tactics as their brethren. It's just that people that recently entered the space haven't become quite educated to these aspects yet, which makes them more vulnerable. I do not mean to be hostile in this comment, but wanted to raise awareness, as we need to look out for each other in this space.
Agreed with a lot of this. Most of the point of the video is explaining my thought process and hopefully making people more aware of the issues. I'm a long time gacha player too, so I feel the same way you do about this.
I think the devs of HSR are focusing on the team archetypes, and not the actual characters. Genshin has characters that can solo *ahem WATER DRAGON* and the team buffs him. While in HSR, the META is to build a team around an idea. (Fua, Crit, Break, summon).
You aren’t gonna solo anything in hsr unless it’s e6s5 latest dps. In genshin there is much more skill expression and you can just not take damage, in hsr damage is inevitable
@@verse2702 agreed! Best bet would be adventurine or blade. But that's hyper investment! Genshin drops someone like that once in a while. Hsr really, and I mean REALLY plays hard into the team game
@@verse2702yeah I think that’s because one game is a completely different type of gameplay then the other, you aren’t soloing moc with one character because of the turn based nature of it while you can theoretically solo the abyss with one character if you are good enough or just have Mr water dragon and a max dpi mouse, genshin itself is more of a casual go around and explore vs starrails focus on endgame activities that all have different types of gameplay, yeah sure you might not be able to clear with 1.X dps but that’s kinda how most gacha’s are, is it bad? Yeah it’s not good that old units can’t be used to beat current endgame, but that’s just how it is sadly, if you are struggling with endgame with your old characters then you can also just save up for a new dps or support, yknow normal progression where you are not meant to only play with your old units, at some point they won’t be viable anymore. idk tho about how genshin is all I know is every friend I have seen play the game easily clears the abyss and it looks so boring.
Oh and older units such as jingyuan are now even stronger as their niche is getting more support, hypercarry such as seele aren’t as lucky tho but I don’t expect the first ever limited character to be that viable
I feel that first bit. I've taken breaks from genshin multiple times in the past and I have never felt that punished for it besides missing out on some events and pulls. Taking a break from HSR made me almost not want to try playing again after seeing how far behind I was. I have massively caught up since then with some absurd luck, double robin in one ten pull then Feixao on my next pull, then recently I got Sunday, his lightcone, and Jingyuan all in about 150 pulls. Suddenly after somewhat building these new teams the endgame content is extremely easy, which goes to show just big the gap has become.
Yeah this was my experience too. I’ve taken several breaks in Genshin and it’s always easy and even refreshing to jump back into it. HSR on the other hand feels like I’m being punished for not playing. Everything feels tougher and I can’t even think of doing endgame modes anymore. Took several months but after getting Firefly, Robin, Sunday, Aventurine, Huohuo and Jing Yuan the game actually feels playable now and I’m having fun again. Honestly if this keeps up, the next time I take a break might result in me dropping the game because good grief was it rough trying to catch up.
Honestly same. I frequently take breaks from Genshin and I always come back with nothing amiss except for events, meanwhile I dread having to take some time off HSR because I know it only gets harder with every patch. It sucks because I genuinely enjoy HSR but idk if I can keep playing like this.
I agree, Genshin has never been punishing to take a break from aside from missing some primos. Hell, I only login now to do abyss and IT as well as any events near the end of their last day. Natlan as of right now is barely even explored
same happened to me, i took a break from hsr for like 2 months and suddenly i could no longer clear MoC with my current units, i had a slightly better chance after pulling rappa and building aventurine with topaz LC and acheron to beat hoolay, second half took me 9 cycles.
I wish more people talked about that, because it really is a problem, and it should get resolved someway or another, because eventually characters will reach the point that the only new thing they're going to bring to the table is just bigger numbers. If Sunday kit is already so overloaded, imagine for example in 2 years, they release a support that buffs HP, DEF, ATK, Energy, RES PEN, Crit Rate, Crit Damage, BE, EHR, Speed, DMG at E0 alone Fun Fact: If you try to speak about powercreep problem with the russian community of HSR they will make fun of you saying that their E2 Firefly clears all content, so it's fine
Yeah I've seen some takes saying "well as long as we can clear powercreep doesn't exist", completely ignoring the fact that some people don't want to get the shiny new toy or eidolons on those toys just to do so. It's silly.
Idk about Russian community, but from my perspective (im Russian too), i think opinions are divided 60/40, where 60% - begin to be indignant, because their "acheron" has stopped passing the content. Heh.
Try to talk to Vietnamese community, they whitenight the game’s meta like crazy but minus the logic. It’s gotten so bad that the average conversation is “oh, just quit then” “skill issue” or “I have these characters and I auto cleared”
One of the problems that i really don't like in current HSR is that there's an support that are almost obrigatory to have to enjoy some play style, like Robin for follow-up attacks, now with Sunday. Like told in the video, the new characters apparently not strong as acheron when she's debutted compared with the DPS in 1.X, but it's appear that it's necessary to have Sunday to really enjoy using then, and that's what kill the joy in an strategy game like HSR for me.
HSR is a victim of the fact it's a pure numbers game, there isn't much flexibility to the gameplay itself since at the end of the day the gameplay is just when to use three options and on whom. It feels like Hoyo doesn't understand It's fine for characters to be just a bit stronger than their predecessors but Hoyo is definitely underestimating how much players like the characters, their designs, and animations. As a new player that just started 2 patches ago I was HYPED for Sunday even though I just finished Penacony because the story was just that good. Sunday and Jing Yuan are the first characters I was able to pull and did pull. That's because their stories were just SO GOOD. I didn't care Sunday was super powerful, I just liked his design.
@huyphamle159 i mean I'm no expert but I think Gallagher, Pela, and Lynx would like a word with that comment. I'm sure some dps 4 stars can still be built enough for it with God tier level builds.
@@huyphamle159you actually can. but better get those E6 S5s and your S5 DDDs ready lol. Oh and dont forget the insanely high-standards stat tuning on your relics. As of now, calling 4* only runs F2p is basically a huge scam at this point. The ones doing it probably have set their accounts that way from the beginning or they are whales that have too much excess resources.
I've played quite a few turn-based games already, and then playing HSR without the option to use items in combat and the ability to skip turn/block is just weird lol Having 3 abilities is limited, true, but I can live with that. But not having some other options in combat really makes that limit being more severe, and feels bad to play lol
The problem was clearly Acheron's release. When she came out, her damage output was significantly higher than any other DPS released before. After that, to make future characters worthpulling, they had no choice but to give them a damage output similar or greater than Acheron's to avoid being skipped.
it was because she was special, the first palyable emanator, but she just raised the bar a lot and players dont care if a character is special, they want every one to do as much as the special
7:35 "Create problem, sell the solution." Not only is this an effective way to incetivize players to spend money (I am not calling it "good", but "effective" from a business standpoint), MHY has been doing this since even before Genshin was released. They're not even the only dev doing that, but this is about MHY. Anyway, I'm not at all surprised that this is how Hoyo handles HSR powercreep. As an RPG, the most important factor in the end are hard numbers. MHY has never stricken me as particularly skilled at handling RPGs so the fact the dev team defaulted to numbercreep as the go-to way to advance the game seemed like an obvious thing that was bound to happen eventually. There's only so many ways you can use a certain number of mechanics with equivalent numbers before the solution to variety is to create whole new mechanics, slap several mechanics together in one character or raise the numbers on old mechanics; sometimes they reuse mechanics while removing some limitations they had as well. Now, there are certainly examples accross the board of gacha games about how powercreep is handled; but powercreep in a gacha game is effectively inevitable. Even when it doesn't seem to impact as much, the fact is its still there. To use an example I've seen cited somewhat recently: FGO, despite its infamous reputation as an old and predatory game, has had a relatively elegant solution to powercreep. First off, it exists. Anyone telling you otherwise is BSing you. Secondly, while it exists across all levels of play, from DPS to supports, which kind of powercreep matters most is very, very different. Supports are KING: as long as you have the best supports possible for a given category, you can make a lot of units work for you because the vast majority of the game is about farming and the best supports are also mostly the ones that enable the best farming methods. Similarly, with those supports in hand, there are a number of "omnifarmers" that can do most of the farming on their own for you. The F2P income is poor as hell, but if you spend smart you can certainly get away with being F2P in FGO for an extremely long time. So long, in fact, that HSR could go through five years of powercreep and you could probably still use the same 5 or so units in FGO and keep cruising through the game because, unlike HSR, most of the challenging content in FGO is *entirely optional* often with minuscule rewards...which is the flipside of the coin. In RPGs, the challenge is often about complicated mechanics or high numbers, often both together. HSR decides to make this part of the reward system in MoC/PF/AS (not so much in SU modes where the rewards are negligible), while FGO makes the challenge itself the point. In FGO it makes for a game that's very much about clearing with the characters you like *usually* (because devs will sometimes still fall into annoying design pitfalls that make clearing with your preferred characters much harder or even impossible compared to other options), but also incredibly easy to drop because you have to actively make yourself care about sticking with it, whereas Hoyo's games (including HSR) excel at giving things for the player to do; if not care about, at least it encourages the player to keep coming back. I don't particularly like the powercreep problem, but I've been living with it for so long due to playing HI3 since before Genshin came out that it's just a fact of life for me. This is pretty much Hoyo' s101 and I don't foresee it changing, not when Hoyo is effectively an unkillable giant at this point. In the end, the players vote with their wallets, and as long as people open their wallets to Hoyo while they use these design choices, the trajectories of these games will not change where game balance is concerned.
"So long, in fact, that HSR could go through five years of powercreep and you could probably still use the same 5 or so units in FGO and keep cruising through the game because, unlike HSR, most of the challenging content in FGO is entirely optional often with minuscule rewards...which is the flipside of the coin." I didn't realized the post game content in HSR was mandatory to play. Guess I missed the memo that the story, sidequest, exploration, and simulated universe were no longer the main content of the game. /s Listen, I'm just saying. You people need to stop acting like MoC, PF, and AS are the main content of the game, cause they're not. They're just modes the HSR team made to get players addicted to the gacha, and thus basically scams. You also don't need to full star these modes when the reward is very minusule at the end of the day. Even if you don't do post game modes at all, all you get are level up resources and jades, which there are other sources to get them. While that's a lot of jades left on the table, you only need them if you want a ton of the 5 stars, which is a telltale sign you should not be playing gacha games (though I understand how hard that can be thanks to addiction), as they are the type of players gacha companies prey upon with these games.
I like that you picked a specific part to criticize and ignored how I actually refer to MoC/PF/AS in the next paragraph: "THE REWARD SYSTEM OF HSR". Because, yes, this is how they help sell characters to the more gameplay-minded people who want to get more characters since it's, yknow, a gacha. You even start with "you people". Nice projection, there. Do I need to explain it specifically so you don't misunderstand my point again? Modes like SU and minigame events offer different experiences, and the bulk of the rewards, but they largely do not influence how character's themselves are designed. A large part of why they are designed in that way is because of MoC/PF/AS. "Create problem, sell solution." Are they the only thing that matters about the game? Hell no. I even said that "HSR excels at giving people reasons to stick around/come back". Which, according to you, is apparenlty just MoC/PF/AS. That wasn't even the point of the comment. I basically said: "IT CAN'T BE HELPED. WHALES FUND THIS." Went on a tangent comparing how another RPG handles powercreep as an example, but next time I guess I'll just do a one liner or three to avoid getting called out for something I didn't say I guess.
@@tsf9600 "Which, according to you, is apparenlty just MoC/PF/AS" For someone who accused me of "not reading" your post, you definitely missed the "/s" of my comment. I'm clearly implying that MoC, PF, AS should not be viewed as the main game modes of the game. Especially when there are purposefully designed to be essentially scams and poorly designed to get you to summon on the gacha. "but they largely do not influence how character's themselves are designed. A large part of why they are designed in that way is because of MoC/PF/AS." Correct. This is why post game content and the gacha are this game's cycle of addiction and why people should not play these modes, or at least care to full star these modes. That's mainly why I commented on your post, since it seems like with this comment "because, unlike HSR, most of the challenging content in FGO is entirely optional often with minuscule rewards", you were suggesting that the post game content in HSR was not optional. But ig that wasn't your intention and just worded this section poorly, so I apologize. Last thing I would say is about this comment: " Nice projection, there." This is particularly funny since I have never full star any of the post game modes except one time in PF (and evidently, it was after that PF that they made PF had a powerspike in difficultly lol). In fact, the way I play these modes is to use the "free" characters the game gives you + the Astral Express members (plus a few exceptions of those that are really close with the crew). This is more so an arbitrary act so that HSR feels more like a game to me rather than a gacha, even though I could full star at least modes like MoC and AS if I wanted to. Though, who knows how long this last for me since I'm getting bored of these post game modes honestly. But according to you, I'm "projecting" which... ok. lmao
This is an problem i usually call “the acheronification” of hsr, where they made her so broken that now everything has to compete with her, pushing the dps standard constantly higher and higher and then they need hp to compensate for it, the sad thing is many old units have very good designs on paper (jingliu, dhil, silver wolf, blade, kafka) but suffer from either lower multipliers because the standard of today is so much higher or are completely replaced due to direct powercreep of what they do (like silver wolf being phased out of the meta by dpses just implanting their own weaknesses or ignoring them) The characters not being balanced around a relic set is a pretty interesting idea, it makes units that either a) dont have a perfect relic set, or b) get a new one much later when its already too late (ex: jingliu) suffer significantly more, not to mention how op new relic sets are, id really like them to go back and buff old units, wont happen but one can dream I am just hoping 3.X tones it down a little bit, i feel like a lot of people now skipping acheron on her rerun is a wake up call
Id honestly argue it started with Ruan Mei before acheron, people just didn't realize it yet because she hadn't gotten to her full potential(superbreak) yet. Acheron definitely brought dps into the equation more, but it was already happening earlier imo.
@ yeah shes definitely a factor too, she set the bar very high for supports while acheron did that for dpses, even if her value didnt come out fully until break and ESPECIALLY when APOC came out, that mode can be miserable if you dont have her, acheron pretty much dominated the second she released which is why id attribute it more to her than to mei, but both are true, same way how we see characters like aventurine just dominate the entire sustain meta, setting a extremely high bar for sustains especially preservation and gallagher doing what seems to be setting a much higher expectation for four stars, at least imo he is
I agree will all that you said, except the SW part, her fall off was due to support powercreep essentially, not because breakers could ignore weakness or Feixiao, even just before break took over she wasn’t really great in any team and you would much rather play a harmony like Robin or RM or sparkle even. You could say her uniqueness was stripped away but its not because of implant on dps that she fell. The main thing that SW helped in was attaching a -20% res to the enemy making it as if they actually had a weakness to that element, breakers don’t do that, they still lose 20% of their damage if the enemy isn’t weak to their element. So yeah it was because other supports are insane and have next to no issues that SW got phased out, her supportive capabilities, SP economy, and team variety just doesn’t match theirs at the end of day.
I'm so confused why people think that Acheron did anything when she was literally competitive with DHIL w/ Sparkle and Kafswan at release.. and they both were available BEFORE Acheron. It's not until the lineups favored Acheron more, or until JQ released that Acheron was truly better than them. Not to mention that the perception of her performance is flawed to begin with because most people assume she has her signature. SW isn't being phased out by DPSes just implanting their weaknesses, she's just not good period. The only reason she was still meta was because she was competitive with Harmony units with Acheron, but now JQ exists and you can replace the second nihility even more easily thanks to JQ stacks gen. These DPSes existing or not wouldn't change anything.
1000% agree. HP inflation is a result of character inflation. But nobody wants to talk about the ridiculously strong characters that have been released lately. It's just "HP too high" types of comments. I get that people don't like talking "badly" about their favorite games, but it's just absurd.
This. I was watching a beta video of an upcoming boss in 3.0 and Feixiao running against it and some in the comments were blaming her for how absurd she came to be, as if she wasn't also a consequence from the Acheron> era of dps in this game, then a slightly weaker dps comes out and it's the same community that claims "trash, skip because they're weak". Aglaea looks like she's gonna be absurdly strong too but I wouldn't be surprised if the next Acheron ends being Castorice in terms of it being heavily felt in the game with the kit strength and enemies/mechanics built around for the character to tackle.
Thing is if X dps launches same level or even 1% weaker than the previous one, people will just say why bother or X dps is not worth or mid if you have Y, if they launch too hot (and they aren’t as beloved as say acheron and FF) they are flamed and blamed for powercreep, when it was 1000% acheron who started this whole dps powercreep shitshow to begin with. Now I am not saying we blame the character its hoyo who makes them this way, just that people even when blaming characters blame the wrong ones.
@@Radiant450 We can look at the Rappa banner as an example. Rappa was massively skipped despite having a higher ceiling than FF simply because FF/Boothill already filled a similar role and had similar performance.
Perhaps I am just making a wrong call here, but maybe the reason that people are not talking about character inflation is because how horribly bad the relic system is, like you just won't be able to build your crit characters easily, the relic system is the worst I have seen in any gacha game, ofc Acheron's kit is so good that even with low investment she can dosh out good dmg but other dps still need good builds, but the relic rng is just so horrible
It is what it is. Compared to genshin HSR is the one that keeps releasing 2 new char banner after banner so the higher chance of powercreep, but hey the game is (slightly) more generous than genshin why would people complain 😂
genshin created xilonen kit with kazuha buffing potential in minds. 40 % res shred and about 35 % ~ 40 % elemntal dmg bonus depends on em. then xilonen kit buffing potential is around the same 38 % res shred and 40 % elemtal dmg. both kit buffing almost the same with xilonen being easier to build and activate then longer duration. hsr just never care, look at sparkle and sunday. better advanced forward + better dmg % buffing and also crit rate. Sunday is sp positive enough with SP cashback in his kit. everything in genshin almost a sidegride which is bad and good. but the good thing is we can play every characters we want and the result will be almost the same just depends on player skills. in genshin you need to kill enemies. elemental shield just use right element. enemies floating just use the ranged characters or use the mechanics available to bring it down, just need bow characters. meanwhile in Hsr there are alot of things and locked behind premium characters specialty lmao. hp inflation might be okay if the moc turbulance also give dmg buff that EVERY CHARACTERS CAN BENEFIT. not just current banner chara archetype lol. current moc problem are beside hp inflation turblance dont give any buffing and the dmg only come after turn ends make it losing a turn. previous moc there was the turbulance dmg that come before turn ends really helps that 1 clutch turn
Yeah so many of hsr character just don't get consequences of their advantage. Ex. Ruan mei doing job of welt and sw better than them without having any drawback or condition involved.
While I don't know the level of a take this is. I feel like part of the problem is how a section of the playerbase almost demands that the next character be that much stronger. I remember how with one of Fugue's earlier version, in a pure DPS setting she was essentially a sidegrade and in some instances weaker than HMC, which I found fine since she had her exo toughness which made her preferable in certain settings there were those who wanted her strength to be "layman levels" noticeably stronger. there was also on top people wondering why her ultimate dealt so much damage not regarding that it was an ultimate that dealt a lot of toughness damage to all enemies full stop. There was also how rappa was considered weaker because she couldn't implant weakness even though she already have penetration. Lingsha being seen as a gahlleger side grade "not in a good way" and look at how she is performing. Earlier than that there were complains that feixiao had her speed reduced from a value that could make her go 5 times a cycle on speed boots alone. Doom post stating that firefly was mid and worthless, look at her now And the oh so famous "who wants a new 4-star. who wants their favourite character to be the new 4-star" just look at ororon. I feel like the players should also grow to accept a character would be released not so strong and accept it.
Thats the funny thing is people don't want there favorites to be the one who got the short end of the stick as the character who tones down the scaling so you see a lot even more so for characters that have a solid first impression in terms of design and personality doomposting and begging for buffs.
That is just another consequence of the same issue, the Devs are the ones who conditioned the player base to think that way by consistently releasing characters consistently stronger than the previous one. The scrutiny towards fugue's kit was born from the fear of "what if I pull for this character that is just slightly better than a free one and hoyo just a few patch down the line release the Sunday to her sparkle?"
@@joyboy_3165 While there is merit to your perspective let me engage you in this hypothetical. Say Fugue resulted in mathematically less damage than HMC, she would still have her exo-toughness which would make her the better support for Rappa, Himeko and xueyi, she is not "stronger" than older units but provided utility that makes them worthwhile, but some people don't want that some people want her to have that utility and be mathematically stronger than HMC. those are the people who I'm pointing my finger at.
@SkyDrifter2025 Yes I got that the first time around and I'm saying even though I'm not part of that crowd I personally can't blame them for feeling that way because their sentiment was ultimately born of the now long standing precedent hoyo has set in this game.
TBF, I don't want my favorite unit to be a 4-star because I want to be able to get the unit. Pulling for 4 stars in a Hoyoverse title is such a fucking trap.
Giga cope. Balance patches will never happen in a hoyo game, however since HSR has shown some creativity I am willing to bet maybe sorta kinda could be a 0.1% chance they look at some underperforming characters, but individually most likely. Some units unironically make pennies on reruns now because they just become useless due to powercreep, like why would you pull Blade nowadays unless you REALLY like him?
@@vinhinh6810 nope i didnt play genshin in a long long time , but many games do balance patches for a lot of characters, it wouldnt be Impossible but it likely wont happen
I agree that it has gotten ridiculous, power creep is necessary but the fact that E1S1 jingliu is p much unusable right now is crazy. When Acheron came out they were both top tier, which means in less than a year she’s gone from clearing everything at E0S0 with ease to no data for MOC12
It's funny, because Rappa was severely doomposted before her release with people calling her mid or even weak. And she is about to become even more broken with the release of Fugue.
The doomposters have an 0/20+ record and yet for some reason it took almost 2 years for the idiots in the -mains, leaks, and mainsub to stop downvoting people for pointing out that the Doomposters are literally always wrong. One of the main problems with HSR is the community shilling for Hoyo, defending stupid shit, and taking years to catch up to the people that notice the actual problems.
not really, the best is universal supports so if you get a new one it'll improve everyone. Look at Sunday... yeah JingYuan was resurrected but Sunday had to be omegabusted, and what about the next summon DPS? if the game wanted to have slow powercreep then their kit will have QoL but the damage will be lower to compensate... no, she's just omegabusted too xD so OP + OP to much dmg and the devs are scared to they make a new enemy that has more hp.
I always felt universal break was a dumb mechanics but they proceed to double down and introduced guaranteed weakness implant and ability to shred weakness even faster like why.
It was okay when the universal break or implant was single target. If anything it would've been nice to only give it to Hunt characters, for balance. Then they made Acheron and Firefly.
I feel like Universal break is a near-mandatory effect for Break-centered units. A non-break DPS/team can typically do 60-80% of their damage when fighting off-element content, a Break team fighting against off-element does like, 5-10% of their total damage at best, before accounting for resistances. If Hoyo wanted to make any break damage units mainstream, they needed some means to break enemies off-element. If not for implant/rainbow break, Rappa, Firefly, and Boothill would be completely irrelevant in any non-matched element fight, not just weaker like non-break units. That said, I don't understand why Acheron and Feixiao needed universal break in their kits. I feel like non-break centered units don't really need universal break.
@@EternallyCryingOnion break units can break enemy much faster than average unit and that's already an incentive to go for them based since they shut down the boss gimmick. I think Sunday boss is an example of that where him having very hard to break toughness should have prevented break units from excelling but it actually ends up then doing better since other teams aren't as good since they have to deal with his gimmicks multiple times or in case of apoc, just get the mode buffs faster And another advantage of break is simply that you don't even need as much sustain. As someone who has boothill, it's very noticeable cuz not only does the dude has fastest shred in the game but his ult also delay enemy action for some reason so I can run him sustain less very reliably and I am someone who refuses to roll Ruan mei who could have further extended his ability to prevent enemy from taking action
@@i_dont_have_a_youtube_chan8584 Yet performance-wise, they don't perform that much better than other team archetypes. They might have slightly more consistent sustainless clears and 0-cycles than other archetypes, but their performance isn't that much better when they are ON-element in optimised scenarios. It might be slightly comfier, but that doesn't matter that much when another archetype can often just kill a boss instead. Sunday is also a boss that's almost tailor-made for break, since you can cut off a lot of his damage by consistently and repeatedly breaking all his adds. He is so tailor made for break that he's supposed to be the boss fight that sells you Harmony Trailblazer. It's hardly a fight that's designed to be difficult for break. And the moment they go off element, without omni-break or weakness implant, they're fucked. Without the ability to break, you get walled by the simplest, single mook enemy in PF, or Story, or SU, or DU. (unless you have the break spreading blessings) And a lot of omni-break also breaks at 50% toughness efficiency anyways. They're still subject to slower clears and damage type resistances even with their weakness implant and omni-break.
Honestly I think another issue with HP inflation and Unit design is that alot of 1.x characters were just poorly designed. There is such a gap between 1.x characters that are relevant and the ones falling off design wise and how they can synergize with future kits. Like Jingliu pretty much capped at her release, sure we have gotten supports that make her better, but her kit is so airtight that there just isn't much you can do to actually buff her directly. Meanwhile Topaz has alot of flexibility in her kit and can be usable in a variety of ways especially with Sunday out. JingYuan has gotten buffed by Sunday aswell but alot of the pain points of his kit design still remain and he is bound to be replaced, from building stacks of LightingLord to Lighting Lord being pushed back if Jing Yuan gets CC'd there are just pain points to his kit that future units probably won't have. Hell if I'm being honest DOTs biggest issue is probably Kafka, sure she's the machine to get the comp going but she's not a very good one because all she is a retrigger not an amplifier which is what DOT actually needs. Even in her skill it only allows dots to do 75% of their original damage, I personally think if Kafka was designed today, she would boost the dot damage instead. Even for Mid characters like Jade who only specialize in PF, she has flexibility to her kit and any strong Erudition, mass AOE, or HP drain units in the future will allow her to stay relevant, and speaking of Blade has more future potential than alot of other 1.x units that used to be vastly superior to him. His biggest issue wasn't his kit but the lack of support for it which can be easily fixed in the future and fights like Hoolay show that he actually can scale pretty well with certain fight designs unlike a lot of other characters. Its sad but alot of 1.x characters just weren't made well while alot of 2.x characters can easily stay relevant with the release of future characters or interesting fight mechanics.
This is the correct answer. Characters with more mechanics are more versatile in how they can interact with their team and have more knobs the designers can turn via new LCs/relics/teammates to keep them in the running, but Seele and Jingliu show up in every single conversation about powercreep because they have essentially zero synergies to play with and you could see their ceiling from the word go. Jingliu _might_ eventually benefit from a theoretical HP manipulation-based support thanks to the tiny amount of it in her kit, but that's her only hope, and Seele just straight up needs a kit adjustment because her on-kill mechanic is completely inflexible.
Kafka's E1 increases the amount of d.o.t a target takes when they are hit with her follow up. Her E2 increases the d.o.t damage of all characters in the party. Tldr: Kafka's potential is edilon locked.
Exactly why i stopped paying attention to meta and just focused on paying attention to having fun. Making something you like into a job will make you hate it. I was testing some Boothill teams in the new divergent universe, and my favourites were him, harmony caelus, new march 7th, and Moze/Pela/Herta. It's a fun team, plus I love all of the characters.
That’s the right thing to do. Obsessing over the meta is so stupid and pointless. Like why do you want to pull for a character you don’t like just to full clear moc 12? just to get the extra 80 jades once every 42 days? it’s so meaningless and honestly makes the game less fun and more frustrating when it should be the other way around
hsr hasn't even been around for full two years yet i'm tired from the game as if i've been playing genshin for 5 years. a testament to how exhausted their powercreep made me lmao (day 1 player)
I think the main problem is that people want stronger characters and in a game like HSR, a turn based RPG, it's what the people pay for. In genshin there is the open world aspect, which makes it more "casual" in a way, so the characters don't really require to be too strong, as they already one shot every enemy in the open world, it also doesn't need too complex as the main attraction are not the character gameplay, but the world and the character's story themselves. Meanwhile in HSR there's no such thing as open world, corridors are good time waster but is nowhere near as attractive as a fully open world, so in order for they to make character sell they need to make them stronger or something else. They probably tested the water since DHIL and JL and knew people like to roll/pay for powercreep, and acheron and ff fully proved that it totally worked. The sad thing is, i can see a world where HSR powercreep was more balanced like genshin, but people would become less interesting on rolling for characters or the characters would have been less interesting as balancing sometimes limits the creativity that can be put into a character kit, which is something that genshin is currently suffering. In short, HSR lacks the open world aspect or content of similar magnitute, so it has to sell end-game units with bigger numbers, which in turns makes the game be balanced around those new numbers.
this aspect is one reason why i will never understand why people compare the two in regards to unit powers. HSR is more heavily combat-focused, & there are many forms of endgame. it's not as casual of an experience when compared to genshin, & they're in fundamentally different game genres.
@nilmerg Can't blame them tbh. A good game, specially a live service game, doesnt always translate to more profit for the devs. In genshin, it kinda does, but is at the cost of, well, much higher development cost as they need to create the world and story to sell the characters, HSR ofc does the same but at much lower scale, however that lower scale also means theres less casual content where to play with the characters. In a perfect world we would have a more balanced meta, with the current end game content while the devs make the same amount of money, but unless HSR has something as big as open world that makes people keep playing even if the characters are balanced , thats never going to happen and the current state of powercreep will continue. People vote with their wallets after all and hoyo follows where the money is at.
they're definitely afraid of a scenario where a banner doesn't sell well maybe adding 4 stars that can do similar mechanics of a 5 star character BUT not having a bloated kit can somewhat alleviate the new power creep these 5 stars always bring 3.0 is coming and I'm afraid of the future for this game meta-wise
It gonna get to that point soon because reruns are already selling horribly because 90% of the time, the character has been crept since release. Hopefully hoyo fixes up in 3.0
It's more of a chicken and the egg problem. Do enemies get absurd HP values because characters are getting more and more broken, or are characters getting more and more broken because the enemies get absurd HP values? The real problem is that the team behind hsr went too fast with their gameplay visions and now we have the HP and powercreep problem.
I can definitely see this being the case. Realistically though, idk that it matters which came first because it definitely is a problem either way, like you said. HSR just kinda moved too fast compared to how other games are, and its resulted in the issues.
I think it is because characters are getting too strong, enemies HP become too inflated as a result. In MrPokke's HP inflation video, he pointed out that the biggest HP inflation increases happened when Ruan Mei, Acheron, and Feixiao were released.
As a person who plays HSR since launch, I honestly don't mind if my characters will have only few kits or do few things. The point to play this kind of game is for characters and story, not power flexing. That's why Fate: Grand Order has stood up for very, very long time. You can use many characters in FGO from launch in today's content just fine (and unironically Mash can carry you if you have enough time to burn), while Seele barely functions outside SU and MoC (even then she struggles a lot unless you have her light cone).
the powercreep is so fast that within a few patches a bunch of new dps had released each more powerful than the last one. I think my E1 acheron would become useless within half a month
I find it quite funny they ran Kafka in 2.5, Acheron in 2.6, and Jing Yuan in 2.7, just for them to release Aglaea, who's already very strong while being the weakest she'll ever be 😭
And THIS is what makes things very hard for new players. Depending on when they joined the game at worst they only have 4-star DPSes and buffers to work with, but clearing current content with them is either barely doable or take foreeever because their kit is so fkn basic
Great points. Altough i must include one thing that I think was missing, and that is the fact that on genshin (or any open world gacha) you can have fun with your characters outside of the end game mode. And by that I mean you have to farm, collect flowers, and do miscellaneous stuff that DON'T consume the daily energy, therefore giving you more things to do in the game (if it's monotonous or not is besides the point). HSR on the other hand, if you are bodying the entire game on auto with a roaster that's a whole patch behind the curve, that's just not enough fun. If everything you do is log in to spend the daily energy on a slight chance to upgrade one of your already competent characters, chances are you just won't. Not saying that's the right approach or anything but it's worth putting down
Definitely agree with this, I've talked about this in previous videos too. Lack of having things to do = lack of defined goals for player = player quits. Characters alone can't keep people invested.
@@SupurNeoDude this is by far the most HP inflated MoC in HSR history Strife of Creation (3.0) HP (Single) : 16.1 Million HP HP (AoE) : 13.8 Million HP
I had a bit of a different thought. When you talked about Chasca, and this applies to other Genshin characters too as far as I'm aware, the important thing to note is that they deal mostly single target damage, while supports mostly support a single character. While raw hp numbers in HSR increased, it was partly as a result of adding more mobs. And they did this because they had to sell Erudition units somehow. Fuck, I can't properly flesh out this idea cuz I'm in a game of TFT... Hopefully you get the idea.
I get what you mean, but that's more of a venti problem I think. If genshin made their end game have mobs rather than always slamming bosses down our throats then I feel venti would take over like he did when the game released and up to 2.0. He's honestly a little bit of a stop gap himself for that game having more varied content.
@@fl2ur Oh no, I wasn't trying to shit on Genshin or anything, or maybe I misunderstood. The differences in combat between GI and HSR exists on a fundamental level, as you're probably aware. Such that, even without knowing much about Genshin, I doubt that even with hordes of mobs, Venti wouldn't be that much better. I'm speculating, but since only one character can exist on the field at any given time, any effective aoe character would necessarily have to be over tuned. When that happens, you get a repeat of HSR, where Erudition, Blast, and ST carries continue to try and powercreep each other. To bring it back to the topic of the video, I ultimately have the same conclusion, that hp has to inflate to curb that vicious cycle of creep, but we arrived there at slightly different ways. This isn't even mentioning the fact that HSR prints nearly 2 characters every patch.
@@fl2urThen just don't add smaller mobs? We've had plenty of abysses during 4.0 (presumably when you took a break) where it was AOE but they were heavy mobs like the Mechs, so Venti or any anemo couldn't group them.
@@gameplayerone3917on the contrary venti is still really good but the game realizes this. He's capable of cleaning all the floors with light mobs enemies better than anyone else. It's just kazuha is able to do a weak variation of that and buff. In pure cc situation venti wins but kazuha is just more flexible for the bosses.
I think there's also one major factor that contributed to HSR'S imbalance, and that inherently as a turn basec game, it's very bare bones and simple. And thats not a bad thing per say, but then theres only so much you can do to increase the difficulty when all you have are three buttons to work with. You can have certain mechanics, yes, but at the end of fhe day increasing HP is really the only thing you can do to increass fhe difficulty. I think Aventurine is the only boss whose mechanics actually require a plan ahead, but honestly even that is easily countered. Ive seen some people say that you dont need to full star the endgame, and yes you dont have to, but... HSR clearly cares about the combat, as seen by the stupidly overtuned new characters and the fact that we've got THREE endgame modes, not to mention the stimulated universe if you count that, when the game is barely 2 years old. It's not like Genshin where you actually dont need to fully star the endgame because you play that for the story and exploration, in HSR the combat actually matters (and frankly i just dont find the story that interesting tbh.).
Pretty much....genshin has tons of ways to get primos outside of combat. Exploration and the hangouts/story quests etc don't need players to heavily invest character. Every new character I genshin also has relevant teapot setups so it encourages slight deviations if you really want the primos. All of these are kind of absent.
@@rushalias8511 there are non-combat events (including permanent), overworld chests, 10 free pulls every patch, & side quests in HSR. wdym it's absent... even in some combat-based content like DU, you don't even have to invest in units at all to get a lot of the jades since it levels + equips them for you.
@nilmerg what i mean is that genshin has content outside of combat so combat as a whole isn't the focus. Even if DU or SU auto levels and equips characters. It's still the same combat you need to do. The overworld chests in hsr are...a lot less than genshin. You can find them all in a day. As for the events yes hsr has events permanently added. But that's not exactly a fix for what the issue is. The issue is that the main focus of hsr is the turn based combat that is very focused and very restrictive compared to other games. It's such an issue that even when they try and stretch the combat to 4 arguably 5 different modes. MoC, PF, AS, DU and SU, it all boils down to the same thing. All the events are added because the game would be very repetitive and stale because there just isn't anything to do beyond combat. Even all the events that are added...are all just temporary fixes. As for the free ten pulls. Here's the sad truth about that....they have to give it. You know why...because it's a a necessity. They release characters at a higher rate than genshin. In just two years their roster is already more than half of genshin. So they need to ensure that players feel as compensated to pull and try and keep up with the release rate. Characters who are once again...only marketable in how they perform in the combat. Genshin has half it's content devoted to exploration. That's why you can get away with making the combat easy. People aren't just sold on the combat but how the character works elsewhere in the world for exploration.
Someone is same strength level as previous best thing: why bother? Someone is better than previous best thing: POWERCREEP However this sentiment is weird because if a unit is loved enough people are willing to look the other way, its just recently that people are starting to see how unhealthy Acheron’s strength level was for the game, everyone after her is a byproduct of her strength level basically, so that they could at least compete, yet they ended up surpassing and becoming powercreep themselves.
Well Hoyo caused that mentality themselves because they make certain characters better than the others instead of balancing the game well. Boothill and Rappa were good characters, but they clearly made Firefly the more definitive and versatile option since they handle single target and aoe content well nevermind she got multiple fire element teammates to help her whereas the others didn't get anything. The only dps you really needed to pull in 2.x was Acheron and Firefly because they handle the situations you would have pulled Feixiao, Boothill, Rappa, Jade or Yunli for without issue anyway because they are the favored units. Those other dps are for sure more situationally useful may even be have higher dmg ceiling like Feixiao but they don't bring much value at all if you pulled the favored units and their supports. No doubt they will make Castorice in the game Awards trailer cracked because thats clearly who they want players to focus on.
The problem wasn't really Ruan Mei characters onwards per say, it was the base design of many of the mechanics in the game. Case in point; if RM just provided benefits for a Break team on release and very few generic buffs, no one would have played her at the time of release because Break was an incredibly flawed design at base (which self-limited its ceiling way too hard by being able to rebreak, not providing enough delay to be useful utility, and not providing enough of a damage boost to be "generally useful" to teams, so hard to design hybrid or solo break teams). Dedicated Break was mostly a niche playstyle at the time, and it would be a hard sell to convince people to go for it on its own; it really required something like Superbreak for dedicated Break to be a thing. Designs like RM, which needed to fit both specific archetypes, but still be useful enough to be attractive before those archetypes were active, or Acheron, who needed to be strong enough to activate underutilized archetypes, were responses to be made to hypercarry because incentivizing pulls for unique utility was just not properly accounted for, and the game could not properly incentivize new team structures smoothly without power creep. Many of the early "meta" ideas were clearly scrapped as people got better as the game (for example, one of Kafka's earlier kit designs was actually as a Break DoTTer, and her earlier versions had her DoT go as low as less than 150%-ish ATK, just to give an idea of what they "thought" were going to be good enough until they retested many of their ideas). By contrast, Genshin has many "soft archetypes" (generally the different elements and element combinations), but really only two hard archetype structures (Hypercarry and Quickswap), and the soft archetypes are much easier to transition between because as long as you just apply a lot of an element you were looking for, you had at least some overlap with new releases rather than almost none. Yes, there are concerns such as energy generation, etc., and sometimes, new soft archetypes can come into prominence such as mono-Fire, but actually transitioning characters to new archetypes is a much simpler task.
When you mentioned characters doing too much. This reminded me of the gacha i came from. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, or FFBE for short. It started with characters doing a single thing, kinda like Natasha is a healer, she heals. period. But, by the time of its EoS recently (End of Service), it went way too deep into the powercreep hole. Every unit is an absolute monster of a powerhouse and every single one of them HAD to do everything! Deal Damage, heal, buff, debuff, whatever else is possible. If you didn't have at least 3 to 6 well built units on your team, you would be COOKED in the endgame. But there is a catch... if you were a day one player like myself. You would be fine. You would always have enough to pull for units and could easily keep up with the ascending meta. Sadly for new players it isn't that simple, right? HSR is suffering form the same problem rn, at least i believe. I see a lot of new players complaining that it has been too hard to catch up. While day one players like myself aren't struggling at all. Either Hoyo has a plan that couldn't be fulfilled during the game release, or they are deliberately falling the power creep hole and in two years we'll be dealing 1 billion damage in MOC. I just hope Hoyo do something for older units so they can at least be useful... I fear this decision could be simply re-releasing older characters into new gacha version of themselves. Like DHIL (which is already not optimal, but can still be saved by releasing new characters that buffs Basic ATK/Skill Consumption.)
I had a friend really invested into ffbe, he even got me to play it are little around the time there was like a 6 or 7* cloud and tifa releasing. Honestly my biggest thing with that game is that it felt overwhelming to get into, which kinda points to your point of HSR suffering the same problem for new players. Like, if I was a new player rn and wanted to clear a 5m hp boss in MoC with my base dan heng I'd be like "wtf how is that possible" and the only answer is "get broken supports or replace dan with a newer unit". But how is that new player even meant to figure that out? What if base dan is the unit they want to use but can't? It's just a mess at this point.
It's definitely not that simple, I didn't play since day 1, but I'm logging in daily since Silverwolfs banner and I still often struggle to clear. 3 stars on MoC 12 are definitely not something that's possible to get with my E0S0 Jingliu,, and my Bronya is E0S0 as well, I just had no luck. If the Weakness mix isn't favorable for my roster, I have to spend a lot of time crafting a team that doesn't suck. The problem is simply that I ain't meta slaving. I don't have the latest supports (Robin, Lingsha), I didn't like their designs. I'm not pulling Sunday for the same reason. I built a Crit Kafka because I wanted her to be useful outside of DoT (which seemed very weak at the time). Of course you can say these issues are self inflicted. But my point is just that it's not reasonable to expect everyone pulled all the characters and built all the characters simply because they played for a long time.
This is pretty much exactly what Fire Emblem Heroes has been going through for the past couple years. New characters are releasing with their weapons and personal skills each having like 5-6+ other skills added onto them so they instantly become one man armies / one man support bots and are powercreeping other characters that released in the past 1/2/3 months
The hp bloat to character kit creep obviously goes hand in hand, but i partially blame their incessant push for archetypes. It went from more concise team building to a punishment for not investing in whatever archetype they are pushing on top of turning very greedy for investment and feeding into the bloated kits you talked about It started with the ipc fua and how e1s1 topaz was taken as the norm bc she gave ratio the necessary amount of debufs and most recently the superbreak units all having early cons with def shred to motivate you to reach that 100 def down
Acheronification my friend. But the devs just want people to keep paying, they don't do anything about it because Nobody really complains, in the CN fandom they just want to forcw the spendings more and more without any remorse.
The way imo to fix it is to have all of your team archetypes being viable and tailor new units to make certain archetypes stronger. Sunday is obviously made for summons but even without a summon dps he’s one of the best supports in the game still.
I still can’t believe that some people are comparing Genshin Impact to Star Rail. If you want to compare gameplay styles, it should be done with games in the same genre, like FGO, Limbus Company, or Reverse: 1999. Comparing it to these games would provide a better perspective on how far the meta has evolved and how bad their power creep is. But from my experience playing turn-based gacha games, HSR has the worst balance among turn-based gacha games. For instance, it’s like comparing Sparkle vs. Sunday. When Sparkle was first introduced, it didn’t power creep Bronya that much. But look at when Sunday arrived-E0S1 Sunday > E6S5 Sparkle. It feels completely absurd!
I definitely agree that there's comparisons that are better, but the video was framed in the context of a discussion my friend and I had. He doesn't really play other gachas, so that's kinda where it started and ended. Believe me, if there were other systems from different games(fgo rankups please and ty hoyo) that would be something I'd be extremely happy with.
Yeah as you mentioned, if devs will stop HP inflation, players not gonna have any reasons to pull for new characters in HSR. Because you don't have a cool open world to just walk around and interact with your character like for example Genshin does. Genshin players not just pulling for characters to fight the endgame, they are pulling for them to live inside Teyvat, just travel, fly and mintpick, etc. As you can see they even willing to play this game as they recieving new running effects. So I think HSR devs should think about any other reasons why players will want to pull for character instead of just make them do stronger damage. They already screwed up the trailblazer's room feature by the way that could have huge impact on that in my opinion.
In the early patches like 1.0 there wasn't a real focus on an team comp, that was up to players to piece together. The characters were their own units and did what they did because they could supply their own triggers to their effects. Kafka could supply her own DoTs to to trigger them in the Ult. Weakness breaks were more important because that was the only real way to get real dmg in. Despite all of that, the dmg characters could do was roughly the same so surviving an onslaught was more important than buffing. Now the dmg characters do has ballooned thanks to the onset of not just Super Break but at base newer characters just do more dmg. Instead of making use of the unique mechanics to control a fight and make them more engaging, Hoyo decided that just ballooning HP will fix it without taking into account that an HP sponge is never fun to fight.
I'm fine with the hp inflation ONLY if they gave rank up quest for old 4* and 5* characters like in FGO. This would not only make for viable alternative teams but also make old characters still desirable to pull Right now with the current MoC, I couldn't even use half of my characters to 3 star floor 12 unless I have the newly released character designed for that MoC.
Wonder if they were to do this would it be unlocked via a trace or a TB mission. (One can cope ig) Trace 4 or just a slight bump increase of base multipliers or added gimicks to catch up Seele would get some sort of extra buffs off resurgence, and deals much more during resurgence. JY would probably just get a bump on multipliers of skill or ult Kafka gets something as an extra just to bump up DoTs like a buff extender Blade gets extra HP% loss scaling bonus Silverwolf eliminates her own type implant as part of an rng and have built in ehr to crit val. IL gets a passive that gives him buffs the more SP gained/loss from the team. JL trades ally hp% loss to an extra multiplicative multiplier Argenti gets more energy by acting Topaz PoD gets extended to increase vul potency of repeated FUa attacks. Ect.
I have watched a lot of those ‘Honkai HP Scaling videos’ and honestly none of them ever really hit the mark for me… But your reasoning and explanation really resonated with me-‘side upgrades’ and niches are a really important part of the balance ecosystem, and the bloat of each unit really doesn’t leave any room for that. Starting with Ruan Mei they shoved everything in-she was, at her core, a break-based unit, wanting increased efficiency and duration… but then she also gets res pen? Why? Now any future res pen units have to also have something extra to keep up with her. It sorta felt like their base/confidence early on was weak (like they weren’t sure people would like the game)-they seemed to have felt like they couldn’t just put out a break focused support unit when there were no real break DPS… so they had to make her have extra stuff that benefited everyone. The fallout from that is now each unit compounds on one another to the point they had to start adding broad new stuff like super break across multiple characters (Imagine how awesome it would be if super break was a character-specific bonus meant as a niche buff for those who liked that play style! And no other unit could interact with it directly! Imagine if each new MC was a support/enabler for a whole new playstyle to help show off each type with a super unique kit!) This, along with what you said about relic sets (the most blatantly ‘for a specific unit’ type of gear in a GACHA game I’ve ever seen) means that they are constantly in a race with themselves. And look, I’m a die-hard fan. I read all the guides. 100% every challenge every reset. But honestly? I don’t see myself spending on this game. Because it feels like whatever I spend to get a cool unit I like won’t matter in 5-6 months, I’ll just be flushing it down the drain… It’s quite the corner they’ve backed themselves into, with really the only solution being to stop the bloat now, which will make each new unit less enticing power-wise, which I fear they won’t do due to their need to make money… it’s just a shame they don’t trust their designs and stories to do most of that heavy lifting for them… Anyways, that’s a follow from me. Can’t wait to hear more from you!
Ruan mei and Acheron really were the watershed moment, these 2 completely eclipsed their respective competitions and everything after that has just a one upping mess.
It's also to do with the fact there are so many characters being released and there being no solution to the HP problem besides having the characters themselves. Given what some of the TH-cam shorts have 'leeked' to me, the power increase needed to address new content is fucking insane. I see a huge drama incoming for that alone. It's not a sustainable method. And people are just going to drop off the game because it's no longer fun. I remember quitting in 1.1, then coming back in 1.6. The amount of power needed to even do Phantylia was insane. Plus I was timegated by the fact I not only had no characters to beat her, but also no good relics. So I was stuck on her for over a week. Same with True Sting and Argenti. I was punished because I didn't have Jingliu or DHIL. Catch up mechanics would fix that easily (Not just reserved trailblaze power), but an option to gain one of the patch's limited 5 stars with all the necessary talents and relics given too. Which isn't asking for too much, look how many characters there are.
HSR also suffers from the fact that the game is just Combat, like there is very little to this game outside of combat, to compre it would be like if Persona 3 was just Tartarus and nothing but Tartarus, that’s HSR. In Genshin if you dont like the combat there still a whole world for you to explore, in HSR if you dont like the combat then just go play something else, cuz there isn’t really much else to do And since 80% of the game time is spend in combat, basically everything about a unit must revolve around combat, which make the flaw in said combat system much more apparent and also inescapable
I put it entirely on everything from 2.2 to 3.0, possibly further, only falling into two damage archetypes, break and FUA. Break hasn't been so bad, with clear variety between the three, but held back by a severe lack of supports so multiple teams aren't viable. FUA on the other hand has just been about attack frequency, and every new character has to hit as many times and as hard as the last, so instead of fleshing out the other archetypes (DoT, HP, Ult, AA, etc) and getting them up to the same level, it's just been FUA after FUA after FUA, with each one having to creep up higher and stronger than what came before while everything else is being left in the dust. Since Acheron, FUA has gotten 2/2 sustains, 5/8 DPS, and 1/2 supports. Break got 3 DPS and 1 sustain. Everything else is just... Jiaoqiu, who really only fits best for a single DPS, not even an archetype.
honestly if I'd have to say my view of the problem, it's that hsr devs wants to make all 5 stars unique and make sure that they do the hype of the character justice. But all they do is just make them too op, so they had to make the enemies' hp scale a lot because of this, to say that their dmg is just "normal".
ive been playing hsr on and off since it launched, but only recently started to actively play it. And boy let me tell you, these new units are so strong that i dont even bother with the old ones. they make the early game zoom by QUICK
I've seen this kind of thing everywhere: Fate Grand Order, Fire Emblem Heroes, DBZ Dokkan Battle, it always happens to my favorite Gacha games; a true shame.
Imo, it's not that she doesn't need them, it's that she doesn't need *both*. Being able to superbreak innately on top of getting bonuses for doing so is kinda a lot.
It was my hope that once we had a really well oiled fully decked out premium comp like feixiao's fua comp for example the powercreep would plateau there and they wouldnt need to inflate enemy hp anymore than that. I'm beginning to think that just isn't hoyo's intentions though. The obvious profit incentive is there yes, powerful characters sell, but I think theres a bit more to it than that. Each new kit added to the game is a new variable to balance around and if no older characters are outliving their usefulness that means none of those variables are aging out. I think what it comes down to is hoyo doesnt wanna spend the money qa testing if their next character isnt gonna break the game with some wild combination of synergistic characters and LCs they made years ago. In the absence of balance patches or in more severe cases straight up removing problematic mechanics; powercreep is the way hoyo rotates things they dont wanna be part of the meta anymore out of the game. The thing I compare it to is standard rotation in magic the gathering. Only the most recent couple sets are legal in standard formats so as new variables rotate in old variables rotate out. I myself prefer eternal formats because I love when a new card comes out and has explosive synergy with an old card that never really had a chance to shine. The compromise is eternal formats have extensive ban lists. I'd love it if 1.x characters could have explosive synergies with characters released many years into the future, but i feel that would necessitate balance patches sometimes even nerfs to preexisting strategies and it would cost hoyo more money to test and I think thats ultimately the reason they arent going to go down this route. Its something I hope I'm wrong about.
Tl;dr: Because of Turn-based gameplay. There is no "gameplay" in HSR, there's only numbers. So the only way to make a new shinny unit desirable is to increase those numbers, to increase those paragraphs. It's a snowball effect, and it won't get fixed. Because that's what makes them money.
You have never played any other turn based game in your life, didn't you? Go play any Atlus game, be it Persona or the wide selection of Shin Megami Tensei games going back all the way to the 1980s. Go play Final Fantasy 1 to 10. Go play Pokemon gen 1 to gen 5. A lot of these games are relatively simple at the surface, until you dive deep into the underlying complexities. Anyone who thinks Pokemon is easy and simple with not real gameplay variation has never even tried to engage with all the underlying systems and variables. Atlus games have some of the best boss designs in the entire turn-based RPG genre. Final Fantasy excels in class design. There are a lot of cool things you can do with turn-based game design. You just need to be more creative and think outside of the box. Reverse 1999 is a Chinese turn-based gacha game that does exactly that. Simple and easy to learn at the surface. Surprisingly deep and harder to master underneath it. Lots of distinct character designs and skill sets and a wide array of teamcomps and archetypes.
The only way for HP inflation to come to a full halt, is either enemies/bosses starts to have more ridiculous mechanics or they buff or rework older characters specifically 5*. Which I highly doubt the latter.
I'm mixed on how the game is handling things with character power, on one hand I'm actually kind of glad that characters are actually stronger because a higher power budget means they can be more flexible in what they actually do and the more flexibility you allow a character to have the more they can use it to get into something a lot more specific and enter certain niches and promote different playstyles better. This makes me excited for characters that are more unique and interesting than what... *some* 1.X characters have been where some of their ultimates or talents or even skills sometimes felt really uninteresting and that played a fair amount into why they were ultimately just bad units by today's standards. Like look at Bronya's talent (30% action advance on using basic at lv. 10) and tell me when you're gonna ever make any use of that outside of maybe some really niche scenarios. Probably never! So I think raising the overall power level isn't bad on it's own. However there is of course the bad part to this in that yeah this does cause the enemies to get stronger and as such old units become really not good anymore. This is why I really hope that we can get more direct buffs to old units some day because some of them have pretty interesting ideas for a kit that just kinda don't get fleshed out nearly as well as if they were made today, and it's a shame because a modern version of older units that lack some pizazz in their kit would be really fun, this is why the way I hope they buff these characters is through a system similar to HI3's augment cores that kinda just change how the character works, though here I'd not make them into a totally different character, I'd want them to still keep some core ideas in the character even if they do change some parts significantly if it's necessary to be able to actually expand upon the character. Oh and of course there's still the problem of hoyoverse could potentially just keep increasing the power cap without ever really putting a lid on it and making contemporary units the best for their time in more elegant ways than being a power spike over older units (mode specific caters like MoC buffs and PF buffs and enemy lineup plays a part in doing this better than just a power upgrade but that's a whole can of worms that there's no need to get *too* deep into)
I agree with this mostly - realistically I know that it's not possible to fully keep people at even strength levels. Even if they tried, there would eventually be a slip up where someone ends up stronger than intended - what would they do then, nerf them?(no) What I really want is it to slow down at the very least by lowering the amount of things characters get in their kits, or if they want to keep giving a lot of stuff, then make each thing less potent. Like, sure Sunday could keep his AA and CD buff, but make his crit buff 8% instead of 20(wtf were they thinking)
Thanks for articulating something I’ve felt unconsciously. I am F2P in HSR and perfectly happy. My teams are strong enough, but I have no fear of wasting money due to power creep. I’ve spent $ on Genshin, and have not regretted anything because every character I’ve invested in is still relevant. Not perfect or best on slot, but totally useable.
Tbh I’m thinking about quitting since my biggest problem is saving up for a character. It would be good for a patch, but in a few months about 4-5 new characters would now be better than it. Sad how the devs did not take this into consideration.
I think HSR can take a note from the Wenut in genshin here,that boss had a stupidly high res that was diminished only if you swirl the element in the anemo spheres that it had, it either made people bring bow characters or make creative changes in their rotations to swirl the elements. Similarly they can bring in something like superbreak resistance, making a boss mechanic which if done correctly buffs dot dmg (this was really useful in unknowable domain conundrum runs when the dot weak robot exploded and dealt huge dmg to the enemies on the field) and make even more creative ways to restrict the current meta characters so that the future characters cam be more balanced
i think its more of a problem of toning down certain units on because if we think about it the only gross units have been robin sunday and ruan mei. like firefly acheron boothill yunli lingsha jiao jade and rappa all feel within reason yes they are all strong but it feels within reason. I think the correct argument you made is that Sunday’s bloated kit shows an extreme lack of awareness. he needed to have stronger summon buffs and weaker general buffs. like he doesnt need to out perform sparkle in 85% of cases out of his intended niche. robin and ruan mei feel bloated but ruanmei only feels necessary of break. and robin was supposed to be that for follow up but once again had broken generalist mechanics. TLDR make supports more niche for their teams. Jiaoqiu is the perfect example he fits into the acheron team and can be a slight downgrade to other supports in dot teams it feels super fair.
Meta characters sells way more over just waifu/husbando. That's why rerun even for meta rerun character not doing good as their first released as people see little to no value in them. That's also why characters like seele, silver wolf and blade not getting rerun even if units like Jing Yuan who released after seele got another rerun. In meta pull value, these characters already fallen off hard an hoyo knows that they will never gonna get profit from them.
That's quite an interesting & effective take on the topic. I remember seeing a discussion in the early days where ppl were like why do u need a JY when E6 Serval wud be just a bit weaker, we saw similar takes with Sampo & BS or Gall & Lingsha. So, I think Hoyo took it upon themselves to make newer kits so bloated/overtuned/overloaded that the balance came out to be HP inflation. If only they had tried to apply uniqueness feature to chars be it 4* or 5* that the synergies are somewhat limited & the pool for a particular combat engine gradually increases, it wud've been better but we actually saw the rise of FuA & SuperBreak in less than 6 months to their max potential already. So, to compensate it we saw quite a strong rise in difficulty.
8:15 We already have this tho, it's called archetypes and that's how they're currently balancing units. The real reason hp inflation is happening is because we just got two perfectly synergistic teams and the game is clearly being balanced around that. Sunday should be the strongest support in the game just because he's new and powercreep is a problem, right? Nope, he only works well in some sp intensive teams and summon teams. Break units want Ruan Mei, summons Sunday and follow up ones will want Robin. Having too many buffs or words in his abilities isn't going to make Sunday better in dot teams than whatever dot support they give us in the future.
The thing is, the more bloated kits are, the more likely a unit built for one niche can play outside of it. Robin is the best support in the game, period. You can see this in how she's used in almost every team archetype (including dot). Sunday is meant for summon units sure, but due to being bronya pro max, he's usable in the every one of the places she is. Firefly has niche use cases where she acts as a support(fire implanter) for himeko. Rappa has use cases as a universal breaker for firefly teams. The whole point of the video is that units just do too much. If you take away a little bit from their kits then they're guaranteed to stay in niche, but hoyo doesn't seem to want to do that.
@@fl2ur Yeah but they're played in other teams because the game is still new and we don't have something that covers every niche. Robin isn't going to be played in a dot team once we get a dot support, we just need to give them time. If you complained about things like Sunday powercreeping Sparkle for no reason due to his kit doing too much I would understand, but you often complain about word counts and even brought up Rappa's energy passive even tho she's clearly balanced around that because she deals basically no dmg outside of her ultimate and it costs 140 energy, so of course she's going to have something like that. You even pointed at Ruan Mei but she's no different than Bronya, they both provide a lot of different things, she's just giving buffs that actually work with break units.
Now if only people followed the archetype rule. No, they literally run Sunday and Robin together in one team because the devs didn't make sure this won't work. When players aren't penalised for double-booking supports, they absolutely will do that, archetypes be damned.
@@jeremiahsmith916 Yeah but like I said, they are going to fix this, they just need time. The only way to fix this is to release more supports and they can't just drop 3 archetype support banners tomorrow.
Even if you are right. What can be affected easier? A nerf to enemy HP? Or a nerf to units? Even if you say, well going forward don't make them so strong that wont help what's already happened. I realize too that going the other direction is a problem likely also, but the simple answer for now is to nerf the HP. Or start scaling both back in the future.
@@dew332 It's hoyo, they've never heard of ACTUALLY buffing old units instead of releasing a new one that will help for a while (Apart from the Zhongli situation because CN was crying.)
@@Thunderdroceon yeah, but we aren't talking about genshin here, and we know that honkai star rail is the favorite one of its creators, so there could be a chance
@@Thunderdroceonthey did buff lucy on ZZZ like 3 patches after release. She was already the top 2 sup in the game so it was more of correcting the stats used in scaling of one of her abilities since they probably forgot to add it as well, still added something to her kit that made her better.
Additionally with the point of "why this is happening with HSR so much faster than Genshin?" is that people seem to like acting like they're not literally ongoing at the exact same time, by the same overall company, *learning from each other ('s community feedback)* and Genshin having multiple years of a headstart. HSR is speedrunning/playing catch-up, and overcompensating as a resullt.
I got busy with life and took a break from all gatcha games for almost a year. Came back to genshin still able to 36. Came back to HSR and it felt like playing with two broken feet lmao. I wanted to come back and pull for the characters i missed (Blade, Boothill) but i feel like there's just no point.
Right now the game is expected you to do 69 trillion damages in all end-game contents. 4-star characters in this game are poorly useless since most of them has been overshadowed by 5-star version of themselves. The game is getting closer to their ancestor Hi3 especially in the next 3.0 patch it's going to be Hi3 player pleaser with the new world, new Hi3 cameo character, etc. And on top of that, the Fate collab is on the way. We are going to have the stupid FGO Gacha moments in this game (Personally, I hate Fate series because of my (used to be) friends) and I bet those collab characters will do the SH*T ton of damages of course.
For me, personally, I feel somewhat conflicted, I guess? I actually do not mind the high difficulty at all, but I do feel bad over not being able to relate with some in the community and there being a disagreement from my side in general. There are two things that I should mention to contextualize things. I don't even have 35 characters on my account, and my main DPS chars are Argenti, Qingque and Serval, from 1.5 when I started playing, till today. Furthermore, and more importantly, I think that I have a preestablished and slight bias towards actually not minding the high difficulty because I came from Genshin. I played Genshin from 1.0 until the ending of Sumeru. For a vast majority of the game's life cycle, approximately from 1.3 onwards, I kind of disliked my time there in a similar way to how a lot of HSR players are feeling about the "HP Inflation" / Feature Bloat. However, I disliked my time in Genshin for the exact opposite reason, and for the same reason some might like Genshin, specifically: - I really, really, really disliked how easy the game was, it felt like I never had anything to work towards. This is coming from someone who mained Klee. (Albeit, my other main was Tartaglia.) - I really disliked how simple the character kits were, because each felt so similar to one another in my eyes. On the points of what I disliked there, I also commonly saw comments from people and discussions around these topics wherein people - I would say, based on my insight and experiences - could agree with me. Not everyone, obviously, but a chunk of people. This is not to take away from anyone liking Genshin. I stuck with the game for as long as I did specifically because I cared for the game so much to actually criticize it so much, and I suspect that people have similar outlooks on HSR. I still use old, crusty 4-star DPS units (and Argenti) because I believe in the idea that horizontal investment is the way to go in HSR, compared to the vertical investment that is present moreso in other games. I believe that in Genshin, it is incentivized to produce great stats for a few characters you wanna build, but that in HSR, it's better to produce good enough stats for a lot of characters who cover many bases. I'm still doing fine, I full cleared last PF with my Serval, about to full clear the current AS with my Qingque, etc., and I would assume it's because I invest in every unit I have a good amount. Granted, full disclosure, reason why I advocate for horizontal investment while also having below 35 chars on my acc is because I E6'd Argenti. I love that stupid man. However, I believe that horizontal investment is not easy for the general gacha audience because most gacha games kinda train the mind towards vertical investment, especially with how the culture of "maining" someone is, how humans will typically gravitate towards "perfecting" their favourites, and because its very easy to form a bond with a character in a gacha game considering how companies actively try to hook you in any way possible to feel compelled towards a character. Finally, I also think that there should be a lot more effort put into full clearing if you actually want to, but also that it is ultimately inconsequential, so it doesn't bother me too much. I see the last stars in the endgame content as something to work towards a lot, whether it be in building chars or playing a lot for the god runs. And if I fail, I do not mind it too much, mostly because I think that it's normal for the hardest of hard content in a game to be "exclusive" and also because I won't stress over, like, half a pull or something like that. (On a side-note, I also just prefer HSR's story and reward system a ton more, so that might also be something to consider if we're looking for potential biases.) (EDIT: also to add the fact that there's so much endgame, obviously, too) All in all, despite me not having many characters, nor using newer units to full clear, I do want to say that I have difficulties clearing the hardest content, as aforementioned in the last paragraph I sent, and it's not like I always manage to do it. It takes a lot of research, grinding and effort, but I don't mind it. However, just because I don't mind it, doesn't mean that I advocate necessarily for it. I left Genshin, but I accept that it's simply not for me. I think that both HSR and Genshin have their own niches, and it just depends on what you, as a player, would like more. This was a great video by the way, I wish you much luck in your TH-cam career
Rare Argenti haver spotted! I made a 2nd account forever ago just to get him back when he released. Anyway, I do want to specify the point I was trying to make in the video wasn't really about difficulty. I actually am in the same boat as you comparing genshin to hsr in terms of how genshin didn't really have any as it's a super easy game. I was more trying to point out the difference in character kit bloats between the two, and hopefully lead people to start thinking "well, maybe there's a middle ground between the two" instead of one or the other.
Increasing difficulty doesn't equal to more hp bloat, you can have one without the other, aventurine boss fight was one of the highest difficulty spikes when he's released, but he does so because of his gimmick, not just by having 5x the hp pool. You're rewarded by ulting at the right time to get it back fully after he's doing the gamba thing, while punishing people that don't. Compare that to svarog that have almost 0 mechanic except with his hand summon, and for many teams, the hand is literally a gamba that either doesn't matter at all, or fked up your speed tuning if you ignore it. And the only counter is basically breaking and killing him fast enough before he does it
Hi Scorpion, I thought horizontal investment means having many unit at E0S0. And vertical investment as few BUT super strong unit like your E6 Argenti. ( I noticed that is how everyone mentioned vertical and horizontal investment means) Btw, I agree with your play style. I play HSR as Harem Star Rail. Sadly until today, I only have 2 DPS Waifu. Thankfully one is broken which is Firefly but the other one is Sushang. So it's really hard to clear MoC and AS since one side is so weak. HSR punish players for not getting meta unit. I don't like mommies/ husbando/ spoilt brat so I skip Acheron/Feixiao/ Boothill/ Yunli/ Rappa. I almost skip Firefly too because I don't like Sam. Thank goodness when I tried firefly in combat, my eyes focus more on the enemy bar and AV bar on the left rather than the unit. ( And lucky they have a big picture of Firefly face in the cockpit). Luckily my E1S0 Firefly can 2 cycle her side giving Sushang to 8 cycles the other side. But this most recent AS already show warning sign that even Firefly may no longer be OP. ( Sushang obtain 3424 points Vs Cocolia while Firefly only did 3328 points Vs the monkey banana boss!!!) HSR really not allowing us to play Harem style and want us to keep throwing away units that we love for brand new units that we may not like. 😢
You are so fucking right. While genshin hides QoL behind characters, HSR does a much worse jobs bloating their characters and also hides the solution behind the newest released character (which frankly they have done the latter since the beginning of MOC). BUT increasing HP is a product of their new characters being just too OP to fit in the older meta so they think they have to balance the game around them. Highly agree with everything said here.
Yes! You've managed to descripe what's been on my mind for the last ~ year. It was kinda exciting when the first broken characters started to come out cause of wow factor, but it got old very quickly. Now I feel like every other new unit is the NEW META, the STRONGEST, the MOST USEFUL. You got new character and they are already feels weaker the next patch. Im exaggerating, but you got the point. I feel like this powercreep will be an even bigger problem in the future.
a really big issue i see in the game is how many characters released every single patch, genshin came out almost 3 years before hsr and they are already closing the gap on the number of 5 stars, and in a game where you don't have other factors aside from combat like exploration you have to powercreep the units to keep them interesting
genshin scaled so much since natlan came out tulpa boss was in abyss not long ago with 2 mil hp now it has 3.6 mil but comparing both games really doesn't work due to how they are played elemental reactions vs all the different archetypes in hsr doesn't make sense to compare them since it doesn't translate 1 to 1
Yeah, HP increase doesn't affect Genshin as much as HSR since in Genshin you have several ways to amplify your damage through reactions and smart play while in HSR the only two ways to do more damage is by getting better Relics (Which completely depends on RNG) or getting new characters, and even those two methods have a hard limit on how far you can go.
Feature creep is real and it's wild. I'm not even sure how Aventurine wasn't brought up. He does so much that making a new shielding preservation unit that you'd want to pull for is hard to even imagine. It's far too late to shift gears now as you can't really nerf any of these characters, and they gotta keep pushing stronger characters out. HSR in 4.x will have bosses with billions of hp and characters releasing that applies a dot that can crit while also doing super break damage and if you stack just attack% they get crit rate crit damage and effect hit rate for free lmao.
I feel like early in the game they had a good hand in the power budget with characters like Silver Wolf, Luocha, Blade, etc... They were strong characters but had limitations that left room for future characters to compete without having to break the power ceiling.
However, I don't know what changed when they released Ruam Mei and Acheron but whatever it was made them throw any notion of balance out the window.
It was from then on that every new support had to have the equivalent of 3 different characters in their kit and every DPS had to be able to do twice the damage of the previous one with half the investment.
Yeah, 100% agreed. Maybe it's because ruan sold so well that they were like "well I guess this is what the playerbase is okay with", but it still is unfortunate either way.
It was Ratio. A free character that single-handedly obliterated 2.x. The game changed when that unit was given to players for free.
I would argue that the first case of serious powercreep came from DHIL. He was a bigger power leap comparatively at launch than than Ruan Mei was when she released. It was the first time we saw a character easily doing multiple hundreds of thousands of damage. She was very good at the time, but her value was nowhere near what it has become over time. For example basically all the break related parts of her kit were mostly just for some extra survivability rather than being an entire extra window of damage for superbreak teams like it is now.
Also I'd like to add the main reason I mention DHIL is because powercreep was not even in the cards for discussion until his release. At that point people started to talk about how he was very powerful, and they were worried that this would start a trend of insane powercreep.
@@Sakamoto_1535E3 Ratio was and still is good, but what really pushed him above and beyond was Robin, when he came out he was interchangeable with DHIL depending on the fight.
Thank god you didn’t view SW falling off being due to Boothill,FF, and Feixiao, because with all due respect this is a dumb way of thinking yet it’s so common. SW literally did not fall off because of implant or even weakness ignore, that was never the reason, you could argue it took away some of her uniqueness but thats all. Reason is simply other supports do her main job better (make dps do more damage) whether those teams have a dps with weakness ignore/implant, or not, other supports basically fit like a glove in their best teams and have almost no issues.
SW was kinda doomed from the get go, the more dps and RESISTANCES (not weaknesses) you covered with other dps you pulled, the lower her value would be.
I noticed this when people talked about Fugue. Her kit seems pretty straightfoward. She gives break damage boost and super break damage. Her multipliers are good and she seems fun and interesting to slot into different teams.
But every time she came up, there were a million reasons she sucks. "Can't use DDD on her", "She gives no speed boost like RM", "her def shred isn't that good" and I'm like, how can any character even compete with the current powerhouse supports without just having a "you win" skill button?
You know, HMC exists. And fugue isn't really better than a free unit, while being event 5*
@@nationalgeografic7687 Yes, I know HMC exists, that's my point. The requirement for Fugue to be considered "useful" or "meta" at all is way too high, because HMC is already so good that it makes her look neutered by comparison. And as such, hoyo keeps overloading their characters with busted kits to sell them.
i just found it funny how fugue was actually supposed to be a hmc substitute/only a sidegrade when literally 3.0 will most definitely abandon superbreak from the meta almost entirely because of archetype changes in endgame content. Which makes the situation even worse for her. And hoyo expects people to buy into pulling for her when its strategically an L 😂
Still coping that they'll give her away for free on christmas lmfao
@@Rainbowsaur this not even cope, this is delusion💀🙏
it's such a shame. I see why the developers are doing this they've dug themselves into a hole they can't get out of that easily, but damn it devs just try to, my e2 Acheron obliterates all the content with max points or low cycles. The inflation isn't working it just makes the other team archetypes unusable without having a wallet. PLEASE I JUST WANNA USE MY DOT TEAM AGAIN
You can,DoT is in the best spot its ever been since like forver
Viable in all 3 modes(comfortably 1 cycle Svarog,a DoT PF and DoT buff on AS)
@@hoangnguyen0721Can I get a contact for your copium dealer? That guy must have some good stuff. 😂
@@lazaruslong697he is objectively right though, all three game modes are in favor of dot right now with svarog having both electric and wind weakness, apoc first side having a dot buff, and the whole pf being dot related
@jp-dx6829 That may be true for the current instance of those modes, but what about the next? As soon as those buffs switch, DoT will most likely become as irrelevant and niche as it always has been. Not saying you can't use it, but boy, does it suck in comparison to anything else. You know, even a broken clock is right twice a day kind of situation...
@@lazaruslong697 Why does DOT have to be meta forever?
You can still clear with it being niche
I think what makes difficultly feel more oppressive in HSR is that so many bosses and challenges are designed with two or three specific characters in mind. The moment you don’t have one, it’s incredibly hard to compensate because there’s no 4 star equivalent or team alt.
While Genshin does in fact make bosses and challenges that clearly lean in specific character promotions, you still make ten other teams to kill that boss. Even if you have the character designed for the challenge, you run their 4th best team and find success cause the other units still compensate for their premium counterparts in some shape or fashion. That new Monkey Boss without Rappa just kinda sucks to deal with. 😅
Too true. I swear you can’t beat Hoolay with Firefly’s break team
@@leeminhyung167 Hoolay only has 3 options to fight him with which is Yunli Firefly and Feixiao and two of those have team comps that require certain characters.
@@rdogg114don’t forget Boothill and Clara
I can't say I've had any issues with the Monkey boss and I don't have Rappa. Heck, for this AS I used Himeko/Herta and cleared.
Difference between hsr and genshin is hsr isn't baby's game
I think part of this inflation comes from the fact that it seems they didn't really have fully fleshed out archetypes at the release of 1.0 and took it upon themselves to create distinct playstyles for 2.0. So characters who released during the 2.X series belong to these individual archetypes and feel so much stronger and due to have a playstyle that is actually supported by the game while others don't. And they need to inflate these HP values because once you assemble all the pieces of one of these teams, the amount of damage you can generate is insane compared to your 1.X DPS who don't seem to really have any homes. Individual power budgets wouldn't be so bad if older units were also given the same level of care and attention, but we all know that Hoyo rarely goes back and uplifts older units directly.
I definitely agree with this. Like in seele's case, there's no team that can be built around an "extra turn on kill" because it's so 1 dimensional - she kills, or she doesn't. All you can do for her is buff damage and literally nothing else. Compare that to the recent fua characters where they are all synergistic with each other and it's a night and day difference.
@@fl2ur I agree as well and I have hope in the future that perhaps we'll see older units continue to get uplifted - take Topaz and JY for example, who struggled with meta relevance upon their release but with the synergistic teams shot to relevancy. Even Seele has hope of being 'redeemed' in the event a unit able to buff her damage to insane heights based off speed were to exist, as even at E0 she has a 25% speed increase in her kit, or a unit who buffs a character's damage based off having less hits, to make her ult possibly nuke harder.
The ONLY unit who I can still see struggling even with the addition of a dedicated support is Yanqing since SO much of his kit is reliant on him not taking damage AND his buffs only lasting 1 turn anyways. Even with insane supports like Sunday and Robin out there, he has so little to properly convert into damage that it's hard to imagine a balanced support existing that wouldn't make other units be TOO strong.
Interestingly it was a bit the opposite with Genshin when the 4* starter characters where overpowered and scaled up with any evolution of the game
I agree with this. Before Sunday I didnt even know what a good jy team would be (I dont have sparkle) and the same applies to my Blade and Jingliu that cannot use the same Support 2.x units use to even close to the similar effect unless you pull for supp eidelons. Sundays kit is so loaded and the AV on summon and cleanse fixes the major issue that was in JY Design that he is actually one of my favorite units now after being benched for a Year. Lmao. At this point we will have kit designs so bloated and fight enimies with an HP Pool of an aeon before we reach anything close to an aeon (like 6.0 endgame or smth). These 1.x units have so many random limitations and punishable Designs but so little room to actually reign the Benefit of it. Like Blade solo sustain, and the Hp drain on your Team with jingliu does also very little than force you to run a sustain on low invest.
I feel like they could drop new sig lightcones that directly target a 5 star unit. Maybe make it so only THEY can use it so that way for people like seele they can make changes to their entire kit just from the lightcone basically giving them a direct buff and they can't be sued for that (because a big reason they don't change kits directly is because legally they can be sued in some countries) you can simply just not use or pull the lightcone nullifying any lawsuits. They could change seele entire gimmick to make her more modern. And still make money from it because players have to summon for a new lightcone if they want to use their seele at her new best.
Part of the issue is how quick they were to treat game mechanics like inconveniences. Weaknesses annoying? All type toughness damage (rip Silver Wolf). Energy annoying? Unique energy mechanics/innate ER mechs. Having your enemies attack too annoying? Advanced Forward. The only balancing route they left themselves is damage, unlike Genshin where they have elements and reactions.
This I definitely think is one of the problems, how they essentially disrespect and break, their own game mechanics. It's cool and novel and even a relief at first, but then in the long run it leaves you nothing to overcome.
Part of the fun is in figuring out how to work around the limitations set up with what you have, but then they just decided to hand you the solution on a silver platter.
I remember how in the beginning I wished I could bring one more character because I needed a certain element, but couldn't replace anyone on the team or else they'd either die or take forever to kill the enemy. Which led to wishing more characters would do more things. And that's the route they went.
I wonder what would've happened instead if we could've brought a team of five instead, but each character was limited to one or two things, and no character did the same two things.
Maybe some overlap, like say how Clara and Yunli both are physical destruction and counterattack, but then one of them lands bleed and the other deals extra break dmg or smthn instead. Or one counters when they're hit themselves (and has increased aggro working as a pseudo sustain like a tank/bruiser) and the other counters when others are hit.
Instead of ending up with, "X, but better."
Point is, they ran out of creativity in terms of gameplay and resorted to the laziest solutions possible by basically just removing their own limitations.
With summons we're now getting that fifth team member ON TOP of already bloated kits instead😮
I'm getting more and more convinced I should just quit the community and return to the true single player experience and just enjoy the game for the story and not worry about the characters, because everywhere this seems to be all people talk about and it's so very VERY depressing...😑
I agree, also the paths the characters follow have lost quite a bit of their uniqueness (aside of the Lightcones they have available) because many characters now seems to dip into different paths.
@@writerducky2589 yeah.. i mean the best thing you can do in any hoyo game is distance yourself from the community lmao.
On topic tho, i do remember how hard it was for me to beat any penacony boss ever. I played hsr from the start but then paused it like a patch before penacony, and then came back to to after the main storyline was finished... 2.3 i think? Or even 2.4.
Either way, you can imagine how fucked i was by missing all the penacony characters. I think the only one i accidentally pulled was sparkle (which worked perfectly with my DHIL at least).
And then... The Aventurine boss. Dude. When i tell you, i could not freaking beat him for the life of me. I think that lasted until they added the casual boss mode, and at that same time i also got Huohuo. AND DUDE. THE SUNDAY BOSS. When i tell you i couldn't beat him unless i got Aventurine i'm not joking. I only beat him last patch, during Aventurine and Acheron's rerun. Since i got Aventurine...
AND OMG the way i troubled to even get past Argenti before that Sunday confrontation is crazy. Like be so fr.
It really puts into perspective how if you just decide not to pull for certain units, you're screwed. Good luck to those accounts who try a "can you beat hsr without pulling" challenge. The answer is no!!!!
@@eherden2169this....100% agree with this.
All the sustainer now either have to dmg or buff the others in addition to healing.
All the debuffers(nihility) are also dps of a different kind.
The 3 main damage types being destruction, hunt and erudition are all continously powercrept relying on applying there own debuffs in the form of weakness implants or ignoring toughness.
That paths make no sense now story wise and game play wise.
Yes that was true but talking genshin is better handling elemental reaction is the biggest copium inhale I ever seen.
Don't know about the Chinese community, but in global there's the pervasive problem of any new character who is not direct and clear powercreep being called mid, ez skip, poor investment, etc. Hoyo's going to sell you the characters you want to buy. "Skip Lingsha, she's a Gallagher sidegrade." "Only reason to pull Fugue is in case you want to run break and RMC on the same floor." "You can skip Robin, she's a Ruan Mei sidegrade and only better for FUA (lol)". Even with kits as bloated as Sunday, you still have some saying it's better to skip and get his rerun because he just doesn't push the envelope as much RIGHT NOW.
You also have some content creators / so-called "meta experts" setting 0 cycles as the standard. Even if very few players will ever reach that standard there's still the wider expectation of "If this character can't clear in 1-2 cycles they've fallen off". Which is why you now see Acheron being ragged on, whereas in my personal observations I've yet to see any indication she can't clear MoC12. Or you have some loonies calling Firefly a "fraud DPS" because "she can't 0-cycle without S5 DanceDanceDance".
My only hope is that the current HP inflation was done by Hoyo to kill the expectation of 0 cycling for non-whales, because despite all of the recent complaints about powercreep I don't see anything to suggest that the current community is going to do anything but further enable it with their pulling/spending habits. In any case, pulling for meta seems like the most miserable way to play this game. Your characters aren't "investments" when a full endgame clear gives you 2% of the pulls needed to guarantee an E0S0. As much as it might suck to see 33/36 stars in MOC, I'll just ignore it if the current trend keeps up. I grew up too poor for keeping on a gacha treadmill to seem like a good use of my money.
Best take right here. People only care about powercreep when it's their favorite character.
Then you have these 0-cycle addicts setting it as the standard for determining the values of new units.
"B-but if the new characters need 3 cycles to clear on average investment then they're gonna be worse in the future", okay here's the thing, it WON'T be a problem if the powercreep slows down, or even plateaus. How do we slow down powercreep? By having BALANCED, or even MID units!
Stop wanting new characters to be broken, people. Ffs.
@@itsarches People say they want mid units until it's their favorite units and then won't pull them anymore because of people online and the fanbase. Just look at Jiaoqiu who's arguably the best debuffer right now but (guinaifen sidegrade / 5 star guinaifen). Sunday is also mid apparently too.
@@hellonyancat666If JQ launched mid, barely any tears would have been shed over him since he isn’t TOO popular, if someone like FF launched mid or had glaring issues, she would have the been the clown of the town because her fanbase is massive (and easily triggered) and everyone would have been mad at hoyo because she is not good or as good as say acheron at the time, popularity really matters you see? If some random unit from 3.X gets a mid kit or even just balanced kit, people might celebrate this as hoyo slowing down powercreep, but if say castorice or Mydei have a mid kit people will be lamenting that these characters got the short end of the stick and “does hoyo not want our money?” kind of arguments will start.
Even rn people are literally calling Aglaea mid, she's gonna end up like Mid Yuan.
When both of them are really good characters?!!
Idc about all of this I'm still picking up Boothill when his rerun comes. He may not be Firefly but still good enough for me.
Expand your mind please. Who is responsible for the players acting like this? Hoyover is. They cultured their audience to fear pulling a character that isn't OP. Why? Because they've showed, time and time again, that they powercreep and will NEVER directly buff a character.
Hoyoverse created this with their choices. People wouldn't act like this if Hoyoverse buffed older characters or created more balanced, unique kits.
Can't blame a consumer for acting like this, ESPECIALLY if they spend money.
Basically every update cycles:
1. Stronger new character
2. The new character shred everything
3. The enemies is "stronger" So the new character doesn't shred as much
4. New even stronger character
5. Repeat the 2.
And it will keep going. This is a REAL problem. In the future, the new dps will casually deal 3 million damage to deal 28% in MoC. The problem is that mihoyo's target on the new character is the powers. They're not priotizing on implementing unique character mechanic.
It's just like, "this unit is strong, just use it!" Instead of "this unit is strong IF [blablabla] and also this unit only using it's full potential if [blablavla] but [blablabla] which is hard to use, but reward you for a great strength if used correctly" They just don't! The new unit are just free dps spike and they're even THAT easy to use
Now that I think about it. Some characters are even a reused 4 star character concept for a 5 star character
One of the biggest problems is that people can't tell the difference between powercreep and meta.
Firefly is OP, right? What if I tell you that HYV put puppet trio in (LITERALLY) every other MoC since her release? That's called the meta, not powercreep. Firefly loses a lot of performance each time puppet trio isn't in MoC, from 0-1 cycles to 3-4 cycles. HYV keeps putting wind-weak enemies for Feixiao, keeps putting fire-weak enemies for Lingsha (which is one of the reasons why she's so much better than Gallagher right now), etc.
Feixiao isn't necessarily better than Firefly and Firefly isn't necessarily better than Acheron. The exact lineup dictates what's better and thus meta, but the meta always change. HYV just happens to heavily favor the recently released characters. Dendro also was heavily favored in Genshin the whole 3.X era, and it fell off a bit since 4.X started, not even a need for new DPS units to come out for that to happen. Nilou was perceived as being insanely good in any AoE lineup and now she's barely viable since 4.X, not even a joke.
Note I'm not arguing there isn't powercreep, like obviously 1.X units got powercrept. But sometimes it's also way overblown because people can't tell the difference between powercreep and meta.
@osmano8498true, firefly was strong but depending on enemies she can be replaced by Himeko which is an permanent banner, people just trying to justify their mistakes of don’t know how to build a team without searching on youtube or chatgpt, I don’t have fugue, jiaoqui or lingha which are like the present characters for meta because I know fugue and lingsha aren’t 100% necessary to build a team, even jiaoqui who is one of the best to boost Acheron active ability is not 100% necessary. Not everything need to be 0 cycle, one get nothing by showing off the 0 cycle to random people on internet.
Ruan Mei was their first true overtuned release, she has so many stuff in her kit you could almost swear you are reading seperate kits. but that aside, 2.x was the version of them pushing archetypes and selling teams instead of individual characters like 1.x which contributed to powercreep as it meant your character wasnt at it best without X and Y ( try playing Fei without Robin or Firefly without Ruan Mei ) while 1.x chars already dont have dedicated supports like Blade and JL
I noticed that ever since Robin and HMC released is when HP inflation became a thing, i genuinly believe that if it wasn't for both we wouldn't be in this situation right now. Robin is simply way too strong for this game's health as a singular unit, something even Ruan Mei before her didn't do. same thing for HMC despite being a free unit as with basically no investement you're outdamaging most crit DPS's with a average investement
On that topic, i feel like it's less units being overall ''overloaded'' and more so Harmonies specifically being overloaded, overbloated and overtuned all at once while doing things Nihilities really should be doing not them. Ruan Mei has so many stuff in her kit she might as well be 3 character kits at once ( why does a Harmony unit have res pen in her base kit as well as knockback after breaking ? thats the most nihility thing ive ever read ), Robin's 100% teamwide AA was always gonna be a problem and im surpised NO ONE saw it coming not mentioning the overtuned damage buffs and Sunday is a Bronya promax that feels more so overloaded than overtuned ( he still is overtuned ) but im positive my opinion will change as soon as we get summon DPSs, Sparkle is the only actually balanced Harmony as she sticks to her gimmick and look at her now losing to two characters not even supposed to buff her archetype due to how overtuned they are. on the other side we have JQ who might be the most balanced 2.x unit as he just.... makes enemies take more damage while doing small damage. Black Swan does DoT and amps damage by def shredding and vunlerability. what im trying to say is that Harmonies are always overtuned and doing way too much to the point where you never really need a 4star or a nihility unless you don't have them. ofc there are exception like Aven's shields being too strong while being easily refreshable or Feixiao having rainbow toughness ignore for seemingly no reason but these are'nt reasons that ''hurt'' the game compared to the teamwide buffers
I think 3.x is when they will try to ''fix'' powercreep if JY is any indication especially if you've seen the dreams, as it seems HP inflation is simply them overcorrecting for the mistake they've done with Robin and Superbreak. or of course they could just double down on it and drive HP inflation to the moon.
Speaking of HMC... Fuge is in the same niche, but even more overturned then HMC is. Like hoyo, was super break teams not strong enough already?
And here comes another question... Why not rebalance the old characters to keep up with the current meta, just like the older Gachas did?
@@vampiranya9939Fugue isnt much of a Replacement for HMC for all the Characters. She isnt noticable better than HMC for FF and more of a Sidegrade. Also especially for HMC they needed a Replacement sooner or Later since he will Change its Path in 3.0 you cant make the MC a Staple for Multiple Archetypes since you cant use him in only 1 Team.
@@stormgalaxypegasusthere arent any Gachas were this is Reality. HI3, Bleach Brave Souls,FGO all Gachas i played that have a Mechanic to make older Units stronger but even with this Upgrades there Miles behind current and still not a real Competition.
Incorrect, Ruan mei was the first FULL character that didn't have their full character design locked behind Eidelons.
3.x....The character monetization(kit/meta wise) and endgame will either make the game for better, or ruin it completely.
3.0 livestream has a chance to be even greater than 2.7 if the devs listened and performs a mass rebalance. its a big patch after all.
@@pein4332 I hope so...
Acheron(the most hyped character of all time) rerun selling criminally low and hoyo getting no tga(hsr wasn't even nominated at anything for tga, that's underwhelming for a company like hoyo and the fact game is still not even 2 year old imo, whereas genshin still stands somehow)/way less rewards than usual this year awakens them a bit
And yeah, I REALLY hope they try to fix our dissatisfaction with Penacony(2.x) arc, they just need to want to fix it.
@@dreamsandhopes6802 in HSR your lifespan as a top dps is shorter than the time it takes for you to rerun, this happened to everyone. By the time acheron reran, Yunli, FF, Boothill and Fei were all either strictly better or situationally better at equal investment.
Basically just Break a already Broken game until it's *Unrecognizable* 💣
- Remove toughness/weakness is their first step
@@Radiant450I spent money to get DHIL E2 on his rerun only to immediately regret it, shit sucks 😭
Also one thing I dislike in hsr compared to other turn based games or turn based gacha games i played (fgo, e7, r1999 or magia) is that all of its major end game mode revolve around time/turn limit instead of actually clearing the content.
Like lets take moc, apoc or pf for example. Remove their turn limit and suddenly the game mode becomes extremely easy, just use a healer+shielder and become immortal. The real challenge is the timer and enemy hp meanwhile boss gimmicks more serve as an obstacle to your damage race. Thats why they have to rely a lot more on hp scaling enemy more or designing units that do more damage instead far more than any of these where they can go around introducing new gimmicks and units that counter those gimmicks
Also as someone who has played other turn based games, having a two button gameplay really feels like limiting the creativity of the kits in this game even though i would say they have done excellent job so far with this limitation
I actually have a video discussing the timed end game stuff being a problem! It's a few videos back called "HSR Needs new end game". Really, I feel adding more diversity to the end game would go a long way to making everything feel better.
MAGIA RECORD MENTIONED!!
I really wish HSR had something like Mane Bulletin. It's great for allowing players with moderate investment to get all the rewards while giving a near unlimited score ceiling for the whales and hardcore community to flex their rosters and skills.
It lets your sustain and damage mitigation units shine as the boss gets tougher and tougher, and if they tied it to a number of enemy actions, it could even give delay and slow a relevant role in the meta again.
Agree the super basic 3 button gameplay is holding it back, the fact that we dont even have a simple “block” button… the most basic of basic turn based combat mechanics
@@Carlisho If we add a block mechanic for our chars, then the enemies will also have the right to block our dmg too making the game more RNG and frustating. Even if blocking does half the dmg, it hurts all chars. If the enemies block, all dmg you deal will be heavily lost.
I think kit bloat is okay, but the bloat must be "directed".
Like we mention Sunday, but as absurd as his kit is, it has a clear identity, with him having all of his buffs being single target and his ult encouraging only skilling your hypercarry. Yes he is absolutely broken with what he does but there are tons of teams that do not mesh well with what he does, and there is a good chance not all summon comps will actually run Sunday despite his power level.
The problem comes with characters like Robin or Fei Xiao, where the limitations were clearly not thought through. Robin's energy demands have tons of workaround, and Fei Xiao being a single target might be a joke at this point, with her damage profile and frequency of attack. Currently, any type of content can be cleared by them and any unit that attacks frequently can become an indirect buff to the team. It becomes very hard to design enemies or characters that could not play into this kind of team archetype.
Hopefully summons are not a "I do everything, but with more damage" kind of deal, or else it's looking grim.
Agreed with a lot of this, though I do want to add on that being bloated/broken can bring characters outside of their intended niche - like how robin is usable literally everywhere, and how sunday despite being intended for summons is also usable everywhere bronya is, feixiao(like you said) can be used anywhere that you have a fast attacking unit(hello summons lmao)
Feixiao can't even 2c or barely the content tailored for her (current MoC first half) assuming no signature and no E1 Robin.. what's the issue here exactly? Yeah she's absolutely insane in 0c strategies, but how is that any relevant for the average playerbase? She's not any stronger than Acheron/FF except when the content is obviously tailored for her
@osmano8498the midcheron glazing
@@Hndlse I'm literally slandering Acheron in my other comments under this exact video.
Sunday completely making sparkle out of existence (useless) even in her niche despite he being summons harmony 😂. See how that's not overtune when he taking another limited harmony who released in the same patched. But anyways, Sparkle is a mid units who failed to buff hypercarry teams to be as good as Ruan Mei ( break team), Robin ( FUA team) and now Sunday with future Rememberance team. Even he is better for sp hungry dps😂 which should be sparkle bread and butter. You will see how low sparkle usage from now on in endgame due to how weak she is even Bronya got more usage than her despite being a standard unit.
One day, after dinner, while my younger sister and I were lounging about in Mr. Gopher Wood's yard, we spotted a fledgling Charmony Dove all on its own. That baby bird was tiny, it didn't even have all of its feathers, and it couldn't sing. When we found it, it was already on its last breath, having fallen into a shrub - probably abandoned by its parents. We decided to build a nest for it right there and then. However, thinking back, that winter was unusually cold, with fierce winds at night in the yard, not to mention the many poisonous bugs and wild beasts in the vicinity... It was clear that if we left the fledgling in the yard, it stood no chance of surviving until spring. So, I suggested we take it inside, place it on the shelf by the window, and asked the adults to fashion a cage for it. We decided that when it regained its strength enough to spread its wings, we would release it back into the wild. The tragic part - something that we'd never considered - was that this bird's fate had already been determined long before this moment... Its destiny was determined by our momentary whim. Now, I pass the power of choice to you all. Faced with this situation, what choice would you make? Stick to the original plan, and build a nest with soft net where the Charmony Dove fell? Or build a cage for it, and feed it, giving it the utmost care from within the warmth of a home? I eagerly await your answer.
One day, after ninja eating time, while my fellow ninja apprentice and I were practising resting ninjutsu in Master Hakobune’s ninja training field, our enhanced ninja senses spotted a Ninja Initiate Charmony Dove all on its own. That ninja initiate was tiny, it didn't even have a ninjutsu of its own, and it couldn't do any ninja techniques. When we found it, it was already on its last ninja breath, having fallen into a ninja training shrub - probably after making a mistake during ninjutsu training. We decided to become it’s ninja masters and train it right there and then. However, thinking back, that ninja winter was unusually cold, with fierce winds at night in the ninja training field, not to mention the many evil fiendlings in the vicinity... It was clear that if we left the ninja initiate in the ninja training field, it stood no chance of surviving ninja training. So, I suggested we take it inside, place it on the ninja shelf by the window, and talk-no-jutsu the adults into creating a ninja training cage for it. We decided that when it regained its ninjutsu power enough to graduate from being a ninja initiate, we would release it back into the ninja wilds. The tragic part - something that we'd never considered - was that this ninja initiate’s path of the ninja had already been determined long before this moment... Its path of the ninja was determined by our momentary whim. Now, I pass the Dazzling Ninjutsu Technique: Choice, to you all. Faced with this situation, what path of the ninja would you take? Stick to the original ninja plan, and build a futon with soft net where NInja Initiate Charmony Dove fell? Or build a ninja training cage for it, and teach it everything you know about being a ninja from within the warmth of a home? I eagerly await your ninja answers..
🤲🐦
@@fl2ur …My congrats to you for translating that into Rappa nijaspeak.
With each update, HSR becomes more and more like HI3 in terms of rapid meta changes and apparent powercreep. At this point, all you can expect is a stronger DPS or harmony support in the next two patches. And it's not just a bloat problem where characters are doing too much, it's also a base multipliers that are increasing to the point where you have a character doing more damage with their skill than a 1.x character's ultimate.
WIDE SUNDAY. The real problem is it makes the game boring. Part of the appeal of Star Rail is being a turn based RPG.
I have a 9/10 traces Serval, and she is a liability in Stage 3 AS. Stage 3!! Blaznana has way too much HP. Meanwhile my Rappa with LC is so overtuned that she eats Blaznana for breakfast even in Stage 4. These 4-star units are supposed to compensate for things you don't have, not be completely unusable. It makes me question whether it's even worth it to log onto this game every day, instead of just logging on when story drops, do that, and then disregard all the battle content.
It's not interesting in a RPG when my only choice is to throw new or meta units at content, regardless of how you interact with boss mechanics.
3:27 wide sunday jump scare 💀
I remember Zajef talking about HSR before it released and how he thought the powercreep would be way worse simply because HSR is a turn-based RPG. Turns out he was completely right.
No wonder he doesn't really show his excitement towards this game that much 😅
Turn based still can avoid powercreep fiesta, if they focused more on decision making in combat, rather than characters pure number/raw power. Look at Summoners War, 10 years old units are still kicking hard in PvP or PvE.
It's not that turn based that powercreep-y, it's just Hoyo sucks at designing turn based games
@@lycerisrico8943 Im pretty sure those units have super awakening which boost their skills and stats, beside summoner wars has no pity on their summons unless you buy the 5* scroll and even with that you can’t select the monster or element you want, in term of pure number and raw power summoner wars also have that problem because of revenge and additional turn proc, if you are lucky you might have 5 extra turn and that extra turn can change the fight which make pvp very rng, imagine you are winning and suddenly your opponent get 10 extra turn and 5 revenge that will turn the fight for your enemy favor
One problem I see is a new player getting into the game, playing through the story. Maybe they read the story carefully, or maybe they just skim through it or use autoclicker. Whatever the case, they may for example see Kafka in the story and think to themselves "Hey, I really like Kafka, her banner is there and I'm gonna roll for her," and they use up 120+ pulls only to find out Kafka has been powercrept long ago.
That's a really good point, it's kinda unfortunate that new players can get stuck in the situation of wanting to pull for older characters but they're not super worth it anymore
Who has power crept Kafka? Acheron and Kafka function radically different despite both being nihility and lightning.
@@TOTGodofWar i think that you re right, powercreep is not the word to define what happened to kafka and the dots, they where just left behind, there aren´t characters that can do better than her, but the enemies just can obliterate you easily
easy solution: be like me in perpetual denial that kafka and dot as a whole is irrelevant :')
@@dew332 Right now in D.o.Ts situation there are only 2 premium D.o.T characters. While Huo Huo and Ruan Mei are very nice, neither apply a D.o.T of their own naturally. I'm leaning more toward Huo Huo being replaced in that comp in the future.
HSR seriously needs more power creep in exactly one category: Story. :P
Yeah, Penacony had its moments but the story as a whole was kinda of a mess with a LOT of plot points not really conecting or being resolved off-screen (Aventurine being saved by Argenti, Robin whole character arc, the IPC plans to Penacony, Sparkles, etc...).
@@Truck-kun11 LOL... I'm not all the way through Penacony and I cannot figure WTF is going on. And this is coming from someone who has read Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, and the first 4 books of Wheel of Time... I don't struggle with complex plots.... I struggle when they just aren't explained. I'm sure the story is beautiful, but I cannot figure it out. Why is the cornerstone so important to an IPC member? Why did Sunday try to kill Aventurine? If you die in the dream world do you die IRL?
My personal favorite: What is the Watch Maker's Legacy? I hear that term once per cut scene and I have NO IDEA what it is.... and somehow the Express Crew and Acheron are after it... and never bother explaining it...
Dear, HOYO: If it's so central to the plot, at least show me a picture of the thing, or explain it.
Just have a 10 second cut-scene of Sunday glancing at the Watch Maker's Legacy so I know what it is. It isn't hard to write this stuff and yet, Hoyo just cannot help themselves. It's just dialogue dump after dialogue dump.
Dude, I really need a minute to speak with the person responsible for 2.2, 9 hours man, 9 HOURS
@@John_II Honestly, as much as I loved Penacony, I have to agree that the story had too many subplots going on and not well directed as it could’ve been, but the bar was quite low when Luofu previously wasn’t so… memorable either. Not until you go back to the Luofu that they improved a lot on the story and forward.
I’m really hoping in 3.0, they improve their story direction because that’s personally the thing I like critiquing the most when there’s quite a lot of gacha games out there with good story writing. I STILL want them to address Trailblazer’s and Kafka’s past at some point since that’s been one of the biggest hinted plot points in the game and we haven’t visited it for some time.
@@John_II most of these questions are answered in the story lol, albeit the Sunday wanting to kill Aventurine is a bit odd, it is still explained why
Same with the cornerstone, I don't think it was explained before in-game??? But basically without spoiling you it is a source of a certain power for the Stonehearts, you're not supposed to know what the Watch Maker's legacy is, and it will get revealed don't worry, however it's exactly why everyone is after it. No one knows what it is, but it was stated in the invitation so it must be important, potentially dangerous, potentially amazing for negotiations, whichever it is, and Sunday looking at the Watch Maker's legacy,,, eh you'll see and, while a bit annoying, the last question, whether if you die in a dream you die IRL is answered in both the main mission and unvoiced missions, however they pay mor attention to it in one of the unvoiced mission rather than the main story
As someone that has been playing gachas for close to a decade at this point, I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with this. But honestly, it surprises me that this has to be even said!
I'll just call the beast by it's name:
This is just by the numbers powercreep.
More multipliers, more kit features, more text. These are pretty good indicators for increased strength of characters. And inflated enemy stats are soon to follow, so they can match those stronger characters. This relationship between ally and enemy strength has been known for a long time!
I'm honestly a bit confused why people seem to not understand this point. But I have to remember that people that play Hoyo games have very little interaction with the greater gacha space, so they are having these conversations for the first time. In that light, it makes sense that we'll retread old ground here.
But that ties to a greater point here I think:
While we have been in a gacha popularity boom, "quality gachas" still very much remain gachas using very much the same tactics as their brethren. It's just that people that recently entered the space haven't become quite educated to these aspects yet, which makes them more vulnerable.
I do not mean to be hostile in this comment, but wanted to raise awareness, as we need to look out for each other in this space.
Agreed with a lot of this. Most of the point of the video is explaining my thought process and hopefully making people more aware of the issues. I'm a long time gacha player too, so I feel the same way you do about this.
@@fl2ur In that light, I am very grateful you made this video! We need more education about these topics in this space!
I think the devs of HSR are focusing on the team archetypes, and not the actual characters. Genshin has characters that can solo *ahem WATER DRAGON* and the team buffs him. While in HSR, the META is to build a team around an idea. (Fua, Crit, Break, summon).
You aren’t gonna solo anything in hsr unless it’s e6s5 latest dps. In genshin there is much more skill expression and you can just not take damage, in hsr damage is inevitable
@@verse2702 agreed! Best bet would be adventurine or blade. But that's hyper investment! Genshin drops someone like that once in a while.
Hsr really, and I mean REALLY plays hard into the team game
@@verse2702yeah and some players play without shielders or healers and consider shielders dps loss
@@verse2702yeah I think that’s because one game is a completely different type of gameplay then the other, you aren’t soloing moc with one character because of the turn based nature of it while you can theoretically solo the abyss with one character if you are good enough or just have Mr water dragon and a max dpi mouse, genshin itself is more of a casual go around and explore vs starrails focus on endgame activities that all have different types of gameplay, yeah sure you might not be able to clear with 1.X dps but that’s kinda how most gacha’s are, is it bad? Yeah it’s not good that old units can’t be used to beat current endgame, but that’s just how it is sadly, if you are struggling with endgame with your old characters then you can also just save up for a new dps or support, yknow normal progression where you are not meant to only play with your old units, at some point they won’t be viable anymore. idk tho about how genshin is all I know is every friend I have seen play the game easily clears the abyss and it looks so boring.
Oh and older units such as jingyuan are now even stronger as their niche is getting more support, hypercarry such as seele aren’t as lucky tho but I don’t expect the first ever limited character to be that viable
I feel that first bit. I've taken breaks from genshin multiple times in the past and I have never felt that punished for it besides missing out on some events and pulls. Taking a break from HSR made me almost not want to try playing again after seeing how far behind I was.
I have massively caught up since then with some absurd luck, double robin in one ten pull then Feixao on my next pull, then recently I got Sunday, his lightcone, and Jingyuan all in about 150 pulls. Suddenly after somewhat building these new teams the endgame content is extremely easy, which goes to show just big the gap has become.
Yeah this was my experience too. I’ve taken several breaks in Genshin and it’s always easy and even refreshing to jump back into it. HSR on the other hand feels like I’m being punished for not playing. Everything feels tougher and I can’t even think of doing endgame modes anymore. Took several months but after getting Firefly, Robin, Sunday, Aventurine, Huohuo and Jing Yuan the game actually feels playable now and I’m having fun again.
Honestly if this keeps up, the next time I take a break might result in me dropping the game because good grief was it rough trying to catch up.
Honestly same. I frequently take breaks from Genshin and I always come back with nothing amiss except for events, meanwhile I dread having to take some time off HSR because I know it only gets harder with every patch. It sucks because I genuinely enjoy HSR but idk if I can keep playing like this.
I got that same luck on Robin and Feixiao and it ... the immediacy with which I went from feeling totally cooked to "this is so easy" was ridiculous.
I agree, Genshin has never been punishing to take a break from aside from missing some primos. Hell, I only login now to do abyss and IT as well as any events near the end of their last day. Natlan as of right now is barely even explored
same happened to me, i took a break from hsr for like 2 months and suddenly i could no longer clear MoC with my current units, i had a slightly better chance after pulling rappa and building aventurine with topaz LC and acheron to beat hoolay, second half took me 9 cycles.
I wish more people talked about that, because it really is a problem, and it should get resolved someway or another, because eventually characters will reach the point that the only new thing they're going to bring to the table is just bigger numbers.
If Sunday kit is already so overloaded, imagine for example in 2 years, they release a support that buffs HP, DEF, ATK, Energy, RES PEN, Crit Rate, Crit Damage, BE, EHR, Speed, DMG at E0 alone
Fun Fact: If you try to speak about powercreep problem with the russian community of HSR they will make fun of you saying that their E2 Firefly clears all content, so it's fine
Yeah I've seen some takes saying "well as long as we can clear powercreep doesn't exist", completely ignoring the fact that some people don't want to get the shiny new toy or eidolons on those toys just to do so. It's silly.
Idk about Russian community, but from my perspective (im Russian too), i think opinions are divided 60/40, where 60% - begin to be indignant, because their "acheron" has stopped passing the content. Heh.
It's not just russian community, it's casual community as a whole, I mean any person with e2 firefly wouldn't care about powercreep
@@sutkonos people with e2 firefly don't care, for now...
Try to talk to Vietnamese community, they whitenight the game’s meta like crazy but minus the logic. It’s gotten so bad that the average conversation is “oh, just quit then” “skill issue” or “I have these characters and I auto cleared”
One of the problems that i really don't like in current HSR is that there's an support that are almost obrigatory to have to enjoy some play style, like Robin for follow-up attacks, now with Sunday. Like told in the video, the new characters apparently not strong as acheron when she's debutted compared with the DPS in 1.X, but it's appear that it's necessary to have Sunday to really enjoy using then, and that's what kill the joy in an strategy game like HSR for me.
HSR is a victim of the fact it's a pure numbers game, there isn't much flexibility to the gameplay itself since at the end of the day the gameplay is just when to use three options and on whom. It feels like Hoyo doesn't understand It's fine for characters to be just a bit stronger than their predecessors but Hoyo is definitely underestimating how much players like the characters, their designs, and animations.
As a new player that just started 2 patches ago I was HYPED for Sunday even though I just finished Penacony because the story was just that good. Sunday and Jing Yuan are the first characters I was able to pull and did pull. That's because their stories were just SO GOOD. I didn't care Sunday was super powerful, I just liked his design.
Can we even clear all endgame contents with 4 stars characters anymore?
Hard to say, alot of things will have to line up for that. It definitely isn't as achievable as it was in early 2.x@@huyphamle159
@huyphamle159 i mean I'm no expert but I think Gallagher, Pela, and Lynx would like a word with that comment. I'm sure some dps 4 stars can still be built enough for it with God tier level builds.
@@huyphamle159you actually can. but better get those E6 S5s and your S5 DDDs ready lol. Oh and dont forget the insanely high-standards stat tuning on your relics. As of now, calling 4* only runs F2p is basically a huge scam at this point. The ones doing it probably have set their accounts that way from the beginning or they are whales that have too much excess resources.
I've played quite a few turn-based games already, and then playing HSR without the option to use items in combat and the ability to skip turn/block is just weird lol
Having 3 abilities is limited, true, but I can live with that. But not having some other options in combat really makes that limit being more severe, and feels bad to play lol
The problem was clearly Acheron's release. When she came out, her damage output was significantly higher than any other DPS released before. After that, to make future characters worthpulling, they had no choice but to give them a damage output similar or greater than Acheron's to avoid being skipped.
it was because she was special, the first palyable emanator, but she just raised the bar a lot and players dont care if a character is special, they want every one to do as much as the special
7:35 "Create problem, sell the solution."
Not only is this an effective way to incetivize players to spend money (I am not calling it "good", but "effective" from a business standpoint), MHY has been doing this since even before Genshin was released. They're not even the only dev doing that, but this is about MHY. Anyway, I'm not at all surprised that this is how Hoyo handles HSR powercreep. As an RPG, the most important factor in the end are hard numbers. MHY has never stricken me as particularly skilled at handling RPGs so the fact the dev team defaulted to numbercreep as the go-to way to advance the game seemed like an obvious thing that was bound to happen eventually. There's only so many ways you can use a certain number of mechanics with equivalent numbers before the solution to variety is to create whole new mechanics, slap several mechanics together in one character or raise the numbers on old mechanics; sometimes they reuse mechanics while removing some limitations they had as well.
Now, there are certainly examples accross the board of gacha games about how powercreep is handled; but powercreep in a gacha game is effectively inevitable. Even when it doesn't seem to impact as much, the fact is its still there.
To use an example I've seen cited somewhat recently: FGO, despite its infamous reputation as an old and predatory game, has had a relatively elegant solution to powercreep. First off, it exists. Anyone telling you otherwise is BSing you. Secondly, while it exists across all levels of play, from DPS to supports, which kind of powercreep matters most is very, very different. Supports are KING: as long as you have the best supports possible for a given category, you can make a lot of units work for you because the vast majority of the game is about farming and the best supports are also mostly the ones that enable the best farming methods. Similarly, with those supports in hand, there are a number of "omnifarmers" that can do most of the farming on their own for you.
The F2P income is poor as hell, but if you spend smart you can certainly get away with being F2P in FGO for an extremely long time. So long, in fact, that HSR could go through five years of powercreep and you could probably still use the same 5 or so units in FGO and keep cruising through the game because, unlike HSR, most of the challenging content in FGO is *entirely optional* often with minuscule rewards...which is the flipside of the coin.
In RPGs, the challenge is often about complicated mechanics or high numbers, often both together. HSR decides to make this part of the reward system in MoC/PF/AS (not so much in SU modes where the rewards are negligible), while FGO makes the challenge itself the point. In FGO it makes for a game that's very much about clearing with the characters you like *usually* (because devs will sometimes still fall into annoying design pitfalls that make clearing with your preferred characters much harder or even impossible compared to other options), but also incredibly easy to drop because you have to actively make yourself care about sticking with it, whereas Hoyo's games (including HSR) excel at giving things for the player to do; if not care about, at least it encourages the player to keep coming back.
I don't particularly like the powercreep problem, but I've been living with it for so long due to playing HI3 since before Genshin came out that it's just a fact of life for me. This is pretty much Hoyo' s101 and I don't foresee it changing, not when Hoyo is effectively an unkillable giant at this point. In the end, the players vote with their wallets, and as long as people open their wallets to Hoyo while they use these design choices, the trajectories of these games will not change where game balance is concerned.
"So long, in fact, that HSR could go through five years of powercreep and you could probably still use the same 5 or so units in FGO and keep cruising through the game because, unlike HSR, most of the challenging content in FGO is entirely optional often with minuscule rewards...which is the flipside of the coin."
I didn't realized the post game content in HSR was mandatory to play. Guess I missed the memo that the story, sidequest, exploration, and simulated universe were no longer the main content of the game. /s
Listen, I'm just saying. You people need to stop acting like MoC, PF, and AS are the main content of the game, cause they're not. They're just modes the HSR team made to get players addicted to the gacha, and thus basically scams.
You also don't need to full star these modes when the reward is very minusule at the end of the day. Even if you don't do post game modes at all, all you get are level up resources and jades, which there are other sources to get them. While that's a lot of jades left on the table, you only need them if you want a ton of the 5 stars, which is a telltale sign you should not be playing gacha games (though I understand how hard that can be thanks to addiction), as they are the type of players gacha companies prey upon with these games.
I like that you picked a specific part to criticize and ignored how I actually refer to MoC/PF/AS in the next paragraph: "THE REWARD SYSTEM OF HSR". Because, yes, this is how they help sell characters to the more gameplay-minded people who want to get more characters since it's, yknow, a gacha. You even start with "you people". Nice projection, there.
Do I need to explain it specifically so you don't misunderstand my point again? Modes like SU and minigame events offer different experiences, and the bulk of the rewards, but they largely do not influence how character's themselves are designed. A large part of why they are designed in that way is because of MoC/PF/AS.
"Create problem, sell solution."
Are they the only thing that matters about the game? Hell no. I even said that "HSR excels at giving people reasons to stick around/come back". Which, according to you, is apparenlty just MoC/PF/AS.
That wasn't even the point of the comment. I basically said: "IT CAN'T BE HELPED. WHALES FUND THIS." Went on a tangent comparing how another RPG handles powercreep as an example, but next time I guess I'll just do a one liner or three to avoid getting called out for something I didn't say I guess.
@@tsf9600 "Which, according to you, is apparenlty just MoC/PF/AS"
For someone who accused me of "not reading" your post, you definitely missed the "/s" of my comment.
I'm clearly implying that MoC, PF, AS should not be viewed as the main game modes of the game. Especially when there are purposefully designed to be essentially scams and poorly designed to get you to summon on the gacha.
"but they largely do not influence how character's themselves are designed. A large part of why they are designed in that way is because of MoC/PF/AS."
Correct. This is why post game content and the gacha are this game's cycle of addiction and why people should not play these modes, or at least care to full star these modes.
That's mainly why I commented on your post, since it seems like with this comment "because, unlike HSR, most of the challenging content in FGO is entirely optional often with minuscule rewards", you were suggesting that the post game content in HSR was not optional. But ig that wasn't your intention and just worded this section poorly, so I apologize.
Last thing I would say is about this comment: " Nice projection, there."
This is particularly funny since I have never full star any of the post game modes except one time in PF (and evidently, it was after that PF that they made PF had a powerspike in difficultly lol). In fact, the way I play these modes is to use the "free" characters the game gives you + the Astral Express members (plus a few exceptions of those that are really close with the crew). This is more so an arbitrary act so that HSR feels more like a game to me rather than a gacha, even though I could full star at least modes like MoC and AS if I wanted to. Though, who knows how long this last for me since I'm getting bored of these post game modes honestly.
But according to you, I'm "projecting" which... ok. lmao
This is an problem i usually call “the acheronification” of hsr, where they made her so broken that now everything has to compete with her, pushing the dps standard constantly higher and higher and then they need hp to compensate for it, the sad thing is many old units have very good designs on paper (jingliu, dhil, silver wolf, blade, kafka) but suffer from either lower multipliers because the standard of today is so much higher or are completely replaced due to direct powercreep of what they do (like silver wolf being phased out of the meta by dpses just implanting their own weaknesses or ignoring them)
The characters not being balanced around a relic set is a pretty interesting idea, it makes units that either a) dont have a perfect relic set, or b) get a new one much later when its already too late (ex: jingliu) suffer significantly more, not to mention how op new relic sets are, id really like them to go back and buff old units, wont happen but one can dream
I am just hoping 3.X tones it down a little bit, i feel like a lot of people now skipping acheron on her rerun is a wake up call
Id honestly argue it started with Ruan Mei before acheron, people just didn't realize it yet because she hadn't gotten to her full potential(superbreak) yet. Acheron definitely brought dps into the equation more, but it was already happening earlier imo.
@ yeah shes definitely a factor too, she set the bar very high for supports while acheron did that for dpses, even if her value didnt come out fully until break and ESPECIALLY when APOC came out, that mode can be miserable if you dont have her, acheron pretty much dominated the second she released which is why id attribute it more to her than to mei, but both are true, same way how we see characters like aventurine just dominate the entire sustain meta, setting a extremely high bar for sustains especially preservation and gallagher doing what seems to be setting a much higher expectation for four stars, at least imo he is
I agree will all that you said, except the SW part, her fall off was due to support powercreep essentially, not because breakers could ignore weakness or Feixiao, even just before break took over she wasn’t really great in any team and you would much rather play a harmony like Robin or RM or sparkle even. You could say her uniqueness was stripped away but its not because of implant on dps that she fell.
The main thing that SW helped in was attaching a -20% res to the enemy making it as if they actually had a weakness to that element, breakers don’t do that, they still lose 20% of their damage if the enemy isn’t weak to their element. So yeah it was because other supports are insane and have next to no issues that SW got phased out, her supportive capabilities, SP economy, and team variety just doesn’t match theirs at the end of day.
I'm so confused why people think that Acheron did anything when she was literally competitive with DHIL w/ Sparkle and Kafswan at release.. and they both were available BEFORE Acheron. It's not until the lineups favored Acheron more, or until JQ released that Acheron was truly better than them. Not to mention that the perception of her performance is flawed to begin with because most people assume she has her signature.
SW isn't being phased out by DPSes just implanting their weaknesses, she's just not good period. The only reason she was still meta was because she was competitive with Harmony units with Acheron, but now JQ exists and you can replace the second nihility even more easily thanks to JQ stacks gen. These DPSes existing or not wouldn't change anything.
I'd love to imagine a world where implants are a strictly support feature, and one where Silverwolf is able to choose the implant to put into enemies
1000% agree. HP inflation is a result of character inflation. But nobody wants to talk about the ridiculously strong characters that have been released lately. It's just "HP too high" types of comments.
I get that people don't like talking "badly" about their favorite games, but it's just absurd.
This. I was watching a beta video of an upcoming boss in 3.0 and Feixiao running against it and some in the comments were blaming her for how absurd she came to be, as if she wasn't also a consequence from the Acheron> era of dps in this game, then a slightly weaker dps comes out and it's the same community that claims "trash, skip because they're weak".
Aglaea looks like she's gonna be absurdly strong too but I wouldn't be surprised if the next Acheron ends being Castorice in terms of it being heavily felt in the game with the kit strength and enemies/mechanics built around for the character to tackle.
Thing is if X dps launches same level or even 1% weaker than the previous one, people will just say why bother or X dps is not worth or mid if you have Y, if they launch too hot (and they aren’t as beloved as say acheron and FF) they are flamed and blamed for powercreep, when it was 1000% acheron who started this whole dps powercreep shitshow to begin with. Now I am not saying we blame the character its hoyo who makes them this way, just that people even when blaming characters blame the wrong ones.
@@Radiant450 We can look at the Rappa banner as an example. Rappa was massively skipped despite having a higher ceiling than FF simply because FF/Boothill already filled a similar role and had similar performance.
Perhaps I am just making a wrong call here, but maybe the reason that people are not talking about character inflation is because how horribly bad the relic system is, like you just won't be able to build your crit characters easily, the relic system is the worst I have seen in any gacha game, ofc Acheron's kit is so good that even with low investment she can dosh out good dmg but other dps still need good builds, but the relic rng is just so horrible
It is what it is. Compared to genshin HSR is the one that keeps releasing 2 new char banner after banner so the higher chance of powercreep, but hey the game is (slightly) more generous than genshin why would people complain 😂
genshin created xilonen kit with kazuha buffing potential in minds. 40 % res shred and about 35 % ~ 40 % elemntal dmg bonus depends on em.
then xilonen kit buffing potential is around the same 38 % res shred and 40 % elemtal dmg.
both kit buffing almost the same with xilonen being easier to build and activate then longer duration.
hsr just never care, look at sparkle and sunday. better advanced forward + better dmg % buffing and also crit rate. Sunday is sp positive enough with SP cashback in his kit.
everything in genshin almost a sidegride which is bad and good. but the good thing is we can play every characters we want and the result will be almost the same just depends on player skills.
in genshin you need to kill enemies. elemental shield just use right element. enemies floating just use the ranged characters or use the mechanics available to bring it down, just need bow characters.
meanwhile in Hsr there are alot of things and locked behind premium characters specialty lmao.
hp inflation might be okay if the moc turbulance also give dmg buff that EVERY CHARACTERS CAN BENEFIT. not just current banner chara archetype lol. current moc problem are beside hp inflation turblance dont give any buffing and the dmg only come after turn ends make it losing a turn. previous moc there was the turbulance dmg that come before turn ends really helps that 1 clutch turn
dont forget to mention that kazuha can also group enemies which xilonen cant.
Yeah so many of hsr character just don't get consequences of their advantage.
Ex. Ruan mei doing job of welt and sw better than them without having any drawback or condition involved.
36% Res Shed from a crowned Xilonen skill not 38% and Xilonen also suffers same issues as Kazuha
While I don't know the level of a take this is. I feel like part of the problem is how a section of the playerbase almost demands that the next character be that much stronger.
I remember how with one of Fugue's earlier version, in a pure DPS setting she was essentially a sidegrade and in some instances weaker than HMC, which I found fine since she had her exo toughness which made her preferable in certain settings there were those who wanted her strength to be "layman levels" noticeably stronger. there was also on top people wondering why her ultimate dealt so much damage not regarding that it was an ultimate that dealt a lot of toughness damage to all enemies full stop.
There was also how rappa was considered weaker because she couldn't implant weakness even though she already have penetration.
Lingsha being seen as a gahlleger side grade "not in a good way" and look at how she is performing.
Earlier than that there were complains that feixiao had her speed reduced from a value that could make her go 5 times a cycle on speed boots alone.
Doom post stating that firefly was mid and worthless, look at her now
And the oh so famous "who wants a new 4-star. who wants their favourite character to be the new 4-star" just look at ororon.
I feel like the players should also grow to accept a character would be released not so strong and accept it.
Thats the funny thing is people don't want there favorites to be the one who got the short end of the stick as the character who tones down the scaling so you see a lot even more so for characters that have a solid first impression in terms of design and personality doomposting and begging for buffs.
That is just another consequence of the same issue, the Devs are the ones who conditioned the player base to think that way by consistently releasing characters consistently stronger than the previous one. The scrutiny towards fugue's kit was born from the fear of "what if I pull for this character that is just slightly better than a free one and hoyo just a few patch down the line release the Sunday to her sparkle?"
@@joyboy_3165 While there is merit to your perspective let me engage you in this hypothetical.
Say Fugue resulted in mathematically less damage than HMC, she would still have her exo-toughness which would make her the better support for Rappa, Himeko and xueyi, she is not "stronger" than older units but provided utility that makes them worthwhile, but some people don't want that some people want her to have that utility and be mathematically stronger than HMC. those are the people who I'm pointing my finger at.
@SkyDrifter2025 Yes I got that the first time around and I'm saying even though I'm not part of that crowd I personally can't blame them for feeling that way because their sentiment was ultimately born of the now long standing precedent hoyo has set in this game.
TBF, I don't want my favorite unit to be a 4-star because I want to be able to get the unit. Pulling for 4 stars in a Hoyoverse title is such a fucking trap.
The Star Rail power creep is why I started playing Genshin again. Didn't touch it for 3 years, and my old characters are still fairly usable.
game & devs still suck
@@nilmergboth are the same thing
@@nilmergdid you even play fontaine/natlan lol?
@@nilmergwomp womp
I hope they would do some balance patches in hsr it could be great..
Giga cope. Balance patches will never happen in a hoyo game, however since HSR has shown some creativity I am willing to bet maybe sorta kinda could be a 0.1% chance they look at some underperforming characters, but individually most likely. Some units unironically make pennies on reruns now because they just become useless due to powercreep, like why would you pull Blade nowadays unless you REALLY like him?
rememnber that one time they try to fix the neuvilette's "bug"? now imagine that but for a lot more characters
@@Radiant450 i KNOW it wont happen , but it could be cool nonetheless
@@vinhinh6810 nope i didnt play genshin in a long long time , but many games do balance patches for a lot of characters, it wouldnt be Impossible but it likely wont happen
HSR devs don't seems to be smart enough to handle that properly. Also, CN gamers are literal toddlers and will throw massive tantrums over it.
I agree that it has gotten ridiculous, power creep is necessary but the fact that E1S1 jingliu is p much unusable right now is crazy. When Acheron came out they were both top tier, which means in less than a year she’s gone from clearing everything at E0S0 with ease to no data for MOC12
It's funny, because Rappa was severely doomposted before her release with people calling her mid or even weak. And she is about to become even more broken with the release of Fugue.
The doomposters have an 0/20+ record and yet for some reason it took almost 2 years for the idiots in the -mains, leaks, and mainsub to stop downvoting people for pointing out that the Doomposters are literally always wrong.
One of the main problems with HSR is the community shilling for Hoyo, defending stupid shit, and taking years to catch up to the people that notice the actual problems.
all i got from this video was that we need more supports like jiaoqiu in the game.
not really, the best is universal supports so if you get a new one it'll improve everyone.
Look at Sunday... yeah JingYuan was resurrected but Sunday had to be omegabusted, and what about the next summon DPS? if the game wanted to have slow powercreep then their kit will have QoL but the damage will be lower to compensate... no, she's just omegabusted too xD so OP + OP to much dmg and the devs are scared to they make a new enemy that has more hp.
I always felt universal break was a dumb mechanics but they proceed to double down and introduced guaranteed weakness implant and ability to shred weakness even faster like why.
It was okay when the universal break or implant was single target. If anything it would've been nice to only give it to Hunt characters, for balance.
Then they made Acheron and Firefly.
I feel like Universal break is a near-mandatory effect for Break-centered units. A non-break DPS/team can typically do 60-80% of their damage when fighting off-element content, a Break team fighting against off-element does like, 5-10% of their total damage at best, before accounting for resistances. If Hoyo wanted to make any break damage units mainstream, they needed some means to break enemies off-element. If not for implant/rainbow break, Rappa, Firefly, and Boothill would be completely irrelevant in any non-matched element fight, not just weaker like non-break units.
That said, I don't understand why Acheron and Feixiao needed universal break in their kits. I feel like non-break centered units don't really need universal break.
@@EternallyCryingOnion break units can break enemy much faster than average unit and that's already an incentive to go for them based since they shut down the boss gimmick.
I think Sunday boss is an example of that where him having very hard to break toughness should have prevented break units from excelling but it actually ends up then doing better since other teams aren't as good since they have to deal with his gimmicks multiple times or in case of apoc, just get the mode buffs faster
And another advantage of break is simply that you don't even need as much sustain. As someone who has boothill, it's very noticeable cuz not only does the dude has fastest shred in the game but his ult also delay enemy action for some reason so I can run him sustain less very reliably and I am someone who refuses to roll Ruan mei who could have further extended his ability to prevent enemy from taking action
@@i_dont_have_a_youtube_chan8584 Yet performance-wise, they don't perform that much better than other team archetypes. They might have slightly more consistent sustainless clears and 0-cycles than other archetypes, but their performance isn't that much better when they are ON-element in optimised scenarios. It might be slightly comfier, but that doesn't matter that much when another archetype can often just kill a boss instead.
Sunday is also a boss that's almost tailor-made for break, since you can cut off a lot of his damage by consistently and repeatedly breaking all his adds. He is so tailor made for break that he's supposed to be the boss fight that sells you Harmony Trailblazer. It's hardly a fight that's designed to be difficult for break.
And the moment they go off element, without omni-break or weakness implant, they're fucked. Without the ability to break, you get walled by the simplest, single mook enemy in PF, or Story, or SU, or DU. (unless you have the break spreading blessings)
And a lot of omni-break also breaks at 50% toughness efficiency anyways. They're still subject to slower clears and damage type resistances even with their weakness implant and omni-break.
Xueyi being the only character that can ignore weakness was cool but I felt that after Acheron and the other characters doing this felt horrid.
Honestly I think another issue with HP inflation and Unit design is that alot of 1.x characters were just poorly designed.
There is such a gap between 1.x characters that are relevant and the ones falling off design wise and how they can synergize with future kits. Like Jingliu pretty much capped at her release, sure we have gotten supports that make her better, but her kit is so airtight that there just isn't much you can do to actually buff her directly. Meanwhile Topaz has alot of flexibility in her kit and can be usable in a variety of ways especially with Sunday out. JingYuan has gotten buffed by Sunday aswell but alot of the pain points of his kit design still remain and he is bound to be replaced, from building stacks of LightingLord to Lighting Lord being pushed back if Jing Yuan gets CC'd there are just pain points to his kit that future units probably won't have.
Hell if I'm being honest DOTs biggest issue is probably Kafka, sure she's the machine to get the comp going but she's not a very good one because all she is a retrigger not an amplifier which is what DOT actually needs. Even in her skill it only allows dots to do 75% of their original damage, I personally think if Kafka was designed today, she would boost the dot damage instead.
Even for Mid characters like Jade who only specialize in PF, she has flexibility to her kit and any strong Erudition, mass AOE, or HP drain units in the future will allow her to stay relevant, and speaking of Blade has more future potential than alot of other 1.x units that used to be vastly superior to him. His biggest issue wasn't his kit but the lack of support for it which can be easily fixed in the future and fights like Hoolay show that he actually can scale pretty well with certain fight designs unlike a lot of other characters.
Its sad but alot of 1.x characters just weren't made well while alot of 2.x characters can easily stay relevant with the release of future characters or interesting fight mechanics.
Jing can't be CC'ed if he's paired with Sunday and Adventurine.
@@nessashawunless res is 100%, they all can :(
All my homies hate Cocolia
This is the correct answer. Characters with more mechanics are more versatile in how they can interact with their team and have more knobs the designers can turn via new LCs/relics/teammates to keep them in the running, but Seele and Jingliu show up in every single conversation about powercreep because they have essentially zero synergies to play with and you could see their ceiling from the word go. Jingliu _might_ eventually benefit from a theoretical HP manipulation-based support thanks to the tiny amount of it in her kit, but that's her only hope, and Seele just straight up needs a kit adjustment because her on-kill mechanic is completely inflexible.
Kafka's E1 increases the amount of d.o.t a target takes when they are hit with her follow up. Her E2 increases the d.o.t damage of all characters in the party.
Tldr: Kafka's potential is edilon locked.
Your comment made me realize theres only one unit thats boosts DOT damage. Sampo
Exactly why i stopped paying attention to meta and just focused on paying attention to having fun. Making something you like into a job will make you hate it. I was testing some Boothill teams in the new divergent universe, and my favourites were him, harmony caelus, new march 7th, and Moze/Pela/Herta. It's a fun team, plus I love all of the characters.
That’s the right thing to do. Obsessing over the meta is so stupid and pointless. Like why do you want to pull for a character you don’t like just to full clear moc 12? just to get the extra 80 jades once every 42 days? it’s so meaningless and honestly makes the game less fun and more frustrating when it should be the other way around
hsr hasn't even been around for full two years yet i'm tired from the game as if i've been playing genshin for 5 years. a testament to how exhausted their powercreep made me lmao (day 1 player)
I think the main problem is that people want stronger characters and in a game like HSR, a turn based RPG, it's what the people pay for.
In genshin there is the open world aspect, which makes it more "casual" in a way, so the characters don't really require to be too strong, as they already one shot every enemy in the open world, it also doesn't need too complex as the main attraction are not the character gameplay, but the world and the character's story themselves.
Meanwhile in HSR there's no such thing as open world, corridors are good time waster but is nowhere near as attractive as a fully open world, so in order for they to make character sell they need to make them stronger or something else. They probably tested the water since DHIL and JL and knew people like to roll/pay for powercreep, and acheron and ff fully proved that it totally worked.
The sad thing is, i can see a world where HSR powercreep was more balanced like genshin, but people would become less interesting on rolling for characters or the characters would have been less interesting as balancing sometimes limits the creativity that can be put into a character kit, which is something that genshin is currently suffering.
In short, HSR lacks the open world aspect or content of similar magnitute, so it has to sell end-game units with bigger numbers, which in turns makes the game be balanced around those new numbers.
this aspect is one reason why i will never understand why people compare the two in regards to unit powers. HSR is more heavily combat-focused, & there are many forms of endgame. it's not as casual of an experience when compared to genshin, & they're in fundamentally different game genres.
@nilmerg Can't blame them tbh. A good game, specially a live service game, doesnt always translate to more profit for the devs. In genshin, it kinda does, but is at the cost of, well, much higher development cost as they need to create the world and story to sell the characters, HSR ofc does the same but at much lower scale, however that lower scale also means theres less casual content where to play with the characters. In a perfect world we would have a more balanced meta, with the current end game content while the devs make the same amount of money, but unless HSR has something as big as open world that makes people keep playing even if the characters are balanced , thats never going to happen and the current state of powercreep will continue. People vote with their wallets after all and hoyo follows where the money is at.
they're definitely afraid of a scenario where a banner doesn't sell well
maybe adding 4 stars that can do similar mechanics of a 5 star character BUT not having a bloated kit can somewhat alleviate the new power creep these 5 stars always bring
3.0 is coming and I'm afraid of the future for this game meta-wise
It gonna get to that point soon because reruns are already selling horribly because 90% of the time, the character has been crept since release. Hopefully hoyo fixes up in 3.0
It's more of a chicken and the egg problem. Do enemies get absurd HP values because characters are getting more and more broken, or are characters getting more and more broken because the enemies get absurd HP values? The real problem is that the team behind hsr went too fast with their gameplay visions and now we have the HP and powercreep problem.
I can definitely see this being the case. Realistically though, idk that it matters which came first because it definitely is a problem either way, like you said. HSR just kinda moved too fast compared to how other games are, and its resulted in the issues.
I think it is because characters are getting too strong, enemies HP become too inflated as a result. In MrPokke's HP inflation video, he pointed out that the biggest HP inflation increases happened when Ruan Mei, Acheron, and Feixiao were released.
As a person who plays HSR since launch, I honestly don't mind if my characters will have only few kits or do few things. The point to play this kind of game is for characters and story, not power flexing. That's why Fate: Grand Order has stood up for very, very long time. You can use many characters in FGO from launch in today's content just fine (and unironically Mash can carry you if you have enough time to burn), while Seele barely functions outside SU and MoC (even then she struggles a lot unless you have her light cone).
the powercreep is so fast that within a few patches a bunch of new dps had released each more powerful than the last one. I think my E1 acheron would become useless within half a month
I find it quite funny they ran Kafka in 2.5, Acheron in 2.6, and Jing Yuan in 2.7, just for them to release Aglaea, who's already very strong while being the weakest she'll ever be 😭
Dang. Thats True, HSR characters do like 8 Billion Things lol
And THIS is what makes things very hard for new players. Depending on when they joined the game at worst they only have 4-star DPSes and buffers to work with, but clearing current content with them is either barely doable or take foreeever because their kit is so fkn basic
Actually your whole argument makes a lot of sense. In the next survey I'll recommend the video to the dev team. And u earn a sub
Great points. Altough i must include one thing that I think was missing, and that is the fact that on genshin (or any open world gacha) you can have fun with your characters outside of the end game mode. And by that I mean you have to farm, collect flowers, and do miscellaneous stuff that DON'T consume the daily energy, therefore giving you more things to do in the game (if it's monotonous or not is besides the point).
HSR on the other hand, if you are bodying the entire game on auto with a roaster that's a whole patch behind the curve, that's just not enough fun. If everything you do is log in to spend the daily energy on a slight chance to upgrade one of your already competent characters, chances are you just won't.
Not saying that's the right approach or anything but it's worth putting down
Definitely agree with this, I've talked about this in previous videos too. Lack of having things to do = lack of defined goals for player = player quits. Characters alone can't keep people invested.
You think 2.0 MOC Enemy HP was bad? Wait until you see 3.0 MOC HP.
That one 9M HP boss has a gimmick that cuts the HP in half
@@SupurNeoDude4.5M HP is still pretty high
@@SupurNeoDudeits half HP is 4.5 million 😅.
@@SupurNeoDude that's not true at all, it only 5% per summon, you have to destroy the summon with even more HP inflation
@@SupurNeoDude this is by far the most HP inflated MoC in HSR history
Strife of Creation (3.0)
HP (Single) : 16.1 Million HP
HP (AoE) : 13.8 Million HP
I had a bit of a different thought. When you talked about Chasca, and this applies to other Genshin characters too as far as I'm aware, the important thing to note is that they deal mostly single target damage, while supports mostly support a single character.
While raw hp numbers in HSR increased, it was partly as a result of adding more mobs. And they did this because they had to sell Erudition units somehow. Fuck, I can't properly flesh out this idea cuz I'm in a game of TFT...
Hopefully you get the idea.
I get what you mean, but that's more of a venti problem I think. If genshin made their end game have mobs rather than always slamming bosses down our throats then I feel venti would take over like he did when the game released and up to 2.0. He's honestly a little bit of a stop gap himself for that game having more varied content.
@@fl2ur Oh no, I wasn't trying to shit on Genshin or anything, or maybe I misunderstood.
The differences in combat between GI and HSR exists on a fundamental level, as you're probably aware. Such that, even without knowing much about Genshin, I doubt that even with hordes of mobs, Venti wouldn't be that much better. I'm speculating, but since only one character can exist on the field at any given time, any effective aoe character would necessarily have to be over tuned. When that happens, you get a repeat of HSR, where Erudition, Blast, and ST carries continue to try and powercreep each other.
To bring it back to the topic of the video, I ultimately have the same conclusion, that hp has to inflate to curb that vicious cycle of creep, but we arrived there at slightly different ways. This isn't even mentioning the fact that HSR prints nearly 2 characters every patch.
@@fl2urThen just don't add smaller mobs? We've had plenty of abysses during 4.0 (presumably when you took a break) where it was AOE but they were heavy mobs like the Mechs, so Venti or any anemo couldn't group them.
@@gameplayerone3917on the contrary venti is still really good but the game realizes this. He's capable of cleaning all the floors with light mobs enemies better than anyone else.
It's just kazuha is able to do a weak variation of that and buff.
In pure cc situation venti wins but kazuha is just more flexible for the bosses.
"they deal mostly single target damage while supports mostly support a single character" this is just... wrong? blatantly wrong
I think there's also one major factor that contributed to HSR'S imbalance, and that inherently as a turn basec game, it's very bare bones and simple. And thats not a bad thing per say, but then theres only so much you can do to increase the difficulty when all you have are three buttons to work with. You can have certain mechanics, yes, but at the end of fhe day increasing HP is really the only thing you can do to increass fhe difficulty. I think Aventurine is the only boss whose mechanics actually require a plan ahead, but honestly even that is easily countered.
Ive seen some people say that you dont need to full star the endgame, and yes you dont have to, but... HSR clearly cares about the combat, as seen by the stupidly overtuned new characters and the fact that we've got THREE endgame modes, not to mention the stimulated universe if you count that, when the game is barely 2 years old. It's not like Genshin where you actually dont need to fully star the endgame because you play that for the story and exploration, in HSR the combat actually matters (and frankly i just dont find the story that interesting tbh.).
Pretty much....genshin has tons of ways to get primos outside of combat.
Exploration and the hangouts/story quests etc don't need players to heavily invest character.
Every new character I genshin also has relevant teapot setups so it encourages slight deviations if you really want the primos.
All of these are kind of absent.
@@rushalias8511 there are non-combat events (including permanent), overworld chests, 10 free pulls every patch, & side quests in HSR. wdym it's absent... even in some combat-based content like DU, you don't even have to invest in units at all to get a lot of the jades since it levels + equips them for you.
@nilmerg what i mean is that genshin has content outside of combat so combat as a whole isn't the focus.
Even if DU or SU auto levels and equips characters. It's still the same combat you need to do.
The overworld chests in hsr are...a lot less than genshin. You can find them all in a day.
As for the events yes hsr has events permanently added.
But that's not exactly a fix for what the issue is. The issue is that the main focus of hsr is the turn based combat that is very focused and very restrictive compared to other games. It's such an issue that even when they try and stretch the combat to 4 arguably 5 different modes. MoC, PF, AS, DU and SU, it all boils down to the same thing.
All the events are added because the game would be very repetitive and stale because there just isn't anything to do beyond combat. Even all the events that are added...are all just temporary fixes.
As for the free ten pulls.
Here's the sad truth about that....they have to give it. You know why...because it's a a necessity. They release characters at a higher rate than genshin. In just two years their roster is already more than half of genshin. So they need to ensure that players feel as compensated to pull and try and keep up with the release rate.
Characters who are once again...only marketable in how they perform in the combat.
Genshin has half it's content devoted to exploration. That's why you can get away with making the combat easy. People aren't just sold on the combat but how the character works elsewhere in the world for exploration.
Duality of man:
WHYYY HP INFLATION HAPPENING REEEEE
and
SKIP UNIT IF NOT SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER DMG OUTPUT
Finally some1 who understands the real problem
Someone is same strength level as previous best thing: why bother?
Someone is better than previous best thing: POWERCREEP
However this sentiment is weird because if a unit is loved enough people are willing to look the other way, its just recently that people are starting to see how unhealthy Acheron’s strength level was for the game, everyone after her is a byproduct of her strength level basically, so that they could at least compete, yet they ended up surpassing and becoming powercreep themselves.
Well Hoyo caused that mentality themselves because they make certain characters better than the others instead of balancing the game well. Boothill and Rappa were good characters, but they clearly made Firefly the more definitive and versatile option since they handle single target and aoe content well nevermind she got multiple fire element teammates to help her whereas the others didn't get anything.
The only dps you really needed to pull in 2.x was Acheron and Firefly because they handle the situations you would have pulled Feixiao, Boothill, Rappa, Jade or Yunli for without issue anyway because they are the favored units. Those other dps are for sure more situationally useful may even be have higher dmg ceiling like Feixiao but they don't bring much value at all if you pulled the favored units and their supports.
No doubt they will make Castorice in the game Awards trailer cracked because thats clearly who they want players to focus on.
that because hoyoverse didn't even balance their characters and endgame content
The problem wasn't really Ruan Mei characters onwards per say, it was the base design of many of the mechanics in the game. Case in point; if RM just provided benefits for a Break team on release and very few generic buffs, no one would have played her at the time of release because Break was an incredibly flawed design at base (which self-limited its ceiling way too hard by being able to rebreak, not providing enough delay to be useful utility, and not providing enough of a damage boost to be "generally useful" to teams, so hard to design hybrid or solo break teams). Dedicated Break was mostly a niche playstyle at the time, and it would be a hard sell to convince people to go for it on its own; it really required something like Superbreak for dedicated Break to be a thing.
Designs like RM, which needed to fit both specific archetypes, but still be useful enough to be attractive before those archetypes were active, or Acheron, who needed to be strong enough to activate underutilized archetypes, were responses to be made to hypercarry because incentivizing pulls for unique utility was just not properly accounted for, and the game could not properly incentivize new team structures smoothly without power creep. Many of the early "meta" ideas were clearly scrapped as people got better as the game (for example, one of Kafka's earlier kit designs was actually as a Break DoTTer, and her earlier versions had her DoT go as low as less than 150%-ish ATK, just to give an idea of what they "thought" were going to be good enough until they retested many of their ideas).
By contrast, Genshin has many "soft archetypes" (generally the different elements and element combinations), but really only two hard archetype structures (Hypercarry and Quickswap), and the soft archetypes are much easier to transition between because as long as you just apply a lot of an element you were looking for, you had at least some overlap with new releases rather than almost none. Yes, there are concerns such as energy generation, etc., and sometimes, new soft archetypes can come into prominence such as mono-Fire, but actually transitioning characters to new archetypes is a much simpler task.
When you mentioned characters doing too much. This reminded me of the gacha i came from. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, or FFBE for short. It started with characters doing a single thing, kinda like Natasha is a healer, she heals. period. But, by the time of its EoS recently (End of Service), it went way too deep into the powercreep hole. Every unit is an absolute monster of a powerhouse and every single one of them HAD to do everything! Deal Damage, heal, buff, debuff, whatever else is possible. If you didn't have at least 3 to 6 well built units on your team, you would be COOKED in the endgame. But there is a catch... if you were a day one player like myself. You would be fine. You would always have enough to pull for units and could easily keep up with the ascending meta. Sadly for new players it isn't that simple, right?
HSR is suffering form the same problem rn, at least i believe. I see a lot of new players complaining that it has been too hard to catch up. While day one players like myself aren't struggling at all. Either Hoyo has a plan that couldn't be fulfilled during the game release, or they are deliberately falling the power creep hole and in two years we'll be dealing 1 billion damage in MOC.
I just hope Hoyo do something for older units so they can at least be useful... I fear this decision could be simply re-releasing older characters into new gacha version of themselves. Like DHIL (which is already not optimal, but can still be saved by releasing new characters that buffs Basic ATK/Skill Consumption.)
I had a friend really invested into ffbe, he even got me to play it are little around the time there was like a 6 or 7* cloud and tifa releasing. Honestly my biggest thing with that game is that it felt overwhelming to get into, which kinda points to your point of HSR suffering the same problem for new players.
Like, if I was a new player rn and wanted to clear a 5m hp boss in MoC with my base dan heng I'd be like "wtf how is that possible" and the only answer is "get broken supports or replace dan with a newer unit". But how is that new player even meant to figure that out? What if base dan is the unit they want to use but can't? It's just a mess at this point.
It's definitely not that simple, I didn't play since day 1, but I'm logging in daily since Silverwolfs banner and I still often struggle to clear. 3 stars on MoC 12 are definitely not something that's possible to get with my E0S0 Jingliu,, and my Bronya is E0S0 as well, I just had no luck. If the Weakness mix isn't favorable for my roster, I have to spend a lot of time crafting a team that doesn't suck.
The problem is simply that I ain't meta slaving. I don't have the latest supports (Robin, Lingsha), I didn't like their designs. I'm not pulling Sunday for the same reason. I built a Crit Kafka because I wanted her to be useful outside of DoT (which seemed very weak at the time).
Of course you can say these issues are self inflicted. But my point is just that it's not reasonable to expect everyone pulled all the characters and built all the characters simply because they played for a long time.
This is pretty much exactly what Fire Emblem Heroes has been going through for the past couple years. New characters are releasing with their weapons and personal skills each having like 5-6+ other skills added onto them so they instantly become one man armies / one man support bots and are powercreeping other characters that released in the past 1/2/3 months
The hp bloat to character kit creep obviously goes hand in hand, but i partially blame their incessant push for archetypes. It went from more concise team building to a punishment for not investing in whatever archetype they are pushing on top of turning very greedy for investment and feeding into the bloated kits you talked about
It started with the ipc fua and how e1s1 topaz was taken as the norm bc she gave ratio the necessary amount of debufs and most recently the superbreak units all having early cons with def shred to motivate you to reach that 100 def down
idk why but i started thinking about k'sante right when he done listing out all the stuff that sunday do
We need a Sunday version of that ASAP
Acheronification my friend. But the devs just want people to keep paying, they don't do anything about it because Nobody really complains, in the CN fandom they just want to forcw the spendings more and more without any remorse.
The way imo to fix it is to have all of your team archetypes being viable and tailor new units to make certain archetypes stronger. Sunday is obviously made for summons but even without a summon dps he’s one of the best supports in the game still.
I think they definitely shifted gears after they released Ruan Mei.
Poor Jingliu and Blade tho.
I still can’t believe that some people are comparing Genshin Impact to Star Rail. If you want to compare gameplay styles, it should be done with games in the same genre, like FGO, Limbus Company, or Reverse: 1999. Comparing it to these games would provide a better perspective on how far the meta has evolved and how bad their power creep is.
But from my experience playing turn-based gacha games, HSR has the worst balance among turn-based gacha games. For instance, it’s like comparing Sparkle vs. Sunday. When Sparkle was first introduced, it didn’t power creep Bronya that much. But look at when Sunday arrived-E0S1 Sunday > E6S5 Sparkle. It feels completely absurd!
I definitely agree that there's comparisons that are better, but the video was framed in the context of a discussion my friend and I had. He doesn't really play other gachas, so that's kinda where it started and ended. Believe me, if there were other systems from different games(fgo rankups please and ty hoyo) that would be something I'd be extremely happy with.
Yeah as you mentioned, if devs will stop HP inflation, players not gonna have any reasons to pull for new characters in HSR. Because you don't have a cool open world to just walk around and interact with your character like for example Genshin does. Genshin players not just pulling for characters to fight the endgame, they are pulling for them to live inside Teyvat, just travel, fly and mintpick, etc. As you can see they even willing to play this game as they recieving new running effects. So I think HSR devs should think about any other reasons why players will want to pull for character instead of just make them do stronger damage. They already screwed up the trailblazer's room feature by the way that could have huge impact on that in my opinion.
In the early patches like 1.0 there wasn't a real focus on an team comp, that was up to players to piece together. The characters were their own units and did what they did because they could supply their own triggers to their effects. Kafka could supply her own DoTs to to trigger them in the Ult. Weakness breaks were more important because that was the only real way to get real dmg in. Despite all of that, the dmg characters could do was roughly the same so surviving an onslaught was more important than buffing.
Now the dmg characters do has ballooned thanks to the onset of not just Super Break but at base newer characters just do more dmg. Instead of making use of the unique mechanics to control a fight and make them more engaging, Hoyo decided that just ballooning HP will fix it without taking into account that an HP sponge is never fun to fight.
I'm fine with the hp inflation ONLY if they gave rank up quest for old 4* and 5* characters like in FGO.
This would not only make for viable alternative teams but also make old characters still desirable to pull
Right now with the current MoC, I couldn't even use half of my characters to 3 star floor 12 unless I have the newly released character designed for that MoC.
Yeah, I truly hope they do this at some point - fgo's way is like the peak of "making everyone usable", and a lot of other games should take notes
Wonder if they were to do this would it be unlocked via a trace or a TB mission. (One can cope ig)
Trace 4 or just a slight bump increase of base multipliers or added gimicks to catch up
Seele would get some sort of extra buffs off resurgence, and deals much more during resurgence.
JY would probably just get a bump on multipliers of skill or ult
Kafka gets something as an extra just to bump up DoTs like a buff extender
Blade gets extra HP% loss scaling bonus
Silverwolf eliminates her own type implant as part of an rng and have built in ehr to crit val.
IL gets a passive that gives him buffs the more SP gained/loss from the team.
JL trades ally hp% loss to an extra multiplicative multiplier
Argenti gets more energy by acting
Topaz PoD gets extended to increase vul potency of repeated FUa attacks.
Ect.
I have watched a lot of those ‘Honkai HP Scaling videos’ and honestly none of them ever really hit the mark for me…
But your reasoning and explanation really resonated with me-‘side upgrades’ and niches are a really important part of the balance ecosystem, and the bloat of each unit really doesn’t leave any room for that.
Starting with Ruan Mei they shoved everything in-she was, at her core, a break-based unit, wanting increased efficiency and duration… but then she also gets res pen? Why? Now any future res pen units have to also have something extra to keep up with her. It sorta felt like their base/confidence early on was weak (like they weren’t sure people would like the game)-they seemed to have felt like they couldn’t just put out a break focused support unit when there were no real break DPS… so they had to make her have extra stuff that benefited everyone. The fallout from that is now each unit compounds on one another to the point they had to start adding broad new stuff like super break across multiple characters (Imagine how awesome it would be if super break was a character-specific bonus meant as a niche buff for those who liked that play style! And no other unit could interact with it directly! Imagine if each new MC was a support/enabler for a whole new playstyle to help show off each type with a super unique kit!)
This, along with what you said about relic sets (the most blatantly ‘for a specific unit’ type of gear in a GACHA game I’ve ever seen) means that they are constantly in a race with themselves.
And look, I’m a die-hard fan. I read all the guides. 100% every challenge every reset. But honestly? I don’t see myself spending on this game. Because it feels like whatever I spend to get a cool unit I like won’t matter in 5-6 months, I’ll just be flushing it down the drain…
It’s quite the corner they’ve backed themselves into, with really the only solution being to stop the bloat now, which will make each new unit less enticing power-wise, which I fear they won’t do due to their need to make money… it’s just a shame they don’t trust their designs and stories to do most of that heavy lifting for them…
Anyways, that’s a follow from me. Can’t wait to hear more from you!
Ruan mei and Acheron really were the watershed moment, these 2 completely eclipsed their respective competitions and everything after that has just a one upping mess.
It's also to do with the fact there are so many characters being released and there being no solution to the HP problem besides having the characters themselves.
Given what some of the TH-cam shorts have 'leeked' to me, the power increase needed to address new content is fucking insane. I see a huge drama incoming for that alone. It's not a sustainable method. And people are just going to drop off the game because it's no longer fun. I remember quitting in 1.1, then coming back in 1.6. The amount of power needed to even do Phantylia was insane. Plus I was timegated by the fact I not only had no characters to beat her, but also no good relics. So I was stuck on her for over a week. Same with True Sting and Argenti. I was punished because I didn't have Jingliu or DHIL.
Catch up mechanics would fix that easily (Not just reserved trailblaze power), but an option to gain one of the patch's limited 5 stars with all the necessary talents and relics given too. Which isn't asking for too much, look how many characters there are.
HSR also suffers from the fact that the game is just Combat, like there is very little to this game outside of combat, to compre it would be like if Persona 3 was just Tartarus and nothing but Tartarus, that’s HSR. In Genshin if you dont like the combat there still a whole world for you to explore, in HSR if you dont like the combat then just go play something else, cuz there isn’t really much else to do
And since 80% of the game time is spend in combat, basically everything about a unit must revolve around combat, which make the flaw in said combat system much more apparent and also inescapable
I put it entirely on everything from 2.2 to 3.0, possibly further, only falling into two damage archetypes, break and FUA. Break hasn't been so bad, with clear variety between the three, but held back by a severe lack of supports so multiple teams aren't viable. FUA on the other hand has just been about attack frequency, and every new character has to hit as many times and as hard as the last, so instead of fleshing out the other archetypes (DoT, HP, Ult, AA, etc) and getting them up to the same level, it's just been FUA after FUA after FUA, with each one having to creep up higher and stronger than what came before while everything else is being left in the dust. Since Acheron, FUA has gotten 2/2 sustains, 5/8 DPS, and 1/2 supports. Break got 3 DPS and 1 sustain. Everything else is just... Jiaoqiu, who really only fits best for a single DPS, not even an archetype.
honestly if I'd have to say my view of the problem, it's that hsr devs wants to make all 5 stars unique and make sure that they do the hype of the character justice. But all they do is just make them too op, so they had to make the enemies' hp scale a lot because of this, to say that their dmg is just "normal".
I am very scared of what will happen with the upcoming FGO Characters like Gilgamesh and Rin T^T
ive been playing hsr on and off since it launched, but only recently started to actively play it. And boy let me tell you, these new units are so strong that i dont even bother with the old ones. they make the early game zoom by QUICK
Agree fully. It's like where we are now is what ALL OF 3.X should be at ceiling wise.
I've seen this kind of thing everywhere: Fate Grand Order, Fire Emblem Heroes, DBZ Dokkan Battle, it always happens to my favorite Gacha games; a true shame.
4:20 YES Rappa needs those functions, she NEEDS those to *function.*
Imo, it's not that she doesn't need them, it's that she doesn't need *both*. Being able to superbreak innately on top of getting bonuses for doing so is kinda a lot.
It was my hope that once we had a really well oiled fully decked out premium comp like feixiao's fua comp for example the powercreep would plateau there and they wouldnt need to inflate enemy hp anymore than that.
I'm beginning to think that just isn't hoyo's intentions though. The obvious profit incentive is there yes, powerful characters sell, but I think theres a bit more to it than that. Each new kit added to the game is a new variable to balance around and if no older characters are outliving their usefulness that means none of those variables are aging out. I think what it comes down to is hoyo doesnt wanna spend the money qa testing if their next character isnt gonna break the game with some wild combination of synergistic characters and LCs they made years ago.
In the absence of balance patches or in more severe cases straight up removing problematic mechanics; powercreep is the way hoyo rotates things they dont wanna be part of the meta anymore out of the game.
The thing I compare it to is standard rotation in magic the gathering. Only the most recent couple sets are legal in standard formats so as new variables rotate in old variables rotate out. I myself prefer eternal formats because I love when a new card comes out and has explosive synergy with an old card that never really had a chance to shine. The compromise is eternal formats have extensive ban lists. I'd love it if 1.x characters could have explosive synergies with characters released many years into the future, but i feel that would necessitate balance patches sometimes even nerfs to preexisting strategies and it would cost hoyo more money to test and I think thats ultimately the reason they arent going to go down this route. Its something I hope I'm wrong about.
Tl;dr: Because of Turn-based gameplay.
There is no "gameplay" in HSR, there's only numbers. So the only way to make a new shinny unit desirable is to increase those numbers, to increase those paragraphs.
It's a snowball effect, and it won't get fixed. Because that's what makes them money.
You have never played any other turn based game in your life, didn't you? Go play any Atlus game, be it Persona or the wide selection of Shin Megami Tensei games going back all the way to the 1980s. Go play Final Fantasy 1 to 10. Go play Pokemon gen 1 to gen 5.
A lot of these games are relatively simple at the surface, until you dive deep into the underlying complexities. Anyone who thinks Pokemon is easy and simple with not real gameplay variation has never even tried to engage with all the underlying systems and variables. Atlus games have some of the best boss designs in the entire turn-based RPG genre. Final Fantasy excels in class design.
There are a lot of cool things you can do with turn-based game design. You just need to be more creative and think outside of the box. Reverse 1999 is a Chinese turn-based gacha game that does exactly that. Simple and easy to learn at the surface. Surprisingly deep and harder to master underneath it. Lots of distinct character designs and skill sets and a wide array of teamcomps and archetypes.
The only way for HP inflation to come to a full halt, is either enemies/bosses starts to have more ridiculous mechanics or they buff or rework older characters specifically 5*. Which I highly doubt the latter.
I'm mixed on how the game is handling things with character power, on one hand I'm actually kind of glad that characters are actually stronger because a higher power budget means they can be more flexible in what they actually do and the more flexibility you allow a character to have the more they can use it to get into something a lot more specific and enter certain niches and promote different playstyles better. This makes me excited for characters that are more unique and interesting than what... *some* 1.X characters have been where some of their ultimates or talents or even skills sometimes felt really uninteresting and that played a fair amount into why they were ultimately just bad units by today's standards. Like look at Bronya's talent (30% action advance on using basic at lv. 10) and tell me when you're gonna ever make any use of that outside of maybe some really niche scenarios. Probably never! So I think raising the overall power level isn't bad on it's own. However there is of course the bad part to this in that yeah this does cause the enemies to get stronger and as such old units become really not good anymore. This is why I really hope that we can get more direct buffs to old units some day because some of them have pretty interesting ideas for a kit that just kinda don't get fleshed out nearly as well as if they were made today, and it's a shame because a modern version of older units that lack some pizazz in their kit would be really fun, this is why the way I hope they buff these characters is through a system similar to HI3's augment cores that kinda just change how the character works, though here I'd not make them into a totally different character, I'd want them to still keep some core ideas in the character even if they do change some parts significantly if it's necessary to be able to actually expand upon the character. Oh and of course there's still the problem of hoyoverse could potentially just keep increasing the power cap without ever really putting a lid on it and making contemporary units the best for their time in more elegant ways than being a power spike over older units (mode specific caters like MoC buffs and PF buffs and enemy lineup plays a part in doing this better than just a power upgrade but that's a whole can of worms that there's no need to get *too* deep into)
This wall of text requires paragraphs. Please use paragraphs. This is unreadable.
I agree with this mostly - realistically I know that it's not possible to fully keep people at even strength levels. Even if they tried, there would eventually be a slip up where someone ends up stronger than intended - what would they do then, nerf them?(no)
What I really want is it to slow down at the very least by lowering the amount of things characters get in their kits, or if they want to keep giving a lot of stuff, then make each thing less potent. Like, sure Sunday could keep his AA and CD buff, but make his crit buff 8% instead of 20(wtf were they thinking)
Thanks for articulating something I’ve felt unconsciously. I am F2P in HSR and perfectly happy. My teams are strong enough, but I have no fear of wasting money due to power creep. I’ve spent $ on Genshin, and have not regretted anything because every character I’ve invested in is still relevant. Not perfect or best on slot, but totally useable.
Tbh I’m thinking about quitting since my biggest problem is saving up for a character. It would be good for a patch, but in a few months about 4-5 new characters would now be better than it. Sad how the devs did not take this into consideration.
Same, i thought i could play this game like genshin where i can use any main dps i want and still clear anything (klee
I never thought of it like, great vid!
I think HSR can take a note from the Wenut in genshin here,that boss had a stupidly high res that was diminished only if you swirl the element in the anemo spheres that it had, it either made people bring bow characters or make creative changes in their rotations to swirl the elements. Similarly they can bring in something like superbreak resistance, making a boss mechanic which if done correctly buffs dot dmg (this was really useful in unknowable domain conundrum runs when the dot weak robot exploded and dealt huge dmg to the enemies on the field) and make even more creative ways to restrict the current meta characters so that the future characters cam be more balanced
i think its more of a problem of toning down certain units on because if we think about it the only gross units have been robin sunday and ruan mei. like firefly acheron boothill yunli lingsha jiao jade and rappa all feel within reason yes they are all strong but it feels within reason. I think the correct argument you made is that Sunday’s bloated kit shows an extreme lack of awareness. he needed to have stronger summon buffs and weaker general buffs. like he doesnt need to out perform sparkle in 85% of cases out of his intended niche. robin and ruan mei feel bloated but ruanmei only feels necessary of break. and robin was supposed to be that for follow up but once again had broken generalist mechanics.
TLDR make supports more niche for their teams. Jiaoqiu is the perfect example he fits into the acheron team and can be a slight downgrade to other supports in dot teams it feels super fair.
Meta characters sells way more over just waifu/husbando. That's why rerun even for meta rerun character not doing good as their first released as people see little to no value in them. That's also why characters like seele, silver wolf and blade not getting rerun even if units like Jing Yuan who released after seele got another rerun. In meta pull value, these characters already fallen off hard an hoyo knows that they will never gonna get profit from them.
We just need a new additional gear system and it'll increase the power ceiling for every unit equally
That's quite an interesting & effective take on the topic. I remember seeing a discussion in the early days where ppl were like why do u need a JY when E6 Serval wud be just a bit weaker, we saw similar takes with Sampo & BS or Gall & Lingsha. So, I think Hoyo took it upon themselves to make newer kits so bloated/overtuned/overloaded that the balance came out to be HP inflation.
If only they had tried to apply uniqueness feature to chars be it 4* or 5* that the synergies are somewhat limited & the pool for a particular combat engine gradually increases, it wud've been better but we actually saw the rise of FuA & SuperBreak in less than 6 months to their max potential already. So, to compensate it we saw quite a strong rise in difficulty.
8:15 We already have this tho, it's called archetypes and that's how they're currently balancing units. The real reason hp inflation is happening is because we just got two perfectly synergistic teams and the game is clearly being balanced around that.
Sunday should be the strongest support in the game just because he's new and powercreep is a problem, right? Nope, he only works well in some sp intensive teams and summon teams. Break units want Ruan Mei, summons Sunday and follow up ones will want Robin. Having too many buffs or words in his abilities isn't going to make Sunday better in dot teams than whatever dot support they give us in the future.
The thing is, the more bloated kits are, the more likely a unit built for one niche can play outside of it. Robin is the best support in the game, period. You can see this in how she's used in almost every team archetype (including dot). Sunday is meant for summon units sure, but due to being bronya pro max, he's usable in the every one of the places she is. Firefly has niche use cases where she acts as a support(fire implanter) for himeko. Rappa has use cases as a universal breaker for firefly teams.
The whole point of the video is that units just do too much. If you take away a little bit from their kits then they're guaranteed to stay in niche, but hoyo doesn't seem to want to do that.
@@fl2ur Yeah but they're played in other teams because the game is still new and we don't have something that covers every niche. Robin isn't going to be played in a dot team once we get a dot support, we just need to give them time.
If you complained about things like Sunday powercreeping Sparkle for no reason due to his kit doing too much I would understand, but you often complain about word counts and even brought up Rappa's energy passive even tho she's clearly balanced around that because she deals basically no dmg outside of her ultimate and it costs 140 energy, so of course she's going to have something like that. You even pointed at Ruan Mei but she's no different than Bronya, they both provide a lot of different things, she's just giving buffs that actually work with break units.
Try saying that in Bronya/Sparkle face.
Now if only people followed the archetype rule. No, they literally run Sunday and Robin together in one team because the devs didn't make sure this won't work. When players aren't penalised for double-booking supports, they absolutely will do that, archetypes be damned.
@@jeremiahsmith916 Yeah but like I said, they are going to fix this, they just need time. The only way to fix this is to release more supports and they can't just drop 3 archetype support banners tomorrow.
If anything, if the dps isn’t 5x better than the last, it just gives you more time to save for who you really want.
Even if you are right. What can be affected easier? A nerf to enemy HP? Or a nerf to units? Even if you say, well going forward don't make them so strong that wont help what's already happened. I realize too that going the other direction is a problem likely also, but the simple answer for now is to nerf the HP. Or start scaling both back in the future.
maybe a buff to older units can help to solve the problem? or maybe not 💀
@@dew332 It's hoyo, they've never heard of ACTUALLY buffing old units instead of releasing a new one that will help for a while (Apart from the Zhongli situation because CN was crying.)
@@Thunderdroceon yeah, but we aren't talking about genshin here, and we know that honkai star rail is the favorite one of its creators, so there could be a chance
@@dew332 I really hope it turns out that way but we'll see in 3.0+
@@Thunderdroceonthey did buff lucy on ZZZ like 3 patches after release.
She was already the top 2 sup in the game so it was more of correcting the stats used in scaling of one of her abilities since they probably forgot to add it as well, still added something to her kit that made her better.
Players : We want challenging endgame content
Hoyo : Best we can do is raise the hp
Additionally with the point of "why this is happening with HSR so much faster than Genshin?" is that people seem to like acting like they're not literally ongoing at the exact same time, by the same overall company, *learning from each other ('s community feedback)* and Genshin having multiple years of a headstart. HSR is speedrunning/playing catch-up, and overcompensating as a resullt.
I got busy with life and took a break from all gatcha games for almost a year. Came back to genshin still able to 36. Came back to HSR and it felt like playing with two broken feet lmao. I wanted to come back and pull for the characters i missed (Blade, Boothill) but i feel like there's just no point.
Right now the game is expected you to do 69 trillion damages in all end-game contents.
4-star characters in this game are poorly useless since most of them has been overshadowed by 5-star version of themselves.
The game is getting closer to their ancestor Hi3 especially in the next 3.0 patch it's going to be Hi3 player pleaser with the new world, new Hi3 cameo character, etc.
And on top of that, the Fate collab is on the way. We are going to have the stupid FGO Gacha moments in this game (Personally, I hate Fate series because of my (used to be) friends) and I bet those collab characters will do the SH*T ton of damages of course.
Why do we have core mechanic of the game - weakness types and then spam characters for the entire year, who can completely ignore it?
For me, personally, I feel somewhat conflicted, I guess? I actually do not mind the high difficulty at all, but I do feel bad over not being able to relate with some in the community and there being a disagreement from my side in general.
There are two things that I should mention to contextualize things. I don't even have 35 characters on my account, and my main DPS chars are Argenti, Qingque and Serval, from 1.5 when I started playing, till today.
Furthermore, and more importantly, I think that I have a preestablished and slight bias towards actually not minding the high difficulty because I came from Genshin. I played Genshin from 1.0 until the ending of Sumeru. For a vast majority of the game's life cycle, approximately from 1.3 onwards, I kind of disliked my time there in a similar way to how a lot of HSR players are feeling about the "HP Inflation" / Feature Bloat. However, I disliked my time in Genshin for the exact opposite reason, and for the same reason some might like Genshin, specifically:
- I really, really, really disliked how easy the game was, it felt like I never had anything to work towards. This is coming from someone who mained Klee. (Albeit, my other main was Tartaglia.)
- I really disliked how simple the character kits were, because each felt so similar to one another in my eyes.
On the points of what I disliked there, I also commonly saw comments from people and discussions around these topics wherein people - I would say, based on my insight and experiences - could agree with me. Not everyone, obviously, but a chunk of people.
This is not to take away from anyone liking Genshin. I stuck with the game for as long as I did specifically because I cared for the game so much to actually criticize it so much, and I suspect that people have similar outlooks on HSR.
I still use old, crusty 4-star DPS units (and Argenti) because I believe in the idea that horizontal investment is the way to go in HSR, compared to the vertical investment that is present moreso in other games. I believe that in Genshin, it is incentivized to produce great stats for a few characters you wanna build, but that in HSR, it's better to produce good enough stats for a lot of characters who cover many bases. I'm still doing fine, I full cleared last PF with my Serval, about to full clear the current AS with my Qingque, etc., and I would assume it's because I invest in every unit I have a good amount. Granted, full disclosure, reason why I advocate for horizontal investment while also having below 35 chars on my acc is because I E6'd Argenti. I love that stupid man.
However, I believe that horizontal investment is not easy for the general gacha audience because most gacha games kinda train the mind towards vertical investment, especially with how the culture of "maining" someone is, how humans will typically gravitate towards "perfecting" their favourites, and because its very easy to form a bond with a character in a gacha game considering how companies actively try to hook you in any way possible to feel compelled towards a character.
Finally, I also think that there should be a lot more effort put into full clearing if you actually want to, but also that it is ultimately inconsequential, so it doesn't bother me too much. I see the last stars in the endgame content as something to work towards a lot, whether it be in building chars or playing a lot for the god runs. And if I fail, I do not mind it too much, mostly because I think that it's normal for the hardest of hard content in a game to be "exclusive" and also because I won't stress over, like, half a pull or something like that.
(On a side-note, I also just prefer HSR's story and reward system a ton more, so that might also be something to consider if we're looking for potential biases.)
(EDIT: also to add the fact that there's so much endgame, obviously, too)
All in all, despite me not having many characters, nor using newer units to full clear, I do want to say that I have difficulties clearing the hardest content, as aforementioned in the last paragraph I sent, and it's not like I always manage to do it. It takes a lot of research, grinding and effort, but I don't mind it.
However, just because I don't mind it, doesn't mean that I advocate necessarily for it. I left Genshin, but I accept that it's simply not for me. I think that both HSR and Genshin have their own niches, and it just depends on what you, as a player, would like more.
This was a great video by the way, I wish you much luck in your TH-cam career
Rare Argenti haver spotted! I made a 2nd account forever ago just to get him back when he released.
Anyway, I do want to specify the point I was trying to make in the video wasn't really about difficulty. I actually am in the same boat as you comparing genshin to hsr in terms of how genshin didn't really have any as it's a super easy game. I was more trying to point out the difference in character kit bloats between the two, and hopefully lead people to start thinking "well, maybe there's a middle ground between the two" instead of one or the other.
Increasing difficulty doesn't equal to more hp bloat, you can have one without the other, aventurine boss fight was one of the highest difficulty spikes when he's released, but he does so because of his gimmick, not just by having 5x the hp pool. You're rewarded by ulting at the right time to get it back fully after he's doing the gamba thing, while punishing people that don't. Compare that to svarog that have almost 0 mechanic except with his hand summon, and for many teams, the hand is literally a gamba that either doesn't matter at all, or fked up your speed tuning if you ignore it. And the only counter is basically breaking and killing him fast enough before he does it
@@fl2ur Hehe, I love ma man
Hi Scorpion, I thought horizontal investment means having many unit at E0S0.
And vertical investment as few BUT super strong unit like your E6 Argenti.
( I noticed that is how everyone mentioned vertical and horizontal investment means)
Btw, I agree with your play style.
I play HSR as Harem Star Rail. Sadly until today, I only have 2 DPS Waifu. Thankfully one is broken which is Firefly but the other one is Sushang.
So it's really hard to clear MoC and AS since one side is so weak.
HSR punish players for not getting meta unit.
I don't like mommies/ husbando/ spoilt brat so I skip Acheron/Feixiao/ Boothill/ Yunli/ Rappa.
I almost skip Firefly too because I don't like Sam. Thank goodness when I tried firefly in combat, my eyes focus more on the enemy bar and AV bar on the left rather than the unit. ( And lucky they have a big picture of Firefly face in the cockpit).
Luckily my E1S0 Firefly can 2 cycle her side giving Sushang to 8 cycles the other side.
But this most recent AS already show warning sign that even Firefly may no longer be OP.
( Sushang obtain 3424 points Vs Cocolia while Firefly only did 3328 points Vs the monkey banana boss!!!)
HSR really not allowing us to play Harem style and want us to keep throwing away units that we love for brand new units that we may not like. 😢
You are so fucking right. While genshin hides QoL behind characters, HSR does a much worse jobs bloating their characters and also hides the solution behind the newest released character (which frankly they have done the latter since the beginning of MOC). BUT increasing HP is a product of their new characters being just too OP to fit in the older meta so they think they have to balance the game around them. Highly agree with everything said here.
Yes! You've managed to descripe what's been on my mind for the last ~ year. It was kinda exciting when the first broken characters started to come out cause of wow factor, but it got old very quickly. Now I feel like every other new unit is the NEW META, the STRONGEST, the MOST USEFUL. You got new character and they are already feels weaker the next patch. Im exaggerating, but you got the point. I feel like this powercreep will be an even bigger problem in the future.
a really big issue i see in the game is how many characters released every single patch, genshin came out almost 3 years before hsr and they are already closing the gap on the number of 5 stars, and in a game where you don't have other factors aside from combat like exploration you have to powercreep the units to keep them interesting
genshin scaled so much since natlan came out tulpa boss was in abyss not long ago with 2 mil hp now it has 3.6 mil but comparing both games really doesn't work due to how they are played elemental reactions vs all the different archetypes in hsr doesn't make sense to compare them since it doesn't translate 1 to 1
Pretty sure first Tulpa was already 3m HP.
Yeah, HP increase doesn't affect Genshin as much as HSR since in Genshin you have several ways to amplify your damage through reactions and smart play while in HSR the only two ways to do more damage is by getting better Relics (Which completely depends on RNG) or getting new characters, and even those two methods have a hard limit on how far you can go.
Genshin is also way older as well
Feature creep is real and it's wild. I'm not even sure how Aventurine wasn't brought up. He does so much that making a new shielding preservation unit that you'd want to pull for is hard to even imagine.
It's far too late to shift gears now as you can't really nerf any of these characters, and they gotta keep pushing stronger characters out. HSR in 4.x will have bosses with billions of hp and characters releasing that applies a dot that can crit while also doing super break damage and if you stack just attack% they get crit rate crit damage and effect hit rate for free lmao.