Creatures at level 110 now scale with item level

[MrExcelion]

Update:

Thanks for the feedback on this issue. It’s clear that we need to make some changes here, so here are our current plans:

We’re removing the increase to damage dealt by creatures in the world. Our overall goal with this change is to keep the amount of time it takes to kill a creature from getting ridiculously short, and increasing the damage they deal is unnecessary for that goal. Instead, this was making you feel like they were becoming more dangerous, which was not our intent.
We’re significantly reducing the rate at which creature health scales with your item level. Again, all we’re trying to do here is prevent cases where monsters die too quickly for players to react to their presence, particularly around World Quests. Our initial tuning was far more aggressive than it needed to be, which could make it feel like your upgrades weren't actually helping. This change will make it very clear that you are still becoming noticeably stronger than your enemies as your gear improves.
Those two changes are already live, and you should be seeing them in-game now.
Later today, we’ll be correcting a separate issue that’s causing unequipping an item to drastically alter the power of enemies you’re facing. The above changes make it so that’s never the right thing to do anyway, but this is still a strange/buggy interaction that needs to be fixed.

It should also be noted that this change was on the Patch 7.2 PTR (and has been since January). We didn’t communicate anything about it initially because we wanted to get testers’ raw and honest feedback about it when they encountered it themselves, rather than attempting to pre-empt or otherwise influence their opinions ahead of time. When that feedback never came, we assumed that meant it was an acceptable change – i.e., those who hadn’t noticed it weren’t bothered by it, and those who had noticed it thought it was fine. Clearly that was a false assumption, and we should have drawn attention to it later in the PTR cycle, so that we could have caught these issues before Patch 7.2 went live.

=========

Apologies for the delay in getting information out on this - our initial focus was on putting out other patch-day fires.

Yes, this reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended. The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future.

Power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame, and the last thing we want is to undermine that. We stressed the importance of that progression when discussing how the level-scaling system worked in Legion around the time of the expansion's launch, and explained why we then had no plans to scale foes' power based on gear. But as we've watched Legion unfold, we've come to observe some side-effects of our endgame content plan and the associated rewards structure that made us reconsider.

We've never had the initial outdoor world content stay relevant for this long in an expansion before. By the end of Mists of Pandaria, for example, the mantid of Dread Wastes that had once been reasonable foes were completely trivial. They'd basically evaporate if a raid-geared player looked in their general direction. But there wasn't much reason besides achievements or completionism to revisit the Klaxxi dailies once Isle of Thunder was out or, later on, Timeless Isle. And the enemies in those later zones could be tuned to a proportionally more challenging baseline difficulty.

But in Legion, while the new content in Broken Shore is the focus of 7.2, and we've made sure that the core outdoor rewards (both dropped and from Nethershards) are superior to the rep-related rewards from the original factions, the intent is not for the Broken Shore to completely replace the rest of the game. You'll still go back to the other Broken Isles zones for emissaries, Legion Assaults (coming next week!), Order campaign quests, improved world quest rewards, and more. And as 7.1 and 7.1.5 progressed, we could see that even with Nighthold gear the pacing of combat was getting a bit silly - what would happen once new content made that level of gear more common, and once the Tomb raid pushed limits even higher?

To reiterate, power progression is an essential part of the WoW endgame. We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die.

Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme. We tune outdoor combat for a fresh 110 around a 12-15sec duration against a standard non-elite, non-boss enemy. It's great for gear, over the course of an expansion to cut that time in half, or even by two-thirds. But once you get down to a duration of one or two global cooldowns, the game just wasn't built to support that as the norm. (Note that this is an current-content endgame concern; running legacy content for completion/transmog/etc. purposes is a totally different story.)

The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing.

Finally, there's the natural question of why we didn't patch-note this. It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players. But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences. Thank you for that, and I look forward to continued discussion.

So now we have to consult ilvl spreadsheets to figure out which pieces of gear we need to unequip to make our daily chores as painless as possible. Fun.
To be clear, it's unacceptable to us for the "right" thing in any form to ever be equipping weaker gear, unequipping items, or doing things that in any way lower your "absolute" power. There are a couple of loopholes where that is true currently, and they'll be high-priority fixes for us in the next day or two.

Also to be clear, scrapping the entire system is certainly still an option. My post was not meant to be a "too bad, get used to it" proclamation.

But I did want to lay out what we consider to be the very real problem we're trying to solve here. I also understand that to many folks it doesn't appear to be a real problem at all, and it seems like we're just trying to throw up pointless obstacles.

Power always feels good. It feels better to kill something in 5 seconds than in 10, especially when you remember when it took 10. Even better when you can do it in 2. Better still when you can kill 4 or 5 things in that time. But is there a point where that goes too far? We think so, and we're just looking to ease up off the gas pedal a little bit. We don't want to halt the power curve, and certainly never to go in reverse, but rather to take a bit longer on our road to an endgame world where everyone effectively walks around death-touching mobs for quest credit.

e: replaced OP with the official post

[Deleted]

Oh give me a ********* break, this is so much bull****.

Guess I wont be playing my mage anymore, was brutal enough just after dinging 110. Guess I wont be finishing Suramar either, thanks Blizzard assholes.

[Zephre]

I'd like to know this as well, I recall Watcher saying something during a Q&A a few months back that mobs wouldn't scale as it was " fine " to outgear mobs as it instilled some form of character progression. I'd like to know what prompted them to change their minds and implement this.

[Deleted]

I'd like to know this as well, I recall Watcher saying something during a Q&A a few months back that mobs wouldn't scale as it was " fine " to outgear mobs as it instilled some form of character progression. I'd like to know what prompted them to change their minds and implement this.

Just like the Suramar City team, they are assholes.

[Deleted]

Utterly demoralizing. What is the purpose of gearing if not to feel stronger out in the world and compared to when you just dinged?

[Jegethy]

Thanks for posting here. I forgot.

This is probably one of the worst changes they've ever implemented in my opinion. It completely negates gear progression in the open world. I'm all for level scaling during the levelling process, but not power scaling at 110.

You can confirm it yourself. Simply remove a piece of gear while targeting a mob.

[Deleted]

They are going to catch so much shit for this.

[Maelstrom51]

This is the stupidest change blizzard has ever implemented.

[zoomgpally]

They are going to catch so much shit for this.

And they deserve so much more

[KaPe]

Couldn't this be easily abused? Remove one item from least important slot, thus tanking your item level and making everything much easier.

[Metallourlante]

Well, that's a bummer for sure. I wasn't a big fan of the whole scaling thing to begin with, but at least at 110 one should be able to outgear simple trash mobs in open world.
Would have been better if only Broken Shore mobs scaled (since it's a new zone could make sense, everyone in danger while fighting them bla bla bla)

[Erous]

Well this just turned me away from redubbing. There haven't been many decisions I've been against from Blizzard, this takes the cake. First, legendaries made you OP in vanilla, they were rare and you were equally powerful based on their rarity. Then, as time went on, the better gear you had, the easier content was, including farming. That made gearing more worthwhile. Now it's not? No thanks.

[melodramocracy]

good move on blizzards part.

[Caerule]

A little scaling can make sense.

Cause, I mean, there's a hundred item level difference between high and low gear. More, even. It'll be like 200 points more after 7.3. So some scaling may not be unreasonable. However from what I hear, it's very heavy scaling.

I guess I understand Blizzard's logic a little in that, in this way, anyone can have the same experience on the Broken Shore. And if just that was current content, I guess it wouldn't be that bad. But with the mobs of other zones, which you've worked hard for to be able to kill faster, having this change too... Doesn't quite feel right.

[Rendark]

If that is true then what is the point of getting gear anymore?

[Jegethy]

Couldn't this be easily abused? Remove one item from least important slot, thus tanking your item level and making everything much easier.

From my testing, mobs won't go below their default health even with zero items equipped.

[iamthedevil]

Completely voids upgrading gear to gain power. Wtf?

[Varjo410]

Is this only Broken Shore or all Legion mobs? I could perhaps understand the reasoning if it was just Broken Shore to emphasize the neverending threat of the Legion. But if it's all mobs, the most retarded change ever. You should outgear mobs as you progress, if not, why play this game at all if you don't experience a sense of progress.

[Deleted]

Probably a bug.

[Underverse]

Mobs should scale a little bit to prevent the world from becoming negligible. But it shouldn't be linear with ilvl.

- - - Updated - - -

Probably a bug.

Also this. They haven't made an official announcement, right?