Yup, that’s always happening if two factors come together:
1st: the devs f*&k up the balancing of items/Classes/skills and
2nd: the population is dropping and the game becomes power-creep for the RMTers/whales and/or p2win
Had to experience this a lot in Dragon Nest from 40-80 cap where everything was turned upside down with every class balancing, making you switch your character to gear anew one just to run new content with a party. Non-top tier DPS and non-top gear got you kicked out of 80% of the parties that were viable for clearing the content, and the other parties…
well, people died like flies and couldn’t even scratch the monsters.
That game is a good example where power creep and P2win go and how extreme this can become. Currently, if you got the best costume equipment (cash only, with RNG involved), you are 2 times as useful as a non-casher(meaning that every powerful equip has 2 times the value of a casual player). If this continues, the hard player base will be nothing more than whales/RMTers and the casuals will just come, level to cap and realize that they can do nothing -> quit the game.
At least the skills and values got reworked for the base classes, so they can deal some decent damage even with cheaper equip, but that’s about it.
No cash equip and no FD make you really bad in contrast to others.
I just hope this won’t happen to TOS as well, because with the current rebalancing and lack of “end-game” gear that doesn’t require you to farm with alts and/or do endgame content like ET, resulting in even more distress because of time loss and more and more discrimination against Classes/builds, I don’t see a way out of this spiral downwards.
Hunting Grounds seem like a good approach, but we won’t get them anytime soon, and the equip is outdated. We need lvl 280+ equip, not some level 75-220 equip to not go crazy over ET farming/Practonium cube rerolling/daily Saalus runs…