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

[Kagthul]

This worked out fine in earlier expansions though. You didn't have more than 10 iLvls between tiers but the encounters were tuned in such a way that you needed those 10 iLvls. Having a BiS item coming from the previous tier isn't necessarily a bad thing either, I remember getting an offhad back in TBC that I knew was BiS for two tiers, getting it felt really satisfying, I don't think we need to replace every single piece of gear as soon as a new raid comes out.

Your numbers are a bit off on the gap in old raid tiers, but your "lower the insane power scaling" thing is something that has been being told to the devs since the original beta. No shit.

And i agree wholeheartedly. We also dont need 4 raid difficulties. 2 would be fine, honestly, and turn LFR into a Mythic-5 experience. Same story, tune the encounters differently. Use all the same art assets. Lets people experience the story if they want, keep the weekly lockout, and count it as a mythic dungeon.

For clairy, back from Vanilla > Cata (at least early Cata, i know they added LFR in there later and that messed things up) it was 12/13 iLevels between tiers (they alternated, so 25/two tiers), and six between Normal/Hard.

For instance, from LK:

Naxx 10 was 200
Naxx 25 was 212
KT and the dragon right before him (KT i know, unsure about the dragon and too lazy to look it up) dropped +6, being considered "hard".

Ulduar 10 was 212
Ulduar 25 was 225
Hard Modes dropped +6

etc. The entire xpac only went through 64 iLevels (200 base at level 80, from Heroics or Naxx 10 or Crafted, through 264 for Heroic LK).

We do that in ONE FUCKING TIER now.

That's the problem.

Game designers who dont understand Mudflation in a statistics-based game are morons.

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That was an entirely different situation. There was no gear catchup in BC so every alt or new player had to start at Kara and worth their way up. Before Hyjal/BT this was not too bad as you could gear up Kara and then there were plenty of people doing SSC/TK. Once BT was out no guild that was already attuned wanted to touch SSC/TK. There were then very few guilds in that tier and it became really hard to get into a guild in BT because of attunements. In fact when BT guilds needed fresh blood they actively recruited from other weaker BT guilds and passed the problem on. Sure sometimes those guilds would be forced to attune new people but they did it as rarely as possible. The guild I was in back then only ran SSC/TK once after we moved on.

The main reason that Kara and ZA remained relavent for so long is because they existed a separate progress track for people not in raiding guilds and the alts of raiders. These days those people raid Normal/Heroic and a much easier time making the leap to mythic if they want to.

Sunwell Island had catch up gear through the Heroic version of the 5-man.

Worked fine.

Edit: and they added new badge gear for for each Tier (usually only 2-4 pieces) in Shat. And crafted gear was viable (for the 2-4 slots it was available for) for the entire xpac.

[Temp name]

You can get to 900 in a week with ZERO non-LFG content, so that point is irrelevant, and on top of that, taking a break SHOULD put you behind.

Yeah, it should put you behind.. But there hasn't been a point in the game where at the start of a new tier you do 4x more dps than the start of the previous one.

The word you're searching for to all-caps is "meaningless".

It doesn't matter whether you kill one boss with 1k dps in one minute or another boss with 100 billion dps in one minute. Both bosses die in roughly expected timeframes, and you're geared to make it happen. In the good old days you wouldn't try (unless carried) another tier of content until well-geared from the last, so precedent is set. Be geared for the content. The relative numbers and distance between them means dick-all.

It matters when the same scaling is applied within a raid, or within a tier. Doing Helya when she released was stupidly tough, but a few months later, after NH came out, suddenly she was a fucking cakewalk, while still being current content

[Aeula]

They can power creep all they want for my sake. The quicker content becomes easier the happier I am.

[cparle87]

But that's also stupid... what's the point of getting gear if everything just gets harder when you do?

So how do you propose that we become stronger with time, but the mobs do not, but still remain a challenge? Honestly asking. It sounds to me like asking "how do you eat your cake and save it for later at the same time?"

[Echocho]

So how do you propose that we become stronger with time, but the mobs do not, but still remain a challenge? Honestly asking. It sounds to me like asking "how do you eat your cake and save it for later at the same time?"

It's a case of the mobs in the outside world being trivial to begin with and then boosting our dps by 1000% as we get gear. If the mobs posed a challenge as they did in the early days and at the end of the expansion we were twice as strong as when we finished leveling they would be easier but not trivial.

[Eon Drache]

In this scenario titanforging doesn't exist but warforging +5 does. Mythic+ awards a static iLvl increase the higher you go up to the cap of current content heroic iLvls.

As a retribution Paladin this chart would mean that I wouldn't replace T19 2 piece for anything even 2 tiers after unless the tier bonus is better (It currently is not on ptr) and using Normal NH Relics over Mythic ToS relics would be a thing. Also a haste/vers ring from Mythic EN would be used over any ring in Mythic ToS if it had mastery on it. The ilevel jumps are to actually give reason to do the content. Did it need to jump as much as it did? No. But this chart wouldn't be much better.

Specially since Heroic Dungeon gear would have been better than Normal EN gear with some of the tuning and passing on raid gear for the reason "Oh this 810 relic from a 5 man is better than this 830 relic from a raid" is shit.

[BiggestNoob]

There are a few problems I wish they'd fix:

1. Secondary scaling is effectively nonexistent above a certain ilvl and primaries don't make up for this difference, which means power growth happens more with trinkets, set bonuses, class buffs, artifact buffs, and legendaries than it does with ilvl, and ilvl has traditionally been the implicit nerf in content. In NH it required a massive player buff along with content nerfs, and the same is likely true of ToS. Avatar and KJ in particular, while Sass'zine could be a bit more forgiving with shot soaks as the fight is quite hard in P3 with any deaths. I don't like having a patch come through and just basically trivializing the content. HFC was very easy with 730 ilvl and rings above 760, but it was an incremental and slow growth, and if you killed Archimonde at ~726 raid ilvl with rings at like 940 it was still quite difficult (10-11 minute or so kill) versus what people experienced much later with +10 ilvls and 795 rings (7 minute kills) which is basically what happened to Gul'dan within the span of a month or two.

2. Titanforging is just stupid. M+ drops and previous-tier drops especially of trinkets and set shouldn't retain so much power in progression.

3. It takes a little over 2 months to get every single legendary for a spec on a fresh character with an enormous amount of play time. It'd actually be nice if you could pick a legendary you wanted and work towards it rather than having it be full lottery, because many people didn't get BiS legendaries until one of their last pieces, and referring to 1, BiS legendaries are one of the biggest things you can have. It doesn't take anywhere near that long to get AK 40 and have Concordance, so I don't understand why this incredibly alt-unfriendly and new player unfriendly design is still so incredibly fucked.

4. Split farming is still too effective, there should be no real benefit to doing this, because it just artificially injects time into a raid. I think this could be fixed with a combination of not making heroic a huge jump over the previous tier's mythic and properly balancing trinkets/tier and removing TF.

[cparle87]

Through progression to harder challenges. If you dramatically outgear something it shouldn't be rewarding for you.

But weren't people complaining heavily last xpac that outdoor content was meaningless and unrewarding? Also by that logic should random heroics and regular mythics not drop AP and have a chance to drop leggos for mythic raiders?

[Svisalith]

Blizzard tried to counteract this with scaling mobs and people didn't like it.

It's just the fundamentally wrong solution.

If you have to scale everything up by 5x because player power has increased by 10x, why didn't you just leave them unscaled and scale the players by 2x?

The time-to-kill on that content would be the same either way but with the second option the power gains actually make sense.

[dexx]

Exponential power increases between tiers is done deliberately to avoid other problems, though. If you don't have big enough ilvl gaps between tiers, newer content doesn't seem as rewarding or exciting and older content remains relevant or even required for much too longer for the way the game is currently designed.

Would that be so bad? Why does the power increase have to be so big each time? The player base would adjust to a new tier giving only a marginal increase.

[Dracullus]

What's wrong with power creep? It will all reset in next expansion anyway and if number go too high - they will just squish it. Outdated tiers are easier to get, we can solo old content sooner, world have soft item level scalling, so you current world content won't feel outdated. So what actually is the problem?

[Leih]

Would that be so bad? Why does the power increase have to be so big each time? The player base would adjust to a new tier giving only a marginal increase.

Whether you agree with it or not, the game is designed since, like, Wrath, that at any one time only the current tier raid is the relevant content. The old linear progression system where even in the last patch of the expansion you're still expected to start from scratch and raid Molten Core for a couple months before you can move up to Blackwing Lair is long gone.

It's fair to think that the Vanilla system of linear progression was better, but that's not the game Blizzard are making and they haven't been making that game for, well, basically the past 9-10 years.

If ilvl gaps aren't big enough, then older raid content becomes relevant and (in the eyes of the community) mandatory and WoW's meant to be more casual than that. It's intended that a guild can raid 2-3 times a week and focus on progressing together in the current raid tier, and that every player can get to the same level fairly quickly. The old days of segregating the playerbase and the concept of a raid guild being this massive massive 5 days a week time-sink are gone, and the ilvl jumps are a part of that design.

[kamuimac]

Who gives a shit if people do more damage and have a high ilevel?

dumb people who have troubles with big numbers aka majority of population - people generaly have trouble to comprehend numbers bigger then 9999 / shrug

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But weren't people complaining heavily last xpac that outdoor content was meaningless and unrewarding? Also by that logic should random heroics and regular mythics not drop AP and have a chance to drop leggos for mythic raiders?

people werent compalining about it because it was easy - people were complaining because it didnt give them any gear

people dont give a f... about chalenge - people care about steady slow gear progression over time - only basement dwellers care about meaningless things like "chalenging themselves" in computer games - most just want to have fun

[gushDH]

The only problem with legion's power creep isn't the ilvl. Ilvl has been increasing exponentially in every expansion, so the relative power increase with each major patch was the same for every tier. And it needs to be there so it feels worth and you feel the difference in power with each upgrade in gear. If it was linear, the higher ilvl you are, the less interesting the upgrades look.

The problem is that we have the artifact weapons, and more specifically the 15% throughput increase with the 2 traits. That on its own is the reason that each 1 ilvl is counted as 1.15 ilvls.

The easiest solution to legion's power creep would be to have never introduced these traits to the artifacts.

[Echocho]

What's wrong with power creep? It will all reset in next expansion anyway and if number go too high - they will just squish it. Outdated tiers are easier to get, we can solo old content sooner, world have soft item level scalling, so you current world content won't feel outdated. So what actually is the problem?

Inflation. Read about it, it's pretty bad.

[Dracullus]

Inflation. Read about it, it's pretty bad.

Could you expand this?

[Trend]

I think it would suck to still feel like I need to do NH, much less even older raids. I like the fact that inflation makes those raids obsolete and pointless outside of such a low chance to get a high enough titanforge proc on very specific pieces that it's not even worth considering doing.

I get the point that not everyone feels the same way, but I like moving on to new things.

[ponies]

Blizzard design team is stupid now,

If they balanced game around ilvl caps being smaller previous raids wouldnt be totally useless and could still be raiding to fill like one night a week or something.

[Hctaz]

For instance, from LK:

Naxx 10 was 200
Naxx 25 was 212
KT and the dragon right before him (KT i know, unsure about the dragon and too lazy to look it up) dropped +6, being considered "hard".

Ulduar 10 was 212
Ulduar 25 was 225
Hard Modes dropped +6

I gotta correct this for you cuz I'm a Wrath baby and Wrath is my baby.
Naxx 10 man did drop 200 gear. Naxx 25 man was 213 gear. Only KT dropped higher item level loot, not Sapphiron. KT's loot on 10 man was 213 and 25 man it was 226.

Ulduar 10 was 219
25 was 226

Hard mode Ulduar 10 was 226
25 was 232 or 239 depending on the boss. Not sure why 25 man had two different item levels for hard modes.

But anyway, yeah the starting tier of item level was 200. The ending item level was 277 from heroic ICC 25 man or 284 weapons from heroic 25 man LK or Shadowmourne. We destroyed that gap in one tier.



And for all the people claiming that "It's all just relative"

No. No it isn't ALL just relative. For raids it is relative. They will obviously balance the brand new raid around whatever loot drops from it but something you've overlooked is the effect it has on the rest of the previous content. Yeah, Blizzard has done a good job at making sure the new tier is the only thing you care about and the rest is irrelevant but obviously this expansion has broken the mold by continuing to make the 7.0 world content relevant throughout the patch cycle. This has led to Blizzard implementing the system that allows enemy creature's health to scale with your item level. You want creatures to stop scaling with your gear? Then nerf the power creep. That's the only way you're getting that feature removed. Blizzard doesn't want people to run around one shotting the mobs from the beginning patch. It was never like this before MoP introduced so many raid difficulties. Sure, a fully geared ICC heroic 25 man player would not face a challenge doing world content but they also couldn't round up everything in sight and one shot it all by sneezing on it.

[Dracullus]

No. No it isn't ALL just relative. For raids it is relative. They will obviously balance the brand new raid around whatever loot drops from it but something you've overlooked is the effect it has on the rest of the previous content. Yeah, Blizzard has done a good job at making sure the new tier is the only thing you care about and the rest is irrelevant but obviously this expansion has broken the mold by continuing to make the 7.0 world content relevant throughout the patch cycle. This has led to Blizzard implementing the system that allows enemy creature's health to scale with your item level. You want creatures to stop scaling with your gear? Then nerf the power creep. That's the only way you're getting that feature removed. Blizzard doesn't want people to run around one shotting the mobs from the beginning patch. It was never like this before MoP introduced so many raid difficulties. Sure, a fully geared ICC heroic 25 man player would not face a challenge doing world content but they also couldn't round up everything in sight and one shot it all by sneezing on it.

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.