How Legion iLvls should've been to avoid insane power creep

[Dracullus]

I mean me wanting the game to have less difficulty settings is another story entirely that I won't get into. The argument is that when the gear inflation gets so bad that they have to implement health scaling from world content based on your item level then you know there's a problem. They've never had to do this ever in the history of WoW.

Ok, there was a problem, they found solution for that problem, now world content doesn't feel like from older expansion and we still keep benefits for multiple difficulties. So what's your problem?

Also, they never had to do it before, because Legion is first expansion where every single piece of continent is relevant for max player until the end . In the past they just tuned patch zone harder, whole other world content was irrelevant anyway.

And about different difficulties. I never get why some don't want other difficulties. It's very childish "I am center of the universe" attitude. But I understand why some don't want to have reason to do multiple difficulty a week. But this have nothing to do with "power creep" and can be solved without hurting majority of playerbase. For example:

- titanforging goes only up to current heroic difficulty level. Mythic have static loot table without RNG stats and warforged, but drop only 1-2 piece for boss.
- legendary. if you kill mythic boss, it is like you killed it on all 4 difficulties this week; if you kill it on LFR, you just got 1 chance, but if you will kill it on Mythic on same week, you'll get remaining 3 chances for legendary; if you kill it only on normal, you'll get 2 chances, etc. I hope it's clear.

[david0925]

This type of scaling has gone on since vanilla, not just LK. Assuming you're starting off with someone in just dungeon gear and ending with someone with near BiS gear from the last raid of an xpac. I don't know the vanilla numbers off the top of my head but I know in BC people were doing 300-400 dps in dungeon gear and something like 2000 dps in Sunwell.

People in dungeon gear are expected to do about 200k dps and do about 1 million dps now, so over 3 tiers we have had a 5-fold growth currently when people are barely stepping into Mythic. Once people are in bis non-WF gear we should expect about 6-fold growth over dungeon set, over 3 tiers of raids. Whereas Sunwell had equal or less of that growth in 4 tiers of raiding (Sunwell count as its own tier since it offered the same ilvl growth as tier 4 to 5 to 6).

Also this kind of creep wasn't there for vanilla (not that it's a good or bad thing)

[Natureseer]

That's not how item level works. Item level 200 to 277 is not a bigger increase than 900 to 977. They're both increasing the base item level by 77. Every expansion has a "ground zero" and Wrath's was 200. The previous 199 item levels literally no longer matter. You are tuned around item level 200 being the same at 80 as you were at... whatever the baseline itemlevel was in BC at 70. 200 is 0. I don't even know what constitutes as 0 in Legion. I guess whatever LFR EN was. But we've already gone up over 100 item levels from there. 100 is greater than 77.

This is actually incorrect. The difference between item level 900 and 977 and item level 200 and 277 is not even close. Item level 277 is probably the strongest that characters have ever been in relation to their initial power (the end of MoP probably comes close.) The reason for this is that the initial level of stats on the gear at, for example, item level 213 (Heroic Naxx) was too high, and because the increase of stats that comes with increased item level is proportional, every item level increase was a higher gain than it is today, especially considering that with Legion they reduced the rate at which secondary stats scale on items. The current power creep has more to do the with artifacts and other scaling issues than with the actual item level.

[Dracullus]

No we have inflation because Blizzard add more iLvls unnecessarily every patch.
If you look at my original post it's quite easy to at least make it better.
For example, LFR ToS drops 895 gear and heroic NH drops 890 gear. In what world does that make any sense at all? LFR ToS should at best drop the same iLvl gear as normal NH.

Check this out:
LFR T1: 800
Normal T1: 810
Heroic T1: 820
Mythic T1: 830
Mythic T2: 840
Mythic T3: 850
Mythic T4: 860

By separating the difficulties by 10 iLvls and then just adding 10 when a new tier comes out not only do the iLvls increase a lot less, we also solve the problem of having to run trivial (for your raid group based on your chosen difficulty) difficulties because of upgrades.

And I ask for 100th time, why it matter if difference is 10, 1 or 10.000 item level? It is just number. You make problem out of thin air. If numbers will became too high (for aesthetic point of view), they will squish it. Every expac is hard reset. Every tier is soft reset. It worked for years and will work as long people will want to play WoW.

And if someone raided heroic in Nighthold tier, but now don't have time and stable group, can't raid some LFR ToS for upgrades and have fun? Because small % of tryhard... I mean hardcore need to run EVERYTHING for every tiny chance of upgrade? If you want find solution for your problem, it can't hurt casual majority of the playerbase. Check my previous post, I dropped some solutions for it.

[david0925]

And I ask for 100th time, why it matter if difference is 10, 1 or 10.000 item level? It is just number. You make problem out of thin air. If numbers will became too high (for aesthetic point of view), they will squish it. Every expac is hard reset. Every tier is soft reset. It worked for years and will work as long people will want to play WoW.

And if someone raided heroic in Nighthold tier, but now don't have time and stable group, can't raid some LFR ToS for upgrades and have fun? Because small % of tryhard... I mean hardcore need to run EVERYTHING for every tiny chance of upgrade? If you want find solution for your problem, it can't hurt casual majority of the playerbase. Check my previous post, I dropped some solutions for it.

The issue being presented doesn't having anything more to do with casual players or mythic raiders and throwing them into the mix doesn't actually strengthen your argument. I don't think power creep is an issue and I agree with most of your points. Your second paragraph just seems completely unnecessary.

[youswas]

i will never understand people complaining about things like "too big health pool" or "damage numbers too high" it makes zero sense to me.

in terms of power creep this expansion, it is more than other expansions not because of item level, but because of how many sources there are for power increase.

1. raid gear
2. set bonuses
3. artifact relics
4. artifact traits
5. legendaries

the legendary and artifact traits/relics in particular cause blizzard an even bigger headache than normal while balancing, for the obvious reasons.

however, it's all planned out pretty well imo. you can see that Fallen Avatar and KJ in their current incarnations will not be killed by more than 50 guilds, if even 50 guilds kill it. BUT, once 7.3 drops and we have new traits, the netherlight crucible, possibly new traits? these power increases will act as a soft nerf (similar to when mythic dungeons were released at the end of HFC, allowing you to upgrade your gear's item level).

personally i like the way this "soft nerf" works a lot. the boss mechanics are the same, but player power is increased making them easier to deal with.

[BiggestNoob]

Because secondaries don't scale nearly as fast as primaries, Blizzard has actually made the problem worse at high ilvls. Item level matters somewhat, but people seek specific trinkets, set bonuses, and items with the correct secondaries almost exclusively of ilvl, with the exception only being some huge ilvl jump. This is why people will gladly equip an 890 arcanocrystal over a 930 mythic trinket, or a 910 whispers over anything at 930. This is also why 4pc/2pc is so strong for some specs, especially if each of those items has the appropriate secondaries.

Blizzard thought this would be a good design because some specs just don't work without enough secondaries (though they don't seem to care about this for timewalking which results in the most hilariously imbalanced bullshit), and because late-expansion gear often had so much secondaries that you could hit multiple caps and have insane DPS scaling. That was actually preferable as it felt like your character was reaching some penultimate state, which is no longer the case -- it's about the right pieces, ideally with TF, and sockets are absurdly strong even with only 150 of a secondary.

Instead of having a really strong meaningful ilvl with reforging to fix bad itemization or prevent drops from being sharded and limiting the number of ilvls per raid so people don't need to repeat content on lower difficulties or obsolete raids, we've got the polar opposite of that. Blizzard for some reason loves doing the polar opposite of what people actually want. Do X, people hate it, so do the polar opposite of X, people hate it, so go back to X, never realizing this kind of illogical dichotomy bullshit is the worst possible way of doing anything.

[RoKPaNda]

In this scenario titanforging doesn't exist but warforging +5 does. Mythic+ awards a static iLvl increase the higher you go up to the cap of current content heroic iLvls.

Mythic dungeons and M+ are far too rewarding in the model.

(Current)Mythic raids are far too unrewarding(not counting tier bonuses) because items will not be stat optimized. Ultimately the issue was(and remains) titanforging

So why are we penalizing the plebs again? For all the whining that people like Preach and Asmongold do about Titanforging the ONLY people that Titanforging are bad for are the people going for World First. That's like 1% of the 3% that even raid Mythic. And that's only because they're being competitive in something that isn't meant to be competitive. They're doing things like split farming and they're trying to get every up possible on their competition so they can be #1. In a race where there is no reward and they get no recognition from Blizzard.

So why would we EVER take Titanforging away from everyone else, or nerf it into the ground, to cater to that small fraction of the 3% that raid Mythic for whom TF becomes problematic? It's not a problem if you go into a tier and you shard a couple pieces of gear from the first throwaway bosses, that's always been the case. Nixxing TF wouldn't fix that.

Breaking or removing TF is nonsensical, that's like cutting off a leg because you have an in-grown toenail. The only thing that makes sense is to fix the issues with Mythic raiding, not breaking things that are good for literally everyone else because those things can sometimes be inconvenient to Mythic raiders. At worst just make it so that TF caps out 5~ ilevels below current tier Mythic raid ilevel. That's the quick and dirty fix.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Weell, could've, should've, would've.

It's not like they're going to change it now, is it?

- - - Updated - - -

So why are we penalizing the plebs again? For all the whining that people like Preach and Asmongold do about Titanforging the ONLY people that Titanforging are bad for are the people going for World First. That's like 1% of the 3% that even raid Mythic. And that's only because they're being competitive in something that isn't meant to be competitive. They're doing things like split farming and they're trying to get every up possible on their competition so they can be #1. In a race where there is no reward and they get no recognition from Blizzard.

So why would we EVER take Titanforging away from everyone else, or nerf it into the ground, to cater to that small fraction of the 3% that raid Mythic for whom TF becomes problematic? It's not a problem if you go into a tier and you shard a couple pieces of gear from the first throwaway bosses, that's always been the case. Nixxing TF wouldn't fix that.

Breaking or removing TF is nonsensical, that's like cutting off a leg because you have an in-grown toenail. The only thing that makes sense is to fix the issues with Mythic raiding, not breaking things that are good for literally everyone else because those things can sometimes be inconvenient to Mythic raiders. At worst just make it so that TF caps out 5~ ilevels below current tier Mythic raid ilevel. That's the quick and dirty fix.

Can't take Asmongold seriously when everything he's about, has to do with him wanting to remove content from others. Be it pandas or automated grouping or titanforging...

[Chickat]

In this scenario titanforging doesn't exist but warforging +5 does. Mythic+ awards a static iLvl increase the higher you go up to the cap of current content heroic iLvls.

I like this, and I like the removal of titanforging. +5 warforge is good enough. I do think the jump between raid tiers should be 15 item levels though.

Tier 1
Normal dungeons-800
Heroic dungeons-810
LFR Tier 1-815
Mythic dungeons-820
Normal tier 1-825
Heroic tier 1-835
Mythic+ cap- 840
Mythic-845(850 last boss)

Tier 1-ToV
Normal dungeons 800
Heroic dungeons-810
Lfr Tier 2-820
Mythic dungeons-820
Normal tier 2-830
Heroic tier 2-840
Mythic+cap-840
Mythic-850-855

Tier 1 NH
Normal dungeons-810
Heroic dungeons-820
LFR-830
Mythic dungeons-830
Normal-840
Heroic-850
Mythic+cap-855
Mythic-860-865

Tier 2
Normal dungeons-825
Heroic dungeons-835
Lfr-845
Mythic dungeons-845
Normal-855
Heroic-865
Mythic+cap 870
Mythic-875-880

Tier 3
Normal dungeons-840
Heroic dungeons-850
LFR-860
Mythic Dungeons-860
Normal-870
Heroic-880
Mythic+cap-885
Mythic-890-895

My idea is 15 item level bump between actual tiers for everything. ToV only got a 5 bump, and I didnt update everything else. 5 wasn't worth updating anything. I updated everything by 10 with Nighthold. So with Nighthold and ToV everything got between a 10-15 item level bump.

- - - Updated - - -

An entire expansion with only 40-50 item level bump from 1 content level to the last. If you count from OG normal dungeons to top tier Mythic raids its around 90-95 difference. Legion will end up getting almost double that. 15 ilev between tiers is a big enough bump to feel it. We dont need 25 item level bumps.

[BiggestNoob]

Can't take Asmongold seriously when everything he's about, has to do with him wanting to remove content from others. Be it pandas or automated grouping or titanforging...

Those things aren't content, nor do they make content accessible. What they do is make the game worse or force Blizzard to nerf the game into the ground to justify them existing. If you'd actually listen to Asmongold instead of having your tiny head shoved up your gaping asshole, you'd understand the point of his position is that the game has very little in it that feels like an accomplishment anymore, and so the vast majority of players are robbed of that, while only an exclusive handful (high M+ keys, and mythic raiders pushing content when it's still hard) get to experience anything even remotely close to what made the game reach 12 million subscribers back in its glory days.

So why are we penalizing the plebs again? For all the whining that people like Preach and Asmongold do about Titanforging the ONLY people that Titanforging are bad for are the people going for World First. That's like 1% of the 3% that even raid Mythic. And that's only because they're being competitive in something that isn't meant to be competitive. They're doing things like split farming and they're trying to get every up possible on their competition so they can be #1. In a race where there is no reward and they get no recognition from Blizzard.

It's not penalizing the "plebs". TF doesn't impact just 1% of people in mythic, it impacts everyone. Retarded fucking idiots like you are so stupid and so incapable of doing anything that your goal is "i want a piece of gear as good as mythic raiders get" and fuck every impact that has on the game. Why do you need such a piece? Explain?

How about this: we give every retarded idiot who can't do content 50000 ilvl outside of raids and watch them all quit within a day when nothing in the game is rewarding, while the game becomes exclusively high end PvP and PvE in arenas that actually have content tuned appropriately?

Alternatively feel free to kill yourself, nobody would miss you.

Infracted

[Saverem]

In this scenario titanforging doesn't exist but warforging +5 does. Mythic+ awards a static iLvl increase the higher you go up to the cap of current content heroic iLvls.

They'd also have to get rid of TF in order for this to work. Also, M+ should start at 1 above regular M dungeons. So starting at 830 instead of 820.

[Gorsameth]

And I ask for 100th time, why it matter if difference is 10, 1 or 10.000 item level? It is just number. You make problem out of thin air. If numbers will became too high (for aesthetic point of view), they will squish it. Every expac is hard reset. Every tier is soft reset. It worked for years and will work as long people will want to play WoW.

And if someone raided heroic in Nighthold tier, but now don't have time and stable group, can't raid some LFR ToS for upgrades and have fun? Because small % of tryhard... I mean hardcore need to run EVERYTHING for every tiny chance of upgrade? If you want find solution for your problem, it can't hurt casual majority of the playerbase. Check my previous post, I dropped some solutions for it.

The problem is that old content is utterly trivialized because of power scaling. The difference between 10 ilvls between tiers and 1000 is that in the former it still provides some challenge when you go back a tier while the latter can be solo'd.

It also causes issues within the raid itself, people scale throughout the duration of the tier and yet the bosses need to remain challenging. That is why there are so many 1 shot mechanics now, Because just 'heavy damage' gets outscaled when you progress on later bosses.

[Zka]

This type of scaling has gone on since vanilla, not just LK. Assuming you're starting off with someone in just dungeon gear and ending with someone with near BiS gear from the last raid of an xpac. I don't know the vanilla numbers off the top of my head but I know in BC people were doing 300-400 dps in dungeon gear and something like 2000 dps in Sunwell.

Blue geared pure DPS were doing 700-1000 dps in Kara unless they sucked. 2K dps was only reachable by a few specs like destro lock and huntard.
Hybrids were quite lower all the time due to the "hybrid tax".
Anyways, the point is that the scaling grows with each expansion and it's quite out of hand.

[Hctaz]

Yup i remeber when they didnt scale up HP on heroic bosses on Panda. The median kill was around 15 seconds.

For world content I mean.. they even said that the time people were killing what should have been relevant mobs was too fast in MoP even. Like I remember being fully heroic Siege geared and running around Timeless Isle one shotting things in the world content that was supposed to be relevant. The fire mobs in the special area were even jokes and that just didn't feel right to me. They should have at least been difficult throughout the remainder of the expansion and requiring at least a healer to take care of.

- - - Updated - - -

Item level 277 is probably the strongest that characters have ever been in relation to their initial power (the end of MoP probably comes close.)

I mean but that's incorrect. The devs themselves stated that the power creep was worst in their eyes during MoP. None of them cite Wrath as being problematic for the world content but explain how people were doing things in MoP that they didn't really want to be possible at all during its lifetime. Maybe Legion item levels are not as bad as I'm making them out to be, but I guess that's an example of the precautions they've taken to make scaling not as big of a problem via item levels. Pre-stat squish, everything was pretty much identical so going up 120 item levels was exactly as power as going up 120 item levels in another expansion.

[Queen of Hamsters]

If you'd actually listen to Asmongold instead of having your tiny head shoved up your gaping asshole, you'd understand the point of his position is that the game has very little in it that feels like an accomplishment anymore,

Haha, what an utterly predictable reaction from Asmongold's band of followers (zealots).

He doesn't feel that the game has a sense of accomplishment? You agree with him? Well, if you both didn't have your heads so far shoved up your own assholes, you'd be able to realize that your opinions on what the game feels like to you are not rule of law.

If his and yours "sense of accomplishment" would come from restricting the vast majority from accessing content aimed at the lowest common denominator with rewards to match that fact, then you're not only arrogant; You're shit out of luck, since that vast majority pays the bills.

But hey, intelligence doesn't bite on the Asmongold goons, they're too busy having someone preach to them about how they should feel when playing this game.

And it's hilarious I might add, that you and Asmongold pretends to know better why WOTLK pulled 12 million subs than the people actually sitting with the data, AKA the developers of this game. As I said before, arrogance + a healthy dosage of "head-up-your-own-ass"-ism + you = true.

[kamuimac]

Haha, what an utterly predictable reaction from Asmongold's band of followers (zealots).

He doesn't feel that the game has a sense of accomplishment? You agree with him? Well, if you both didn't have your heads so far shoved up your own assholes, you'd be able to realize that your opinions on what the game feels like to you are not rule of law.

If his and yours "sense of accomplishment" would come from restricting the vast majority from accessing content aimed at the lowest common denominator with rewards to match that fact, then you're not only arrogant; You're shit out of luck, since that vast majority pays the bills.

But hey, intelligence doesn't bite on the Asmongold goons, they're too busy having someone preach to them about how they should feel when playing this game.

And it's hilarious I might add, that you and Asmongold pretends to know better why WOTLK pulled 12 million subs than the people actually sitting with the data, AKA the developers of this game. As I said before, arrogance + a healthy dosage of "head-up-your-own-ass"-ism + you = true.

the only source of accomplisment Asmongold cares about is his monthly checks from youtube and twitch where he based his operation on spreading extreme/hardcore view on game - and idiots who share that view are the ones paying his bills soo... congrats to him i guess .

clearly he is succesfull if he found decent source of revenue by spreading nonsense to nerds

[Deleted]

So why are we penalizing the plebs again? For all the whining that people like Preach and Asmongold do about Titanforging the ONLY people that Titanforging are bad for are the people going for World First. That's like 1% of the 3% that even raid Mythic. And that's only because they're being competitive in something that isn't meant to be competitive. They're doing things like split farming and they're trying to get every up possible on their competition so they can be #1. In a race where there is no reward and they get no recognition from Blizzard.

So why would we EVER take Titanforging away from everyone else, or nerf it into the ground, to cater to that small fraction of the 3% that raid Mythic for whom TF becomes problematic? It's not a problem if you go into a tier and you shard a couple pieces of gear from the first throwaway bosses, that's always been the case. Nixxing TF wouldn't fix that.

Breaking or removing TF is nonsensical, that's like cutting off a leg because you have an in-grown toenail. The only thing that makes sense is to fix the issues with Mythic raiding, not breaking things that are good for literally everyone else because those things can sometimes be inconvenient to Mythic raiders. At worst just make it so that TF caps out 5~ ilevels below current tier Mythic raid ilevel. That's the quick and dirty fix.

Actually, in the long-run, titanforging is much more hurtful for the "plebs" as you call them than those 1-3% of mythic raiders: Due to the insane gear inflation that is possible for the "plebs" for the first time ever, the simple concept of ilvl has been devalued so much that requirements are going up. This means that those "plebs" that have a high ilvl still won't be taken into higher content because ilvl means nothing any more.

That's actually even assuming that those "plebs" even WANT to do higher content in the first place, which many actually don't. And then the question becomes: What do those "plebs" even NEED those max ilvl items for?

[h4rr0d]

If you don't have powerlevel jumps between tiers, it seems like the difficulty will never truly go down (we actually had that in Nighthold Mythic) and lower tiers are still relevant, so it could happen your BiS item for the whole expansion is in the first tier, so you basically have to run that each week additionally to whatever raid is current.

Which is different from running NH HC, hoping for TF tier or trinket only that now you have an additional layer of RNG you need to beat in order to get your piece.

[Queen of Hamsters]

the only source of accomplisment Asmongold cares about is his monthly checks from youtube and twitch where he based his operation on spreading extreme/hardcore view on game - and idiots who share that view are the ones paying his bills soo... congrats to him i guess .

clearly he is succesfull if he found decent source of revenue by spreading nonsense to nerds

Couldn't have said it better myself!