How Legion iLvls should've been to avoid insane power creep

[XDurionX]

With a flat curve like this, good players can roflstomp the newest raid tier without any gear from that instance.

[XDurionX]

Much like it is today you mean? The people clearing mythic or parts of it the first week doesn't have any mythic gear from that raid on them.

But they're nearly fully hc equipped. With your changes, they could clear mythic with LAST tiers hc gear.

[Gorsameth]

But they're nearly fully hc equipped. With your changes, they could clear mythic with LAST tiers hc gear.

Yes, and they (almost) no one had a problem with that in all the previous expansions.

[XDurionX]

Yes, and they (almost) no one had a problem with that in all the previous expansions.

The power creep is the same as in every other expansion before, it's not worse in Legion. In Wrath for example the ilvl increased from ~200 at max level to 277, which is a 34% increase. To reach that, we would have to get to ~1100 in Argus.

Correction, they would do it in last tiers mythic gear which is how it should be. Going down a difficulty every tier is frankly just weird, you should continue to progress at the same difficulty you were raiding the previous tier. Of course they could do current heroic for specific trinkets and/or set bonuses as it would award the same iLvls as the previous tier mythic but that would be completely optional and give marginal gains at best.

i said they COULD clear it in last tiers hc gear. Of course they would have last tier's mythic gear. Gear inflation has always been this way, even when there haven't been as many difficulties as we have now. It's not suddenly a problem. You have to keep a steep curve to keep gear aquisition interesting and needed.

[Shiny212]

Ilvl in and of itself is fine I think. The issue to me is the incredible non-fun of getting any item if it isn't titanforged. Generally bad design if you ask me, not only do you have to try to get an item, the item itself has a high chance of being useless.

Biggest issue with Legion as a whole is legendaries. The entire system around them is awful. When you got players starting new chars, lvling them, gearing them, just to try to get better legendary RNG, something's wrong. A 920 dps or healer wth crappy legendaries (and in many situations they are ALL crappy except the 2 BIS legendaries), is comparatively useless.

[XDurionX]

The difference is that those 34% increases in iLvls resulted in a 150% DPS increase over the course of an entire expansion. In Legion we've already increased our DPS by 450% and we're not even finished with the expansion yet.

If we were to go by the Wrath model our DPS by the end of Legion should be 850k on a single target fight, we're already almost at twice that.

It was waaaay more than 150%, and i'm yet to see someone pull 1.7m on a st raid encounter. Hyperbole won't help your point.

[Adlian]

Tbh TF system was fun at the start, not it feels more like an annoyance. I feel like im forced to do normal/heroic because there is a chance for TF gear. Also 200+ ilvl for 1 expansion sounds silly, we went from 800 to most likely above 1000 in Argus. TF system should be removed from the game. WF 5-10ilvls was fine.

[Echocho]

It was waaaay more than 150%, and i'm yet to see someone pull 1.7m on a st raid encounter. Hyperbole won't help your point.

Wotlk started out at 4k and ended at 12k. Legion started at 340k and is now at 1.5 million. Math checks out.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

Wotlk started out at 4k and ended at 12k. Legion started at 340k and is now at 1.5 million. Math checks out.

Your memory is obviously failing you. WotLK started at like 2k (assuming you base your start on freshly dinged chars, not fully geared iLvl 200 chars).

ICC did most certainly not end at 12k. Fully 277 geared chars, especially Legendary Warrs could easily pull 20k+.

[dcc626]

Tbh TF system was fun at the start, not it feels more like an annoyance. I feel like im forced to do normal/heroic because there is a chance for TF gear. Also 200+ ilvl for 1 expansion sounds silly, we went from 800 to most likely above 1000 in Argus. TF system should be removed from the game. WF 5-10ilvls was fine.

titanforge cap in antorus will be 970. only legendaries will be 1000.

[Hctaz]

And why current implementation of item level scalling is a problem? You don't even notice it. On the other hand multiple raid difficulties allow different kind of people (yes, there are less and more skilled/experience people than you!) to find their place and have fun.

Plenty of people obviously have a problem with item level scaling since there is general community outrage over it. I don't care about it myself and would rather have the item levels stop being so damn inflated instead.

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The power creep is the same as in every other expansion before, it's not worse in Legion. In Wrath for example the ilvl increased from ~200 at max level to 277, which is a 34% increase. To reach that, we would have to get to ~1100 in Argus.

That's not how item level works. Item level 200 to 277 is not a bigger increase than 900 to 977. They're both increasing the base item level by 77. Every expansion has a "ground zero" and Wrath's was 200. The previous 199 item levels literally no longer matter. You are tuned around item level 200 being the same at 80 as you were at... whatever the baseline itemlevel was in BC at 70. 200 is 0. I don't even know what constitutes as 0 in Legion. I guess whatever LFR EN was. But we've already gone up over 100 item levels from there. 100 is greater than 77.

- - - Updated - - -

Your memory is obviously failing you. WotLK started at like 2k (assuming you base your start on freshly dinged chars, not fully geared iLvl 200 chars).

ICC did most certainly not end at 12k. Fully 277 geared chars, especially Legendary Warrs could easily pull 20k+.

Yes but that's also with a 30% damage buff. The top dps without the buff was 18k max. And you're assuming a freshly dinged 80 then we can assume a freshly dinged 110 and not a full mythic dungeon geared player as well. I know when I was fully mythic dungeon geared 840-850 I was doing about 300k as unholy parsing in the top 80-95% on all fights in EN heroic and mythic. I honestly couldn't tell you how much people were doing freshly dinged at 110 but I know the item level was lower than 800. I imagine it was probably around the 100k range.

[Deleted]

Ilvl is not the only cause we are having such a power creep, adding shit to artifacts every patch only makes it go even further. I remember when they released the new traits everybody was doing about 50k dps more the same day and that just skyrocketed to madness when people eventually got to concordance 1. Before the artifact change, i remember being 9/10 MM and still doing Krosus on the last portion of the bridge (~5:00 kills), so the DPS wasn't that inflated at all; but eventually we got to gul'dan (about 4-6 weeks later)+new traits and boom, krosus died before reaching even the third portion.

[Dracullus]

Plenty of people obviously have a problem with item level scaling since there is general community outrage over it. I don't care about it myself and would rather have the item levels stop being so damn inflated instead.

You don't know how this community works? There is "general community outrage" every time when Blizzard change something. Bigger change, bigger outrage. Then they forget about it, because they are busy raging at some more recent change.

We have inflation, because we have many difficulty levels. Many difficulty levels exist because WoW is played by people with different skill, experience, commitment (newbie, casual, experienced, hardcore and so on) and in different environment (pug/organized). On the other side you just "rather have the item levels stop being so damn inflated instead". Any of you can't come up with reasonable argument, you just trow numbers and tell it is bad for some reason.

[Hctaz]

You don't know how this community works? There is "general community outrage" every time when Blizzard change something. Bigger change, bigger outrage. Then they forget about it, because they are busy raging at some more recent change.

We have inflation, because we have many difficulty levels. Many difficulty levels exist because WoW is played by people with different skill, experience, commitment (newbie, casual, experienced, hardcore and so on) and in different environment (pug/organized). On the other side you just "rather have the item levels stop being so damn inflated instead". Any of you can't come up with reasonable argument, you just trow numbers and tell it is bad for some reason.

I mean me wanting the game to have less difficulty settings is another story entirely that I won't get into. The argument is that when the gear inflation gets so bad that they have to implement health scaling from world content based on your item level then you know there's a problem. They've never had to do this ever in the history of WoW.

[Deleted]

I mean me wanting the game to have less difficulty settings is another story entirely that I won't get into. The argument is that when the gear inflation gets so bad that they have to implement health scaling from world content based on your item level then you know there's a problem. They've never had to do this ever in the history of WoW.

Yup i remeber when they didnt scale up HP on heroic bosses on Panda. The median kill was around 15 seconds.

[david0925]

Power Creep is always inevitable. If you make stat gain linear, character growth will stagnate. If you want to keep linear character growth, stat growth must be exponential. So the best thing you can do is to control it.

Having 4 difficulties and Titanforge really exacerbated the issue by, as the OP suggested, making the range of ilvl larger. Artifacts being so strong also increased the base value of your abilities which made these % based modifier even stronger. I didn't play MoP or WoD so I can't speak for them, but this is the first tier that I have experienced that you can take 20 people in mythic NH gear and kill almost every boss from the previous tier on mythic in 1:30 or under.

I honestly don't know what they can do about it, or if they need to do anything about it. Ever since Sunwell in TBC the game has been mostly about latest tier + catch up gear.

[apelsinjuice]

this is what you get when you have fking 4 difficulties of the same raid + titanforge

[Zka]

Extreme power creep has been a huge issue since about LK. There should be something like +100% power gain during a whole expansion. Instead of that we are seeing 500-1000% gains in DPS.
Legion spans over ~200 ilvls AND we have artifact weapons on top of that, to be extended further with a new tree in next major patch. Just ridicolous.

[dreamdaddy]

I see what Blizz was trying to do with titanforging: making older content semi-relevant so you would have some benefit for running H EN with your guilds' alts when you're in M NH gear. I think they should have removed the RNG aspect of it and made obliterum-like items purchasable with badges that drop from content that can raise the ilvl of items by 5 (with increasing prices the higher the item is). Instead of hoping for a 900 unstable arcanocrystal, I could choose to grind and invest in my 860 one to buff it up to 900.

[david0925]

It depends on how you look at it. Even when accounting for WF/TF the average ilvl jump between each tier is identical. It's just that there is a chance, however small, that you may find something you really want in a previous tier. The chance is extremely small, but it is bigger than zero.

The system is designed intentionally to not be "Oblitertum based" so you don't feel compelled to grind it. Some people will choose to go back to a previous tier and hope for a 0.000000005% of a trinket that TF for 50 levels, or they will decide that such a small chance isn't worth their time. Meanwhile if you make it so you can steadily work up an old item by running old content, even if it took 100 runs, the "reliability" of getting such item will compel people to do it.