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The Allied Strike change underscores the biggest flaw among many in how the devs do business: They go out of their way to destroy ANY confidence players have that the money or grind they put into the game will be worth it for even a little bit.

Most players understand power creep. We accept that if we grind or buy something that's more powerful than what we currently have, that shiny new upgrade might be overshadowed by an even more powerful upgrade that's released next year. BUT, we expect that we at least get some time to enjoy having the newest, shiniest thing before the next model comes out, AND we expect that the better-than-default upgrade we invested in will always be better than what we started with.

This is where the devs keep fucking up. Originally, power creep was erratic--it was up for debate whether each event set was better than FNP or prior event sets. That changed eventually, but most of that accepted it as okay/expected for this kind of game. This change is different in that it depowers some of the upgrade content to the point where it's objectively worse than "default" sets. I don't have a complete Vandal set for one good reason: That set was so clearly powerful and useful that that the contest for top 100 was a few million points harder than other events. The guys who sunk enough time and resources into grinding out those points deserved a set that kicked ass. Releasing even more powerful sets later might tarnish the shininess a bit, but it wouldn't change the fact that you had an objectively better set that could grind more gold and clear events more easily than a peak FPN set.

That's arguably changed now. Stats-wise Vandal is still better, but arguably the debuff to Allied Strike and the buff to other abilities bring Fairy and Passion a bit closer to parity. At the very least, the improvement has been narrowed to the point that--if we had known what we know now--we probably wouldn't have fought nearly as hard in the Vandal event.

Same goes with the Silence debuff. Silence in a set was uniquely useful; given how many event enemies have abilities, that set was arguably better than other sets with comparable stats. With the Silence nerf, you're better off using whatever FNP set you replaced.