The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria

[Vook]

TBH I'd love to go back to smaller numbers. I remember back in TBC, seeing a tank with 20k HP and going "HOLY SHIT THAT TANK HAS A FUCKTON OF HEALTH". Or seeing that I had 7k mana and thinking that was a lot.

And really, right now in Cata, it feels really awkward...the gap between 1 and 85 is gigantic. Going from 300 hp at level 10 to 160k at level 85. Whereas back in Vanilla, 1-60 felt somewhat balanced in terms of numbers, going from 300hp at level 10 to 4k hp at level 60. (no, I am not a vanilla fanboy.)

[MusashiX]

I'm for the item squish all the way. There's so many useless upgrades in old raid content now and I never understood why from vanilla to BC avg player health went from 6-8k to maybe 12k, in wrath 20-30k. cata 120-200k. That's a pretty extreme curve. May want to tone it done a bit lol.

[Kumashy]

I just read about 20 pages of comments and I have to say, what is wrong with some of you people? Did you completely skipped school or something? Never managed to learn how to read or what the f...?There's a SINGLE phrase in the entire post that answers what a lot of people fear, not being able to faceroll old content...

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.

That in and of itself includes: PvP, PvE both old and new. You will do the same damage/healing to EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING IN THE GAME RIGHT NOW. ONLY THE NUMBER DISPLAYED WILL CHANGE IN GEAR/DMG METERS/HEALTH/ETC. He just didn't elaborate and broke down piece by piece what would change, but he's pretty much saying everything will be the same as it is today, just a shrink in numbers across the board.Why is that notion so difficult to understand, does Greg need to highlight it and explain it like he was talking to a bunch of 5 years old for you people to understand it?

I took one read at it and I got his point. Enough with the chart example already, it's just that, a theoretical chart to better explain how the ilvl increase would look like come release. Stop doing your weird math and being hell bent on not being able to solo X content because they are not nerfing 60 and lower content, and yada yada yada.

And YES, scale everything back to classic levels and start from there again. Sure, it's gonna be a tad weird at first, but like many people have said, we will adapt for sure after a couple of weeks. Right now, the situation is ridiculous and it's only going to get worst if you keep this ilvl inflation up thoughtout yet another expansion.

[Shadefire]

The numbers might be getting ridiculous but wouldn't you rather that the developers went for the mega damage option and spent their time working on new content rather than working on old content? Personally I'd much rather have mega damage and new content than everything being squished and a lack of new content. Out of interest how many people voting for the squish would complain about the lack of new content due to the developer's time being spent on old content (again)? Would you rather have the squish or new content?

[Puntar]

This problem is so easilly solved...

Keep everything as it is now. ONLY 1 CHANGE IS NEEDED!

Item budgets should not increase by %, but by a STATIC VALUE!


Example:
Tier 12 --> Tier 13, +400 strenght (or any other vary of stats)
Tier 13 --> Tier 14 +400 strenght (or any other vary of stats)

Result 1: After cataclysm the items would have had their stats increased by 1200
Result 2: After Pandaria the items would have had their stats increased by 2400
Result 3: After expansion X the items would have had their stats increased by 3600

INSTEAD OF THE 39k stats at the end of 95.

In other words: Make the item budget LINEAR NOT EXPONENTIAL


-Vaem/Varox/Astion w/e

NOT POSSIBLE AS ILEVEL FORMULA USED NOW FOR ITEM STATS IS EXPONENTIAL!

They won't squish items! Blizz will certanily lower ilevel power on all expansion gear.

Instead of 85 - 115 ilvl BC blues, LK 135 - 200 ilvl bues, I can certainly predict that in WoW 5.0 if they follow the "classic" formula we will have

61 - 70 blues for BC
71 - 80 blues for LK
and

81 - 85 blues for Cata

Gratz we are now back in BC in terms of numbers!

-------------------------

For the sake of the game I do hope Blizz also changes the ilevel formula for stats! And make a shaking change to the itemization as well.

Even if that means fiddling with stats on gear bellow lvl 60!!!

-----------------
Just and example of this. (ilevel of items is +50% of lvl - - end game gear for current expansion do not follow this rule"


lvl ilevel
20 30
40 60
60 90
70 105
80 120
90 135

[Kumashy]

The numbers might be getting ridiculous but wouldn't you rather that the developers went for the mega damage option and spent their time working on new content rather than working on old content? Personally I'd much rather have mega damage and new content than everything being squished and a lack of new content. Out of interest how many people voting for the squish would complain about the lack of new content due to the developer's time being spent on old content (again)? Would you rather have the squish or new content?

I don't see it as time consuming as some people are making it out to be. You know what took developer time? Redoing pretty much every vanilla zone for Cata, that imvho while cool, was completely irrelevant. Sure, it was cool to level a new toon and see how zones changed from way back in 2004 when I leveled my first char, but besides that, pointless.

Tweaking a bunch of numbers is hardly a 1-year job. I am sure they have the tech already to modify stats on massive content with ease. You think when they nerfed firelands they did it 1 by 1? I am sure they have a program around that lets them tweak the overall dmg/hp/stats on ANYTHING in the game, on multiple items/mobs at once. But we don't know for sure, do we? Besides, it doesn't take a team of a 100 people to do the job, and I'm sure a "content developer" is not going to be doing that job.

[spiderfish]

I just read about 20 pages of comments and I have to say, what is wrong with some of you people? Did you completely skipped school or something? Never managed to learn how to read or what the f...?There's a SINGLE phrase in the entire post that answers what a lot of people fear, not being able to faceroll old content...

I'm going to chalk your inability to grok this concept up to the american public school system.

I want you, and the rest of the posters in this thread like you, to stare carefully at the two graphs posted in the article.

Look at the difference between the end of Vanilla and the end of TBC in the first chart. Looks like roughly iLevel 95 and iLevel 170 to me.

That's a ~79% increase in power from Vanilla to TBC.

In the second graph we have iLevel 70 at the end of Vanilla, and iLevel 95 at the end of TBC. That's a ~36% increase in power.

Now look at Vanilla vs Cataclysm in the first chart. 90 vs 410. 355% more powerful in Cataclysm.

In the second chart? 70 vs 175. Only 150% more powerful. If this were a flat percentage squish you'd like to think it is, you'd still be 355% more powerful in Cataclysm than Vanilla--but doing less damage.

Now you get it. Old content will, in fact, be almost twice as hard to solo after the proposed item squish.

-- edit for typo

[Karnige]

The numbers might be getting ridiculous but wouldn't you rather that the developers went for the mega damage option and spent their time working on new content rather than working on old content? Personally I'd much rather have mega damage and new content than everything being squished and a lack of new content. Out of interest how many people voting for the squish would complain about the lack of new content due to the developer's time being spent on old content (again)? Would you rather have the squish or new content?

they are a billion $ company they can do both. I'm in favor of the squishing but at the same time I don't really care because I don't solo old stuff

[Ralidyn]

MUDflation = bad

[Dynamike]

All this addition! Why not involve multiplication? On the item description include the "Item gear level" such as 376. Then have the STR DEX etc have a 1.257 for instance next to it to indicate how much strength or dexterity you're getting. I would of course highlight the 376 because that's what people will be looking at, not how much strength it really has. They want to know if it increases their haste as opposed to crit. And if they want to compare the lvl 376 item to a 375 to see which is better; grab a calculator or have the "true numbers" of the strength appear if you click a button on the item.

That took me about 30 seconds to come up with. Its the most simple and logical answer which doesnt require changing tons of code.

[NSDragon]

I want you, and the rest of the posters in this thread like you, to stare carefully at the two graphs posted in the article.

You didn't stare at the graphs carefully enough. They're about item level, not about overall character power. Item level by itself does nothing. It's just a way to determine the item's total stat budget.

What GC didn't say was how they were thinking of keeping relative character power, i.e. how to make your fireballs still one-shot that heroic 70 boss even after the squish. Which he mentioned as his goal in that same post, by the way.

Your percentages also mean nothing. If a level 60 character at the end of vanilla had an ilvl of 90, then how is a current character with heroic gear (~380 ilvl) able to do what 40 of those vanilla players could, even though his ilvl is only about four times greater? That ~300% increase in ilvl translated to an increase of power of at least 3900%. Hell, some of us could even solo MC at level 80, with an ilvl cap of about 280.

[anyaka21]

A linear path has been needed for a while because of the inflated stats as they are going. Something has to be done, and has needed to be done even when TBC came out. Heck, most people when TBC came out replaced half their gear in the 1st 20mins of questing.

Linear progression also adds a more balanced raiding experience. As it is now, and has been since LK came out, you finish one tier and then no one does any of the other raids any more until either or nostalgic reasons, mount reasons, or soloable do people go back and do them again.

Personally, I think this could be a good thing. One of the main things I do wonder though with what has seemingly been a mass exodus of players, is...will this work, will it bring back players to the game or will it drive more away.

I think in terms of the hardcore crowd, they could care less. 50k dps or 5k dps doesn't matter to them as long as they are progressing. It will matter to the solo player who couldn't get in a group to do it him/herself before and as thus needs to massively outgear it to do it. It will matter to the vanity crowd who think they've been nerfed, who only want bigger and bigger numbers without seeing the big picture.

[axio]

I don't know about the "squish" as they say it, but I agree with redoing all of the stats with a more linear approach... as long as the stats for the last tier in Cataclysm come out to be about the same. If they're just worried about displaying the numbers, then "k" and "m" are very common (especially for the new players coming from Runescape) so it shouldn't be a problem. I just don't think going back to doing 6,000 fireball crits and having 25k hp is going to help this game at all.But if they're worried about the technical aspect of it:"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."Computer's are getting more and more powerful. Technology also grows exponentially... so this shouldn't be a huge problem. A decent computer runs $500. My recently bought laptop for $750 plays WoW on max settings (aside from shadows being on low) no problem @ 1080p resolution.The problem will probably come in when they can only store numbers up to 2,147,483,647 effectively on 32 bit machines. A 64 bit machine however, can do up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807. So maybe it's time that WoW goes 64 bit? It seems like they've been working on it: http://wow.mmosite.com/updates/wow_4...lient.shtmlHow many PC's that run WoW are still 32 bit? Surely if it's been bought within the last 5 years it's 64 bit, and anything older than that really can't be expected to play the latest games... There would be ways for Blizzard to maintain 32 bit support, but at a performance hit. Of course it's not like we're going to be hitting bosses for 2 billion yet anyway.

[niceguy17s]

Ive seen some talk of linear models for gear. As great as that sounds in theory, that hurts what they are trying to do. Since they want gear to feel like an up grade to new content rather then moving stats little by little, which a linear model would do. The solution that I can up with since everything in the game is based on a percentage and is exponentially growing as content comes out is to decrease stats per expansion based on a percentage. For example; at lvl 60 is the stats were strength 75 stam 85 crit 30 haste 23 then for that lvl you could decrease stats by 10% they would then be 67.5, 76.5, 27, 20.7, then for content of lvl 70 you would decrease stats at 20% lvl 80 30% lvl 85 35% lvl 90 40%. Keep in mind this is just a thought and percentages to stat ratio was not thought out. Its just the general idea that since stats grow at a exponential rate that if you want to decrease them but still keep the feel that items are a rewards and "big" upgrade during expansions that you would would then decrease them based on a percentage that grows exponentially as well.

[rockdontroll]

they'll never turn wow into a 64-bit application to address these issues, mainly because most people still run 32 bit windows on their 64-enabled cpus. Its just not the same as simply adding in a dx11 option for those running win7

[Dkatt]

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.

While the rest of the concerns are valid, that line here is total rubbish. The client executes 32 bits code. There is no difference in performance for any integers under 4294967295. 10 digits is right, but that is only threat, I have not seen anything over 7 digits in game yet.

[Zole_Zole_Zole]

they'll never turn wow into a 64-bit application to address these issues, mainly because most people still run 32 bit windows on their 64-enabled cpus. Its just not the same as simply adding in a dx11 option for those running win7

Don't be so sure, a while back I saw something to do with 64 bit code for wow.

[bbr]

But we like big numbers... and at the same time,, ridiculous numbers make it a lot harder to really consider / crunch anything. it makes big items THAT much better that there is simply no point at all in having old gear around - you are a LOT weaker without new items. Its the diablo effect really. Giant item, with giant stats... might seem fun, but it really just isnt good to have an item with crazy stats. manageable numbers are great - small upgrades.

[Vlinx]

Why don't we just instead of crunching numbers, adapt a more linear approach. by 4.3 GEARED dps would have 160-170k and Like next expansion MOP dps would have 210K HP. Isn't that a possible solution?

[willtron]

heres another idea... why does it matter if fireball crits for 6000000, or a peice of armour has 60000 armour? Just leave it.