was talking with my friend yesterday, and she was talking about how scummy the Break Countering was with Amphoreus. For context, she had spent a decent amount to get to E2S1 at launch. And I had went with /hsrg/'s tried and tested
>if you're not pushing endgame, it thankfully shouldn't really matter
Which she then completely ignored and pointed out that it kinda did. Since Amphoreus' launch, every enemy has had a sizeable Toughness Bar, with the lowest being about 30 toughness. For a point of future comparison, let's use Svarog as our frame of reference, who is supposed to be at 120 Toughness according to Homdgcat. Now, we have basically every miniboss enemy at 160, and the most recent manta ray at 180. Then you rope in the bosses also being very anti break, with Pollux toughness locking itself and Flame Reaver outright punishing you with damage reduction if you break him in the aura farming phase.
Normally when talking about character shills, we only really focus on endgame since that's the real content. But my friend pointed out how after opening her wallet to make sure her favorite character could be viable until roughly 4.X., the game had just spat in her face for about half a year, and she was struggling to use that squad just for the easy story mode. And that was a bit eye opening to me.
Honestly the problem isn't only powercreep, it's that there's legit nothing else to do in hsr except push endgame content and story. Where else are you supposed to use your favourite character? At least in genshin or other open world games you can play with your favourite character in the overworld. If said character isn't good for endgame content it sucks, but you aren't benching them. In other turn based games there's more varied content available.