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What's an older overshadowed/powercrept/non-meta unit in your current gacha game that became relevan

1K View2024-06-03

One of the issues with "powercreep" is that newer enemies are designed to scale with the newer, more powerful units and making earlier released units obsolete. However there are rare cases where powercreep made an earlier released unit better

There is this interesting case in Arknights of an earlier unit named "Ceobe" who's special gimmick is taking a % of an enemy's physical defense and uses it to buff her own arts damage. This makes her particularly powerful against units with high amount of physical defense (arts damage ignores physical defense).

However this isn't enough to get her out of the shadow of Eyjafjalla; whose better base stats, better skills, and versatility makes her the most preferred and most meta caster in the game, and turns every other caster including Ceobe into benchwarmers once you've built her.

Then sometime between 2022 or 2023, the game started to slowly introduce units with considerable amounts of physical dps. Units starting with Pozy, then Mlynar, Ray, and Degenbrecher would deal so much physical dps that enemies that where once considered tanky (with high def particularly) were easily shredded in a couple of seconds; and in return the game started to add newer enemies with even higher defense on new events that were released a couple of months after. The effect is especially noticeable in the optional high-end content "Contingency Contract" where enemy phys def, arts res, and HP can be buffed to the nines in exchange of earning greater rewards; and would sometimes require the help of maxed-out-stats, buff/debuffs, and/or really tricky strats to beat.

In a clever twist of irony, these major def buffs also ended up buffing Ceobe's damage greatly against these types of enemies; enough to make a lot of people prefer her over Eyjafjalla. So much so that she has surpassed Eyjafjalla in the most recent post-"Contingency Contract" survey - 8 places above her. Not the mention, arts damage powerhouses like Eyja and Surtr are also being countered introducing new enemies with even higher arts resistance.

TL;DR an older non-meta unit became meta because her damage potential is tied to enemy defense stats that got buffed to counter powercreep.

Is there an older non-meta or powercrept playable unit in your gacha game that got better because of powercreep of new units?

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