Should scaling get removed?

[Zandalariprelate]

Just remove the ilvl scaling with mobs, I can't believe Midnight got buffed this patch and can one shot you with his kit of skills.

[DoctorDoomkin]

It is a terrible design and against the spirit of MMORPG and the progression of your characters.

Ganking is easily solved by removing CRZ, Sharding, and phasing and allows server hop or WQ add-ons to exist.

Care to elaborate on why it is a terrible design and against the "spirit of an mmorpg" and the "progression of our characters in your original post instead of just saying it is to you?

Quite frankly, I've enjoyed the scaling system when it comes to leveling characters. I don't need to abandon a zone simply because "my character got too strong and doesn't feel he needs to participate in anything else the area has to offer".

The old system goes against "MMORPGs" as players will simply leave because of the previous point. Does it make sense to a character's role as a hero to suddenly have the story go in this direction:

"After preperations have been made for the Alliance to make their attack on a Horde Camp, the hero gives the leader of the Rag-tag group of civilians the finger, rudely shouting,

'Fuck off. I'm going to the Eastern Plaguelands because you've suddenly became a waste of my time!'

And so, our hero left the group, leaving the team without their hero to win the battle. What a prick."

I think it would be better if we actually get to stay and finish what the zone asked for instead of just leaving because it is an inconvienence for the player as they outlevel the zone.

Ganking would not be easily solved by removing the CRZ. If the server is Horde heavy, any Alliance characters would not be able to find someone to play.


Doubt very seriously you'd actually respond since your opening post has as much effort as Blizz's development team.

[De Lupe]

Level scaling is one of the things I've desired for years. It makes leveling enjoyable again. Contrary to popular belief, outleveling a zone is not nearly as entertaining as some make it sound. Being 55 killing level 40 mobs is boring and tedious. I'd rather be at level killing them.

Hope to see every expansion zone get scaled to go from 60 to 110, so I can pick my favorite zones from each expansion all the way up.

[darklogrus]

Im fine with the whole Zone Scaling but I think Mob scaling both in instances and in the world is just wonky and was never properly addressed.

[Deleted]

How exactly you "progress"? You were killing ravagers in 10 seconds, leveled up and still kill them in 10 seconds because they leveled up too. Maybe even slower, because your secondary ratings degrade in usefulness with every level. That's regress, not progress.

Firstly, regression would be if I kill 10 ravagers I lose XP.

Secondly, I can kill 10 ravagers and get 1px each because I outlevel the zone or I can kill 1 ravager and get 50xp because they are still revelvant. And best of all if I absoutely hate killing ravagers, because scaling applies to other zones around me I can go kill something else instead.

And if nothing changes, why even have 120 meaningless levels? Just have level 1 - Classic zones, get 1280947219483721984793287593 XP, level up to 2 - Outland/Northrend, level up to 3 - Pandaria, 4 - WoD, 5 - Legion, 6 - BfA start and level 7 - woo! endgame. When you're NOT progressing, what difference those 120 empty useless levels have?

Because gaining levels gives a sense of progression and some content is in fact still gated behind specific levels. Your problem here is this entire paragraph relies on you being right about not progressiing but because you are not, it comes across as a silly overreaction worthy of Chicken Little.

Yeah, need to stop buying into Blizz PR. A properly designed game would let you finish the story within reasonable timing of your leveling. Blizz uses scaling so they don't have to bother designing things particularly well...in other words, it is actually another aspect of their laziness.

They added it to old zones so they didn't have to keep going back and balancing that each time they made a change. They added it to the new to open up more options when levelling rather than funnelling all players into 1/2 start zones, and that worked incredibly well. I think you need to stop using cyncism as a way of rationalising things.

[Alkizon]

Design is certainly terrible (moreover, it was clear to many people already before its introduction, and it doesn't matter what, with what and how they scale, it's doesn't belong to this game, same true for way they usually using phasing), but problem is that such exactly design is consistent with current their development direction. From which follows that if direction not going to change, then situation will only "deepen/aggravate". As for alternative, we have already discussed this more than once and I'm too lazy to tell fifth time, how it should work as normal with healthy progression in mind.

6. Bad world (and not only) scaling +(+)+/+/+/+/+/+/+
9. Quests/leveling (&levels) +(+)+(+)

[Zka]

Scaling should be EXTENDED, it's the best addition in recent years. Some people...
Without scaling, questing was almost impossible, you outleveled zones so fast you just spent your time traveling between zones all the time. How fast people forget how shitty the previous iteration was, it's incredible and frightening.

[Alkizon]

Scaling should be EXTENDED, it's the best addition in recent years. Some people...
Without scaling, questing was almost impossible, you outleveled zones so fast you just spent your time traveling between zones all the time. How fast people forget how shitty the previous iteration was, it's incredible and frightening.

People talked about this even before (much earlier) they were given scaling, so this isn't even an argument at all. Moreover, scaling was and still remains a “crutch” of a bad design, which means it's not a “cure” = they spoiled original design at first, and then added scaling as a crutch (in that exact order; as they have repeatedly done with other game design areas). Comprends?

Ie, I suppose that it's complicated to understand that problem solution isn't in that everything will grow along with you (individually with each, without caring about logic), but that you grow at an appropriate rate for not overdo it. It follows from this that either zones have an alternative and don't add up to obligatory moneybox of counter, or all zones are taken into account and they need to be passed the more possible the better (which is even slower, therefore first option is preferable in current "lazy" situation, but 2nd globaly better for one way or another you will outgrow everything and you won't see all "world history" points, which means won't have all original experience, but there is always an alternative not to do it longer, just faster, but more dangerous, which means more meaningful/memorable/fun: almost all experience isn't from mobs, but from quests / not 100 monsters with rare "pieces", but 10 with guaranteed / not fat mobs, but very strong, smart and hard to kill (they have classes and abilities) / etc... and no scaling). But scaling as was and continues to murder progress feeling (no, this is not a regression, which is ilvl scaling, it’s just lack of progress, you can continue to convince yourself with anything you want that it's not true, but fact remains: there is no growth (damage 1st experience) and only “local history” progress (therefore there is no sense of general history perception), but if you consider that people many if not even hundredth time past this "story" so it doesn’t help anyhow, but rather infuriates (damage subsequent experience); while take in calculation your "casual races to see the story" is useless in principle), and it never worked normally in any MMORPG... Yes, it's definitely difficult to understand, that's why they distort world without fear. People are stupid enough to not notice anything and indifferent enough to not care about it

[Archibalde]

The entire idea about scaling is terrible. It destroys the feeling of rewarding when a player gains a level, which makes the leveling feel obsolete. The experience becomes such a dumb shit. They now scale leveling to PVP as well which even encourages exploiting low level characters to gank high level characters.

It's not like leveling in WoW is rewarding even without scaling though. With some specs you can go as far as 5 levels without even gaining a new ability and you effectively stop getting anything new at 100. Who cares if that boar still dies in 3 hits instead of 2 when you go from 30 to 31? That's not what felt rewarding when leveling in older expansions. It's not like anything even puts up a fight when you have full heirlooms.

If they want to make leveling rewarding again they need to do it literally. Add some of the utility abilities and passives back and spread them across the 119 levels, make the experience feel at least relevant.

[vsb]

It is a terrible design and against the spirit of MMORPG and the progression of your characters.

Ganking is easily solved by removing CRZ, Sharding, and phasing and allows server hop or WQ add-ons to exist.

I like scaling. Finally I could level in one zone without outleveling at half-time. Scaling does not affect progression, you would encounter hard mobs in the next zone anyway, it's not like wolves from Borean Tundra are somehow different from Elwynn Forest. Progression should be implemented with additional talents and WoW new talent system lack that. They should implement both old talents for progression feeling (could rip them from artifact) and keep new talents for end-game diversity. But it's a completely different problem which does not affect scaling. There are some artifacts from scaling like overpowered 110 level characters, but I think that it could be solved without disabling scaling.

[sam86]

Oh, I thought you meant the scaling when mobs scale to the ilvl

he isn't ? why ?
lvl scaling is great, it made u stay in zone until finish it, ilvl scaling is sh8t, i still remember when u had to remove ur gear to kill mobs faster, it isn't that bad now but it is still sh8t, it make getting gear feel far less rewarding, instead of wasting time for 50 hours in raid to kill mobs 0.3 sec faster, just stay wq and u'll finish them in less time than raid + wq

[Yriel]

I would like it if they scale even more. I level quite a lot and i hate playing through BC and WOTLK, i'd like to level more in MOP or CATA but you can usually only play one zone each for the 10 levels.
I'd love to go from classic straight to MOP or CATA zones. Why not scale everything? Would be nice to level only in classic zones, too.

[Deleted]

i dont know how scaling works in pvp, because i dont gank lowlevels and never have.
but as long as the person with higher lvl/itemlvl has the advantage, id say its fine.
should a 120 be able to evaporate a level 100 from the face of azeroth, with 1 autoattack, as it used to be in the past? no.
even a level 20 should be able to survive 1 attack, pop a defensive cd, cc the attacker and try to get to safety.. (imo).

[SkagenRora]

Scaling should be a thing 1-110, but not 110-120.. it feels horrible to lose so much stats everytime you level up.. and all the enemies just gets more health & dmg, So just removing scaling from BFA and keep it for other zones.

[Necromantic]

I like the scaling, to an extent. For leveling alts, it's nice to be able to level anywhere but once you hit 110, it should either stop or not scale as much so that people who get better gear can actually feel more powerful. Right now, they don't. You just see a higher ilvl that holds no value.

[FuxieDK]

Scaling is counter intuitive..

Go to e.g. Nazmir at level 110 and round up 5-10 random mobs, and you AoE them down in a few seconds, while you take less than 10% damage.
Go back at level 119 or a fresh dinged 120, and try to AoE the same mobs.. Some classes can do two mobs at a time, but most can only do ONE and take 50-75% damage in the process. 5-10 is suicide to all at this point..

We are getting weaker with each level, where we should become stronger..

[Vampyr78]

It is a terrible design and against the spirit of MMORPG and the progression of your characters.

It sounds bad as an idea, yes and I was against it. Until I tried it, I realy like it and it gives you more freedom and choice in what you want to do. Its benefits outweight the flaws, so it should stay. Also it doesn't makes your character weaker during leveling. People feel like it's making them weaker when they level their max level characters from previous expansion into a new one. Those characters are decently geared and way much overgeared for leveling content. As you level up you eventualy replace that gear with leveling gear so eventualy you're not so overpowerd compared to mobs. This was the case in every expansion, the only difference scaling makes is the fact that before mobs were harder as you moved more high level zones and now you can fight the same mobs as few levels below and now they will be harder.

Ganking is easily solved by removing CRZ, Sharding, and phasing and allows server hop or WQ add-ons to exist.

Ganking was the very last problem scaling was trying to fix. Also, nope, removing phasing would have no effect on ganking, phasing is only used for some specific quests. CRZ and Sharding, well they might have effect because they work to help populate the zone with players but is would be way to difficult to remove, so many things in the game rely on those two techs. And server hop addon's wouldn't work if they were to remove tech cross realm techs.

[Dadwen]

It sounds bad as an idea, yes and I was against it. Until I tried it, I realy like it and it gives you more freedom and choice in what you want to do. Its benefits outweight the flaws, so it should stay. Also it doesn't makes your character weaker during leveling. People feel like it's making them weaker when they level their max level characters from previous expansion into a new one. Those characters are decently geared and way much overgeared for leveling content. As you level up you eventualy replace that gear with leveling gear so eventualy you're not so overpowerd compared to mobs. This was the case in every expansion, the only difference scaling makes is the fact that before mobs were harder as you moved more high level zones and now you can fight the same mobs as few levels below and now they will be harder.


Ganking was the very last problem scaling was trying to fix. Also, nope, removing phasing would have no effect on ganking, phasing is only used for some specific quests. CRZ and Sharding, well they might have effect because they work to help populate the zone with players but is would be way to difficult to remove, so many things in the game rely on those two techs. And server hop addon's wouldn't work if they were to remove tech cross realm techs.

Bolded the part that is flat out wrong. I watched someone taking on mobs at 119 3 or 4 no issues then at 120 same mobs kicking their ass. Best (Dumbest) answer people give that are pro scaling, "oh now you have to get another 20 or 30 I levels to feel the same as you did at 119", that's BS....

[Marrilaife]

Bolded the part that is flat out wrong. I watched someone taking on mobs at 119 3 or 4 no issues then at 120 same mobs kicking their ass.

Because the scaling is badly programmed.

Ilvl rewards "scale to your level", but 120 character doesn't get better quest rewards than 119, which is lame, and world quests start at 295 rewards which is super low (the whole idea is to force you to grind and clock MAU or go to AH and buy a set of gear putting a "tax" on newly dinged characters in hopes you buy gold).

Mobs "scale to your level" but max level mobs assume you're 320-340 ilvl while mobs below that assume you're pleb in 260-280 greens. Guess what, you don't stop being pleb in greens for just dinging 120, see the disclaimer above.

It was the same in legion until they put the boa catchup gear so you could kit your characters to the point you felt adequate and not underpowered. But in legion we had easy grouping for WQ through addons so you could bypass the fact freshly dinged character could not solo a NON-elite warden WQ.

If they wanted to "solve" the problem they'd either bump the rewards the moment you ding 120 or upscale the mob less for passing from 119 to max. But they don't want to solve it, because forcing you to grind or pay is both to their profit.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

I don't mind it in old content. I don't like it in current content.