Anyone Not Looking Forward to Stat Squish?

[LTCrystallite]

it will feel stupid to go from 3-4 Million Damage Chaos bolts and 1 million HP to 2000 damage chaos bolts and 1000 HP -.- I mean, i know its all relative, but I dont see a problem with big numbers.

It really just takes up space, causes the need for the whole "MEGA DAMAGE!" type of idea the devs had a while ago, and it makes the gap between numbers mean less.

For example:
100k dmg vs 101k dmg = 1% difference
10k dmg vs 11k dmg = 10% difference

The problem is that when numbers get too big, they might as well be ANY number. The 100k vs 101k ratio doesn't feel like a difference at all, whereas the 10k vs 11k difference is noticeable. Doesn't matter if a boss has 1,000,000,000 health or 1,000,535,257 health. It's just taking up more space on screen and is basically negligible.

[Cows For Life]

But it's an illusion that you'd feel weaker. Enemy health isn't going to stay ridiculously high while player DPS is reduced. Everything is relative. 20k dps killing enemies with 40k health is the same thing as 200k dps with 400k health. There will just be an extra digit, but the effect in game is the exact same.

Except players will be weaker against enemies and players of lower level. I mean, if you actually understood what was going on. Going back to "old content" to farm items, rep, or whatnot will get tougher and take more time.

[Eats Compost]

Except players will be weaker against enemies and players of lower level. I mean, if you actually understood what was going on. Going back to "old content" to farm items, rep, or whatnot will get tougher and take more time.

Not if it's a flat percentage reduction in HP and damage for both the players and content. As for the "how do we squish level 1-10?" kinds of concerns would arise if everything was squished by a flat percentage, you just squish everything down to level 60 or so by a flat percentage and then smooth out the curve from there, with the squish becoming less significant each level down. Hypothetical example; level 60-90 mobs, items and player stats are squished by 70%, level 59 is squished by 69%, 58 is squished by 68%, etc, right until you get down to level 1 being squished by ~10%.

A squish, done right, would have no effect on soloing old content.

[darkwarrior42]

If they do it properly (that is to say, relative power of characters is unchanged at ANY level in ANY circumstance; a level 90 is just as strong against level 60, 70, 80, and 85 raid bosses after the squish, level 60 characters are just as powerful after the squish, etc), then I am completely neutral toward it personally, because it changes nothing of meaning or worth (doing 10k damage to a monster with 100k hp is no different then doing 10 damage to a monster with 100 hp).

If they don't accomplish that, I am opposed to the idea.

(And for the record, regardless of their stated intentions, I don't believe they're capable of an item squish that doesn't change relative power levels somewhere along the line...)

Edit: Did not vote in the poll as it is too obviously biased

[Cows For Life]

Not if it's a flat percentage reduction in HP and damage for both the players and content. As for the "how do we squish level 1-10?" kinds of concerns would arise if everything was squished by a flat percentage, you just squish everything down to level 60 or so by a flat percentage and then smooth out the curve from there, with the squish becoming less significant each level down. Hypothetical example; level 60-90 mobs, items and player stats are squished by 70%, level 59 is squished by 69%, 58 is squished by 68%, etc, right until you get down to level 1 being squished by ~10%.

A squish, done right, would have no effect on soloing old content.

Simply put, you're wrong. That's why they said they're looking at zone buffs for raids. As for things like dungeons, mobs that give faction rep out in the world, or anything else... probably nothing.

- - - Updated - - -

If they do it properly (that is to say, relative power of characters is unchanged at ANY level in ANY circumstance; a level 90 is just as strong against level 60, 70, 80, and 85 raid bosses after the squish, level 60 characters are just as powerful after the squish, etc), then I am completely neutral toward it personally, because it changes nothing of meaning or worth (doing 10k damage to a monster with 100k hp is no different then doing 10 damage to a monster with 100 hp).

If they don't accomplish that, I am opposed to the idea.

(And for the record, regardless of their stated intentions, I don't believe they're capable of an item squish that doesn't change relative power levels somewhere along the line...)

Relative power of a player to something of equal level. 30 vs 30. 60 vs 60. 70 vs 70. 80 vs 80. 90 vs 90. Otherwise they'd just chop all numbers by 99% across the board and be done with it.

[Eats Compost]

Simply put, you're wrong. That's why they said they're looking at zone buffs for raids. As for things like dungeons, mobs that give faction rep out in the world, or anything else... probably nothing.

Care to actually provide some numbers as to why I'm wrong?

[Shahad]

They will turn the exponential curve the stats follow into a linear one. That is the squish. And that is not the same as reducing all stats by a certain percentage.

It will mean that a lvl 90 will be relatively weaker against a lvl 80 after the squish compared to before.

That's not what the squish is. They are keeping the exponential growth, just dragging it back to a lower base so the game can last another few years without needing to switch to 64 bit integers.

No, it's not. The limit of an Int64 is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 and that's a signed int.



But ICC gear didn't get you very far in Sunwell. That was just one expansion between the last and vanilla. Sunwell probably won't be a problem, even if they nerf it that drastically, since the raid will also be changed. But good luck with ICC or DS.

The game is using 32 bit integers. Not 64 bit.

ALL the raids post vanilla will be affected similarly.

Everyone 61-99 will gain power relative to 100s. The decreased delta means 100s will actually be threatened by an extra body or two (across the entire level range) that joins in on any fight. BUT NO CHANGE, PERCENTAGES!

No they won't. 61-99 will stay the same relative to 100.

[jbombard]

Good news Blizzard! If this poll is representative of the player base, you only stand to disappoint 1/3 of your players!

[rebecca191]

I don't like it because it just feels weird/wrong. They should have just scaled stats slower to begin with if there were technical limitations. I'd rather see numbers slowly go up then go up a ton fast then crash.

[Bullettime]

As put a few pages ago

One thing people don' take into account is that larger numbers like this also make it significantly harder to balance things. Blizzard has been doing a good job but the players wonder why you'll see a significant nerf to an ability or a spec. These massive numbers that are scaling up exponentially each tier are forcing the specs to also scale up at exponential rates and making the gap between say a fresh 90 and a geared 90 wayyyyy too massive. We're currently looking at about a 20 to 30% damage difference for every tier and as numbers get larger, that gap begins to grow even more.

In Wrath, a starter 80 was probably doing 2500 DPS and a geared player, without the ICC buff, was doing about 7500. So triple the DPS at the end but with 4 raid tiers. Compare that to now where my Hunter was doing 50k as a fresh 90 and is now doing 300k in SoO without even being BiS and only in 3 tiers time.

Numbers getting this big is just resulting in exponential scaling until numbers, if not put back in check, will get even more ridiculous. People like Fire Mages and Affliction Warlocks will require tweaks every few weeks if we went another raid tier of ilvls. The bigger the numbers get, the harder it is to keep things balanced as different specs scale at different rates due to their mechanic differences.

[Shahad]

I don't like it because it just feels weird/wrong. They should have just scaled stats slower to begin with if there were technical limitations. I'd rather see numbers slowly go up then go up a ton fast then crash.

They didn't expect the game to last 10 years. Heck, they weren't ready for the initial surge of subscribers when wow launched in 2004. WoW wasn't built from the ground up to last so long.

[Ryme]

Without going into the realm of opinion or the insipid blatant fallacy that is "hardware limitations", why exactly is it needed? Can you explain to me that without a reasonable doubt that we somehow need a stat squish in order for the game to be better in some possible way?

Yes, the integer limits are starting to become an issue (heroic Garrosh) that without an item level squish is a non-trivial problem that would eat up huge amounts of development time to fix. Instead, you can just squish and move on.

[BEYR]

When changing an ability by less than a percentage point can add or subtract 50K dps/hps the numbers are too high for stable adjustments.

[Rucati]

As far as I'm concerned they can't squish everything soon enough. Game has gotten ridiculous now with players breaking 1 million health and such. I know it's all relative, but if I'm in PvP and someone has 500k life, and I hit them for 5000 I feel like I'm making no progress at all. The biggest issue will be the next expansion though, given how quickly health raised this expansion by the end of the next one every class will have over 1 million life, DPS will be doing like 800k DPS, tanks will have like 2.5 million health. It will just be stupid at that point.

[jbombard]

I wonder if CEOs look at their financial statements and go "look at all these big numbers, this is so silly and ridicuous! What do these Ks and Ms after the numbers even mean?"?

[wrynil]

Its not needed - Its just nice for some people. I have no trouble comprehending bigger numbers, its digits and mean as such nothing with a squeeze or not because it will be the same afterwards. If i do 500.000 and 501.000 crits then i don't go crazy about it no. I don't go crazy with my lvl 60 doing 5.000 then 5.010 crits. its relative, the none carrying excuse is crap.

It might be nice, it might be bad, or it might not matter at all - i'm just wondering what will happen to numbers at around lvl 1? If they squeeze my 500.000 hits down to 5.000 will they then squeeze my 20 hit down to 0.20 ? Only thing I'm curious about really :b

Edit: It might actually BE needed from hardware point of view, but funny enough i cant speak on that behalf.

[cuafpr]

hate it.... :/

[Ferocity]

That's not what the squish is. They are keeping the exponential growth, just dragging it back to a lower base so the game can last another few years without needing to switch to 64 bit integers.

It is harder than impossible to run WoW on "32-bit" CPUs nowadays. I will go even further and will say that if you have Windows XP (unless it is some unofficial reworked version), you will have big problems in trying to get any kind of good performance with lowest settings in WoW. And just to note, it is not due to big numbers, but due to a lot of graphical improvements over the years and increased requirements to RAM.

On my old PC with Win XP, 3 GB RAM, GB Video RAM, I have 15-17 fps in 5-men with lowest settings. Max fps on medium on other PC. And with "new" (they started to appear around 10 years ago, and were used as servers even longer than that), "64-bit" CPUs, 1 operation with 64-bit integer takes exactly same time as 1 operation with 32-bit integers.

So I don't see point in disrupting character progress for this reason. If developers would want to make WoW more accessible on low end PCs, they would make light-weight clients or added more options to tweak. "Item squish" doesn't address and won't help awful game performance on lower end PCs.

[jbombard]

It is harder than impossible to run WoW on "32-bit" CPUs nowadays. I will go even further and will say that if you have Windows XP (unless it is some unofficial reworked version), you will have big problems in trying to get any kind of good performance with lowest settings in WoW. And just to note, it is not due to big numbers, but due to a lot of graphical improvements over the years and increased requirements to RAM.

On my old PC with Win XP, 3 GB RAM, GB Video RAM, I have 15-17 fps in 5-men with lowest settings. Max fps on medium on other PC. And with "new" (they started to appear around 10 years ago, and were used as servers even longer than that), "64-bit" CPUs, 1 operation with 64-bit integer takes exactly same time as 1 operation with 32-bit integers.

So I don't see point in disrupting character progress for this reason. If developers would want to make WoW more accessible on low end PCs, they would make light-weight clients or added more options to tweak. "Item squish" doesn't address and won't help awful game performance on lower end PCs.

All of the calculations of import happen on the server. While bigger numbers may impact the performance of some addons, those problems are up to the addon authors to address as usual. The squish has little to do with client performance.

[Conzar]

It isn't about the processing power of performing basic mathematical operations (increasing/decreasing by percentages as to whether Curse Of Elements is up or you crit or whatever) on 32bit or 64bit architectures, it's about shunting all that data to and from the servers. Imagine a raid of 25 warlocks all hitting a boss with 3 dots and a channel (extreme example) and a pet, that is 125 changes to the boss health some seconds (will usually be more like 70). But each change in health needs to be sent back to each client in a timely fashion.

Simply doubling the data from 32bits to 64bits (as will be needed when a boss hits the 2 billion health mark) will get the data sent, but will take double the time to do it). And this is just the damage going from players to the boss. The boss is also doing a raid-wide pulsing aoe hitting 50 targets, which also needs to be sent out to all clients.

The squish is needed.

"Megadamage" is no change, apart from presentation and brings in rounding issues when you're looking at whether that new piece of gear (with slightly more int but with Mastery and Crit) is better than your old ones (with less int but Haste and Mastery).

TL;DR: If a boss dies in effectively 100 Chaos Bolts, then it'll still take 100 Chaos Bolts to kill him after the squish.