Honkai: Star Rail and Power Creep

H hold my beer anai star's power creep isn't that bad sort of at least not as much as people might think power creep describes a situation where new characters outperform older characters thus rendering the latter underpowered I pulled this from the wiki because no matter how I Define it I know someone's going to call me an idiot I thought this would be an interesting topic to explore since I in addition to many others feel like some of my favorite older units seem to be falling behind so I set off to develop the closest thing to an objective comparison as I could using units that share similar spaces for the purposes of this video we'll only be discussing limited units at e z and ignoring light cones as The Limited units tend to be one of the bigger focal points of a patch and light cones are tailor made for their respective characters so there isn't much in the way of significant overlap I'm also opting to neglect the four-star units as I don't really believe they're meant to compete with the five star ones with the exception of a few special cases also this video is long my Tik Tok attention span won't last the first pair that came to mind was Jin Yen and Kafka despite being different paths both of them share the same element and attack multiple targets seems like an easy comparison to make just throw them both in a spreadsheet and watches their respective Mains rip me a new come on don't mess turns out it's more complicated than that jingan is often played as a hyper carry so the other units you choose to bring typically Elevate him to King Yen status Kafka on the other hand is really more like a support unit that enables other units to disrespect your enemies while also bringing her own war crimes to the table this basically turns the comparison into Jing Yun versus the Kafka crew okay no big deal just compare best team to best team well now we're looking at different levels of different kinds of investment best team given how many poles how many five star characters are we looking at how many five star lyes what about the enemies were hitting how many targets how fast are they do they have crowd control needless to say but I'll say it anyway it's kind of hard to make a fair objective comparison so let's make unfair subjective ones the easiest path to poke at is destruction looking at limited units we first had blade blade is pretty cool Daniel does it better I'll be it with more effort Don hung and by balun is pretty cool Jing Does It Better i'llbe it with less effort Jing is pretty cool acaron Does It Better albeit with some restrictions and she's not even a destruction unit I guess she's lost again so surely it can't be as simple as bigger number equals bigger better it's not blad's damage varies depending on how frequent his attacks are how frequently enemies hit him and how frequently allies hit him even to ignoring his damage variance he has other strengths in that he doesn't die no matter how much he wants to he does respectable damage and is often times not at significant risk of falling in combat assuming you've geared him relatively well while his solo sustainability is something to be praised it's also somewhat useless after a while when I was but a star fledgling I remember getting star railed a lot memory of chaos was kind of rough and my healers weren't geared enough to keep me erect so I pulled for blade a Man Too angry to die being almost entirely self-sustaining and only slightly SP negative helped to relieve a lot of the pressure on my undergeared and overworked Natasha while this was valuable to me at the time that time only lasted for about a week or two after having properly invested in my sustained units I found the need for blad's personal thickness to be less valuable the supporting units you bring for him don't generally have the same durability he does and because enemies seem to have a raging hard on for plowing Fox girls you usually need to bring a sustain anyway when you think of it like that continuing always getting pressed makes a lot more sense since you have to bring a Healer or a shielder the value in his own self- sustainability becomes somewhat redundant after that all he really has is ease of use and damage the former of which I'll get to later and the latter of which might be a little underwhelming for your Jing Mains moving down the list Don hung in B Luna does a lot of damage at the cost of all your skill points this contrasts greatly with blade as blad's lower damage ceiling is balanced by his more comfortable SP economy and his inherent ability to alleviate healer pressure or make it worse if you want to make the same compromise with the cooler Daniel he loses much more damage which is obviously not ideal as it's the primary reason you'd slot them into your party after you've had enough time to build your units this is generally not problematic since your units will be taking less damage and doing more damage leading to sustains putting in less work and fights ending more quickly but if we look at the situation posed earlier where your level of investment isn't as complete you may find you're using dhong to generate skill points for your sustainers instead a stronger case can be made for blade if this game only utilize one character in a fight making Blade's overwhelming growth much more valuable compared to Don hung's glass Canon nature but this is a team building game so as always it's not that simple while Dan the man has an undoubtedly higher damage dealing than blade his SP hungry damage restricts your team building leaving some fairly powerful supports out of the question blades EAS of use allows you to pair him with almost anyone you want including support units with very strong Buffs that crave skill points like I crave emotional support or even other DPS whether trading the damage ceiling for the flexibility is worth it is really up to the player but on the topic of those other DPS let's talk about jingl analyzing the pattern we can clearly see big trauma equals big damage jingl is similar to blade in Sp economy only consuming two points every five turns or so but her damage Rivals Don hungs this throws a few things out of the window regarding blel Dade Dandy where was ease of use versus damage but you can't have both until now when blade looks to do damage he punches himself in the face when jingler looks to do damage she punches everyone in the face if that's not power creep I don't know what is while Jing does drain everyone's Health it's a pretty negligible amount and nothing your average healer or fushan can handle making this a non-issue usually instead Jing's weakness comes in the form of downtime her Baseline damage is nothing to write home about however after two uses of her skill she enters her spectral trans migration state which offers massive Buffs to her numbers this state lasts for two turns and can be extended with the use of her ultimate so you get three turns to bend your enemies over her table and hump them into submission of five turns three mean pain basic math says it's two turns of downtime in practice most of the time this means very little there are often situations where you can end a wave quickly enough before the cycle rolls over which effectively saves you that cycle however there are instances where you might not at the right damage threshold to pull off this ideal timing which could end up costing you several turns to gain enough momentum in order to enter your damage window again whereas Don hung and blade have relatively consistent output but looking again at Jing's SP economy her low pressure on your skill points means you can pair her with some pretty strong supports like bro which helps in minimizing your transmigration State downtime with a little bit of speed tuning so what we're seeing right now is Don hung levels of damage with ease of use near to that of blades and finally up to this date and excluding leaks we have acaron Arron's only weakness is forgetting where the hotel lobby is all these hallways really look the same to me on a serious note her partner compositions tend to be a little more restricting as her Ascension passive incentivizes you to run her with two nil units for an additional damage multiplier and she doesn't synergize very well with some other good supports due to her unique energy mechanic optimally she's also sp- negative consuming one skill point per turn to her benefit the ideal teammates you'd be using with her can be played almost fully SP positive meaning this is basically not an issue on top of this her damage is crazy and her ultimate which can see pretty frequent use if you have Speedy teammates breaks enemy toughness regardless of weakness type we've been talking a lot about DPS up to this point let's consider other roles sustainers are pretty important unless you're one of those no sustain zero cycle Psychopaths we have laa a strong healer that can be played fully SP positive Wu a strong healer who is sp neutral but brings an attack buff and restores energy fushan a generally SP positive unit that provides heavy party mitigation and trickle healing to counter the inevitable chip damage your party takes and most recently aventurine A near fully SP positive strong shielder who I honestly don't want to look at because I lose all my 50/50s laa is the only sustain among our other limited options that can dispel enemy Buffs in his kit he also has a free heal that triggers when an ally Falls below a certain Health threshold which comes with a built-in cleanse WWA provides a good attack buff party wide cleanses and energy but her SP neutral kit assuming you want follow-up time does impose some team building restrictions she also has very little in the way of reactive healing meaning really fast enemies can potentially knock someone out before you have the opportunity to scrape them off the FL yourself fusan brings a crit rate and Max HP buff to the divining table on top of crowd control immunity per skill use but she takes damage in Li of your party so heavy AOE damage which is common in higher levels of simulated universe's swarm disaster and golden gears can often kill her in one hit your party may still be alive but not for long she can also struggle against frequent ship damage if a fight drags on for long enough if you've used her against Sam or adventuring you might have felt this already and speaking of aventurine I don't really have anything bad to say about him he's a tank but he does damage through follow-up attacks shielded units are given 50% effect resistance has party wide Shields that can sack on top of themselves and his ultimate debuffs an enemy making them take more crit damage for a gambler he's probably the safest bet anyone could make his only weakness isn't unique to him as with all other shielders with the exception of E6 March 7th if you're caught with your pants down any damage you take can't be healed back I've seen some adventuring hars claim he power creeps Fen a unit who is thought to be relatively safe from Power creep and while I don't necessarily fully agree that aventurine dethrones her in every situation I I can certainly see why people can feel this way given how loaded his dice are sure he can Shield but I bet he can't do this help someone help me on to buffers and debuffers those being Harmony and most nihility units there isn't very much to say about nihility we have two damage overtime units in the form of Black Swan and kofka and while they're both dot focused you ideally run them together since Kafka enables Swan to do CAW levels of damage our only other limited nihility unit is silverwolf whose Niche is implanting weaknesses massive defense shredding and consistent debuffing the only unit who compares to her in this regard is Pala the only four-star unit I'll be talking about since she's kind of the goat she lacks the Deo frequency and variety but her defense shred can hit every enemy with good uptime making her even preferable to silver wolf in a fair number of situations and no acaron is not really an nihility unit in terms of Kit design she's really closer to what you'd get if you stuck the hunt and the air addition pads in a room and said they weren't allowed to leave until they breed unless you count instant death as a debuff in regards to Harmony units they are all very good BR a non-limited Harmony unit still holds up very well even after year into this game's life cycle hoyo even went as far as to design another smaller sassy or bronia that functions in largely the same way providing damage B and action Advanced mechanics but with the added benefit of being SP positive it seems like a pretty Apples to Apples comparison where Sparkle just looks better but this won't always be the case br's Buffs are stronger than Sparkles for some units but at the cost of more SP and lower uptime Sparkles consistency can average out your damage to be about the same or stronger than what brho provides while this is good in some situations it's not always preferable having a stronger buff can sometimes mean the difference between clearing within the allotted cycle constraints and wasting a cycle for an additional attack or two however the consistent Buffs may be better as fights draw on for longer in addition to this we have their respective action forward mechanics in either case you choose your unit with the biggest baseball bat and they cut ahead in line br's action advances 100% while Sparkles is 50 in practice this often equates to being the same thing as in the majority of cases 50% action Advance can be enough to get your character to act next or close to next anyway however there are some situations where it's less than ideal as you occasionally find Sparkle's action Advance doesn't drag you up far enough before the cycle ends or before you can break or interrupt an enemy mechanic now we have Ron May and Robin who recently made her debut both of them buff the entire team greatly benefiting dual DPS compositions Ron ma kit provides break efficiency break effect damage % resistance penetration and even a modest speed boost Robin has some overlap in that she provides a damage percent buff but after that she brings attack Buffs a full party action Advance a crit damage buff and she even contributes good damage with coordinated attacks of her own while both units lend themselves to buffing their teams they do so in different ways Ron May being the preferable pick for teams that Focus Unbreaking and Dot damage and Robin being ideal for units that can crit even more so for follow-up attackers made obvious by the nature of her coordinated attacks and this passive that says buff follow-up attackers so while our supporting units seem to be pretty safe for now our DPS are a little more debatable in terms of power creep in this case what is a player to do rip your wallet open and pull everybody dwe needs a new pair of shoes after all new DPS are better on average so you only stand to gain from this or do you consider the progression path of not only the average player but also the game at Star rails launch our first limited unit was Zilla of the hunt path assuming you pulled for her you also have a few units provided for free and no one built you have resources to farm and characters to work on from a fairness standpoint it wouldn't be very pogers of hoyo to throw a boss like aventurine a gacha addict that summons indestructible ads at another gacha addict who just wants to flex the zala a unit whose strength comes from picking off smaller enemies to gain extra turns it would also be kind of rude of hoyo to introduce enemies back then with stats they have right now your builds are time gated behind trailblaze power and it would be incredibly difficult to push this kind of damage on the resources available to us in the first few months of the game however it'd be a pretty lame gaming experience if your characters continued to grow while combat content stayed the same you'd be steamrolling things and nothing would be challenging which would be a terrible shame for a game where one of the primary gameplay elements is turn based combat so as players acquire in aend new characters unlock access to stronger team synergies level traces and improve relics h Al gives enemies stat bumps over time to keep combat engaging while these stat bumps can make some characters feel like they've fallen off the relevance chart I'm sure part of that feeling is due to players no longer investing in those units probably because they've pulled newer units and have switched their build priorities around for example I treated my Jingo much better than I treated my Zilla I've also seen some particularly dedicated Zeal Mains do more damage than my Jing does that's not to say there is no power creep at play here and I'm not saying your builds are trash if you're feeling your favorite units are powercraft I'm also not saying they're not trash I don't know you and I won't pretend to but there are a number of things to consider including the content you're up against I've seen some zeas slap something silly but that's assuming you can Slaughter against stuff that sides with their strengths zala's damage suffers greatly if you can't take advantage of a Resurgence procs now we transition over to characters and their ease of use I won't argue that newer units like Acron and Jingo aren't a generally smoother experience than piloting Zilla because I'd lose but I will say that you may notice shifts in how hoyo designs enemies when enemies were weaker it was easy to get zala's Resurgence procs in memory of chaos after so many enemy Buffs it can be difficult to reliably push the same kinds of consistency you did before oddly enough you may find using zeala in pure fiction to be kind of good since everything in there that isn't the elite enemy is Bully bait and dies with fairly little effort it might not be as SP efficient as bringing an air addition unit but you can consistently pick off things one by one and turn her into a pseudo AOE character with the new apocalyptic Shadow mode coming out Zea might have a new playground to disappear among the Sea of butterflies in some of you may have been brute forcing your way through content with Jingo ever since her debut you might also be noticing it's not going as smoothly as it used to be with the addition of pentacon we find that sweet dreams are made of memes the shell of faded rage takes severely reduced damage when their toughness isn't broken and they're not weak to ice forcing you to bring either silver wolf for the weakness imp PL or swap Jingo out for a more favorable match up if you're looking to clear in a timely manner even adventuring a boss that does have ice and weakness might not feel great for Jingo Mains as his gambling mechanic removes him from the field substituting his D in instead Jingo can hit three of the four in her transmigration States but ironically enough the die can't die so doing 300K versus doing 3K doesn't really matter as long as you're cleaving more of them to increase your odds of not getting rained on while winning the BET does fill your energy effectively gaining you another turn in her enhanced State sometimes your buffed window ends on that hit and your damage falls off before you get your energy refund I'm not saying Jing low is useless for fights like this but I wouldn't call it an ideal matchup it seems like a crazy thought but I wouldn't be surprised if Akron found herself against some tough competition someday how spooky that being said mihoyo has a lot of different things to consider I've posed the situation from the perspective of a player that started when the game launched what about new players new players have the problems veterans had at one point with the addition of inflated stat pools they obviously don't have the same level of investment as a star rail Boomers but mihoyo doesn't want them to have an emasculating experience just because they started later one solution to this is equilibrium levels which helps players feel like they're progressing through the world and story at a reasonable difficulty but this this doesn't impact endgame content like memory of chaos and pure fiction to address this hoyu can raise the damage floors and therefore ceilings of their newly released characters this means players can do relevant damage with less investment which gives them the freedom to build other units to help even out their roster this solution brings us back to the initial problem power creep conveniently enough this is addressed by the final situation I'd like to discuss what about new players that pull for older characters I'm kidding mihoyo's developments to the game often not so subtly retroactively and indirectly buff older units the most prominent example that comes to mind is jingen being the first Limited air addition unit he set the standard for what you can expect air addition units to do and then he was promptly dominated by kfka however with the release of the ash blazing Grand Duke set his damage sealing grew fairly significantly since then we've seen the addition of pure fiction a game mode that plays to the strength of AE Focus units and Sparkle our favorite little terrorist Gremlin while Sparkle and bronia have significant kit overlap Sparkle's Buffs last until the beginning of her Target's next turn whereas Bron's ends when her Target is finished as a result Sparkle can keep jingyun buffed while his lightning Lord slays with his lightning sword Jin Yen isn't the only winner in this case low accurate racism in mind Sparkle shows favoritism towards Quantum oriented teams providing them an extra attack buff depending on the number of quantum units you want to drag along that's a crappy action Advance joke this is good for zela stands raising her potential damage and making her feel much more consistent and keeping up with the Enemy Buffs we've been seeing now's a good time to remind you of the upcoming apocalyptic Shadow mode meant to make hunt unit shine and speaking of shine back to Sparkle she also works very well for blade blade doesn't need the skill points that sparkle provides but BR does blade is one of the few characters that's so easy on your SP economy that running BR and Sparkle together is not only viable but strong for every BR action you get a Blade action and for for every Sparkle action you get another Blade action because blade is being dragged Every Which Way his speed is no longer relevant allowing you to run HP boots to increase his damage per turn since he's getting so many more actions he can more consistently proc his follow-up attacks on top of generate energy faster for more frequent ultimates Don hung and bber Del Lun is another winner netting himself a strong buffer that's also a solution to his SP gobling kit with the release of Robin in her album an argument could be made that she's stepping on rme's toes but we also have Harmony Trailblazer in the very same patch who enables the super Brak mechanic super break is more or less what it sounds like break but powercraft when enemies are weakness broken you get another instance of damage when you hit them meaning you're incentivized to break enemies faster and keep them broken for longer both of which run Bay enables while the scope of this video is meant to Target limited festar units these updates also affect our non-limited ones too Sparkle's buff works for units like Clara in the same way they benefit Jing Yen a strong Shield or like Avent helps immensely with Ying's Talent consistency you could even argue Ron M and akron's release indirectly Buffs welt making him a pretty effective pseudo sustain option against some enemies himo sees the light of day with pure fiction and Bou let's talk about fomo or the fear of missing out mihoyo bends their end-game combat content around the shiny new character and that makes sense for a few reasons first they want to make money if a new character is strong people will feel incentivized to spend their hard-earned Jades on them as a player if you pull for a unit you want that unit to feel like it was worth it it's not very often a person will gladly pull for a character that feels like a strict downgrade to their other options this is bad for people susceptible to fomo if you're the type of person that wants to clear the endgame challenges but you also only want to pull for your favorites you might feel kind of bad if you find yourself struggling mioya wants to take advantage of you when you're at your weakest don't let them win they may seem sting but they're also surprisingly fair if you cope a little bit star rail is a turn-based game if you want to win but don't want to pull for characters you don't resonate with take your time and come up with a strategy miyu plans for you to pull frequently and they know the systems they put in place to slow your sent to Greatness that's why you get about 6 weeks to clear each iteration of memory of chaos or pure fiction if you can't do it with what you have built check to see what others did either through the in-game function or from third party sources use the time you have to build other characters and broaden your options different combinations of weird things may work surprisingly well I believe in you it says so right here in the script I wrote finally coming full circle it's important to remember the wiki definition of power creep we used earlier new units are designed to look good so they sell but are older units really underpowered this may be the case if you're pinning them against content they weren't designed for you wouldn't judge a turtle based on its ability to climb a tree or maybe you would I don't know you but despite my arguments I do believe power creep exists versatility and ease of use are important factors and even characters in a vacuum cuz this game's a space comedy do feel like they're getting stronger on average I don't think it's really as severe as some people might think nor is it as simple as characters being strictly better than their predecessors but I wouldn't go as cars to say any limited festar unit is unusable at least as of the making of this video things could certainly change down the line as more and more units release and vacant spaces become less vacant mioya will have to combat this with creativity making new mechanics or synergies to keep units from breathing each other's air this keeps content fresh and players engaged incentivizing creative thinking and experimenting with units you may not otherwise consider at the end of the day the biggest power creep is me after I've had my protein bar and a huge thank you to my channel members yeeha uncore Lazarus valan and Crystal formerly known as Starlite a bright name either way all that talk about power creep had me feeling like I should reverse power creep the segment I have nothing creative to say here balls

Channel: ALittleSIMPle

Views: 174,229

Keywords: analysis, honkai, star, rail, power, creep, powercreep, does, have, aventurine, fu xuan, acheron, seele, power crept, crept, powercrept, sparkle, bronya, jingliu, dan heng, dan heng il, imbibitor lunae, silver wolf, kafka, black swan, blade, huohuo, huo, apocalyptic, shadow, pure, fiction, memory, of, chaos

Id: tm9-dOy9UyE

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2024