The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria

[Ramman]

I forsee Blizzard stealing another idea of mine. See forums Ramman Velen Item melding published awhile ago.We will all go through a new dark portal and Vanilla WoW and Outland and Northrend will no longer be accessible. We will be in the new WoWverse where you have to be at least level 90 to experience it.Think about it, a game that you can only play if you level to 90 and then transistion through the NEW DARK PORTAL (new server duh). You would actually have to buy WoW with vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cata, and MoP. Then Buy the new Expac so that you could actually transition into the new realm from which you could never return to the old realm. Scaling would immediatly cease to be a problem, your toon would effectively be level 1, gear would no longer be color coded, etc. It would not only open up tons of business for Blizz but for all of the gold farmers, Addon engineers etc that live off of secondary means of the game. This is the greaest thing ever, if you want to play WoW you play on your alts but if you want to play WoW Invasion then you have to switch to your Level 90 + toon that is and must be your Main with of course his subscription to WoW Invasion services etc. I wonder if we will have a D3 AH or the older version like now or maybe something entirely new, like a barter driven AH posting board. Ooooh the possibilities.Tell me I'm wrong HEHEHEHEHEH

[ihazabucket]

Well entry level health at around WotLK to Cata players leveling have around 20-50k health. Then when you hit 85 you would probably have close to 85k-90k health depending. I think if they were to "squish" they should squish back down to early Cata...not BC.

[styopa]

They missed a huge opportunity for this in the Cataclysm.
"It shook the world so hard, the magic fell off the items!"

You log in after Cata, all your gear still looks great, but it's GRAY. And everything you can pick up in the world is now downscaled.

/facepalm at Blizzard. Your fans saw this coming in the TBC expansion.....you just noticed it now?

[MakeMeLaugh]

lol, Your arcane blast crit for 69 TERA DAMAGE!

[Accaris]

Have fun sharing all that loot. I meanwhile will solo everything I can before this change so that when it comes, I won't have to depend on others ("others" having a notorious habit of being incompetent, ninjaing imbeciles) to get what I want.

I agree, imagine trying to run a hard Sunwell with Looking For Raid rejects. There's no major reward, therefore there's no motivation to succeed. It would be a nightmare, and I think I'd rather get a root canal.

[ultimar235]

Why not just stick to a more linear model of growth than exponential? You can still tweak it to give that same "omg powerful gear" feel, but without it going outof control.

They explained why not in the post.

[wakenbake]

I forsee Blizzard stealing another idea of mine. See forums Ramman Velen Item melding published awhile ago.We will all go through a new dark portal and Vanilla WoW and Outland and Northrend will no longer be accessible. We will be in the new WoWverse where you have to be at least level 90 to experience it.Think about it, a game that you can only play if you level to 90 and then transistion through the NEW DARK PORTAL (new server duh). You would actually have to buy WoW with vanilla, BC, Wrath, Cata, and MoP. Then Buy the new Expac so that you could actually transition into the new realm from which you could never return to the old realm. Scaling would immediatly cease to be a problem, your toon would effectively be level 1, gear would no longer be color coded, etc. It would not only open up tons of business for Blizz but for all of the gold farmers, Addon engineers etc that live off of secondary means of the game. This is the greaest thing ever, if you want to play WoW you play on your alts but if you want to play WoW Invasion then you have to switch to your Level 90 + toon that is and must be your Main with of course his subscription to WoW Invasion services etc. I wonder if we will have a D3 AH or the older version like now or maybe something entirely new, like a barter driven AH posting board. Ooooh the possibilities.Tell me I'm wrong HEHEHEHEHEH

I'd rather cauterize my ballsack with red hot butter knifes than play that.

[TheTrueM4gg0t]

I won't have to depend on others ("others" having a notorious habit of being incompetent, ninjaing imbeciles) to get what I want.

urgh... others... why do all those other people have to play my game anyway... :-D
just meat up with friends / guildies and have fun

[Barreveler]

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.

No...the purpose IS to reduce the big numbers, not to make old content more difficult. If you believe otherwise you didn't read the OP. Old content becoming marginally more difficult may be an unavoidable side effect, but it's not the goal.

Whether they choose to do it in a linear fashion, or by flattening the growth curve from Early BC -> Late BC -> Early LK - > Late LK -> Early Cata etc., the goal is still eliminating the problem of having "+3042 strength and +2034" crit on gear that leads to extraordinarily large numbers.

If they reduce the ilevels proportionately, You're ignoring what has to happen behind the scenes to make that ilevel change work. All the mobs have to be proportionately reduced in health and multipliers have to be made to scale appropriately with the new gear levels.

The net result is the same. For a given tier of content, everything will be reduced by a constant percentage. Maybe those percentages will be different from say, mid BC-heroics to Lich King Raids, but they would still be shooting for your health, the mobs health and your DPS to have roughly the same proportions as today.

[Deleted]

I have been thinking about this for a while and found it interesting that it came up in the news.

Just as a side note i haven't played wow for 6 months because I found it got to the same old end-game boredom, a problem that was reflected in blizz losing subscribers a while back, don't get me wrong I still want to play WoW.

Anyway, why is blizzard still flogging a dead horse?

Does anyone else believe they need to stop thinking about expansions and go back to RTS for a continuation in story line before bringing out a 'WoW 2' with a new graphics engine to compete with the modern tech?

I for one would love to see a 'Warcraft 4' followed by a remake of WoW.

[lightmgl]

The only right answer is that there is no right answer. The wrong answer is definitely to let it keep inflating though. That will lead to engineering difficulties in the long run and poor game optimization.

I can't really think of other games that have scaled up at the pace WoW does. Most of them just settle for the "you only get marginally stronger each xpac" mentality, and as Blizzard said it leads to being able to skip over large portions of gear and content which they clearly do not want either.

They'll need to find a middle of the road solution and look for more indirect increases of power. I suppose the problems with those (such as procs, or items that enhance abilities) leads to a balancing nightmare. It gets kind of tedious when everything you are wearing has some sort of proc too.

Oh well, its gonna come down to one of the drawbacks eventually. Its just a giant tug of war between us feeling like we're getting stronger while having large enough steps to make the gear necessary.

[Paloro]

My favorite expansion in this game was BC, mainly because I loved the "epicness" of all the raids and attunements. Each tier that you grew in BC your character was significantly stronger then it was previously. I know that it can be argued the same for every expansion however, putting the item level squish in place would most definately bring back the "significance" of an upgrade again. Will it be a shock to log in when MoP comes out and you don't have 150k hp on your boomkin? Sure it willI just don't want to see stats like the 5.3 chest that was proposed with a itlvl 600 and near 2,000 secondary stats

[akiho]

Definitely squish it. The only issue I can see with this solution is the that ability to solo "Previous-Tier" content might be affected. Most BC bosses can be killed fairly easily with one or two players in less than a minute, at lvl 85. If the numbers are squished a bit to make the same fight take 1.5 minutes or even 2 minutes, while causing our health pool to halve from the damage comparatively, that isn't a big deal. The added challenge would make the older content more fun for people who like challenges. Farmers might complain a bit, if they aren't able to solo bosses, but I don't think this change will have a as much of an impact on soloing as is feared. It all depends on the depth of "squishing" Blizzard decides to employ. If our health at 85 goes from 140,000 to 70,000 and our DPS goes from 30K to 15K, (a dramatic 50% "nerf" which would exponentially decrease future inflation), I believe we will still be able to effectively solo BC bosses. Wrath bosses might be a different story, but they will be nerfed much harder than BC bosses by the change, so it might still be doable. (Personally, I feel that being able to solo things that five levels ago took a whole raid group is ludicrous, but I don't like things to be easy, so maybe I'm the weirdo in that sense).I do NOT like the MEGA number idea. I like the grassroots feel of WoW. I don't want to feel like I'm playing a futuristic pinball game when I am rolling through Elwynn forest. I still remember the feeling I had when I made my very first WoW character. It was very pastoral. I thought the starting area was so epic, and then to realize there was a "massive!" city just outside and so many other zones to explore...I think that somewhat overwhelming, (in a good way), challenge of just exploring the world is what hooks a lot of newbies. If I hit max level and am now in a carnival type atmosphere of MEGA CRITICAL SUPER DAMAGE, it's going to take away from the feeling that I've got anything more to do in the game, which is the same exact issue that I have with WoW currently, (hmm do I do ZA/ZG for the thousandth time, for no reason except to sell some bracers, or do I run around Stormwind for an hour...hmmm...maybe my gear could be tweaked by a few EP if I naggle over some reforging options a bit?). Making the characters feel a bit less powerful in relation to past content is not a bad thing, if it maintains the integrity of the numbers displayed on the screen without selling them out to WORDS. Besides, two weeks after release "The Big Squish" will feel normal just like every other change. Like it was never, ever any other way. Plus it will give us all a new anecdote: Remember when we went from having 20-30K health to having 120-130K health...in one expansion...yeah that was dumb. I'm glad it's not that way anymore!

[wakenbake]

why don't they keep the same numbers but just add a new stat that you need to be able to damage bosses that slowly scales each tier?

[Skippert]

Just squish the numbers. Sure, ofcourse and obviously everyone will feel nerfed at the start, just like the Blizzard devs, but honestly, how much time have they given it? An hour? In a week o so you'll get used to the new numbers. It makes sense, arcane mages doing 130.000dmg on arcane blasts, it's just silly. Just compress that stuff. Sure may take a few weeks to get used to SO WHAT.

[tuesday the paladin]

Maybe someone could help me understand this. I see many people sayng lower tier content would be more challenging with the "squish" but Ghostcrawler stated:

"In other words, your Fireball will still do the same percentage damage to a player or a creature that it does today, but the number would be smaller."

If attacks are still doing the same percentage of damage to a player/creature that woiuld indicate the player/creature has been compressed in accordance. Making the gap of 60-70-80-85-90 just as wide but with smaller numbers.

Edit: It also seems highly unlikely Blizzard would make older content become more challenging out of the blue. It would alienate a fair percentage of their player base.

I'd imagine the ilvl reduction wouldn't be uniform across the board. Say 10% from 1-60 25% from 61-70 50% from 71-80 and 80% from 81-85. Your fireball may do 40% of a mobs hp at 85 before and after nerf but instead of one shotting the level 70 mob it may only deal 70% of the level 70 mobs health because they got nerfed less.

[Vesci]

so he wrote all that to say, "we haven't fixed this yet, we may not fix this soon, we don't really have any clue what we are doing". great.

[asphyx5]

I'm all for the Squish "ONLY" IF they Implement it "Correctly". Not going to count my chickens on that, cause that's alot of changes to all items and npc's hostile or not.

[The Ogdru Jahad]

100% for the ilevel squish. It would feel weird for all of a week or two, everyone would get used to it and it would be fine. Totally hope that blizzard just rips the bandaid off fast and squishes the numbers a bit. It would also show that they actually DO care about what happens in the game. Props to them!

[LeCalinours]

I can't believe how many people have a hard time reading, or understanding this. How some people can post so retarded stuff. YES YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SOLO OLD CONTENT. If they squish the stats, it's for ALL THE GAMES. All boss in the game, items, stats will be changed. And how retarded you have to be to think that, because they post this NOW, it's because they just realized it or noticed this ? They might have been talking about this for YEARS, but just decided it was the moment to share with us the info they have about it. They know that's a problem. SQUISH is the right answer. The challenge after will be to decide of "how much" they squish the number. By 2, by 5... 10 ? That's another story.