Do we need yet another stat squish?

[ls-]

Ok, remove mythic as it is now. A fraction of a fraction of a percent of the playerbase do them, do they really have a reason to exist? Those players would likely still do them if they were nothing but a difficulty tune up (added mechanics, a bit harsher damage) with no higher ilvl gear rewards, just rewarded achievements/cosmetics/mounts, it would be like playing a single player or co-op game designed to be played on normal on insane difficulty, people do that for achievements/cosmetics/just to say they could all the time, I don't think it would be any different here... Make mythic raids exist for the challenge and prestige, nothing more.

LFR is irrelevant to this situation as a raid difficulty because it rewards gear in the previous raid's normal and heroic ilvls, it being there doesn't raise the floor for normal and heroic's loot drops.

I'd also remove TF and cap WF at 5ilvl... There is really no need for TF to exist at all.

TF exists for people who don't raid or do something else besides raiding, it's nice to see some random piece of gear to TF. However, I do think that TF should be capped at mythic gear ilvl.

As for difficulty removal, honestly, I'd remove either N or HC, there's too little difference between the two, ofc they add some mechanics in HC, but difficulty-wise it doesn't really feel like a proper step up.

[Atrea]

Instead of a "stat squish" they could implement a slider that allows you to customize your displayed data.

It could work fairly simply; you could have it show the whole number, rounded to the nearest thousand, or rounded to the nearest million.

That way everybody's happy. If you don't want to see ridiculous numbers, you round it to the nearest thousand or million; then instead of seeing a hit for 12,000,000, you see one for 12,000k, or 12m. And if you like seeing big numbers - then boom.

This solution has the added benefit of being future scalable. As the values increase in future expansions, you can add on a scale to the nearest billion.

This doesn't have to be an all or nothing thing guys. There's a solution that can please everybody.

[Noxina]

It may not be needed to engine reasons, but still needed just for players in general. For humans, lower numbers are easier to deal with and comprehend than larger ones. They'd probably stat squish for gameplay reasons, instead of just for technical reasons.

If a person can't comprehend numbers over a million, I got bad news for that person. It really isn't very hard to understand that 1 200 000 is higher than 1 000 000. Also there are addons that shortens it down for you to 1.2M or what ever.


Are numbers getting way out of hand again though? Yes, I do believe so. But we are playing characters that are killing gods, huge dragons and slaughtering millions of minions that get in our way. After 12 years huge numbers are kinda to be expected.

[Hottage]

I liked 10k hp vanila, or 20k BC... its all ok, watching 12431240823705928423414 numbers on screen its just supid, but Blizzard thinks this make me feel more powerful LuL

In best in slot melee PvP (stamina) gear I had 6,000 HP fully buffed.

10K was only for a BiS tank who'd popped all his cooldowns.

OP: No we don't.

[PointerToAddress]

As far as I'm concerned, the difference between a fresh max level character, and a final tier expansion character in power should be roughly a 50% increase... That's how it was in TBC and Wrath, it worked very well, and it was plenty of an increase for people to feel like they were gaining power over the course of the expansion.

Thats completely wrong. Beginning of WotLK you had people doing around 1500 to 2k starting Naxx. I know because I remember being on a crappy guild that didnt make most of the time the Patchwerk DPS check at 1200. Then I remember pre-4.0 doing around 13k in ICC with buff. Take the buff out and its around 10k dps. So that there is a 5x increase and has been like that (4x to 6x) every expansion. This is the first expansion where it has gotten out of the ordinary since right now we're hitting the 6x mark. It wouldnt surprise me to be in the 2M range at the end of the expansion.

Staying OT, I think that there's gonna be another squish just because it's just better for scaling purposes. The higher the ilvl the more stats between the ilvls have to be to stay on the exponential route. What I would do is squish everything below level 109 to be linear. So level 108 gear is ilvl 108-stat gear and then for the expansion levels 108-120 just add 6 ilvls per level. 109 is 114, 110 is 120....At level 120 you have gear at 180 ilvl and just move on up from there. That way everything below that is linear. If you want Legion gear to stay relevant for the transition time between expansions just increase the ilvl power of the gear by 1 for every 10 ilevels above 780. If 108(~760 ilvl now) is 108 ilvl at squish then 110 Heroic 5man gear(835) is like a 115 ilvl gear and so on. 1000 ilvl gear becomes ilvl 132, the same as a 112 player level questing green in the next expansion using this system.

[Ishayu]

I suppose that would be fine however as a person who plays many alts I place importance on the speed at which I can accomplish a task. If I can reduce a task from 5 minutes to 2.5 minutes I'd be ecstatic because it's rare that any task is simply "5 minutes" it's 5 minutes * # of alts doing it.

Maybe you wouldn't be so bothered how long something took if doing it was actually rewarding and challenging?

- - - Updated - - -

Thats completely wrong. Beginning of WotLK you had people doing around 1500 to 2k starting Naxx. I know because I remember being on a crappy guild that didnt make most of the time the Patchwerk DPS check at 1200. Then I remember pre-4.0 doing around 13k in ICC with buff. Take the buff out and its around 10k dps. So that there is a 5x increase and has been like that (4x to 6x) every expansion. This is the first expansion where it has gotten out of the ordinary since right now we're hitting the 6x mark. It wouldnt surprise me to be in the 2M range at the end of the expansion.

Staying OT, I think that there's gonna be another squish just because it's just better for scaling purposes. The higher the ilvl the more stats between the ilvls have to be to stay on the exponential route. What I would do is squish everything below level 109 to be linear. So level 108 gear is ilvl 108-stat gear and then for the expansion levels 108-120 just add 6 ilvls per level. 109 is 114, 110 is 120....At level 120 you have gear at 180 ilvl and just move on up from there. That way everything below that is linear. If you want Legion gear to stay relevant for the transition time between expansions just increase the ilvl power of the gear by 1 for every 10 ilevels above 780. If 108(~760 ilvl now) is 108 ilvl at squish then 110 Heroic 5man gear(835) is like a 115 ilvl gear and so on. 1000 ilvl gear becomes ilvl 132, the same as a 112 player level questing green in the next expansion using this system.

I don't know what kind of guild you were playing in, but I did around 4k in Naxx and around 2.2k in Sunwell. Reached around 10-12k at end of ICC.

It's true that WotLK had more gear scaling than previous expansions. In fact, Blizzard noted this, and put a debuff on us all in ICC because otherwise the scaling would cause bugs as it had gotten out of hand. So yes, WotLK had a problem, but nowhere near as bad as this.

[Deleted]

Or just leave the K out because it's unnecessary.

will cause people to complain more just like last time when they saw reduced numbers.
You could however remove the k the following expansion for example or add an option to remove the K.

Yeah people can be weird about something that is the same but shows it differently.
It's annoying sometimes. It is a similiar effect how a group of people would complain about server merger but not as connected realms.

And yet sometimes i do understand it.

[Deleted]

since broken isles are adjusting themselves with player level, there isn't any reason why they even added 10 levels.
they could have just continued with next tier after HFC. lots of meaningless adjustment work, balancing, stat bloating and tuning would have been avoided.

[Drusin]

Maybe you wouldn't be so bothered how long something took if doing it was actually rewarding and challenging?

Maybe but that's a dark and scary path to go down. I worry blizz would try and go for "challenging and rewarding" and end up making something tedious and not rewarding yet mandatory. What is rewarding is different for everyone. I care about vanity stuff like pets/toys/cheeves but those can only be rewards one time and I really don't care about whatever amount of challenge it takes to get them. What kind of reward could they offer me for an increase in time/challenge that I would have to deal with on a repeated basis like WQs? Not gold, not resources, not AP, not mats, I personally can't think of something I would find acceptable for an increase in time.

-edit
Maybe something that decreased the amount of time that other activities took Like the Nomi Snacks they are adding that insta completes cooking work orders. If those were rewarded from something slightly more challenging than a typical WQ it would be worth it in my book. Or say something like a temporary 50% mount speed buff, that lasted longer based on how many waves you defeat in Proving Grounds. I personally would find that worth doing everyday since it would speed up everything else I do in game.

[Ishayu]

Maybe but that's a dark and scary path to go down. I worry blizz would try and go for "challenging and rewarding" and end up making something tedious and not rewarding yet mandatory. What is rewarding is different for everyone. I care about vanity stuff like pets/toys/cheeves but those can only be rewards one time and I really don't care about whatever amount of challenge it takes to get them. What kind of reward could they offer me for an increase in time/challenge that I would have to deal with on a repeated basis like WQs? Not gold, not resources, not AP, not mats, I personally can't think of something I would find acceptable for an increase in time.

-edit
Maybe something that decreased the amount of time that other activities took Like the Nomi Snacks they are adding that insta completes cooking work orders. If those were rewarded from something slightly more challenging than a typical WQ it would be worth it in my book. Or say something like a temporary 50% mount speed buff, that lasted longer based on how many waves you defeat in Proving Grounds. I personally would find that worth doing everyday since it would speed up everything else I do in game.

Well, I risk going very offtopic here, but I think the core reward loop of WoW is basically that your character gets to go to new places and see new things because it gets stronger because it defeated the last thing.

So I think a lot of rewards should be given out once anyway.

I think that, ultimately, the world quest system is fine, but there's too much repetition of easy content. I would prefer if world quests came in a variety of difficulty levels with a variety of rewards that are only relevant at certain levels. In fact, I think this should apply to the entire game in general, but I also think that there are some things that should be so hard almost nobody can beat them, and beating them gets you some truly special rewards, which could definitely be toys, pets, mounts, or whatever.

Giving more AP/resources/whatever will fundamentally never remove the grind unless you tone the reward up so much you only need to do it once, in which case it's still easy and mundane.

In the context of pets and toys, I think Blizzard are doing some interesting work with pet battle dungeons, and I hope they continue down that path.

[Winrarw]

I dont even know why we spiked so hard in the first place. At the end of WoD we had like 500k if I recall correctly, why the fuck do I have 4million health now ? Having huge numbers doesn't make me feel super strong.

Doesn't Blizzard realise that our "power feeling" is in relation with the ennemy ? I don't care about doing 2m if the mob has 200m, i'd feel the same hitting 2k if the mob had 200k

[Razorice]

They said they are doing one next expansion. I wonder how it will affect current and older content for soloing.

last squish didn't affect old content soloing, I think it actually made it easier.

[Deleted]

i dont have a issue with current numbers, even if they get too big, big deal , it will be nice seeing 10 million crits xD

[ls-]

I dont even know why we spiked so hard in the first place. At the end of WoD we had like 500k if I recall correctly, why the fuck do I have 4million health now ? Having huge numbers doesn't make me feel super strong.

Doesn't Blizzard realise that our "power feeling" is in relation with the ennemy ? I don't care about doing 2m if the mob has 200m, i'd feel the same hitting 2k if the mob had 200k

Blizz front-loaded us w/ shitton of stats at the very beginning (Legion pre-patch), so we wouldn't be that powerless due to all class changes, otherwise we wouldn't be able to kill anything in HFC.

But as soon as Legion released and we got EN gear we became really OP. Blizz kinda tried to rebalance stuff right before NH, but at that point they couldn't nerf us by much, people would bitch endlessly.

[Deleted]

I'd personally like to see TF'ing go, and also reduce the stat inflation during an expansion.

Similar to Vanilla/TBC this would still give you a reason to venture onto older content such as us doing an EN clear every now and then at this stage in the xpac. That said, it shouldn't be enforced or mandatory so the "non-raid" sources of loot that we've got should also continue to exist as a catchup mechanism for alts and new players. (mythic+, chests, etc)

The benefits are:

* Content stays relevant all through the expansion, but not mandatory
* We don't out-gear stuff quite so quickly, perhaps that helps Blizzard to tune content a little better. (Heroic is far too easy this expansion)
* The rich/poor gap isn't quite so wide which again encourages alt rolling and people coming back to the game (that means more subs, Blizz!)
* We get a bit more variety back, I remember inspecting people in TBC and the variation of gear was perceived as being much broader - Each tier would throw up potential BiS equipment such as the Dragonspine Trophy!

Downsides:

* Hardcore players may still feel obliged to clear all content, especially if they're fishing for THAT BiS Relic or Trinket. Removing WF/TF should mitigate against that though.
* People don't feel like they're getting quite so insanely powerful during an expansion...
* People don't like hanging onto the same item for months/years on end like we used to do.
* It's more difficult to truly "out-gear" content whilst it's relevant which may make the harder bosses more exclusive. This may be mitigated by the fact people are still happy to go back even when the next patch has released (as many of us did in TBC)

[lightofdawn]

I'm curious what makes you think that Vanilla to Wrath (or Cata) will see any sort of change with another squish. They've already been scaled to linear levels. It's Mists/WoD(/ maybe Legion) that would be scaled with another squish.

true i guess... just kind of figured it'd be all items rather than wrath forward. /shrug

[Deleted]

Elisande already resets to 100% thrice just like Garrosh did, so yeah.

[Dartz1979]

The answer to that question no not til next expansion.

[Sunaka]

Elisande already resets to 100% thrice just like Garrosh did, so yeah.

Admittedly I haven't looked into Mythic health pools (full disclosure: I basically don't raid), but that seems to be a story+mechanic thing and not an actual health cap issue. She basically treats the fight like we did with Murozond in End Time: she uses control over time to give her an edge while we're stuck with waning stamina. She does go beyond the safe point number-wise from back during Mists, but didn't they extend the number cap in such a way that it wouldn't lead to a hard fry? 'cause if Elisande's ~2.2b health pool would break it, then there'd be some serious issues having any single-pool fight just in ToS, let alone Argus.

[op3l]

I rather liked when the HP was like 100k for tanks and rest was ##k. Right now it's like 7 mil for tanks and i't slike wut...?