I don’t know your personal gaming history mate, but I will guess that maybe you have played PoE at some time or at least heard of it?
Well, like many others here, I played it for years. So, in case you didn’t play it ages ago, I’ll elaborate on my issue with your suggestion. History. I use PoE because it is such a well proportioned example of “power creep”. This is a prime example of the opposite problem we face here currently but also of how trying to add gear levels pushes the instability in the opposite direction. It is a lengthy example, so be warned…
PoE in the old days was much better balanced imho and the opinion of many other “old timer” players. Going a long way back, the balance between player skill trees plus gear vs mobs & maps was fairly good. It was a tough game still, but there were hardly any “meta” builds because most players could make a variety of class build themselves that could get to “end game” and compete in maps. So, you could pick up the game, learn it, play it and make whatever class you wanted comfortable that unless you were ignorant you would be able to do the hardest content, in a hard way or easy depending on the class/build/gear.
Then their design mentality became one of add harder content, make mobs harder, create more end bosses. Shaper & Elder appeared, with much better loot that normal end bosses thus becoming the target farm. So, the mob/environment was increased in difficulty. To balance the player side, they did very minor “nerfs”, tweaks to the skill trees but added in more powerful gear, crafting. The overall counterbalance meant thus that certain gear pieces were BiS and only certain classes/skilltrees could properly utilise the BiS gear. So, to combat the new mob kings (Shaper/Elder) effectively players found themselves pushed towards a collection of several builds. Builds that players just randomly made themselves weren’t as effective unless they applied a ton of intelligent theory crafting to them. No one apparently thought about the concept of testing badly geared builds not needing tons of wealth to buy/make. So, the game started moving towards gear being more important than class/skills and then only BiS gear.
Then along came Uber Elder etc. All mobs got upgrades in lethality, and the bosses were made harder, Uber was very very hard (at the time). So, new gear was brought in, new more expensive ways of crafting it appeared. RMT crept in, and the market started to contain people selling this new BiS gear for mad prices, thus inflation came in, and GOLD was the new thing to chase, but that’s another issue. Meanwhile Skills were nerfed again, trees were nerfed. The balance was kept (in the devs mind) by adding more gear to combat the more powerful mobs/bosses. So, this second round then ended up with fewer “meta” builds but if you wanted to farm Uber Elder chances are you needed to be playing one of these “metas” because gear and certain skill trees were vital, but the gear was more important now than the skill trees. Skills gems (gear item not a tree) were also made with improvements so instead of your old 20/20 gem you now wanted the idea 21/23 version.
Then a few more changes in this same direction happened (leagues). Then we came to Sirus and some would say this was the point where things changed drastically. Sirus, in it’s original form was a supremely overpowered boss, with extreme one shot mechanics, one shot environmental effects, one shot AoE’s, and in short a one shot encounter in its worst form. All mobs were given their usual tune up, environmental damages by this time were also a big factor and tuned up. To summarise, the “mobs” had the upper hand by a huge margin. How was this balanced on the player side of the coin? Skill trees overall had been nerfed league by league, classes were largely irrelevant outside of the “meta” ones so the “passive” player side of the game was for the most part not important at all. Gear, though, gear was everything. From skill gems to chest,gloves to weapons etc. There were more and more ways of getting OP items, most of them crafted not standard unmodified “uniques”. Some uniques were OP, but they were always gated behind extreme RNG or playing hours/streamers or RMT people. Now there were less than 5-10 “meta” builds that could farm Sirus out of potentially hundreds of possible builds. 95%+ of the playerbase were playing these “meta” builds as everyone wanted to farm end bosses.
The cycle goes on over there. TL;DR of it all is this. They never really corrected properly the “foundations” that each player has ready access to: the classes, the skilltrees, everything a naked player has as a proper form of balancing. Despite mobs getting harder, all they did really was use those “naked” systems as a base for nerfs, which in turn were to address the “meta” builds of each league. So, from day one, the “naked” side of a player (foundations) got weaker & weaker as the mobs got tougher & tougher.
On the other hand the gear side (storeys to use my building analogy) got more OP every league. The crafting got better & better. BiS gear became more powerful incrementally and also more restrictive in terms of which “naked” players could use it.
You end up with a building that has almost no foundations left and those left are crumbly and old designed for 1 storey, topped by 25+ storeys 20+ of which on the lower levels are abandoned and the 5+ at the top are shining modern palaces weighing a ton. On top of these are sites for the next 2-3 storeys they have planned. The foundations will never get improved, and eventually the building will come crashing down.
THAT history lesson is why it is more important to keep the “foundations” balanced properly against the content than to keep just band aiding the situation by adding more and more gear/crafting.
