Is Honkai: Star Rail Power Creeping Too Much?

H Kai sto has completed one full version cycle celebrating this occasion with the release of 2.0 and the hotly anticipated world of pentacon the next area for the main story line bringing with it a Fantastical atmosphere new settings and lots of new characters to No Doubt entice the players into saving up for of which the first two made available to us are Black Swan and Sparkle two very interesting characters in their own right now a point of discussion that star war players have brought up throughout version one despite it being far too soon to tell is whether this game is advancing his power scaling at a faster Pace than gin compounded by the more simplistic almost binary elements to his gameplay making it more likely for market share to be contested between units and the question of power creep appears to be more probable for this game today I want to bring that discussion to light as well as address whether honai staro is or isn't power creeping by presenting Arguments for either side let's begin by going over the causality behind this sentiment gacha games are notorious for power creeping more than most other genres as a result of its monetization system the more practical value a character has the more incentive they have to be sought after thus increasing sales so gacha developers have a financial motive to play into to power creep since if units are weaker than a player's existing units there's not much of a reason to pull for them the other aspect that drives power creep is of course the necessity of pulling for them genin's allowed to make do with serviceable characters on account of there being almost no semblance of difficulty whatsoever releasing only maybe one two maximum of three metad defining units per version while everyone else is seen as optional in terms of absolute value if you have characters like alh nahita net Neu Etc you can very easily skip every other Banner since those units effortlessly clear the entire game handcuffed and blindfolded for the sake of giving you something to visualize the cuto off point for genin is more lenient than staro we can say top 70 percentile is considered meta arbitrarily speaking star's no Fire Emblem heroes or Final Fantasy Brave exus where the next Banner is twice as powerful as the one they came before but they do set off the radar a bit more conspicuously than ginin with the absence of meaningful extrinsic sources of damage in Stars such as Elemental reactions inflating your DPS most of your performance Ines on the characters themselves resulting in each one's individual output playing a bigger part in determining whether you can pass or fail the game's content speaking of content while ginin has only spiral Abyss to fall back on and even then it's only really FL 12 starl has three types of endgame content memory of chaos Stars equivalent of spiral Abyss fear fiction a wave battle Gauntlet that challenges your ability to clear as many enemies as possible in a set number of turns and finally swor disaster a Rog like dungeon called G mod that has you accumulate Buffs and items to face off against increasingly difficult opponents though none of these modes are stifling enough to be uncompletable by free-to-play players one thing is for certain the ceiling of hongkai stars and game difficulty reaches measurably higher than ginin both in scope and diversity you not only have to build units that can rush through bosses quickly but you have to build units who can wave clear units who can sustain themselves in Long protracted fights and so on team building is of Greater Import in Star rail as players need to optimize their party slots skill points and rotations to ensure comfortable clear while paying attention to the changes in each endgame area since Brute Force isn't as viable of a strategy compared to genion naturally players are more inclined to keep tabs on new characters and what they have to offer that are conducive to a more efficient clear because the game itself demands it the first units released in aacha determin the relative Benchmark of power scaling not necessarily the objective Benchmark but a reference point on where to start in version 1.0 the first two event banners featured Zilla and genuine establishing the Baseline of what to expect from a five star damage dealer shortly after we were introduced with the couple supports silver wolf and laa doing the same for their respective Fields you'll notice however that every first character of their type was conclusively the best in that field or damn near close to it lcha was magnitud is more effective than b or Natasha CER made yanin and Don Hong look like three stars in comparison chingu and Crush Teo sural and Hera in performance silverwolf doesn't really count as she was the first of her kind unless you want to compare to wel which I personally wouldn't continuing on we were given kovka the centerpiece of any team specializing in damage over time than blade who was easily the best destruction unit at the time he came out which didn't last very long typically the first year so of aacha service prioritizes rounding out all the different classes and while STL certainly did that their method of approach was pretty Cavalier Frankly Speaking they did follow suit by introducing a tank option for players healing option buffer debuffer damage dealer but what they also did was make each of those options significantly better than what was available at the time a nice gesture mind you but they progressed very quickly around 1.3s when I would say comments pertaining to power creep began to surface Fan's release was a tempestuous one a tank with persistent cover self- sustenance party healing and even some Buffs made her look extremely overloaded then came lunai Dan hung who is even stronger than blade then in version four we had Jing Leo who was essentially LUN D hung but easier to play and use then in 1.5 we had our genti the strongest AER addition unit to date and then huahua who alongside providing no shortage of healing can passively dis spel boost your DPS and Battery your entire team making a solid case for her outstripping lcha as a Healer 1.6 took things a step further by introducing Dr Rao outclassing cila in single Target combat although you'd be hard pressed to call CA a single Target specialist as I find her being more of an a addition unit at this point with the sleeping ability back on topic though rme the first widely accessible Harmony character and what a character she is up until that point many consider bronia to be the best support in the game by leads and bounce and potentially even the best character in the game ren May became the first character to challenge that position something no one else has come close to doing outside of maybe fwen version 2.0's first entrance Black Swan and Sparkle add to this conjecture by pressing the support ceiling to new heights and lengths though she's in a very Niche category Black Swan has heavily Amplified the capabilities of do teams pushing kfka on the same level of strength as the game's best characters when even on her own she already made for Assa Rog St straty in addition Swan basically has star's equivalent of gin's F this inventor of four-piece bonus with E1 like almost an exact 1 to1 copy and finally Sparkle Sparkle is what compelled me to make this video in the first place actually remember when I said that bro is in contention for the best character in the game the reason for that is a sheer amplification and up until now unique function she can increase the damage dealt from an ally by staggering 66% increase the attack of her entire team by 55% and crit damage equal to 16% of her own plus the flat 20% Which when decently built is around the ballpark of 50% total crit damage while those Buffs are indeed impressive it's her turn refresh that cens her has the best support forfeiting her own action to give another party member the chance to act again allowing for a myriad of options from effectively doubling the DPS of your carry to saving your team from certain death by having the tank or healer act before the enemy unleashes A Massive Attack to squeezing out that last bit of energy a teammate needs so you can unleash a massive combo the amount of use cases for a turn refresh is too numerous to mention that's what makes it so powerful while inevitably was going to be succeeded by someone down the line I wasn't expecting it to happen so soon Sparkle has a similar property where she gives bonus crit damage based on a portion of her own plus a flat amount in exchange for giving more crit damage she only affords it to one target but when sufficiently built you could potentially give more than 100% bonus crit damage to a single Ally and she also advances at teammate's action by 50% despite appearing to be only half as good as a full turn advance in practice they're almost essentially the same as for the rest of her skills they literally break open the constraints of star's gameplay while present in battle the max number of SP increases to seven and Sparkle gives bonus damage to her entire team each time a skill point is consumed up to a cap of 18% at Rank 10 Furthermore with her ultimate she instantly recovers 4 SP for the team and amplifies her Town's damage amp from 6% per stack to 16 for a total of 48% damage think about this for a moment since the beginning of starl one of the core facets of it combat is sp conservation the more SP efficient units are the better it's why fuen laa and rme are so valuable because they only need one SP every week turns if that sparkle throws that entire notion on its head encouraging you to spend SP not conserve it by giving you more than most parties know what to do with and that's in tandem with a massive amount of crit damage and total damage it wouldn't be a stretch to say sparkle is the strongest character in the game she gives just as much offensive capability to or carry if not more than the likes of Ron and ren on top of shattering the limitations imposed On You by increasing the max amount of SP you can work with and refilling your supply extremely easily unlike genin whose characters are limited by cooldowns star is limited by energy costs and skill points of which the lad is alleviated by Sparkle given everything I said so far it's entirely possible that starl is indeed witnessing power creep possibly more than is needed or even healthy for the game not only are new units coming out who can achieve Greater Heights than their predecessors but they can also do it more consistently for Less investment and more easily Ching Leo packs the same kind of DPS unai Dan Hong can dis out but without the hassle of SB management Ren makers tons of Buffs just by existing you don't have to worry about turn management or timing or anything just turn your brain off and she works we are at a point where barring a select few character most version one units are either barely holding on to am of relevance or have been shocked out for players who lack every five start in the game they might still use characters like suang cha Natasha and whatnot but if they had all the five stars they likely would not be using them starl version one units are not at the same level as genin's power five that's for sure and many of its five stars are also struggling to keep up with this progression another argument in favor of power creep is the comparatively more binary nature of star combat like I mentioned earlier with this turn-based gameplay there's less room for mechanical expression and combo creativity than than that of a real-time action RPG as such combat and starl is all about numbers and turn order making it significantly easier to achieve the maximum output of a unit whereas trying to achieve maximum results in ginin is much more inconsistent due to a lot more moving parts and fluctuating aspects that can change at a moment's notice you may have gotten the wrong reaction you might have accidentally bursted after your character's buff War off enemies flew away from where you wanted them to be things of that nature in starl simulations and calculations are more applicable because you can consistently replicate them in practice with this in mind every unit has set value and contributions with the only difference coming down to what Elemental weaknesses the enemies have and how many enemies there are continuing on with that Ren BR tingyun Pala silverwolf Etc can all be graded on the same basis how much they add to your team's overall DPS likewise for carries how much damage they can do the Jingo and Dr Rio are different paths they can be directly weighed against each other in single Target multi-target Etc the BR and zwolf specialized in buffing and debuffing respectively ultimately it comes down to how much damage they let their carries do per turn beyond the scope of units light cones are also something to make note of it's very apparent that light cones are growing in strength comparing early light cones to Future ones the difference is staggering as a quick example BR signature weapon gives 10% energy and recovers 1 SP every other cast of the us as ultimate on top of giving 30% more damage to the next allly when using your skill not too bad until you look at Sparkles it grants 32% crit damage to herself which remember she can disperse among the rest of her team and passively grants all allies 10% crit rate and 28% crit damage for basically the entirety of battle thanks to a generous activation and maintenance cost aside from the SP recovery br's light cone is just totally outclassed by Sparkles there's a lot of evidence supporting that indeed starl is power creeping the game's environment makes it easier for characters to overshadow one another while characters themselves are ostensibly one uping each other moreover many of these units feel like one size fits all characters who can work for any party and any team increasing the likelihood of a monopoly it doesn't paint a very friendly picture given there's a lot of endgame content pressuring the need for these allpurpose units to too but what are some possible factors that suggest starl isn't power creeping for one ironically Sparkle a character that got majorly buffed from audition is blade who following his release has been overshadowed by other damage dealers however he's one of the best carriers to use the sparkle elevating his position in the meta not just her but also Black Swan like I said kafka's always been a decent unit but in each play style and need for a completely separate team to be built has in my opinion been holding her back at least compared to more straightforward damage dealers black spawn has added more incentive to build the kka team and the two nil momies are a fine pair at that one way to increase the power scaling of a game while minimizing the effects of power creep is through inclusivity Power creep is defined as a situation where successive updates or expansions to a game introduce more powerful units or abilities leaving the older ones underpowered it's that last part leaving the older ones underpower that makes all the difference it's true there are units who have lost a lot of market share very quickly I might add then again several units have been given a second opportunity the Advent of pure fiction breathed new life into Edition substantially increasing the usability ility of characters like Kimo sural and Hera and while STL is introducing many sari knives they're releasing an equal amount of Niche units toath and Black Swan to name a few consequently a number of existing units are getting retroactively buffed so while yes the game is increasing in power they're doing so in a way that allows many of them to benefit from it the wide selection of endgame content also does a good job keeping things under control if it were just memory of chaos then power creep would be a far bigger issue but swarm disasters many pths make it easier for Less popular units to have their 5 Seconds Of Fame chief of all pure fiction presents an entirely different game mod with entirely different wi conditions creating more scenarios for units with unconventional strengths to excel rounding this all up is the very essence of turnbas games itself since everything ultimately comes down to numbers it prevents units from overstepping boundaries in a vacuum argente might be stronger than heo but if they make the next pure fiction or a mosa cater towards Fire Element units then his advantage over her holds no water because there's only so much he can do in a single turn it's not that he's so much stronger than heot to where he can ignore everything and just Brute Force so so they can level the playing field through circumstances too even if it is artificial and temporary as it stands My overall conclusion of the video's title is this starl is power creeping undeniably faster than ginin but it's currently manageable it is still within a reasonable speed to where older units can keep up the difficulty of the game is still lenient enough for even average units to be viable even if alternatives are more efficient all the same they're skirting a fine line with how ambitious they're being with every new unit if they're not careful it could escalate out of control so it would benefit them to be prudent and keep a close side on every character they release in version 2 but what about you guys which side are you want do you think star's power creeping too fast for your comfort or are you currently okay with how things are let me know in the comments down below that's going to be it for today so if you enjoyed the video it would be great if you could leave a like And subscribe don't forget to follow me on Twitter at bars join my Discord server and check out my other H pestar discussions if you haven't yet but till next time thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon take care 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Channel: Vars II

Views: 88,293

Keywords: genshin, genshin impact, vars genshin impact, genshin why no one plays, mihoyo, hoyoverse, honkai star rail, star rail, honkai star rail why no one plays, why no one plays honkai star rail, honkai star rail version 2.0, honkai star rail 2.1, honkai star rail power creep, honkai star rail sparkle, honkai star rail bronya, sparkle vs bronya, star rail power creep, star rail characters, star rail discussion, star rail black swan, star rail acheron, star rail adventurine

Id: Ir4iOFaMNpI

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 02 2024