Anyone Not Looking Forward to Stat Squish?

[Tinykong]

Blizzard also has a track record of over correcting.

Drop rate of Battered Hilts is too high? The solution is clearly reducing it from 5% to 0.000000000001%. Yeah, that'll fix it.

[Speedlance]

I want squish now tbh, I get the feeling bosses take longer time to kill with so much hp, I know it's silly but it's just how I feel.

[Deleted]

People have come to see the increase in numbers as their power level so even if the rate at which you kill bosses stays the same, people will feel like their character is weaker.

[seam]

That poll seems pretty gosh darn tricky on the wording...

You wouldn't get weaker...you're strength is the same.

Could have just had
"Do you want smaller numbers?"
"Yes"
"No"
"Don't Care"

[Shadoop]

Nice, I tried to post an unbiased poll and a moderator shut it down before I could even finish the poll. lol.

[Barana]

I remain unconvinced of the need for item (character) squishing.

Yes, on a big AOE pack I can do over one million (pinky to mouth) DPS, for a little while. Others can do more.

So?

No, really - so? Big deal. I do not understand how this is broken and needs changing. Can someone explain in terms that don't include personal preferences?

Future patch note: Gear from previous tiers now loses 5% of its stats per tier in current tier dungeons. <-- ooh look I fixed scaling. Now they can make new tier gear only marginally better than previous tier gear and it will still be highly desirable.

Finally, will this squish be used - and at this point I concede the obvious, that nobody give a @$%# what I want and the squish is coming - to fix current and future scaling, or will they just scale us back up too fast a second time, while guessing that the game won't be around in another 9 years for this to be a supposed problem again?

Actually the time travel thing has the potential to be worse than a mere item squish - will they squish us in the new zone but not in any existing zones, so that they can be lazy and not have to go back and change all the old content like they told us they would? Then what was the point of doing it, again? Will we be time travelling in every expansion from now on?

They're doing it now before numbers get even more stupid and they start hitting the limit of a 32-bit integer, i.e. fixing the problem before it becomes a problem. Here's a programmatic example for you:

A typical signed 4-byte integer can be anywhere from -2.1 billion to +2.1 billion, unsigned can go to ~4.2 billion, but then it can't be negative.
A signed short integer can be anywhere from ~-32000 to ~+32000, and occupies 2 bytes. Can also be unsigned.

Just by squashing numbers down to below 32000, which is BC levels of damage numbers, you've halved the amount of memory the processor has to shuffle through and calculate to get the final damage in those calculations. That's not even counting boss health numbers, which have already surpassed 1 billion in heroic (Thok is within 200 million of hitting the limit of a 4-byte integer).

[ReleaseDay]

Item squish is one of the most retarded ideas in wow yet. The code can easily be updated, but going back in numbers is just reactionary and stupid and will lead to sublosses.

[Shahad]

I don't understand why people give so many fucks about big numbers, small numbers.. they're all arbitrary values - it's not like suddenly you're not going to be able to rape old content bosses (although I am interested in how the squish would affect lower levels).

Either way I think it won't feel very natural (guys, this boss just hit me for 200; almost 1-shot me!). I would prefer Blizzard invest resources into an interesting new expansion as a pose to squishing these values, as it simply won't add to the game in any way.

It won't affect sub-60 levels whatsoever and the expansion content can be fairly easily rebalanced.

Here are some charts from Ghostcrawler's blog (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3885585):

Pre-squish:


Post-squish:


Also, the squish means they can stop doing silly things like having bosses heal up during encounters to counter the limit on the size of an integer as well as better plan and spread ilvl growth for the future, avoiding situations like the one we are in where we are doing four to five times the dps as when we first hit 90 at the launch of MoP. It's good for the health of the game, and it doesn't take that much resources to boot. In fact, what constitutes an interesting expansion (story, raids, end game model) is mostly decided by another department than the one that would take care of tuning the numbers.

[Honeyprime]

As long as I can still do what I enjoy the most, soloing old content, I really don't care one way or another. If it turns out it does affect it, I'm not going to be very happy.

[NightZero88]

Two problems with the people saying yay to the squish.

First, you can't do a flat percentage nerf because if you did a level 90 would be nerfed significantly harder than a level 20 for example because of the gear inflation which means you'd have to nerf it differently for different gear levels which means that soloing would be affected.

Second, Blizz has basically screwed up everything they've tried to release since ever. Normally it is not to bad but this however would be a massive problem if they do it wrong.

EDIT: The graph below shows exactly what I mean and this is from GC. If you look it says nothing below level 60 is being touched. That means my level 90s relative power compared to level 60 is substantially reduced therefore I AM getting weaker compared to that content and it WILL affect soloing.

[Osmeric]

Any suggestion to measure things using centimeters instead of millimeters must be rejected, lest the favorite parts of our anatomies become "smaller".

That's how I look on the stat squish complaining.

[Archermit]

With Mists of Pandaria, our characters have gotten really powerful. Tanks have broken 1 million health, DPS do a few hundred thousand DPS, and so forth.

But there's a strong indication, I think, that in the next expansion we'll have item level toned down and our characters severely weakened. How do you feel about that? Are you alright with it, or do you prefer getting even stronger next expansion?

Please make the poll options indicate teh truth, characters will not "be weaker" after the squish, we will do the same damage compared to bosses hp as we do now.

[NightZero88]

Please make the poll options indicate teh truth, characters will not "be weaker" after the squish, we will do the same damage compared to bosses hp as we do now.

Please see my post above about how you're wrong using the graph as shown by GC.

[MistsofBoredom]

Those poll options are horribly biased.

The stat squish cannot come soon enough. It is incredibly needed.

How is my poll biased? WTF?

[Shahad]

Two problems with the people saying yay to the squish.

First, you can't do a flat percentage nerf because if you did a level 90 would be nerfed significantly harder than a level 20 for example because of the gear inflation which means you'd have to nerf it differently for different gear levels which means that soloing would be affected.

Second, Blizz has basically screwed up everything they've tried to release since ever. Normally it is not to bad but this however would be a massive problem if they do it wrong.

EDIT: The graph below shows exactly what I mean and this is from GC. If you look it says nothing below level 60 is being touched. That means my level 90s relative power compared to level 60 is substantially reduced therefore I AM getting weaker compared to that content and it WILL affect soloing.

If you look carefully at the graph, it shows level 60 end game content being reduced as well. And I don't think sub-60 content will be much of an issue even if it isn't reduced.

- - - Updated - - -

How is my poll biased? WTF?

It's biased because characters don't get weaker relative to the environment in which they exist. Which is all that matters in the end.

[Mongoose19]

I miss the Vanilla/TBC numbers. It got stupid since Wotlk.

[Manhands]

Math: The item squish doesn't matter at all. Spells will do the same portion of damage/healing before and after, and everything will be scaled together.

Psychology: But, but, the number is lower! That feels wrong.

Math: Your feelings are stupid.

Psychology: YOU'RE stupid.

Math: Look, why don't you just design an addon after the squish that multiplies all the numbers by 10...or 100...or whatever you want. That way you can feel good and the developers don't have to worry about integer overflow.

Psychology: What's an addon? What's integer overflow?

Math: Why do I even talk to you?

[MistsofBoredom]

Who cares? All I meant by it is that players will be hitting for less. That might bother some people. I don't take into account things relative to their current power.

People get offended so easily. Sad.

[Deleted]

Item squish is one of the most retarded ideas in wow yet. The code can easily be updated, but going back in numbers is just reactionary and stupid and will lead to sublosses.

I agree. Seen from a business perspective, this is terrible (Unless the patch in which it is released is combined with something bigger, like updated character models.)

However, I'm not Blizzard, so I don't give two f***s about overall sub numbers or the business perspective in this case - I just want smaller numbers ^^

Why is this so hard to understand? Everything is being scaled down of everything. You may not know this but monsters are not programmed in wow using a X monster damage = x +-y. Monsters have stats too. EVERYTHING is being scaled. All stat allocations are being scaled, for monsters and players. That curve you linked is also showing the effective change in ilvl for the monsters you are going against too.

They are squishing the stats themselves, not the stats that the player has. This means that monsters with x stats also are going to be scaled back.

I understand that Related Rates require an understanding of calculus to fully grasp, but you should have at least a slight exposure to ratios with variables in the 5th grade.

Yup.

Eg. An average raiding character in WoW right now sits on ~500k +-, yes? Vanilla bosses have like ~1-2m hp, yes? And I do like 150k dps yes? (All these numbers are hypothetical, I haven't raided since cataclysm, please don't hold it against me lol)

That means that if post number crunch, I sit on a 5.000 health pool, one can assume that I'll do something like 1500 dps and Vanilla bosses have something like 10.000 hp.

Same game, different numbers. The problem with people's math problems (lol) is that they base them off percentages, which create the illusion of a ''gap'' in the balancing.

[Asmekiel]

As numbers grow exponentially while ilvl increases linearly, we'll reach a point where guilds will fall apart as every item drop is a 5% or better improvement for a toon. Compare the difference between an i463 character and an i522 character, and then realize by the end of the next expansion that level of improvement (over 100%) will take place within a single tier.

In WotLK your DPS increased roughly 6x going from dungeon gear to T10. In Cata your DPS increased roughly 5x going from dungeon gear to T13. I haven't seen numbers from SoO yet, but it looks like it's again ~6x. Nothing strange is going on.