#and u know it- or he has a constant debuff that takes hp off him and its the e a g l e

[darabeatha]

EVERYDAY- EVERYDAY PROMETHEUS GETS HIS LIVER EATEN.... EVERYDAY! -slams hands over door frame-

[crystalelemental]

Powercreep in Heroes is a big topic lately, and with good reason.  Gen 4 BST came early, and the fallout of this has been...less than stellar, including dancers that are actual combat threats instead of just support, flying and cav units being pushed further and further up, and infantry now essentially mirroring early Gen armor units with their disgusting 173BST totals.  Honestly, it is a lot, and for people who spent to make early game favorites work, they're probably falling off the meta pretty hard.

Here's the thing, though.  It's really not all bad.  Armor units dominated the metagame, and a huge part of that was simply the BST they carried.  180 is obscene when the next best thing is around 158, maybe 163 if you're really lucky.  It's a massive improvement over every other unit in the game.  Now, I do think that a defensive unit should have higher stats than an offensive one.  A defensive unit naturally requires more stats to be good to function; you can't exactly wall out without great defenses, but offense has to be able to potentially muscle past so you need the offensive presence to threaten back, and if you're too slow then the damage output is eternally stacked against you.  Offensive units really only need attack and speed.

To a degree, I kinda like the current meta better than when I started.  Maybe that's because I have units that can compete, but I feel like it's very rare now that I run into a situation where I absolutely cannot break past a defensive wall, and hyper-offensive teams just need debuffs and speed control, which is what I tend to emphasize anyway.  Things feel like they've shifted from "Everyone runs armor all the time, and all you do is turtle up and never take damage while DC/Bold or Wary Fighter and Aether do the work for you."  It's still a good strategy, but it's breakable now, and other strategies are just as effective.  Legendary Alm is all over Arena every time it's Earth season, but as scary as he is and as carefully as you have to play around him, he's beatable with all the dance support that exists.  Units like Sothis are terrifying and some of my least favorite to face, but she's super weak to Chill Speed, which is now a sacred seal.  And with the significant increases to flying and cavalry units' BST, I expect they're going to start making a serious comeback as well.  Which is good!  Variety is important in games, and I feel like Arena has gotten more and more interesting as time goes on.  Sure, L!Azura dominates every form of play because they forgot one extra movement space for flying and infantry units is obscene, and that giving a potential +7 to all stats was the stupidest thing they could do, but hey, something has to dominate the game. The biggest complaint against powercreep, and the argument with the most legitimacy, is simply that early game units are falling completely out of favor.  We all know a solid 60-70% of all Gen 1 5* units should've demoted.  Their stats aren't well aligned, they have absolutely terrible skillsets, and some of them are completely irredeemable even with their refines (Luke).  This poses a problem.  Those units can still be good, but only if you get them fully merged, and even then they're not as effective as newer units who could do the same thing.  A +10 Lucina still wouldn't perform as well as a +0 Brave Alm, for instance.  And that's a problem.  That's a big, stinky problem, and the solution is...half-assed, to say the least.

The attempt was Dragonflowers.  When introduced, they were given to all units, but infantry units only could get up to +10 dragonflower uses.  Which is okay.  It's a flat boost to all stats, which isn't terrible, but isn't the same as keeping pace with the heavily min-maxed meta we know today.  Really, all it did was let BST keep pace, without accounting for combat performance, allocation of those stats, and the fact that weapon effects went from a sentence or two to a paragraph to a novella.  Flat boosts just don't quite cut it, and weapon refines are helpful, but not to those who got early refines that just aren't good (ie, Takumi).  Worse, Dragonflowers were introduced with Gen 3 BST, which made the quantity of dragonflowers units could have sensible.  Infantry units got the highest buff, so old infantry units get the most dragonflower uses.  But, other movement types also got the BST increase, so they were outdated immediately (Thea has 5 more points than Clair, and yet they receive the same number of dragonflowers), and now with Gen 4 they're even further behind.

Essentially, the problem isn't that powercreep exists, it's that older units are not being given the tools to compete.  I think what the game needs is a major update whose sole focus is on early game units being given across the board buffs.  5 extra points, allocated intelligently, to all Gen 1 units could even be sufficient.  Some of the early refines getting a boost would help the 5* locked units continue to be worth existing in that pool.  And perhaps most importantly, Dragonflowers need to be a lot easier to obtain.  If those are going to be your balancing mechanic, you can't demand players excel at Aether Raids for 6 months just to make one (1) unit keep up.  Dragonflowers aren't orbs, they're not something we pay real money to obtain, so there is absolutely no reason to treat them as such a rare commodity (same with Grails, frankly).  Also, if you really want to go in a good direction with this, let players decide where Dragonflowers go.  Sure, you can have 5 uses of dragonflowers, each stat increasing up to 4 points.  Players get to customize their unit how they'd like.  Instead of a flat +2 across the board for, say, Karla, maybe you allocate her 10 by putting 4 in speed, 4 in defense, and 2 in HP so she can be a better duelist.  Maybe you like Desperation builds and go 4 speed, 4 attack, and 2 defense.  Maybe you did that weird wall Karla build with Pavise and Shield Pulse, so you allocate 4 defense, 4 Res, and 2 HP.  That...honestly feels like a much better use of these resources than a flat boost that doesn't really help combat potential, gives players more control over how to build their units, and offers greater variety because two players using the same unit are unlikely to build the exact same way.

There are plenty of ways to fix the actual issues inherent within the constant powercreep.  The problem is, IS likely won't do them.  Overhauling early refines means focusing on units they already consider complete, and because the profits are in the new units advancing the whale meta, they're unlikely to care if older units the rest of the playerbase use can compete.  Hell, it's almost better if they don't.  And overhauling dragonflowers would be a massive cluster at this point, having to create a way for players to essentially "redo" all the allocations u to this point.  Not to mention, their bizarre miser status when it comes to every form of basic resource in this game, even ones that have exactly no attachment to their profits.  You'd have to completely shift their focus to be more generous, which honestly is going to be like pulling teeth.

But at the end of the day, I don't worry about it too much.  Because the only PvP that exists are Arena and Aether Raids, neither of which are particularly scary.  Arena's frustrating until you have finished merge projects, but once your core is done, it's really not so bad.  Aether Raids sucks until you hit Tier 21, but then it's really not too difficult to maintain in that tier, especially if you have a Mythic that prevents some Lift loss.  A single perfect win with the doubler active is enough to cover an entire week in some cases.  And in-game content?  The recent Abyssals like Julia and Roy haven't been any harder than older Abyssals like Grima and Tiki.  Hell, Tiki's was harder in my mind.  So yes, powercreep sucks, and its constant advancement as time goes on can definitely feel like your well-trained and cared for Delcatty has to keep going against an Action Replayed Mega Salamence that can hold Choice Band.  But the good news is that AI doesn't change, and once you get use to that, yeah it looks scary, but for some reason they hacked Mega Salamence to know Bulk Up and locked themselves into only using that move, so really, it's not that bad.

Except for the +10 L!Azura/+10 L!Alm combos.  That's like walking into NU with a Mega Rayquaza.