The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria

[Sahjar]

If Mega Damage is a half-reference to Rifts (and other old pen and paper Palladium RPGs) then that's awesome. But Mega Damage isn't nearly the end of things... just imagine:
"This tank has 50Mega HP..."
"He's past normal Dodge cap (dodging 100% of normal attacks), but he's only avoiding 12% of the Mega hits he takes."
"Lol, Stam-stacking nub."
"My heals are critting for 17Mega health, and I can't keep him up!"

[CW]

Squish the whole thing, but do it well in advance of MoP so we have time to adjust to it before the expansion hits. That way, people get that "nerfed" feeling out of the way before new content hits and they can fine-tune boss damage and hitpoints and such and get a feel for where they want it to be before the expansion hits. If I go from doing 20k DPS to doing 2k DPS, but bosses have 10% of their current HP then I won't honestly care as my DPS wont have changed one bit.

[ihyln]

All I read was "blah blah blah I have no idea how to tackle this issue". Clearly Blizzard's lead designer is fishing the community for answers to problems he's paid to solve.

The guy is a joke.

[Cygne]

Squish the stats, seriously no sweat off my back. If I get cool new gear and the bosses + previous bosses are still killable with no dumb, "oops you can't kill this boss because we squished the stats and forgot to adjust him to compensate" then I'm all for it. Makes no difference if I'm doing 10 trillion mega damage or 100 damage to a boss as long as the damage done is in proportion to it's health. Plus we should all think of Blizzard as caring for our eyesight. I won't have to squint comparing 100456987 agi vs 100456687 agi when it's compressed as 104 agi vs 107 agi.

[chimeraruin]

What?! Over 9-Mega-thousand?!?!?!

[Azidonis]

All I got to say was, it was fine in TBC before GC as gang came along.

Squish please.

[Hextun]

Why not assign mobs an iLvl value which corresponds to the appropriate level of gear to be used against that mob? Then have each piece of gear be given an iLvl and then for each stat a +% which indicates which bonuses that gear confers above the norm for that iLvl. That is, if it's supposed to be a tanking item, it would have +% STA, +% STR or AGI, etc.

All mobs would have a set amount of health, let's say 10k. Or 100k. Tweaking health pools and attack strengths would confer relative power levels between mobs of the same iLvl. To measure how effective an attack is against that mob, you check the player's iLvl and the stat bonuses (all simple percentages above iLvl) to determine the efficacy of the attack.

In essence you would trade increasing actual numbers for a higher iLvl and use percentages above iLvl. Rather than scaling everything, from raw stats to calculated totals like damage as well as ratings, the only thing that would actually scale would be a single number, iLvl. The relative power would come from how different iLvls compare. How much harder would an iLvl 100 sword hit an iLvl 50 mob than an iLvl 50 sword?

Factored into all of this would be your character level. Characters would be limited on how high an iLvl they could equip based on their character level. Higher tiers of gear would lower the minimum level. For example, an iLvl 100 green might require character level 20. An iLvl 100 blue might only require character level 17. An iLvl 100 purple, only character level 15.

Of course that would mean that at level 1, with novice grays, a character might be tossing out 10k smites. Then at level 85 in dungeon blues they are tossing out.... 10k smites. Of course, they would be 100k smites against level 40 mobs, but how often do you care about that? In short, it becomes an inverse inflation, with the numbers gradually growing larger against lower level targets as you gain levels and power. With perhaps a low end cap of one shotting things at 100k a pop. This, I think is what GC meant that folks would not like.

I don't know that there is an answer to that problem. While yes, most people would like to see larger numbers in an absolute sense, to show growth on all their gear, it will always and inevitably result in insanity at the high end. It's taken years to get to this point but here we are. And unless you squish a LOT, it won't take as long to reach this point the second time. Yes, *some* number is going to have to get bigger, but my point is why not just make it a single number, the item level, and let everything auto adjust based on that. The item level can creep up much more slowly, auto adjust the results against the current top tier of mobs as well as auto inflate to more easily wipe out lower level targets.

[Quickstrike1802]

I don't really much care which option Blizz uses for this how ever making the numbers bigger and bigger every expansion is cool and all but it doesnt rally serve a purpose when everyone is still doing the same amount of damage and all its really doing is making the math harder and harder. I have been playing since the release of the burning crusade and I went back to play vanilla during that time and I have played ever since, so the crunch of numbers to me would feel better. I remember the days when a tank was walking around with 20k health it was a big deal. The 1st time we walked into BT and went up aginst supremes we were all like holy shit how are we susposed to kill that thing. Those were the good days in my opinion. So I short I am in huge favor of the ilvl squish. Tho, I know the charts were and example but the way the ilvl squish was portraied it looked as if you could wear the lvl 60 gear all the way to lvl 80 and I'm not much for that you would have to make it where you at least want to use the lvl 70 and 80 gear when you get to those points. Anyways, GOGO Item level Squish Doooooooooo eeeeeeeeeeet

[nutype51]

Item squish, please do it, numbers dont really matter as much as percentages, and the lower numbers can also make you feel less like a walking god.

[Mulderfox]

I think the squish is a great idea. It will give them somewhere to go for the expansions to come, and one month after the expansion dropped, nobody would know the difference anyway. The only potential problem I can see would be achievements that are attuned for the high level of damage, such as wreckingball. Even that doesn't really matter, and could be made into a feat of str. Shrinking the gear increase would make following stat improvements much easier. Not only that, but I think everyone can agree that saying "I pulled 9k mega-dps" or seeing "12 mega damage!" crits pop up just sounds retarded. Bring on the shrinkage!

[Prag]

All I read was "blah blah blah I have no idea how to tackle this issue". Clearly Blizzard's lead designer is fishing the community for answers to problems he's paid to solve.

The guy is a joke.

Consumer studies to improve your product make the guy a joke?

Hi, next exit for Reality 1 mile. Your Low Fuel light is blinking. It's advised you take the next exit.

[Hiros001]

The iLvl squish is good and all if balanced correctly. But I like being able to give off high dps numbers. jumping from say 20k dps to 2k dps in 5.0 raid content would feel off to me. Dropping stat numbers while raising what those stats give would be the best solution in my opinion. like 5str now will be 1str after the squish, so 500str is now equivalent to 100str. Or you could again lessen it even more, like 10:1 and so on... basically my issue with the squish is that putting out less damage means I am not as powerful as I was. Even if everything else is weak, it just doesn't click with me right now.

[JoeS12]

Currently the three solutions: A - Put a comma in and make it Mega damage - Still do same percentage of damage to target that you would, just smaller numbers. B - Squish item-level and stats for all gear pre-MoP, but also squish the boss/mobs health - Still do same percentage of damage to target that you would, just smaller numbers (seems to be more work for Blizzard though to implement this change) C - Do nothing, and have extremely high numbers that seem we are insanely powerful but the bosses are also even more insanely powerful - Still do same percentage of damage to target that you would, just high numbers. Anyway you look at it it, it is not a nerf, but people would complain anyways.

[charizma]

Squish the whole thing, but do it well in advance of MoP so we have time to adjust to it before the expansion hits. That way, people get that "nerfed" feeling out of the way before new content hits and they can fine-tune boss damage and hitpoints and such and get a feel for where they want it to be before the expansion hits. If I go from doing 20k DPS to doing 2k DPS, but bosses have 10% of their current HP then I won't honestly care as my DPS wont have changed one bit.

^ bingo sdfsdf

[Ruck]

even their example armor sets in the post arnt itemized properly. fml

[Ownofdeath]

I think the stat squish sounds like the best plan to do. I'm sorry for anyone who disagree's but the numbers in stats have gone way to out of hand, especially in cata. Squishing the ilvl stats wouldn't necessarily change how long it takes you to kill a creature or a boss, your DPS output and damage output would be lower, but the health on the creature or boss would be much lower to even out the stat change. It's going to be frustrating to try and get use to, i agree on that, but like in their diagram pictures, if the game ever got to those numbers in MoP or the expansion after that, It would just be way to crazy. The squish wouldn't effect how you perform, or how fast you kill something, it would still be the same % of damage you put out, even if your fireball for say is only hitting for 2k instead of 25k, the health on the mob may be only 10k instead of 75-100k.

[kaid]

The biggest problem I see with the item squishing is it does not really fix the underlying issue it just delays them. So we do an item squish now but they keep the same methodology of always wanting each tier level to be big enough that you won't bottom feed or skip item levels and each expansion pack being a gear reset you just delay mega damage by an expansion or two.

To really fix the issue would require stuff I don't think they are willing to do which would be to both squish the items and flatten out the curve without big gear resets between expansions. This gives you something like eq1 where hard core raiders do the current contents raids and the non hard core raiders wind up doing the previous expansions raids to gear up.

The plus side of this is you get more content being used but the downside is the content most people are doing will be pretty "stale" and causals would have little reason to buy the latest expansions since they will be an expansion behind. This may work if you can crank out expansions every 7 to 9 months like eq but I don't see wow doing that.

The really silly thing about the whole item squishing is if cata had not inflated the numbers in such a silly fashion in the first place this whole discussion would have not been an issue for at least another expansion maybe two. Blizz in some ways appears to not be able to look at the logical conclusion of their item level decisions.

[jayremy]

If Blizzard cared or paid attention to it, old raids can be tuned as leveling raids, open to large level ranges and they would get some use again or at least toned for some end game (not like Z'G or ZA, but merely a presence). LFR for old raids would actually get people doing them, also toning most of the longer ones down to 10 man groups and trimming some "fat" aka unimportant trash mobs.


I myself was a big time soloer but I would love this change. I may not find myself being able to solo WotLK stuff in MoP, if playing then (SWTOR, GW2, TSW and KoA look mighty tasty) but still if MoP is designed right I should have compelling solo stuff for the current content as well as likely able to do vanilla and TBC stuff, which is more than enough to be happy.

Its not like duo content is that much harder for a 2nd person to coordinate, it usually and especially if you have a healer makes the content super easy, not a challenge at that point. Even so us soloers have a been a rare breed... or up until people start bandwagoning after seeing DKs solo all the WotLK content, now everybody likes it, but back when I was making posts asking for end level solo stuff (TBC, WOTLK, til very early Cata), no.

[ZeroWashu]

Nope Nope Nope. Part of the allure of WoW is seeing your character grow in power, health, etc. All stats are increased. I don't care if at level 100 I have 1,000,000 health. I think this is a part of growing stronger. Not to nerf the numbers so the Dev's don't have as much work to do. Sorry, I want my sword to have 10,000 strength on it for the pure aesthetics. I don't care if the item squish will yield the same effect with a world-wide nerf. Keep it going the way it is, please. I'll subscribe for another 5 years.

I would normally agree with this but Cata blew it big time. When I realized I was going to have over 100k health on a mage and 180k on my tank I just realized that WOW jumped the shark. We have been heading there a long time. I remember the jokes about +999 spell damage items and they showed up.

The numbers are just stupid looking, its like a bunch of eight year olds are playing Gods and Galaxies. You have a +5000 Vorpal Sword? WELL WELL, I have a phaser and yeah, its and in my bag of holding there is a battleship, the houston astrodome, and some Kix.

[Blacksmithking]

I'd like a number squish, and I'd like to see the mudflation rate adjusted so that no additional squishes are needed in the near future--additional raid tiers can be linear instead of exponential.

A squish does mean I won't be able to solo MC, and characters 5 levels lower than my paladin will no longer be the buzzing of flies to Vigo, but I'll accept that if it means I'm not doing 12 mega ultra damage by the next expansion pack.

If Blizzard wants to prevent people from skipping content, put up some road blocks. Must be level 90 to enter this instance. Must be this ilevel. Must have completed this normal dungeon 10 times.