The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria

[Moshic]

Don't agree with deflation.

[DarkPChan]

LOL if they do Mega Damage, I want them to include the Glitter Boy class :P First thing that popped up in my head was the RIFTS pen and paper RPG

[Designer]

Why not introduce new kinds of crits? For example the mob could loose a hand in a fight due to a crit. But yes, there is no point of being able to hit for gigatons of damage, because that would be like the player is some kind of a god. In pen & paper games there are max level. After that players get more power instead of more skill. By power I mean players become landlords, then earls, then kings... And then they die! A human can reach only so much in his life. You can't live forever and train all the time and gather muscles of an ore carrier truck. And you can't get muscles of an ore carrier truck in like 50 years either. So make the rewards be something else than better items or levels. Otherwise you do end up squishing things / having those massive numbers. Warriors could gather land, buildings, settlements, and an army. Mages could gather land, mage tower, mystical caves, and golems. And so on. Propably we won't see most of these other approaches in Wow, because "Wow is not meant to be all-in-one-game". But there you have the options.

[Barreveler]

So, like, say I just finished soloing the Shattered Halls heroic, most mobs there have 20-100k HP, would that go down if my character's health was reverted from 120k to 20k?

Yes.

Theoretically the proportions should remain the same. If mobs in Heroic Shattered Halls are 70 elites and have 20k health, and you're 85 and have 120k health. Assume a 90% proportional reduction of all stats (which would be extreme) you would have 12,000 health at 85 and the mobs would have 2000 health.

Likewise, if you were doing 30k DPS at 85, you'd do about 3k dps post squish. You'd still one or two shot mobs in Heroic Shattered Halls, but everything would be scaled lower.

However, gear introduces scaling problems. Suppose we take 1 Burning Crusade weapon that has +20 strength, and another that has +26 strength. Reducing that by 90% you run into the problem that if the gear has "whole stats," you now have a gear with +2 strength and a piece of gear with ?? what? + 3 strength? the scaling issue just made that piece much more powerful.

This is the problem that would make old instances incrementally harder and content higher than you would be incrementally easier.

[Arnoror]

Again, GC stated "The Mists of Pandaria gear would still grow exponentially". In MoP you aren't going to solo much with lvl 85 but with lvl 90 so the gap would be closed again.

[orderschvank]

ya im all for squishing just squish down all the old tier bosses so i can still solo or 3 man them lol

[Vital]

Don't agree with deflation.

Solid argument you have there.

[SleepySlug]

You explained it just fine. When you cut everything down by a flat % (Like most people in this thread seem to think Blizzard will do), the difference in those numbers is still the same % wise, but the real difference is much smaller, 10 is 50% of 20, 100k is 50% of 200k.

They can't just flip a switch and scale down everything, or Cataclysm will still have a ridiculous jump.

It wouldn't be a flat %. Again, look at the proposed graph. Now I know this isn't exact numbers or anything, but if you want to squish things into a closer curve, the things furthest out are going to change the most. What this means in English: TBC gear will change the least, Wrath gear would experience a larger change than that, Cata gear would experience and even bigger change, etc. until they reached current content which would just be slid on top of it with a more familiar curve that we're used to seeing within a current expansion.

[markdall]

I so very badly want to hit something for 6 MEGA DAMAGE. I will macro in an MP3 of the first 4.5 seconds or so of "Don't want to change the World" by Ozzy Osbourne. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDtvzuG5Maw

[tohyatvc]

Yes.

Theoretically the proportions should remain the same. If mobs in Heroic Shattered Halls are 70 elites and have 20k health, and you're 85 and have 120k health. Assume a 90% proportional reduction of all stats (which would be extreme) you would have 12,000 health at 85 and the mobs would have 2000 health.

Likewise, if you were doing 30k DPS at 85, you'd do about 3k dps post squish. You'd still one or two shot mobs in Heroic Shattered Halls, but everything would be scaled lower.

However, gear introduces scaling problems. Suppose we take 1 Burning Crusade weapon that has +20 strength, and another that has +26 strength. Reducing that by 90% you run into the problem that if the gear has "whole stats," you now have a gear with +2 strength and a piece of gear with ?? what? + 3 strength? the scaling issue just made that piece much more powerful.

This is the problem that would make old instances incrementally harder and content higher than you would be incrementally easier.

You've fundamentally misunderstood this problem and the solution.
The reductions will NOT BE LINEAR. Level 70 mobs WILL be harder for you to kill at 85 than they are now. That's the whole point. This isn't just to reduce big numbers, this is to smooth out the game scaling, so older content isn't as trivial. The increases in power have NOT BEEN LINEAR. 0-60 is almost completely LINEAR, with the exception of T3 where we spiked up to ilvl 90 for some things.

Since then we have spiked up insanely. It's these reductions that will be reduced, and your overall relative power will be reduced. Thinking it will be a flat 90% reduction is completely wrong. NO FLAT REDUCTIONS.

[maccaruso]

The thing is, older raids and such would become more difficult.

Let's say a 40 man raid boss at level 60 had 1 million health, and a baseline level 60 player had 5000 hp, and they're doing, say 600dps. there's a major difference between player and boss, despite both being at 100% stat power. Once a player reaches level 85, they've got 150k hp and they're doing 30k dps. That level 60 boss has only 6.66x the hp of the player, and produces negligible damage.

Once the Squish occurs, the level 85 player only has 20k hp (1/50th of the boss) and puts out 3k dps. The Vanilla raid boss's damage/HP wouldn't likely change any, as they were implemented into a linear system and wouldn't need to be adjusted.

40 man raid bosses would be difficult (or at the least, very time consuming) at almost any character level, simply due to the character to boss ratio (40:1). 25 man bosses would be more difficult to guess at, as they were all produced under the exponential model.

That's a bit incorrect. The "squish" would happen to mobs as well. Using your given example above the player's health is reduced rougly 7.5x (150 K to 20K) which mens Ragnaros would go from 1 million health to roughly 133.3K health (1 million/7.5).

Blizzard would have to keep everything relative.

[LegendsnDreamz]

I find it funny, who a lot of people find the smallest most ludicrous thing to gripe about and say they are taking dev time away from more important things...like more raids. Then you have a lot of people saying they preffer the squish model, which would be a ton of work and more on top of that to balance/perfect it. Honestly the abbreviation model (mega damage) is a simple fix and makes sense.

[ZenX]

"Or you can adapt the style of having the larger health pools and numbers with reducing the digits to an abbreviated form(K for 1000, or 2^10 to be more precise) for where you just ignore the lower digits for the sake of reducing the needed effort of calculation... For example, suppose in the case of that ilvl 750 piece of item, assuming a player wearing gear on par with it will have around 366K attack power, or 0,36M attack power, now at this point suppose I am to crit with an ability outputting something 4xtimes more than this number of 1.830K or 1,83M. However, this is similar to how we had and attack power of 366 and did 1.830 or 1,83K damage, hence, my proposal would be to keep the big numbers in terms of the player sees it(omg 1M crit) whereas adapting a notation where digits below 1K are truncated(essentially zeros), and similarly 1M count when we are on the order of those numbers. Some may ask whether how can this be handled with lower level gear and transitions? There are two alternatives to it: 1 - This would require the player to be more aware : Any item used that has its required equip level smaller than the character's current level by 5 levels will act as a gray quality item. 2 - This may be a harder modification to be done on the engine, and a bit more fancier to handle: Change the items’ stat representation with an equation of “Stat = Modifier*ilvl”, and otherwise it is a case of displaying the stats, the engine responsible for the calculation will be only concerned with the modifier and will handle the calculation with this modifier parameter, though, I need to make some serious calculations to how to list this modifier and its growth level. TL;DR: Trick us into doing billions or zillions of damage, while handling the computing with numbers of 3 or 4 orders smaller than them, aka always deal with number of 4 significant figures or 4 digits(1,234 or 4321 etc.) for the calculations. Edit: In addition, for the prevention of players one-shotting bosses, apply the modifier of challenge mode for anyone who's entering the raid instances of past expansions with them being tuned for 10-man mode, and player tuned to be on the appropriate level(e.g t11 heroic gear on lvl 80 for ICC), thought this may not be viewed well by many people(sorry mione) So no more soloing of raids..."

[Chromathos]

I'm very very very much for the item squish! I dislike the current model of people having 100k+ heath and critting for 40+ all the time, While I know it's just numbers and would essentially be the same if we went back to 20k health, I much prefer that. Seems kind of silly with so much health and damage, but might just be me.

[Charagon]

Why are people thinking they won't be able to solo old content? Everything (stats, health pools, damage & healing down) is cut down by the same amount, so it would just like loving the decimal one place to the left. You going from having 100,000 health hitting a target with 1,000,000 for 25,000 to something like 10,000 health hitting a target with 1000,000 for 2,500. I'm sure people will make an addon to add an extra 0 or two to the combat log to make you feel more powerful.

You do not understand what is happening.


Vanilla raids were designed for lv. 60 players.
Level 70 players are roughly three times stronger than level 60 players.
Level 80 players are roughly three times stronger than level 70 players.
Level 85 players are roughly three times stronger than level 85 players.

You can solo Molten Core, because you equal about thirty level 60 players all by yourself.

What the item squish would do, would be to get rid of the massive increases between lv 60 and lv 80.
Lv 70 characters won't be vastly superior to lv. 60s. Level 80 characters won't be vastly superior to 70s.

However, the raids will still be tuned to their appropriate level.


Right now, the difference between lv 60 and lv. 70 is about the same difference between lv. 1 and lv.60. The same goes for 70 to 80.
What the item squish does is change it so the difference between lv. 60 and lv. 70 is the same as the difference between lv. 50 and lv. 60.



Basically, don't expect to solo anything you couldn't solo one expansion earlier.

[Ryme]

Right now, they just need a simple piecewise function to allow gear to increase from expansion to expansion but at a linear rate, or perhaps you could get away with some slight exponential growth depending on how much effort you want to put into the function.

The discontinuity from each point just needs to be sufficient enough that gear from old expansions still sucks when we change to the new one.

[Crashdummy]

I demand a graphic for "You healed for 2 Mega HealDamage."

Not anymore, not since Cataclysm, at least not in term of percentage of target healed.

[Kiru]

It wouldn't be a flat %.

I know it wouldn't be a flat % change, but the people arguing about Old Content are saying "Oh it's fine just cut Illidans Health, Your Health and Damage to 10%, IT'S ALL THE SAME WITH SMALLER NUMBERS" when this is nothing like it would be.

At the end of my post I said it wouldn't be a flat % change.

[wiIdi]

here is my crappy idea: remove the last digit on every item, do something similar with hp and dmg

[terrih91]

I find it funny, who a lot of people find the smallest most ludicrous thing to gripe about and say they are taking dev time away from more important things...like more raids. Then you have a lot of people saying they preffer the squish model, which would be a ton of work and more on top of that to balance/perfect it. Honestly the abbreviation model (mega damage) is a simple fix and makes sense.

a simpler fix would be to just scale up to that point slowly. if they rush into it then they are burying themselves to jst get up to ludicrous amounts of stats like in the second picture. why do we need a massive jump or a reset on our stats?