Also to add to that "90% reduction". I can't wait to spend the first 20 levels hitting for 1s through 10s.
5 combo evisceration? 20 CRIT!? OMGRAGGLEFRAGGLEBANATANGULUS. I know 1-60 will not change, but people at least throw some thought out there before you start throwing random numbers into the mix.
Your current numbers are a bit low, depending on class. I currently have about 760k health on my DK fully buffed, and that's without full BiS gear and while prioritizing mastery over stam when using gems and enchants. A monk tank guildmate of mine had very similar health when he stacked stam/mastery for heroic Sha. It may also be worth noting that the shaman healing player buff increases total tank HP by 10% in most raid combat situations.Now come MoP, DPS in Full HC gear is about 120k at most, tanks having 500-550k health
At the end of MoP, we probably will have 650-750k health on tanks and DPS doing 180-200k.
This may throw off your predicted values.
Why peoples care soo much? isn't it more realistic that the more you advance in the game the biggest the hp pools and numbers get? I still prefer fighting a 10trillion hp Sargeras that give me the idea he was a fallen god than a 1million hp sargeras that feel like mob101 in ton long.
I fail to see a relation between Sunwell fix and item squish.. It's a fix to the mechanics, that made soloing the fight nearly impossible. It has nothing to do with the numbers...
And no, I don't see an item squish coming either.. If anything, they simply change it to meta numbers. 300.000 dmg to 300k.. Same output, smaller to the eye..
Big numbers isn't the issue; scaling is. Players roughly triple in power each expansion so after 4 expansions, a MoP character is in the order of 3^4 (=81) times more powerful in simple numbers than a level 60. If instead we only got twice as powerful each expansion, we'd only be around 2^4 (=16) times more powerful than a level 60 player. I personally think 16 would be quite enough whereas 81 is somewhere between ridiculous and absurd. This wouldn't even kill soloing old raids, just move them down a notch. Cataclysm for example would probably be impossible to solo during MoP, but WoTLK would be about as hard or slightly easier than Cata etc.
Btw with current scaling, next expansion we'll be around 250 times more powerful numbers-wise than at level 60. Compare to 32 times if the scaling factor was 2 instead.
Recently it occurred to me that the "mega-damage" solution half-jokingly proposed in Ghostcrawler's old Watercooler post could actually come about more naturally by the next expansion.
We're already mentally abbreviating numbers: 300K may as well be 300. Before long most stat increases on gear will jump on a scale of thousands, at which point digits beyond the first one or two are no more meaningful than if they were behind a decimal point.
As far as old content is concerned, compression shouldn't matter much. The early stuff should fall over in about the same time, while immediately prior content will still be separated by a wide gear-gap (otherwise the new max level would be meaningless).
We basically have that now. I remember when they first put in the ability to shut off experience gains. There was a group of us that decided it would be cool to do the old Vanilla raids at level 60. So we all rolled new characters, stopped at 60, and put in the rule that you could not have any item/talent/etc that did not come from vanilla.
Our first scheduled raid night we had some severe attendance problems and only had 8 people online. Figuring there was no way we would even get past the trash in MC, we decided we would take our group of 8 into ZG. We assumed we would kill some trash, wipe a lot, have some laughs, then go home.
We cleared the entire raid. Without wiping once. With less than half the supposedly required number of players, at level, in primarily quest greens and the occasional blue. It was actually so disheartening, given what we were trying to do (recreate the vanilla raid environment) that the group fell apart.
And if anything, in the 1.5 expansions since that time level 60s have gotten stronger. Do I think a level 60 could solo MC? No probably not. But I would not put it past a level 70 in TBC gear.
I totally understand the issue of players still wanting to be able to solo old raids for mounts, transmog, etc. But there are plenty of solutions to make that happen. If nothing else, the raid testing on the PTR has already demonstrated that Blizzard does have the ability to scale our gear UP in power as well as down, so it would be feasible to simply scale the gear of whomever zoned into an old raid to a level that Blizzard determines is enough to solo it.
I found I enjoyed the game significantly more when I stopped paying attention to all the people on the forums telling me how much I am supposed to hate itAll this complaining is simply further proof that Blizzard could send each and every player a real-life wish-granting flying unicorn carrying a solid gold plate of chocolate chip cookies wrapped in hundred dollar bills, and someone would whine that Blizzard sucks for not letting them choose oatmeal raisin.
Direct quote from GC:
"Now there are some very real computational limitations. PCs just can’t quickly perform math on very large numbers, so we’d have to solve all of those problems as well. Even today, tanks can hit the ten digit threat cap on some encounters."
So yes, big numbers IS an issue.
I think everyone who is the least interested in the debate has read that quote, and there's no way he meant that computing time, within the limits of a float or integer, is an issue. Why? Because adding 000,000,001+000,000,001 and say 223,512,651 + 237,281,989 takes the same amount of time as long as no cross-limit calculations is done.
However, if they could force numbers down and use smaller integers, that could lend some credibility to the idea that lesser numbers = less computational stress
Active WoW player Jan 2006 - Aug 2020
Occasional WoW Classic Andy since.
Nothing lasts forever, as they say.
But at least I can casually play Classic and remember when MMORPGs were good.
Item squish becomes more and more necessary. There is only so much the number can climb before it turns from acceptable over to laughable. I can't remember what it was called right now, but we actually have a nice little Game Design term for that.