The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria

[mackenzie]

I demand a graphic for "You healed for 2 Mega HealDamage."

[Deleted]

Squish squish... Makes sense and same was done with talent trees and talent points. They already done it last expansion and will be doing it again on next.

[Ezaraku]

item squish please! Screw the mega damage! Who's with me?!?

[tohyatvc]

I don't think I get you? If they squish everything (not a nerf), then a boss that would do, say, 3k damage per second would start doing much less (300?) so wouldn't that be the exact same when it comes to soloing?

Really just trying to understand this.

No, he gets it. Vanilla content would be harder, so would TBC and wotlk relative. This is a GOOD THING.

Vanilla scaling would remain completely intact, that is to say, vanilla stats and encounters are the CORRECT WAY to scale.

They want to nerf the crazy scaling AFTER that, which wasn't linear at all. Remember with the launch of TBC, we had the new combat rating system. In vanilla, stats were granted as a fixed percentage (piece of gear gives you 1% crit, affects your exact crit rating, for example).

Older content would be harder (relative to now) at max level (but exactly the same at the relevant level), this is a good thing, it would make me want to play again.

[Nerph-]

It was a joke. Like the caption right under the image says.

I know, it still sounds retarded though

[Ginseng]

Squish. BUT implement the squish sooner rather than later so people can adjust and not be surprised/have problems adjusting closer to the MOP release date.

[Puremallace]

This was so well written I actually e-mailed it to Trion. Rift is going down the same path with gear jumps and in my view I have ALWAYS been against it even when I played WoW.

ToR will have this identical issue also. Guild Wars 2 maybe not so much, but they do not have instanced pve raiding, so they took the easy way out.

[achaeon]

It'd be kind of lame to get weaker from one expansion to another. Not to mention it wouldnt make much sense. They jumped too far with the stats in the past couple xpacs, that's where it broke down. You go from health measured in the 1-3k range at level 60, to 100k+ 3 expansions later? I for one dont want to login to MoP feeling like my characters took back steps. Just doesnt make sense from the perspective of your hero/toon growing stronger.

[Gurbz]

I don't think I get you? If they squish everything (not a nerf), then a boss that would do, say, 3k damage per second would start doing much less (300?) so wouldn't that be the exact same when it comes to soloing?

Really just trying to understand this.

It will be harder to solo raid bosses because there will be much less difference in you stats, compared to the huge jump in stats we see in expansions now.

[Cavox]

IMO squishing would be the best.

[Deleted]

I'm all in for squishy! While it might feel weird, it's alot better than silly mega dmg thing, - don't get me wrong, the mega dmg solution has some crazy ass addon potential but it just seems a bit 2 crazy 2 me, and we wouldn't wanna upset moar peeps about MoP being childish by adding SUPAH-MEGAH-DMG-PWN to it xD

[Spotnick]

It would feel weird, for the first month, then you get used to it. Not such a big deal, I agree that the post-expansion patch is probably the best time to drop this bomb, so people can get used to it BEFORE the expansion.

[Austilias]

This has the potential to make old content much less soloable, and therein lies the potential to loose my monopoly on gear that might drop in having to depend on people. While at higher levels it might make sense, in other aspects of the game such as this, I have a foreboding. Do not want? Potentially.

[fangless]

Is this really that big of a deal?

In BC, GOOD players maybe got to high 2000's for DPS at Sunwell content.

Now we're doing 30,000.



No one thinks 30,000 is a bad number, when it's a HUGE increase from just a few expansions ago. Why would that suddenly change with 5 more levels?

[Deleted]

Squish it! Brings back good ol' memories from the past as well!

[Deleted]

I like the "mega damage" more, it would just feel wierd to do less damage after this expansion, would totally ruin sense of character progression. I'm up for lesser scaling but it just feels wrong to lower the damage output.

[Prothall]

I have to say, "Battleplate of TRULY Ludicrous Numerical Superiority" is an awesome name for a piece of gear.

I think the squish would work - I've been noticing this for a while now. It's weird to get weapons with more stamina that my chest piece had in the last expansion. And really, it was only Cata where things got so out of control. It felt right to have the amount of health I did at the end of Vanilla, and BC, and Wrath. But Cata just blew that out of the water.

[Doombringer]

Neither solution is particularly elegant. As he highlights in the article, a level 80 piece of gear will not be a great jump from level 60, let alone 70. It can lead to people holding onto old gear and bypassing content, etc, etc, as he also mentioned. To put it into perspective, imagine if the gear you got in Tier 11 at the start of Cata was only a mite bit less powerful than the newest and latest in 4.3?

I suppose a solution to encourage players to get an upgrade rather than keeping old gear would be to have the old gear's stats cease to function after a certain level or at a certain point in time. "Valid only until level XX" and all. This is STILL an ugly 'fix.'

Also, with an Item Squish, the content will need to be tuned accordingly, and that means that we will not necessarily easily blow through lvl 60 Blackwing Lair at lvl 85 like we do right now -- retro runs can become harder, and less desirable to run. People run these because they CAN obliterate them easily, it's part of the fun.

[pinkshirtbadman]

I'm so glad they could finally admit this is a problem. I support the item squish personally and want them to do it for 5.0.

There's no "finally" about it, Blizzard has commented on this since at least patch 3.0. They've known it was a coming problem, we've known, they've never pretended it wasn't going to be a problem. As they point out, currently it's not a "big" problem so it didn't "need handled" yet.

[JebJoya]

I realise it's only a mockup of a potential solution, but Fig 5 certainly implies that T3 epics of lv60 will be ~= ilvl to Lv75 items, and an epic from the end of Burning Crusade should take you through to level 85 - anyone else find that a little odd? Feels like running a couple of raids while levelling will just remove the gear progression for a couple of expansions... :S Meh.