Battle for Azeroth - Item Level Squish

[killwithpwr]

Based on this chart and past expansions i assume max level HC dungeons will reward around 295-300
I also have a feeling that every difficulty will stop being a 5 ilvl gap from the previous difficulty, instead being more like 3-4. But thats just my hopefull assumption...

- - - Updated - - -

If Blizz announces changes, there will be complaint posts in forums.
Same as it ever was.

- - - Updated - - -

Just no. Good lord, have you never played through a stat squish before? This isn't the first, or even the second. Nothing much changes, except the numbers on your gear. You'll get over it.

Just want to point out - this is only the second squish... The first one was in WoD.... There was no squish for Legion. (as far as i know)

[Deleted]

OK but who does that actually affect? Ilvl 175-268 is raiding gear for Wrath. So all Wrath raiding has been squished. That affects . . . people who want the Herald of the Titans achievement?

It just lessens the whole experience, it doesn't matter if you get an epic or not, its all the same. And again, combine this with the whole scaling and you will have a standard rotation that will kill any and all mobs while leveling, as the whole thing scales with you. But then again, the leveling experience hasn't been good for a long time now, these changes only make it a bit worse.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Eeuh, yea no, look at the freaking chart. Itemlevel 175 to 268 will become ilvl 100. That means literally that the power levels of all these items will become the same.

I haven't studied it closely since scaling, but 175-268 was traditionally Northrend gear. Except now it could be Outlands gear, right? If you play that to 80? Either way, sounds like the new gear you get when you are level 60-70 will be of one power level, and the gear you get from 70-80 will be another. To be honest, I never fuss too much about upgrades while leveling, unless it's cool transmogs, because the upgrade I get today will be vendored sometime this week anyway, maybe after the very next dungeon. If anything, it might be nice to keep the same item for at least a couple of days.

[Deleted]

What a horrible shit show, yet again..
Getting items while leveling will be utterly useless, it doesn't matter an 175 ilvl item will have exactly the same power level as a 268 ilvl item now. That means that you will hardly have any power increases for a whole expansion, this combined with with the fact that everything scales pretty much means that you'll never feel any power increase at all.

Loving it.

No more going from 250k dps at 860 to 2+ mill at 960+.

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

Just want to point out - this is only the second squish... The first one was in WoD.... There was no squish for Legion. (as far as i know)

Ok - I could be wrong about that point. I am wrong sometimes. But the overall point remains: as long as everything is squished in equal proportions, the actual power balance doesn't change much. Maybe just a bit where numbers had to be rounded off, but not enough to get upset over.

[ls-]

Judging from WoD to Legion, it was a jump of about 250, so I expect ilvl 500 again by the end of BfA. Quite retarded really, they need to cut the crap with exponential gains and 4 difficulties 15 ilvl apart.

The problem is that people don't see smaller ilvl increase between two difficulties as significant enough to even bother doing harder content. HM and BRF say hello.

[Deleted]

Again, this is gear you would only get if you were raiding Wrath content. Questing gear is lower level than that range.

- - - Updated - - -



I think the real problem with Legion was not the item levels but the artifact, plus the fact that 7.2 and 7.3 essentially were massive boosts in artifact power.

Random epic drops are still a thing, and the differences you do get are very small while leveling, again, the scaling here doesn't help.

I think that its not really just the artifact, that didn't help of course, but the weird way secondary stats scale doesn't help either, combined with a 4 tier raid system and the legendaries. Combined they made for the power crawl we had this expansion.

[Qnubi]

I haven't studied it closely since scaling, but 175-268 was traditionally Northrend gear. Except now it could be Outlands gear, right? If you play that to 80? Either way, sounds like the new gear you get when you are level 60-70 will be of one power level, and the gear you get from 70-80 will be another. To be honest, I never fuss too much about upgrades while leveling, unless it's cool transmogs, because the upgrade I get today will be vendored sometime this week anyway, maybe after the very next dungeon. If anything, it might be nice to keep the same item for at least a couple of days.

It will make leveling quite a bit harder if you don't get any power increase from gear for 10 levels, remember the mobs scale with your level and each level decreases your relative strength to a NPC if you don't get gear upgrades. Blizzard will probably not see this and people leveling at that particular range will suffer. You will become weaker as you level up, which is absolutely garbage game design. let's say you are 60 and fight a boar, it takes you 5 seconds to kill it, that same boar at 69 will take longer and deal more damage to you without gear upgrades. Not getting upgrades for 10 levels is also a massive demotivation for me as it's part of the game experience when leveling. I voluntarily not wear BoA gear because of that.

[ls-]

I mean in Legion they bumped ToV up as well.

Well, yeah, for some reason I keep forgetting about ToV >_>

[Deleted]

I think the real problem with Legion was not the item levels but the artifact, plus the fact that 7.2 and 7.3 essentially were massive boosts in artifact power.

Let's not forget the 4 raid difficulties, with LFR Antorus being on par with HC ToS: a 15+ ilvl increase times 3/4 is ridiculous.
But Blizzard have their minds set on it, so we'll suffer it forever.

[Swizzle]

Wait, I'm confused. Every other expansion people complained that their hard earned gear was being replaced by the first green they come across. Now that we may keep our hard earned gear for a bit longer, people are complaining? This feels like when the kids want Itchy and Scratchy to be relatable while dealing with real life issues but also being completely crazy and off the walls.

[JohnRoads]

The last quest reward you'll get in northrend is 174 right now, that will be a ilvl 99 after.
The first quest reward you'll get in cataclysm zones is 272 right now, that will be a ilvl 101 after.

The ilvls in between are used for raid and dungeon loot.

This means that the last dungeons and quest you'll do in nothrend/outland at lvl 79 will give you ilvl 99-100 loot and the first dungeons and quests you'll do in pandaria/cataclysm will give you ilvl 101+ loot. So yes there will still be power increase when you lvl, even though a 1-2 ilvls might not seem as much.

- - - Updated - - -

The current itemlvls that will share the same itemlvl is from raid/high end dungeons. You skip almost all of these in the lvling process.

[Marc7]

Those saying that power gaps aren't solved, blizzard has explicitly said 3 times now that there will be power gaps.

So stop with the bloody crying that it needs to be fixed, it doesn't need to be fixed.

1. They reduced titanforging likeliness by a lot, by the sound of how they worded it, it will be rarer than legendaries.
2. They took away tier sets, tier sets have always been the biggest drive behind power increases.
3. We aren't getting legendaries, that's a lot of stats we won't be getting.
4. Artifact weapons are gone and azerite neck won't give similar increases in damage.

We'll gain a lot less power, but there will still be quite noticeable power gaps every tier.

Yeah no one is thinking that it's accidental. It's just dumb to have player power be 10 times higher at the end of an expansion than at the beginning of it.

[Missed]

because squisching numbers ISNT solving the problem .....

- - - Updated - - -



I found the guy scared by big numbers....

What problem?!

[Deleted]

Who are you speaking for ? And what is this nonsense?

Exactly.

I think at this point no one should care about numbers that are too much above or below of their current power level. Like my current ilvl on 110 is 965 equipped, I don't give a f. about wotlk or wod ilvl, it's irrelevant for me, even EN mythic.

The same goes for a fresh toon, even a new player. The endgame on a new character is irrelevant, you should just monitor the current ilvl and compare it to a new piece on your game level. You won't compare a Maraudon blue item stat with an Antorus epic.

- - - Updated - - -

This is fine at all but they could stop doing this if they simply removed the cause

The cause is to introduce more content to more players to get more money. This concept won't change any time soon.

[Ophenia]

Loving it.

No more going from 250k dps at 860 to 2+ mill at 960+.

Have you played BfA yet ?
Maybe we'll go from 2k dps at 200i to 200k dps at 500i. We can't know this kind of stuff.

But I can guarantee that with :
- 4 different raiding difficulties
- 3 different dungeon difficulties
- Mythic Dungeon difficulty being spread from +1 to +15 (if they keep the same scheme as Legion, which is fine imo)
- TITANFORGING MADNESS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If they want to keep all of this content relevant, the gap will remain as huge as it is right now.

People are being offended because we gained too many stats during the course of Legion, yet they're the first saying the nonsense "hey if you deal 1k on a 100khp mob, that's the same as dealing 1billion on a 100billion hp mob !!".
Plot twist : The exponential stats have gone worse and worse at every xpac, it will be the same here. Remember the 30k dps beginning of WoD ? Yep, they quickly disappeared.

[dcc626]

Yeah no one is thinking that it's accidental. It's just dumb to have player power be 10 times higher at the end of an expansion than at the beginning of it.

but then we get people who complain when a new tier of raiding has smaller item level increases and blizzard is forced to increase the ilvl of drops. this happened repeatedly this xpac.


so what do they do?

[Kieldon]

Why are some people so toxic about how the numbers are big or small is just beyond me.

[klaps_05]

I was missing for most of WOD and came back only towards the end of it and coming from MOP, the stat squish was very weird but also very interesting. I think however they should have went backwards about it - why not define what numbers they want first and then do squish appropriate to it.

So, BFA: 3 tiers. Tier 1 we do 50k DPS, Tier 2 we do 75k DPS, Tier 3 we do 100k DPS
Expansion after BFA: Tier 1 we do 150k DPS, Tier we do 200k DPS, Tier 3 we do 250k DPS.

You can go with smaller incriments too, doesnt matter. But why not plan how much DPS you want ppl to do and then squish according to that, instead of doing a X% squish and then guess what will come out.

[Deleted]

I think it's necessary. They could have decrease the ilvl steep even further, especially around Legion. Hopefully they will iron out the curve every expansion now. No need for ilvl inflation because of old raid tiers.

A diagram showing the conversion. The colored arrows are (approximatly) the ilvls of MC, SWP, ICC, DS, SoO, HFC, Antorus