Why the Spell Scaling is bad

In Development WoW: Forever Beta Discussion
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A Prot or Ret paladin will no longer be able to provide any amount of useful off healing. An enhancement shaman or Ele shaman will provide terrible offhealing as well in hairy situtations - elemental less so since they get some healing power. A resto shaman/druid does z dps.
The hybrid tax has been cranked up to the roof, it’s wild.

Imagine this. You have 1 dollar. Now, someone takes the dollar and gives you 60 pennies, and says “You can only have the remaining 40 pennies while you hold this stick, but you have to first go find the stick in the woods, a specific stick.”
That is what is happening essentially. The stick is your spell power/healing staff.
The spells having massively lowered base damage (some nerfed by almost 70-80%) and having ludicrously high spell power coefficients makes getting a nice gear upgrade not a cool bonus, but a requirement.

Right now the most effective spells to use on my level 20 shaman are Rank 2 Healing Wave and Rank 2 Lightning Bolt. The benefit of 14 more damage or 40 more healing for using higher ranks is massively outweighed by the absurd weight of the increased cast times and massively increased mana cost – for instance Going from Rank 2 to Rank 4 Healing Wave is a difference of 108 mana (44 vs 152) and – and it takes 1 second longer to cast. I can just spam Rank 2 Healing Wave and in the time it takes me to cast 4 healing waves I could cast 2 rank 4 Healing Waves and I would save 300 mana in the process while doing the same amount of healing.

The required amount of spell power/healing power just to reach the “normal” value is insane. There is no point to this change, it just makes things worse and feel bad, and makes a smooth and intuitive process of leveling as a caster turn into a complete clown show of measuring spell values and mana costs vs cast times and comparing them to each other. It’s insane.

The changes to spells only serve to make the game worse. Getting the Emberstone Staff felt great on a caster because it was a bunch of mana, a tiny bit of crit, and some spirit. And it bonked pretty hard too if I wanted to hit someone with it…

Now the only thing you look at is “Does Spell Power NUMBER GO UP??” if yes => Equip.

You can still add some bits of spell power/healing power here and there on items while leveling, that’s fine. What is done currently is not the right way to go about these changes. It just makes things worse and causes a myriad of issues. You should not have to have 715 Spell Power for Chain Lightning to be back to “normal” damage. You should not need 420 spell power for Immolate to do “normal” damage. etc.

Raise the base damage back up. Fix the Mana Cost/Cast Time fiasco that makes downranking to rank 2 the best option.
You can keep spell power and what not on items, that’s fine, just lower the values a bit to compensate for the increase of base damage.
Casters are WAY too gear dependent now, it feels bad and is just weird. This was not a change that needed to happen at all. I have been wracking my brain for days trying to figure out the “WHY” part of this, and I cannot come up with any answer that makes sense. Casters felt great to level, getting an upgrade felt great and you could feel the growth of your character with each upgrade and increase to your mana pool and sustain.

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Exactly. They say they did this cause us casters want to feel powerful when we get an ugrade, we already did feel it. We got upgrades cause they looked cool and were chase items.

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Yeah it just doesn’t make sense to me at all. I don’t understand what people mean when they say “now casters can feel upgrades” - implying that we DIDNT already feel the power increases to our character when we got new items. It’s such a bad change.

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yep, completely wrecks hybrid classes

also a perfect example of how blizzard makes these changes for reasons that are unimportant, and ruins totally CORE things in the process.

it was simply NOT IMPORTANT to make casters feel like the crappy gear that they get between levels 1 and 20 matters.

This is all about giving the instant gratification audience the dopamine hits they need to not jsut bounce off the game. Is there a middle ground? maybe. But this is just another perfect example of a “sounds good on paper, who could say no to that!” change from blizz that comes with unintended and actually meaningful changes.

LIKE THE DUNGEON XP SITUATION GUYS

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They took a core pillar of caster progression; leveling → dpower spikes, spell ranks - and completely shattered it. They took what wasn’t broke, broke it, and then tried to fix it and in the process just made things worse.

Getting the new rank of Fireball or Shadow Bolt felt so good - now I don’t even use the spells because they cost too much mana and don’t do any more damage. It’s better and more efficient to just use lower rank spells.

It. Feels. Terrible.

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Dude it is so refreshing to see someone in the forum with some reasoning skills. I literally am over here like I wanna buy this guy a coffee

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I pretty strongly disagree here. The most optimized way to play Prot Pally and Enhancement Shaman is by stacking spell power. I’m fairly certain on my shaman, spell power is my best stat, slightly above strength and int, for improving DPS. And, you can now get insanely strong caster weapons with high phys DPS from relatively easy quests. Caster weapons used to have reduced phys DPS, but i believe they normalized the damage on it.

Because of stacking spell power, mostly from the Totemic Leather set, the only item I change when I heal dungeons is my weapon, which I swap to a 48 healing power mace (also from a dungeon quest). I’m healing dungeons fine as an enhance shaman despite taking no resto talents. And, when I switched from a 20 DPS 2 handed axe to a 10 DPS 1-handed axe with 24 spell power, my damage went up about 20%. My shield only has 1 spell power on it.

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I actually think the dungeon nerf happened for the same reason.

“we need to give players tons of loot because a green from a lvl 15 dungeon feels bad!” sounds good on paper (arguably? it doesnt even sound good to me lmao), dumb in practice.

“uh oh, now if you run the dungeon again for XP, you level up and get gear we cant have that. better limit the amount of dungeons we can run!”

Its like solving an invasive species by introducing another invasive species. Its so amazingly stupid lmao

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No they didn’t. They do now, however. Emberstone Staff used to be about the same DPS as Smites Hammer/Taskmaster Axe now it’s about 65% of the value, for example.

lol yep it’s just… so wrong and makes no sense to me. I’m glad there are others who understand the game and design of the systems and how they work. This just isn’t it.

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I just got last night an axe from a quest in The Barrens for a 24 spell power one handed axe, Pathfinder’s Clearway. I was going to disagree with you, but I think my confusion was based on the bad information about Pathfinder’s Clearway on WoWhead. It’s reporting the DPS as 15.2, but in game it’s actually 10.0.

That said, switching to a high spell power weapon boosted my damage quite significantly. In my testing, I tested Flametongue Weapon, Searing Totem, Fire Nova as my rotation, alternating Flame Shock > Frost Shock. I tested Big Axe (the 20 DPS one from RoL quest), Fast Dagger (the 1.5 speed 7 DPS from RFC that has 24 healing power), and Prospector’s Claim. The best DPS was Prospector’s Claim, despite being only 2/3rds the phys DPS of Cruel Barb (similar ilvl comparison).

I was wrong about the phys DPS, but the point stands— spell power weapons still do more damage than using a pure martial weapon.

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I’m not sure what your point here is. You are pretty much just agreeing with my point that the scaling is a bad change.

Now imagine if you didn’t get that spell power weapon.

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I’m glad that spell base damage is starting to get more eyeballs and traction on the forum. I’ve been trying to talk to people about it since the spellbooks were available to look at online. The breakdown is mostly this:

  • Most DoTs reduced by 50%.
  • Most direct damage spells reduced by 25%*.
  • Most healing spells reduced by 10%.

*There are some HUGE outliers for direct damage spells that go all the way up to 75-80% base damage reduction.

I agree that this was creating a solution to a problem that did not exist. While leveling, most spell damage upgrades came in the form of buying a new rank of your spell. Melees often SKIPPED ranks of new abilities because they were functionally worthless (a few flat damage added usually). At max level, where spell power upgrades are prevalent, you still get that “feeling” they want you to have when you get an upgrade. Low level upgrades were still exciting because you could generally cast more spells before going OOM.

As it was pointed out already in this topic, hybrids took the brunt of the negative effects of this change. Elemental Shamans seem to be the worst off, closely followed by Balance Druids and Holy DPS Priests, with Warlock direct damage spells in a rough state as well. Most of these need 300+ spell power to equal that of a NAKED Era character casting the same spell. Meanwhile, other specs/classes who weren’t affected quite so badly (Arcane & Frost Mages, Shadow Priests) are just scaling to the moon at 300+ spell power.

When the sentiment was to try and bring less-desired Classic specs up-to-par in Forever, it seems like it’s off to a pretty bad start (for casters). There have been complaints left and right about how bad Elemental and Balance feel at low levels. Some of these might be alleviated as spell power becomes a bit more prevalent, but at the same time the “better” casters will still just be ahead.

I’m just kind of scratching my head at this choice because I don’t really understand its purpose at this point. It definitely needs some major attention, and hopefully more topics like these will get the attention of the devs.

Also worth pointing out that at the time of posting this comment, the top reddit post on r/classicwow is regarding this exact topic. Many people are appalled to find out how bad the base damage nerfs actually were.

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Exactly. This change causes so many problems it’s insane to me that it happened. I can’t imagine this going live, it’s just too much. Too many issues, too many balance problems, it is just not Classic WoW either. It doesn’t fit the game. It also completely bricks hybrids.

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It’s missing [base] Points Per Level to compensate for level gaps, wrote about this in another post but both solutions of keeping base spell and AP/SP coefficents at their high spots aren’t ideal when it comes to scaling later

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I think most of you are missing a key factor here. They want you to get gear. They don’t want you to be carried by your skill ranks and just power through.

Making skills base weaker but stronger gear means you have to actually farm decent gear throughout the leveling process to offset this.

This is part of their progression process and probably ties in with the Horizontal Progression. Also if you look at the new BoP crafted gear. A lot of the Hybrid gear has something like Str/Sta Spell Power, you will get some spell power as Enh Sham or Resto druid. The question is going to be how well does this actually stack up.

The other side of this coin is that Specialisations are relevent from the start. If you play resto then you target resto gear and you heal better, you can’t just go into a dungeon in full enh/feral gear and heal just cause.

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… implying they didn’t want this already before?

That’s what skill ranks were for. You’d hit that powerspike and it would feel super powerful for a while.

No, making casters hyper gear dependent just in order to get back to where they were just makes it feel awful. Now instead of doing normal damage baseline, you need 80 spell power to get back to “normal” damage – and if you DONT Have that gear you it’s an absolutely miserable experience.

Has nothing to do with horizontal progression in any imaginable facet. It just ruins the experience for casters and the experience of hybrids for no reason.

It doesn’t. It tries to fill a hole that they created with this change, and it doesn’t even fill it. It makes no sense.

Entirely wrong and your following point makes no sense and is not correlated with this statement at all. I am playing elemental but I am spec’d for Resto because that’s where the mana sustain talent is, and it also has spell hit which is vital.

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There is no implication, of course theyw ant you to, you just didn’t need too now you do. Not hard to understand.

Casters maybe yes, for anyone who actually played melee they would understand, new weapon = power spike not new skill rank. Now it will be similar for casters. Again it is not hard to understand that the power creep will now be more about getting new gear upgrades than skill ranks.

Melee are already Hyper Gear dependant and nobody seems to care. Also Hyper Gear dependant is a complete stretch. Making it so that the gear you gain while leveling is actually impactful is a good thing and makes the game more interesting just cause you might now have to actually put some effort into getting a few upgrades instead of just waiting on that new skill rank.

Maybe, Maybe not, horizontal progression is an oddball term that has no real meaning. Progression is Progression regardless. How does it ruin the experience for casters/hybrids, as mentioned already, you just need to put more effort into getting better gear to progress faster.

I would hardly think level 20 is a good benchmark for this, talent tree’s don’t really flesh out until level 40.

Also you taking the resto spec due to the mana regen is a sustain choice over DPS, most fights would not last long enough for it to be a relevent choice it just allows you more up time, which impacts killing in the world more than your actual DPS.

The few talents in the Ele tree would make you do more overall DPS on current level bosses, you would just need to drink between pulls similar to mages currently.

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At level 20, a protection paladin can be rocking +80 spellpower, which is huge. If they were going full +healing, they can easily hit nearly double that.

Spellpower is much easier to come by than it was in Vanilla.

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Just wanted to point out that this is more innately intuitive for melee players given their role as well as what the tooltips say. If you hit things with a big bonk, a bigger bonk will bonk better. The weapon DPS on a staff doesn’t matter for spells, and it’s not IMMEDIATELY clear how +spell damage affects your actual damage leading me to my next point…

Tooltips don’t explain how spell power factors into your actual damage on the screen/in your logs. Nowhere does the game explain to you that your 3.5s cast time spell (Fireball) gets 100% of your added spell damage, but your 2.5s cast time spell (Arcane Blast) only gets 71.4% of your added spell damage. Meanwhile, one instant cast spell (Fire Blast) gets 42.9% of your spell damage and another gets 12.9% (Cone of Cold). This is all over the place, and for people not familiar with WoW’s systems, very confusing. This info should be available in the tooltip so you can make more informed decisions.

Most melee tooltips are very straightforward. This skill (Mortal Strike) does weapon damage +flat number, or just flat number damage (Hamstring). There are some skills with AP scaling, and those should be included in the tooltip similar to my suggestion above for spells. However, the thing with these tooltips is that it is immediately apparent where your damage is coming from. You do not get this clarity with spells.

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A Paladin with 80 spell power is the same as a classic paladin with 0 spell power.

The only difference now is that if you don’t have it you’re severely underpowered. L change. Bad design.

I’ve noticed this - some skills such as Rend and Thunder Clap DO more damage based on “something” - but it doesn’t show and is not reflected upon the tooltip. My Thunderclap says it does 17 damage, but it actually does 28 for example (not real numbers made them up).

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