On that note, I really have to get this off my chest.
As I said months ago, I felt that the spike in power creep was PAD's event horizon into doom. What was once a creative and intriguing game rushed into cranking out huge volumes of waifus and hasubandos for a quick buck-- and nothing sells it quicker than releasing stronger and stronger units of every color.
And it's not that this is a new thing, GH making palette swaps/resprites has always been a thing. But now it's to the point that they've more or less run out of ideas and all they have left is "take this character or concept and change them in extremely tiny ways and be sure to make them far stronger at the same time, and what we end up with is an oversaturated game where too many units do more or less the same fucking things, making them feel as if the only thing that separates them is art and name. And that's boring. That's why we have about 10 different variations of Kali now, for example, that more or less are pretty much the same fucking thing. There's no more feeling of "oh hell yes, I got this chase rare and now I have to build a team around their leader skill", which personally I found super exciting. Kind of the notion that now that everything is special, nothing is. Now you can build functionally the same team with a different reskin and it just feels lifeless. It's great to have variety, don't get me wrong, but what we have is over saturation of too many things that do the same thing without much variance to give them unique play styles.
I could go on a long time with things I felt have gone wrong with PAD's development over the years, but all I ever really do when I come to the thread these days is fuss about it, and I hate that. I hate that something that has not only been a huge part of my life since 2013 but also been my main fixation since that time, as well as social outlet has become so stale and unexciting. At this point in the game, there's no thrill anymore. Pulling chase rares ends up being more of a "ugh FINALLY" than an event that makes your day or even week. And yeah, I'm partially to blame, since I was the one who dumped considerable amounts of cash into collecting them and getting lots more along the way. But now, there's no thrill of the chase anymore. Everything is super strong and with the power creep, the vast majority of dungeons are easy to the point of being super boring. And what's not super easy and meant to be challenging is challenging for the wrong reasons, often boiling down to having the absolute perfect team (because even if everything is super strong, you still get locked out by color drains/resists or "oh, you wanted to do lots of damage? Nope, that's too much and you just healed the boss because that TOTALLY MAKES SENSE" for the dungeons or having to rely on sheer RNG blessing. And that's... sigh.
I kinda wish I could start the game blind again. PAD has made a ton of great improvements over the years despite the dumb things they've done along with it that have made it a much more user-friendly experience, but to me, at this point, it's no longer the game that engaged and enthralled me.
It's called Puzzle and Dragons, but the dragons are and always have been painfully generic (to the point of them having the only way to make them good be slapping a well-loved godfest rare's name on it and making them broken as fuck), and the puzzle is pretty much gone too.
