Why are stats so big again?

[Murthag]

That's just a flat out lie.

Wotlk itlv from tiers went from 200 to 277

BFA started at 300 and now we are at 455.

Just the double of wotlk and we still miss a raid tier so no is not a lie

[rhorle]

And OP is making perfect sense to me. What they've done in BfA and Legion would be exactly the same thing as if they took Sarth and Eye and just released it 6 months after the start of Wrath.

Nax, EoE, and Sanctum all had a difference of 13 item levels between them. Sanctum and Nax shared item levels with EoE being the small step up. Uldir and Dazar'alor have a 30 item level gap. The same as Dazar'alor and Eternal palace. We have also had 3 PvE seasons with BfA. It is clear they are all different raid tiers and not just the same group of raids.

Crucible is the only one that compares to the lich king raids. As its item level jump is only 5-10. Of course that is also meaningless since the increase between tier 1 and tier 2 was only 6 or so for 10-man Ulduar. Tiers were random. The only thing that made it tier was calling it Tier and New sets. That link still exists with 3 seasons sets for PvE.

[mickybrighteyes]

Nah, we dont have tiers.

We have garbage azerite armor and ilvl increases, that's it.

Nothing exciting to look forward to with the next raid.

But that's exactly what tiers were. some series of effects tied to specific pieces and a noticeable hike in the ilvl budget....

I mean if we still had tiers like back in the day, the azerite effects would be the 'tier bonus' and we'd only see a couple of them at all.

[Aldo Hawk]

Wasn't there a stat squish right in BFA? I just reached 120 and got some benthic gear and my stats are as high as 1500 stamina on some pieces. What the fuck are they doing? Wouldn't they need another stat squish again right at the beginning of the next expansion? Why are they even doing this?

Because we have tons of difficulties for dungeons and 4 difficulties for raids.

It's one of the reasons why some people (like me) say that we should have less difficulties with more impact on them.

Too many difficulties makes content strangely unrewarding, and they are forced to periodically bump stats into a hardly readable mess...

[mickybrighteyes]

I mean class tiers, they stopped doing it to make them wearer user type now

To be fair, the effects that would have been 'tier bonus' ARE what they used for the Azerite effects.

But honestly the only thing they did with BFA was outright admit they were done giving class specific skins (which they'd long stopped doing since like Wrath era since all the class tier were also recollored for generic armor grade for everyone to use).

[Relapses]

lmao, because they were at most a single dungeon and raid run and you always try and bullshit with exaggeration on how time-consuming or difficult things are to try and maintain your baseless claim.
the best thing attunements did was bar people from getting ran without doing a prior PVE endgame content so that they'd atleast know how to work in a group.

Nothing says "working in a group" like doing irrelevant content for no fucking reason. How tight are your nostalgia-vision goggles taped to your face?

now fucking hunters pet's can't even taunt in PVE content because the retail player-base is a bunch of witless idiots who couldn't manage it so blizzard had to basically break it to cope.

Those witless idiots are the reason the game still fucking exists. Obviously I don't agree with every change Blizzard has made to make the game more accessible (and I doubt you'd find anybody who honestly does), but I can at least understand why they were made.

[Biomega]

Why stats have to be so large: differentiation.

What does that mean? Simply put, it's the difference between gear level within a tier, and also the difference between gear levels from tier to tier.

Within a tier, we have gear ranging from LFR quality to mythic quality - with war-/titanforging on top of that. For each sub-tier (LFR-Normal-Heroic-Mythic) the items need to be different enough that it actually matters. If, for example, an LFR piece had 1,000 main stat and you only got, say, +10 stat per sub-tier, that would make a mythic piece 1030 main stat - a whopping 3% increase that is in no proportion to how much more difficult a mythic piece is to get. To compare: on live right now, an ilvl 400 LFR Azerite head has 718 main stat; an ilvl 445 mythic head has 1093 main stat, which is about 66% more. That means you need to cover a pretty substantial spread even within a tier - and this becomes even more outside of a tier.

Why does this need such large numbers? Simply put, it's because fractions. The smaller the numbers, the more of a chunk fractions are. If we were operating on items that had +10 main stat, the SMALLEST increase we could manage is 10%, because you can't go below +1 stat. But if 10% was the SMALLEST upgrade you could deal with, your power would fluctuate wildly with each new piece of gear. To keep these fluctuations in check and allow for small, progressive upgrades, we need to move at values where small absolute increases (i.e. integers) correspond to small percentages as well. This almost automatically puts the LOWER bound on item budgeting at around the 100 range (where +1 stat is a +1% increase).

HOWEVER what comes into play now is also overall levels. Because gear doesn't just happen at max level but starts at lvl 1, you actually need to start worrying about these things a lot earlier than endgame. Indeed, it's actually a bit out of whack right now if you look at lower levels - there's many examples of very low ilvl items (usually in the lvl 20-60 range or so) actually having equal or LESS of the same stats than an item of slightly higher ilvl, because you run into problems with rounding etc. when you're operating with very small numbers. Differentiation becomes a problem, and suddenly items of vastly inferior ilvl can actually result in more stats (because apparently nobody bothered to hand-adjust every low-level item or whatever).

In practice, this means that once you reach max level, you've already exhausted a good number of ilvls/stats in a low integer range. Further increases need larger numbers to be meaningful, and that's when the whole tier differentiation problem begins and you start having rapidly inflating item levels to make up for the in-tier/cross-tier power differences needed to make gear upgrades meaningful.

And they HAVE to be meaningful differences in order for effort to be properly rewarded. If differences between tiers are too small, then you reduce the incentive for people to progress. It's also why M+ needs constant readjustment based on the current raid tier - if you did not do that, we'd suffer from rapid M+ inflation and would all be doing M+50 keys now, which would create all sorts of problems.

Luckily, this problem hasn't QUITE yet reached MoP proportions, where we were contending with people having millions of HP, or even Legion, where people did millions of DPS - but we'll get there again eventually, requiring another squish. With talk of a level squish, however, we may be in a good position to further curb the inflationary tendencies of the gear system - with less levels, you can set the lower bound for endgame much lower, and keep steps smaller, at least initially. That will slow down ilvl inflation somewhat, but it won't stop it; the next squish will be inevitable, as will the next and the next and the next, for as long as the gear/tier system works as it does now.

[BananaHandsB]

It will never cease to amaze me, the dumb shit that will trigger some ppl.

[Azelas]

Because they need to scale gear to an astronomical amount every raid tier to make way for 4 difficulties to exist.

[rhorle]

No, that is one raid tier.

Just to officially put a nail in this.

For those of you who played Legion, the process will largely be familiar, though in Battle for Azeroth we’re trying to align the opening of a new raid tier with the start of new PvP and Mythic+ seasons

Full post: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...season-2/73698

Blizzard themselves have called Dazar'alor a new raid tier. The post also largely explains the item level jumps and reason for the scaling being the way it is.

[Mask]

Back to 1 raid difficulty. Make raids easier so the majority of guilds can clear them given a few months of work, similar to vanilla/BC style. Also have the early bosses easier so all guilds can progress at least part way through a raid. The last few bosses will be the block that more hardcore guilds work on to beat. No more 4 tiers of difficulty causing 60 ilevel inflation every patch - that is some bullshit.

[Ielenia]

No. It's not natural. They are the ones who determine what stats are on the gear. If it was natural then we would have seen the same rise in stats before. Stats didn't go from 30 to 1500 in TBC, or Wrath, or any other expansion.

... Did you not notice the quotation marks around the word 'natural'?

On top of that, such inflation is necessary to give noticeable boosts of power, especially considering some trinket effects could be better than higher level ones.

[Xar226]

Yes becouse game didnt had 4 difficulty levels on top of titanforing and mythic +. And yes it is problem becouse working with such big numbers just isnt possible. If mob have 30k hp and i hot for 2K hp i can instanly figure out how many mobs will have hp, how many hits i will need, will i survive etc. You really cant do that when mob have 2 521 331 HP and you hit for 211 332k dmg.

I like how you deliberately picked super easy numbers for your first examples and super convoluted ones for your second.

And yes, I can really do it. You're more powerful in the second example, which is approximately 12:1 versus the first which is 15:1. You ignore the insignificant digits, just like you would had you not chosen all numbers that end in 0s and are evenly divisible for your first example.

As to the OP: They're deliberately scaling stamina higher than other stats to achieve other goals. For example, we all got significant power increases with the introduction of essences, which, had the health pools continued to scale linearly while our power scaled exponentially*, would have broken PVP and trivialized healing, and brought us back once again to the healing meta where you have to full-top your entire raid the second damage hits or they won't survive the next spike.

Will they need another squish at some point? Yeah. Who cares either way?

(* Technically I think they're both exponential, but I'm not going to bother graph it to find out. The point remains the same; if health scales smaller than throughput, bad things happen to the game.)

[munkeyinorbit]

I'm not asking why numbers are getting bigger, I'm asking why are numbers this big already so early in the expansion when there had just been a stat squish? Why not increase the numbers more slowly? Why is this so hard to understand for 99% of people in this thread. I never said big numbers are bad. I never said small numbers are bad. This is merely a question concerning the pacing of the stat increase. I almost have the suspicion Blizzard has already decided there will be a level squish in 9.0

And no, several raid difficulties does not mean that numbers have to go from 30 to 1500 in 2 raid tiers. The expansion isn't even over yet.

Where does this happen. What azerite item goes from 30 to 1500 in one expansion? If you can't find anything then your 'argument' falls over.

I also want to see your proof that blizzard has decided to do a squish in 9.0. There must be some indication they are doing it for you to almost have a suspicion.

I will wait for your proof of either or an apology to the community.

[Nevcairiel]

Yeah exactly. So why do we go from 30 to 1500 in 2 raid tiers? That never happened before.

(a) 3 Raid Tiers, anytime the loot increases thats a tier, no matter how much you wish otherwise
(b) That increase is not actually real, and you made it up. Please show your item examples. Going back to my shoulder example from earlier, an item from the first Legion raid already has 49 Stamina. A level 99 quest reward has 37 Stamina. An original BfA Heroic Dungeon Item already had 400 Stamina (ilvl 315).

Clearly for such an increase to happen, there need to be two expansions worth of raid tiers, plus leveling and entry-level dungeons, and whatnot. Next time try with actual facts, and not hyperbole and made-up numbers.

[merli]

Yes becouse game didnt had 4 difficulty levels on top of titanforing and mythic +. And yes it is problem becouse working with such big numbers just isnt possible. If mob have 30k hp and i hot for 2K hp i can instanly figure out how many mobs will have hp, how many hits i will need, will i survive etc. You really cant do that when mob have 2 521 331 HP and you hit for 211 332k dmg.

Perhaps it's an addon but numbers normaly show up like 2 521k HP and hit for 211k. That's not much more difficult to see than a 31 059 HP mob and hit for 2 939. Why did you change from using k for thousand to not using k? Just to make the numbers less readable?

[Malikath]

Nothing says "working in a group" like doing irrelevant content for no fucking reason. How tight are your nostalgia-vision goggles taped to your face?



Those witless idiots are the reason the game still fucking exists. Obviously I don't agree with every change Blizzard has made to make the game more accessible (and I doubt you'd find anybody who honestly does), but I can at least understand why they were made.

not at all, but if you wanna assert that the cataclysm model of LFR assisted catch-up is more-liked, more-popular, or in anyway good for the game i can point to the fact that retail's playerbase is all but dead now that classic came out to assert that the older system of guild-runs was more popular and helped improve player involvement in their guild's activity which led to the core component of what kept people in the game, their guild community.

without that all guilds became were perks then we saw the creation of super-massive guilds which recruited as many casuals as possible to feed gold off of due to the ghost-tax perk.

also, this might surprise you but all the attunements in WoW were intended to be done either through solo quests or just the dungeons you would be doing to gear-up for that content, so again you have to exaggerate to have anything to bitch about so you can act like you have an argument.

you did BRD ONCE for the MC attunement, you didn't even need to go that far off from the typical run to smelt dark iron ore.
for the other atunemnts you either did solo endgame quests or fucking item turn-ins.

so yeah, you are making a mountain out of a mole-hill when you bitch about attunements, cause they weren't hard or fucking time-gating.


also, your assertion that retail is alive in any real function doesn't seem to be backed-up by anything, classic killed it at launch on all external sites and no one's cared about BFA since.
so no, those witless idiots drove off the rest of the player-base with their demands, and they didn't have the right to do that to begin with.

[Shaetha]

actually no, people still did older raids for newer members getting geared up, it wasn't until open-world catch-up mechanics raised Ilvls above older raids that people stopped doing them entirely.

No one did that in WotLK. No one was running naxx to gear people because they were doing easy heroic dungeons or PVP to get naxx 25 level gear. Yes, the PVP gear was slightly worse because of a dead stat, but it wasn't enough worse to stop you from clearing Ulduar, and between that and the badge gear it was easy enough to get adequate gear on off nights. My guild never once did Naxx after Ulduar came out for actual gear.

Even then you could say they did it with the QD badge vendor and MrT in 2.4.

[Garymorilix]

OP said that Uldir and BoD are the same tier of raids.

Why are we still feeding the troll?

This type of scaling will only be "solved" once we get a level squish. 120 numbers need to be scaled higher cuz there are 119 levels below that. Numbers just get naturally higher cuz of this.

[anon5123]

For Vanilla and maybe TBC, stats were a linear path upwards.
Pretty much after that it became exponential. Players have gotten used to this euphoric rush of power and Blizzard can no longer go back to how things were with stats climbing ever so "slowly" like they did in Vanilla and TBC, otherwise players would probably be unhappy. Numbers? Don't want to think about them or manage them. Just put bigger ones on the gear!

It could also be to prevent another Naxx25 from happening, where the raid was literally cleared by raids full of people still wearing Sunwell gear.

If you have perfectly linear stat increases from expansion to expansion, not only does it not really feel very good, but it leads to situations where people are just smashing through the raids in the previous expansion's gear.