Will the new CP system cause Power Creep?

merpins · January 2021

We've seen it in armor to some extent. As new armor is released, ZoS has done a decent job balancing it with other armors, rebalancing old armor and new armor alike to fit around a power level. However there is still power creep there, since some armor pieces are just plain better than others, resulting in everyone selecting the SAME armor set for DPS, healer, or tank based on the build. I'm concerned that, with the new slot system paired with the fact that ALL of the major combat related abilities are shoved into one skill tree (blue), as they release more abilities, the new combat abilities will either just be bad when compared to the old skills, or the old skills will just get phased out in favor of the new, better skills. A la power creep. Wouldn't spreading out the combat skills to all the different skill trees fix that to some extent? Right now it might be a bit strong sure, but in the future, if ZoS could design skills for combat around a different skill tree, and not just shove it all into one, wouldn't that help mitigate power creep to some extent? Just a thought, LMK what you all think.

Mindcr0w · January 2021

Any system that doesn't result in complete stagnation or back peddling will result in some measure of power creep.

That said, I don't think spreading the combat abilities between the trees would make any difference. If you could load an unbalanced amount of points into one tree it might, but seeing as your points always get spread evenly between all trees it really doesn't matter.

redspecter23 · January 2021

I think the idea of keeping all combat skills in the blue tree is to help fight power creep and allow you to actually use the options provided in the green and red trees. If they were all filled with combat/dps skills, you'd never use the other ones. It would remove options.

As it stands right now, assuming no other changes, we look to be getting at least a slight hit to dps assuming we slot everything optimally. Any growth after that comes at the cost of something we currently have. If they try to keep the slotted skills balanced against eachother, powercreep from cp shouldn't happen. If I want that juicy 7% heal on damage, I'm giving up damage to do so. That's a choice players will have to make.

As far as the damage slots look, it appears this is the intention right now. All the damage slot skills appear to be close in power level and dependent on your build and situation. It's a similar situation for the red slots.

MashmalloMan · January 2021

How would this cause power creep when it will remain the same power level as long as they don't continue to release passives and instead expand the system with more actives. Beyond a certain point, you only get extra points to spend on slottables that are locked to 4 slots. From what I can tell from at least the damaging ones, they all have relatively the same power level.

A choice between the following is actually pretty hard in my opinion (from my memory):

150 Weapon/Spell Damage
1300 Stamina
10% dot
10% single target
10% aoe
10% crit damage and healing
15% crit damage when flanking
7% healing from direct damage (or something close to this, I forget)

The % multipliers look stronger, but they're also only applicable to damaging abilities. If you want better healing, then the 10% crit damage, weapon damage and stamina are better options as it would affect all types of abilities instead. So in my opinion, it's balanced really well. I can see myself swapping those out for Solo content, pvp and group pve content very easily.

The current CP system did have deminishing returns, but there was also a ton of space left for growth. Had we continued to rise to 1k cp or above, everyone would of had 21%-23% crit damage, direct damage, dot damage, 4k pen, and extra points to start spending on weapons expert, then there is the 10-13% for Martial/Magical attacks.

Slowly but surely, we'd gain more and more power up until you could put 75 or so points into the 6 points which would be about 1350cp.

It actually shows little to no choice as well, it ended up hurting anyone who wanted to play a hybrid, the new system is very hybrid friendly, if anything you just need more CP to spread it out more, but there is potential for that at least. In the old system there was no way to do that without nerfing yourself by a lot. Just looking at the above options I listed, the only slottable that isn't hybrid friendly is stamina. Everything else works both ways.