It's due to having 4 difficulties out of necessity (Content hardly anybody runs is a waste of development resources), and having to keep going up a difficulty meaningful, who would bother with mythic if it's only 5 itemlevels up from heroic?
Gear improvements need to be big enough to make it feel rewarding to keep doing the ol' gear treadmill, because when you come down to it, that's the basic game structure of WoW: Do stuff, get better gear.
The first sentance of OT is wrong. If you hang around these forums, every couple of days/weeks there a new thread about stat/lvl/ilvl squish.
Blizzard themselves said that they will probably do something about it in the near future, but i really don't see the problem people have with big numbers.
Whats the difference between having 100, 10k or 1mil? The only thing that does matter, is the relative scale of the content to your own stats.
Madness will consume you!!!
We were hitting in the 100k's mark in MoP when they deemed it as a must fix. We're now hit in the 1m's. It's going to happen. The fact of the matter is the numbers are so large they are mind-numbing to a majority of the playerbase, therefor a squish is undeniably imminent. It's quite evident that they have been trying to design a future-proofing stat squish system into the game since before WoD. With the scaling technology we see in Legion, it's pretty clear the next expansion will have it incorporated, where damage and percentages are based around character level. I expect them to role us visually back to WotLK-type numbers (at max level) and slowly scale upwards to make us feel slightly more powerful. When Legion becomes the "old" expansion in the near future, I'd like to see it in the TBC numbers range, and WoD and older in the vanilla range. That would feel appropriate to me.
Titanforging over 30 item levels is so unlikely that it is simply waste of time to run Normal and LFR.
And you don't at this point have all your legendaries for your mainspec, you either have just rerolled, or haven't played enough before this point so it is only your fault you still need to grind them.
Mandatory .. no. Would be nice to have .. yes
However I can live with it if they compress it. Since we now have HP's of 4-8M and dps of 1M+ hits, 4000K - 8000K Hp and 1000K+ hits would seem pretty good. Some customization can be done as preferred by each player to either keep the numbers, have them compress to the example above or even say 4000 in a different color (for hits) instead of 4000K to differentiate.
I will prefer the latter or at least an addon that can do that.
Stat squish will get messy and it's likely that we'll end up right in the same spot fairly quickly.
First squish was actually required because of the systems limitations at the time. Note that Garrosh had to heal each time he switched phases because his health was too high for the games code to actually work. If not for that then every single boss would have to reset its health until they switched the system from a 32 bit integer.
On the topic I'm pretty sure we've already been told that we may see a stat squish and the scale-able world content was supposed to actually test the waters to see how they could add that into the mix.
This is one part of the "progress" or "character development" illusion. It suggests an ongoing player power increasement, especially in combination with outdated content. The lastest content is always tuned around the player power you have in the latest content, ergo your effective player power never change. The illusion of never ending "progress" is one of the secrets of wow's success. To deal 100k , 1mil or 5mil damage is not important for the game, but for the player.
And if we keep squishing every expansion we will end up with going from 200 Hp to 230 in 85 levels.
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And to actually be able to level up for 110 levels. Or do we want to be almost at the same power for 100 levels? Because if we keep squishing that's what will happen.
I have the feeling that Blizzard is not in a rush to do another squish anytime soon.
My only issue with the stat squish is that it would feel very strange that we're dealing less damage even though we're getting significantly stronger in the lore. But, since we're dumping our super powerful weapons next expansion I can kinda see this happening.
"Leave your personal feedback, don't try to convince them that "everyone" hates something." - Ion Hazzikostas
It's actually Wowhead, if I quoted directly from Ion the signature would drag out too long.
It must be a massive undertaking but i agree it is long overdue, and i'm suprised they blew up the numbers so soon after the last squish. I personally thought it was getting stupid really early in the xpac and leading to bad balance.
they've already said they were doing a stat squish next expac(they wanted to do it with legion but didn't have time)
The easiest thing to do (long term, not necessarily short term) would be to do a squish with every expansion's X.0 pre-patch. Take the exponentially scaling gear of the current expansion and move it into a linear scaling system that simply continues the line from where the previous expansion ended, so the massive jump in ilvl doesn't mean an insane curve in the ball of stats on the gear.
For example, after the original stat squish in MoP, the plate legs from Garrosh had 60 str, 108 stam, and 84 points of secondary stats. Now compare tier legs from HFC the next expansion, and we're already back up to 292 main stat, 244 stam, and 388 secondary stats. At the end of HFC, instead of running up into Legion numbers in 7.0 and beyond, squish those stats back down in 7.0 to make it linear with the end of MoP and then have the exponential scaling kick in with Legion gear. Rinse and repeat.
That was because they didn't do it properly, vanilla numbers got like massively increased, now you got 11000 hp level 60 characters, and the scaling up to 60-90 isn't linear at all but massively compressed.
Now the 32 bit whatever limitation they had is gone and they can do 1000 itemlevels more properly from scratch.
Last stat squish I expected WotLK numbers but it wasn't even close. Maybe this time they will do it.