It’s like the mobs are balanced around always having green gear of your level, but you don’t! This leads to some really annoying silliness where you, say, queue up to a follower dungeon, level up midway, and end up having to re-evaluate how much you pull because a pack that used to never bring you below half health got you below a quarter multiple times in an even longer fight. Bosses that were prior easy as long as you avoid their hard-hitting skills are now lopping off large chunks of health, making fights close (and, I have a feeling, outright impossible if I level up further) even if they’ve never landed anything but autoattacks on you.
This would be fine if there was some sort of catch-up mechanic for gear or heirlooms were more affordable, but it’s been 7 levels from quests and I’ve only run each follower dungeon once, I’m still in basic starting gear, and I only have 102 gold to my name when heirlooms cost 500 each. Unless I’m straight up the unluckiest person alive, this feels a bit… off. Any help would be welcome.
You don’t. The entire point of vertical progression is to act as a gear reset.
Edit: Oh you’re an actual new player not just complaining about expansion scaling. Mobs aren’t balanced around having a whole lot of gear but balance between specs can vary pretty wildly at different levels. You’ll get new abilities which typically make up a large bulk of character power.
Questing in one of the more modern expacs should give you better gear/level than doing follower dungeons which will level you very fast (especially early on) but give you very little gear.
Based on what you wrote here I’m assuming you are a new player.
You should not be spending gold on gear. Gear from quests, delves, drops, dungeons, and rares will accumulate and you will be ready for heroics at max level.
Mobs sync to your gear ilvl once you hit 80 (not your level) Herilooms will be useless for you 70-80 because they require tons of gold to be able to use them at that level.
Explain? Not sure what this means.
What are you spending gold on right now? Besides professions I can’t think of anything that would be draining 7 levels of questing gold.
Edit: just seen your public profile is hidden so I’m unsure how legit any of this is.
Next month do the Darkmoon Faire you can purchase heirlooms with faire tickets. You can share tickets between characters on your account. Fish at the faire for darkmoon daggermaw and bloated fish.Pick up a profession to craft beginning gear. Do the cooking dailies in Orgrimmar for experience and gold.
Actually, that’s not a bad drop rate. Personally, I would continue to run those until I had dungeon gear in most slots. That will make you way more powerful.
This makes perfect sense now. Yup, keep doing quests and swapping out for higher item level gear as you go, and this will work itself out before you know it. I wouldn’t eliminate follower dungeons though, especially if you like to see them. Doing them at least one time isn’t going to hold you back.
In order to prevent gear from previous expansions being relevant, the gear in the current expansion will always have a higher stat budget to match the design goal. To make this work, your effective secondary stats (haste, crit, mastery, and verse) are all calculated as a function of your level and raw stats (the number you see on gear) to turn it into the percentage improvement. If I’m not mistaken, stamina and attack/spell power aren’t calculated like this and instead just scale linearly with your raw stats.
As you level up, your raw stats often lag behind your level because you dont pick up gear at the same rates as you gain experience. As a result, if power = stats/level your power naturally declines. Additionally mobs also get stronger as they level up to match your expected gear level
It’s quite noticeable at every expansion launch. People who had the top quality gear at the end of DF were quite easily 1 or 2 shotting mobs in TWW up until about 74/75. Before that point your stats are way higher than “average” for mobs that level so you destroy them. But about halfway through things normalize and your expected gear level and actual gear level match.
There’s not much you can do other than getting better gear. If you’re struggling in dungeons then I would recommend questing for a bit to catch up on gear level.
Alright so just keep at it. It really does sound like it’ll get better by keeping on. Also I’m glad to know I don’t need to outright stop doing follower dungeons because they’re fun! Thank you all!