Unbridled Power Creep (Destiny)

by squidnh3, Wednesday, January 21, 2026, 12:37 (2 hours, 19 minutes ago) @ cheapLEY

Bungie has been letting us get more and more powerful for quite a while, and it's pretty out of control. And now they are afraid to reign anything in because of those actions are usually perceived by the player base as anti-fun, and they really can't afford to alienate any more players with the massively reduced population post-Edge of Fate. This has left power level deltas their only tool for making any content challenging, but that is a very blunt force instrument. The lack of effectiveness of primaries at high power deltas is the result of that - the power deltas expose whatever is lagging behind in the power creep race.

I'd pinpoint Beyond Light and Stasis as when the creep really started. It was so much better at ad control than anything we'd had before, and it gave the player base a real taste for being able to kill 10+ enemies at once, which then required Bungie to increase the ad density of encounters to make them even remotely challenging. This back and forth has continued, except that it's always tempered by the fact that ad density is fairly limited by the game engine, whereas HP increases don't come at that cost, but are extremely negatively perceived by the player base.

Then the 3.0 versions of the other subclasses made them all as powerful as Stasis. Then we got new weapon perks that interacted with the subclass verbs. Then the weapons got more perks, and enhanced perks. Then we got Strand, which was also released fairly overtuned. Then exotic primaries got damage increases. Then Final Shape came out, which added the Prismatic subclasses, which added a whole bunch of combinations of subclass abilities and exotic armor abilities that were previously not possible. Now, finally, if a weapon doesn't have fully enhanced 3 perk options in every column, it's basically worthless.

One of my favorite loadouts post-Final Shape is using Gwisin Vest on my Hunter, with Prismatic. I can go invisible basically whenever I want, almost always have Destabilizing rounds on void weapons, regain health on melee kills, and burst DPS with Golden Gun. That is almost unthinkable power even going back to Beyond Light or Witch Queen. Now, it's not even a top tier loadout!