Do you think legion should get a stat squish?

[Akka]

In theory I'd be all for a stat squish, but honestly, if it's to inflate it again at the same level in one expansion like the retarded case in WoD, what's the point ?
They need to do away with the insane gear inflation first.

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Because smaller numbers are more immersive, IMO, at least as immersive as a numerical health / mana bar can be. Numbers in the millions are somehow reminiscent of sci fi, its a fantasy genre but not the sword-and-sorcery one which WoW falls under. For me personally the best numbers were in Vanilla, MAYBE TBC. When you've got 2 mil. hp and 5 mil. gold you feel like you're living in Zimbabwe paying bread with a billion Z-dollar note.

Pretty much this.

Smaller number also feel more relevant. Mathematically it's exactly the same to do 3 damage to 10 hp than to do 3000000 damage to 10000000 HP, but the first feels like every point count, the second feels like a 5-years old was just in his wide-eyed "BIG NUMBERZ !" delirium, adding zeros just it could be BIGGER !

[Toubacos]

In my opinion yes, I was watching a few Legion streams and I already find the hits returning to the level they were when it became too high.

[Akka]

That's more on perception/sentimental feeling that has no bearing if it objectively needs to be done.

Err... It's a GAME. It's MADE to have fun and it RELIES on how you perceives it. If it helps immersion then it has a fucking objective bearing on if it needs to be done...

[Deleted]

I'm torn on this.

My brain knows it shouldnt care and that they are just numbers. On the other hand its easier to process progression in numbers, to me, when they are smaller.

Going from 10 million hits to 12 million hits has less impact on me then going from 1k hits to 1,2k hits.


In short i guess i have to answer that as soon as damage numbers start going over 100k it does sort of have an impact on how i percieve progression

[Akka]

No SQUISH NEEEDED! Why does anyone want progression to be COMPLETLEY obsolete... linear increase of power is the worst idea ever made. If this sh... would go live, then the fun of getting stronger would be completley gone!

Because inflation is not progression.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Why does this bother people so much? This wasn't even a topic really until Blizzard brought it up themselves before Cata. I could honestly care less either way.

Because people love being annoyed by stupid shit.
As long as the devs are on top of it and the numbers won't cause issues in terms of performance this time around, I couldn't care less. I still only care about % and relative damooge.

Besides, we'll get a squish in 8.0 I'm sure.

[Rilas13]

There will probably be one at the end of Legion. The health pools don't bother the devs as much as the damage done. And we are still doing about 1/3rd of the DPS as we were at the end of MoP.

The way health was scaled changed in WoD which is why our health is way up there now.

That being said I think the WoD stat squish could have gone further. Having 13k DPS be good is perfectly fine. Then again so is 40k. the larger numbers just clutter the screen more.

[Poisongaz]

Once the number get to high it start affecting boss design. I number can only be stored in a computer so high. Garrosh is a great example of the numbers being so high that they could not have him have one health bar and still be challenging, so they split him in to a few different health bars.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Err... It's a GAME. It's MADE to have fun and it RELIES on how you perceives it. If it helps immersion then it has a fucking objective bearing on if it needs to be done...

No it doesn't because perception is different and the person I was quoting had a very ludicrous reasoning on high numbers.

[Akka]

No it doesn't because perception is different and the person I was quoting had a very ludicrous reasoning on high numbers.

Everyone has a different perception so according to your reasoning game design couldn't exist, and actually the person you quoted made a very logical point - huge numbers are thematically linked with huge damage, and doing X millions damage on a boar by waving a dirty sword is certainly pretty ridiculous.

[Echo of Soul]

That being said I think the WoD stat squish could have gone further.

The squish itself was fine. We entered highmaul in blue gear around 20k DPS but at the end of HFC we're already back at well above 100k and that's the real problem. At the end of 7.1 we'll be doing a million DPS at this rate.
The numbers can't keep going up multiplicatively because things will just scale out of control so damn fast at this point. It needs to be addative, like start off at 20k and then add 10k every tier, that way it would've taken until 8.4 or something until we saw the numbers we're at right now.

[Deleted]

Whats the point in deflating numbers just to inflate them back again?

The issue is that the inflation is rampant and numbers just rise drastically into too big scales.

[laplacedemon]

My point is: Smaller numbers make it easier to spot an upgrade/proc instead of relying on visuals. Guess what if you normaly hit for 1200 and get a trinket proc for +800 Strength you NOTICE the difference, at 24576939 even an increase by 40k does look insignificant. so why bother with the big numbers anyway?

My point is there are better ways of tracking buffs and procs than looking at combat text numbers and in some/most cases (depending on spec of course), you won't notice it because there are *a lot* of numbers going on. For example, an affliction lock has 3 dots, DS makes them tick constantly and they're affected at least by Soul Burn: Haunt, Haunt, Dark Soul and haste/mastery weapon proc, while crits and multistrikes convolute it even further. Sure, an arcane mage can notice a buff, but a gamechanging proc like Prophecy of Fear should be tracked in another way really...

I personally have combat text turned off most of the time, because I don't really get anything from seeing those numbers. That's probably why I don't understand why some people are so obsessed about those numbers.

[Rilas13]

@Vidget, I agree. The numbers between tiers never used to be an issue but each xpac they get more extreme.

In MoP we went up about 110 ilvls over the three tiers. In WoD We went up about 105 over two tiers. In TBC we went up about 30-40. That is a crazy scaling change. These jumps probably also explain why they feel like putting in catchup mechanics rather than going through content linearly.

I remember sometime in MoP this was brought up as an issue and the dev response was unless we give a big enough upgrade then players feel like gear is more of a sidegrade.

On a better note they are also making all secondary stats scale linearly in Legion onward. So those numbers will be more inline.

Secondary stats are going to scale a little differently in Legion. There are a few goals here.


Get players to the 'feels good' level of secondary stats sooner. (A Fire Mage doesn't feel so good with 5% crit.)
Reduce the feeling of being nerfed as you level up.
Reduce the degree that players scale exponentially, especially at high gear levels.
Don't reduce the degree of stat customization that players have.
Ensure that players still can't get to crazy levels of stats that break the game, or reduce fun.

Source & full article

[Xargoth6634]

I'd be for it because it'd further trivialize running old raids for mounts, but I don't really care one way or the other.

[Echo of Soul]

I remember sometime in MoP this was brought up as an issue and the dev response was unless we give a big enough upgrade then players feel like gear is more of a sidegrade.

I think we can appreciate upgrades without every single piece showing a notable change. Slow and steady wins the race after all. And since it's impossible to distinguish 1567643 crits from 1675432 crits just by looking at the screen when there are numbers flying around everywhere what does it matter really?
I mean back in vanilla I could've understood since you had like one or two skills, seeing your frost bolt go from 800 damage to 850 damage was something you noticed.

[ShiyoKozuki]

It should be squished all the way back to Classic numbers. Then we can go from there, linearly, not exponentially.

Agreed. 4k HP DPS, 6-8k HP tanks. 1k crits.

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Yep this, and they need to get rid of the "only the content we added last patch matters" mentality as well. Its killing the game.

It's not even "last patch anymore", they've actually made content irrelevant in the same patch it was released in. 6.2 added tanaan jungle, then by 6.2.3 it was made 100% irrelevant by ilvl 700 honor gear. Just...baffling.

From "Play the expansion" to "play the patch" to..I don't even know what to call it now. This making content irrelevant in the same patch it was added crap has to stop, this making content from the same expansion has to stop. It all has to stop. We need a meaty amount of content and character progression and actual progression paths again. Stop pushing us into running out of things to do faster and faster, it's pure insanity and stupidity.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

Yes, I believe so. It's not just a matter of "technical", which they fixed.

Honestly, it's about consistency. It's not normal to do 1 million DPS. What gives? It's just absolutely huge and cluster the screen. Also harder to read.

I'd rather have smaller numbers. I understand that they want the feeling of growing in power when you level, but with the free boost, honestly I don't see the point.

[Deleted]

Yea why not lets make Beta 5 more monts just to test all that things again
Do you think that stats squish will come just with 1 push of button and removing some zeros

[Deleted]

Another squish could possibly help, but only if they stop with this crazy item level bloats coming from 4 different difficulties plus 1-2 random gear upgrades.

In fact, having a smaller spread in item levels in one tier is more important to keep gear bloat in check than having to squish every second expansion.