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  1. #181
    Quote Originally Posted by Stickiler View Post
    The bolded section is the important bit, and has been a constant in every WoW expansion thus far(Since atleast WotLK -> Cata, which is when I got serious about WoW). Endgame gear always transcends the normal range for gear at a given level, which is why you have those situations where you do lose power as you level up, because you started at an abnormally high power level in the first place. This isn't an issue if you're levelling through though, which is where you see a consistent growth in your power level, because you don't have that boosted power level to upset the power scale.
    Yes and no.

    Previously, you would lose power only relatively speaking. The entry zone would be super easy because you over-geared it and each subsequent zone would be relatively harder as you lost your advantage.

    Now, with mob scaling only out since Legion, you lose real power as you ding. The exact same mob type that you just fought before you dinged is now harder afterwards. You are right that it is exacerbated for players starting out with previous expansion end-game gear though ... because while normal plays see the drop at the ding, they'll eventually make up for it with higher ilvl rewards and drops, the raider just keeps seeing drop-offs each ding without being to upgrade much at all until late in the leveling cycle.

  2. #182
    Quote Originally Posted by Stickiler View Post
    The bolded section is the important bit, and has been a constant in every WoW expansion thus far(Since atleast WotLK -> Cata, which is when I got serious about WoW). Endgame gear always transcends the normal range for gear at a given level, which is why you have those situations where you do lose power as you level up, because you started at an abnormally high power level in the first place. This isn't an issue if you're levelling through though, which is where you see a consistent growth in your power level, because you don't have that boosted power level to upset the power scale.
    While it did happen in Cata for a few specs, by and large there was enough of an increase in raw power via levelling (which still gave you more talent points and such back then) and levelling gear, that you still gained in power despite your secondary stats dropping off as you levelled. The loss of those, Haste especially, felt bad but overall power didn't really drop off as a rule. MoP and WoD were similar in that respect, despite the 'new' talent system removing talents as a source of power inflation as you levelled (especially in WoD). Legion had the gain of weapon traits to help counter the stat rot, so despite mobs scaling most specs didn't see a drop off in power - raw primary stats and weapon powers countered the decay of secondary stats. BfA, OTOH, has the loss of legendaries at L116 to deal with, but even allowing for that secondary stats decay very strongly, and the few azerite traits you get while levelling do not compensate for this - and that's not even considering the loss of the Legion weapons (as they no longer work at any level, I don't count that).

    One thing that really irks me is that there's no gain in innate character ability after the L100 talent. They should have lifted the L100 talent to L105 (to fit the 'every 15 levels' pattern), and added a talent at L120. Instead they went for azerite gear, which replaces tier bonuses, character skills/talents, and the legion weapon, and replaces all of those predictable advancement paths with one that's seriously RNG because aside from raid drops (and really expensive purchases from the ethereal vendor) the good pieces come from chests that hand out random pieces.

    To make matters worse (and brining this rant back to something vaguely on-topic), to make the azerite traits feel impactful they tend to be procs, and for procs to mean much overall they have to be quite strong when they're running. That means they add to the stat inflation when they procs if they're adding to a stat. That also makes them hugely swingy, which is why many of them are severely nerfed in PvP. This also means characters are effectively built around combinations of half a dozen trinket procs.

  3. #183
    While there's 4 difficulty levels it will just keep happening. They need to change it up or keep having to squish numbers every 2 expansions.

  4. #184
    Quote Originally Posted by Kalisandra View Post
    The real problem is inflation within an expansion, and it's pretty serious at the moment. A not terribly well geared, but current, character (e.g. has gear solely from open world content, hasn't maxed out all their benthics yet) has four+ times the health of a new L120, and the DPS increase is comparable. This has serious implications for PvP, and for PvE content - it makes older PvE content irrelevant extremely quickly.

    Making room between tiers for titanforging has made the inflation from having four layers of raids even worse. On top of that, in WoD they moved from a 13 ilevel per raid level step to a 15 ilevel per step increment. IMO they should have gone down to 10/step, and stayed with MoP's +5 ilevel warforging, possibly with a very rare +10 ilevel titanforge step. That would reduce a 45+ ilevel per raid patch jump to no more than 30 ilevels.

    Further reductions in ilevel increase could be made by reducing the step between raid types to +5 ilevels, and instead putting fixed sockets in the original BC-to-MoP style on raid and m+ gear, and having higher difficulty gear have more sockets. That would also give us a bit more customisation (yes, most people would just go and look up the latest builds in their favourite guide, but that'll happen regardless).
    I wouldn't be averse to that, but you run into the obvious problem of old Mythic gear being better than the significant majority of current LFR/Normal/even Heroic gear if the ilvl gap is low and Mythic has lots more sockets, as these are very powerful. And I doubt forcing people into old Mythic content is at all desirable.

    Ultimately the ilvl grab isn't a big problem. We've had planned obsolescence of tiers since Wrath, with some exceptional items being exempt such as Arcanocrystal and Convergence of Fates in Legion, or a few Crucible items in BFA. It would exist no matter what the gap between tiers would be given that the alternative is tiring raidings by making too much content attractive.

  5. #185
    Blizzard can't stop themselves from making these huge power jumps from tier to tier. If you go back to MoP as an example the heroic version of a raid, back when heroic was the cap, had gear that was better than the next raid tiers LFR. They slows the power creep some. They moved from this with SoO making the LFR gear there better than the previous best raid gear in ToT, they also at the same time added in flex raiding and the power gap grew by 2 extra raid difficulty settings. They have gone forward with this since then. They did try to slow this a little with world bosses not giving the same strength gear as they have been, normally heroic level now normal level. With TF being in the game now it isn't uncommon for people that don't even full clear heroic raid content to be very close to the item level cap for each tier, with people being able to buy azerite gear they can now do it, where before for BfA that was the one thing holding them back.
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  6. #186
    Stat squishes don't work. We'll need a new stat squish with each expansion to keep things in check. That's the reality in a game where stats grow exponentially instead of linearly.

    This trend was already set in Vanilla. Up to level 60 your itemlevel matches your character's level, but then you need item progression past lvl 60. So the raid items are a higher itemlevel than your characters level. That's where the exponential growth starts. If you raided a lot you'd have a lvl 60 character with lvl 65 overall itemlevel, so you'd feel like a lvl 65 character compared to other people.

    No matter how many times a stat squish is made, there will always be item progression past maximum level and thus there is always exponential growth. But the higher your level the more this inflation needs to be in order to 'feel' the difference of a new item upgrade. And that's why we'll need a stat squish faster and faster.

    I still say Blizzard should've gone with the Megadamage option over a squish.

  7. #187
    Quote Originally Posted by Ielenia View Post
    It's "natural" inflation. Think of it this way: without the stat squishes, instead of seeing 1500 stamina, you'd be seeing upwards of 1.5 mil stamina. Or even 15 mil.
    They just need to switch to scientific exponential notation. Visually there will be no excessive growth even if stats grow literally exponentially. You'll just have 1.5e7 stamina. It's not harder to compare, if an item gives you 3e5 stamina, it's clearlybetter than one that gives you 2e5 and worse than one that gives you 1e6.

    It works for incremental games.
    Samin
    Quote Originally Posted by Ashrana View Post
    So, what would be your reaction, if you found out, that come cata release first patch, blizzard were planning to kill everyone by sending a bear through the mail?

  8. #188
    The Unstoppable Force Ielenia's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Samin View Post
    They just need to switch to scientific exponential notation. Visually there will be no excessive growth even if stats grow literally exponentially. You'll just have 1.5e7 stamina. It's not harder to compare, if an item gives you 3e5 stamina, it's clearlybetter than one that gives you 2e5 and worse than one that gives you 1e6.

    It works for incremental games.
    That is a horrible number display.
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  9. #189
    Quote Originally Posted by Malikath View Post
    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.
    So why were all the people whining all the way through ToS about "being forced" to run Emerald Nightmare?

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Milfshaked View Post
    That is simply not true at all. Almost every guild was still running naxx and EoE on a weekly basis when Ulduar was out, especially for the first few months. Even when TOC was out, a lot of people were pugging Naxx for some specific trinkets. A lot of guilds also organised alt runs for naxx so that raiders that needed trinkets could get prio.

    Algalon trinkets from Ulduar was usually BiS for many classes far into ICC so a lot of people were running Ulduar for the most part of ICC.
    Weird. Did people complain about "being forced" to run those old raids like they did all through Legion about Emerald Nightmare? Also when I posted my comment trinkets had completed skipped my mind and I was thinking purely from an ilvl perspective.

  10. #190
    Quote Originally Posted by cparle87 View Post
    Weird. Did people complain about "being forced" to run those old raids like they did all through Legion about Emerald Nightmare? Also when I posted my comment trinkets had completed skipped my mind and I was thinking purely from an ilvl perspective.
    Not really. I did not play Legion(only expansion I have not raided in) so I can not really compare the two since I do not know why people felt "forced" to do emerald nightmare. Did it have anything to do with artifacts or warforging? If that is the case it seems like a different issue.

    In Wrath, it was usually seen as a part of the farm raid. You were helping guild mates to get the missing gear pieces. For the content that was so easy that official farm raids did not make sense, you usually had unofficial raids for the people that needed the gear and you filled up the slots with alts and/or pugs. Alternatively, it was just up to the player to pug it if it was easy enough. It was also usually okay for people to come with their alts for the lower tier farm raids(with loot priority for mains of course).

  11. #191
    Quote Originally Posted by Milfshaked View Post
    Not really. I did not play Legion(only expansion I have not raided in) so I can not really compare the two since I do not know why people felt "forced" to do emerald nightmare. Did it have anything to do with artifacts or warforging? If that is the case it seems like a different issue.

    In Wrath, it was usually seen as a part of the farm raid. You were helping guild mates to get the missing gear pieces. For the content that was so easy that official farm raids did not make sense, you usually had unofficial raids for the people that needed the gear and you filled up the slots with alts and/or pugs. Alternatively, it was just up to the player to pug it if it was easy enough. It was also usually okay for people to come with their alts for the lower tier farm raids(with loot priority for mains of course).
    No. There were a couple of trinkets off Ursorc that were still BiS at the end of Nighthold. I remember my guildies grumbling about having to run mythic Ursoc every week and coining for it.

  12. #192
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    Quote Originally Posted by lyphe View Post
    Bad planning by leadership unfortunately. They'll tell you that it's just a factor of the needed power growth in characters, but I'd argue that smart people who are educated in game design should be innovative enough to figure out a way to accomplish their end goal without seeing massive bloat again and again.
    Large stamina is the result of filling a problem in game design. The rest of the stats are not overly inflated nor is stamina that great over what we started out at. I can assure you that Blizzard is far more intelligent in game design then you will attribute to them.
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  13. #193
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    Because you play to become more powerful, duh, +there's a ton of older content behind it. Scaling can fix a lot but it can't cover everything without making you question why you're even bothering to level in the first place.
    Last edited by Tiwack; 2019-09-26 at 12:23 AM.
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  14. #194
    Quote Originally Posted by CaliKat View Post
    I saw a Druid out trolling people at an Azorite spit today with 950k health. I laughed and laughed until he swiped me, stun locked me, and then started hitting me with that goddamn moonfire shit...

    Stat squishes are a normal part of long sustained MMOs. Do you really think it’d be fun to try and PvP a bear tank or DK tank with 100M health?
    If your damage is similarly scaled? I don't see the issue. And if it isn't, that's a balance issue, not a big numbers issue.

    You're misblaming something that doesn't have anything to do with your actual problem.

  15. #195
    The Insane rhorle's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by lyphe View Post
    Indeed, they are smart no doubt, but they also suffer from a lot of short term thinking which is evident throughout the game. And stats are still messed up. Agility for example, which is meant to be a Rogue's primary god stat ... is so low compared to the so-called "secondary" stats, that it is now the least desirable stat by a good margin.
    Agility and secondary stats do not even compete on gear. Secondary stats have always been the important stats to shoot for because the primary stats are gained by virtue of getting items in the first place. And of course they suffer from short term thinking because they need solutions in the short term to provide gameplay. They can't wait 1-2 expansions for most things to work out. They try to fix it. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.

    Look at Demonology warlocks and how long it took to get them to a good spot. That isn't bad game design in the slightest. Even more so when things generally change per expansion anyways.
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  16. #196
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    Quote Originally Posted by Carolus Rex View Post
    Many people have not read and understood what I have said and that includes you, and frankly, you aren't worth my time.
    And that's why you're the one banned right now ahahah

  17. #197
    It is a normal result of having 15 years of WoW. In classic there was only one raid difficulty, which increased to what we have nowadays. LFR, Normal, Heroic, Mythic. And every single difficulty needs to have better gear than the previous one, otherwise there would be no reason to do Mythic if you could get the same gear in LFR.
    Then there is the fact that every single addon has to increase your characters power by such an extend that the previous raids become irrelevant. Otherwise you would not do the new ones for better gear. Not to mention the fact that the "green geared pleb" should also be able to start the next addon without having to grind the old raids.

    As such you will have "big numbers" relatively quickly. And when it comes to the Legion squish: Yes, they did that. But they didn't reduce it back down to the classic level. They only reduced it back down to a level where it takes one or two addons to get out of control again. (Although, doing around 55k dps on a single target fight is not that much of a number).

    What they need to do for a meaningful stat squish is a: the squish itself (obviously) and b: reduce the level of raid difficulties. Because think about it. Let us say you have a squish at the beginning of Legion. Since then we got EN, Trial, NH, Tomb, Antorus, Uldir, BoD, Crucible and EP. That are 36 different difficulties and every single one has better gear than the previous one. Leading to a fast increase of numbers and values.

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