iLevel inflation within the breadth of Dragonflight (so far)

Community General Discussion
1
Game Progress iLevel Increase
Fresh 60 about to enter DragonFlight 180 — (3/level)
Level 60 with full Dragonflight normal dungeon loot 226 46
Level 70 with full Dragonflight normal dungeon loot 346 120 (13/level)
Dragonflight heroic dungeon loot 359 13
( ignoring M+, roughly matches raid loot anyway)
Dragonflight LFR loot 376 - 385 17 - 26
Dragonflight normal raid loot 389 - 398 4 - 13
Dragonflight heroic raid loot 402 - 411 4 - 13
Dragonflight mythic raid loot 415 - 424 4 - 13

There’s probably finite levels of gamer psychology that goes into making a decision for how much better to make the rewards every tier. Or some conspiracy having to do with superstitions surrounding the number 13.

If Blizzard had set it to 3 iLevels per tier, the final iLevel (at this point in the game) would’ve landed at around 225 iLevel for the first Dragonflight raid at mythic difficulty.

If Blizzard had set it to 3 iLevels per “tier” across all content:

  • 70 character levels (70 tiers total)
  • 119 difficulties between 49 different raids (119 tiers total)
  • 19 difficulties (normal/heroic) between classic and 9 expansions (19 tiers total)
    • M0 and M+ dungeons omitted since it overlaps raid tiers

iLevels are weird. I suppose they could squish every 2 expansions, but then iLevel almost starts to feel like a borrowed power too. Shrug.

2 Likes
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They’ve already been doing this. They just need to figure out the squish without killing our secondary stats.

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We asked to be rid of borrowed power and this is largely the result.

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I really wish they just put less stats on stuff instead. There’s no reason for items to have 600 stamina, 450 crit and 800 mastery. Just lower the numbers on every item and we won’t have 1 million HP at the end of every Xpac

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Can someone please explain to me how after getting squished to 60 and then getting to 70 our stats are so much higher now than they were from vanilla going to BC? It seems weird to squish us but then raise us back so fast. We have geared tanks with like, over half a mil HP. Throw on raised ilvl in PvP now they have 3/4 mil. Maybe I’m misremembering but isn’t that like, late wrath levels? I know stats are different entirely than how they used to be. But it just seems odd how fast we in ilvl. Even in SL I felt this way.

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There isn’t really a way to do that, as without the changing conversion of rating points per % secondary as you level, we’d be starting the expansion with something like 200% crit, 200% haste, etc.

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Not necessarily. If you scale diminishing returns properly and set soft and hard caps. It’s not a problem. Or just let us hit 200% crit by the end of the xpac and squish us again lol

Tbh I enjoyed barrowed powers. Just not things like dom gems. They made each xpac and each spec feel unique and different.
Legion artifact weapons and legos was probably some of the best gameplay and most fun I’ve had in wow.

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The problem with pushing stat DRs too far within an expansion is that it hurts the feeling of progression over the course of that expansion.

With the current DR system, if we didn’t have the per level scaling or change the amount of secondary stats we got per point since level 50 (when the level squish was implemented), we would be starting Dragonflight at or very near the hard cap.

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Not really. You get more powerful as the expansion goes on. You hit haste caps, rotations become smoother. You start stacking mastery and can feel the difference the more you get.
The only thing DR would do is force you to pick another secondary stat to start pushing.

Then raise the hard cap.
Tbh ever since legion, classes have felt vastly different.
Example is unholy dk. Prior to bfa, your damage was dot based, pets were secondary
Ever since they nerfed the ilvl of legion, mastery took such a massive hit. Pets are primary, dots are kind of an after thought. Still important for aoe, but pets will usually always out shine your dots.

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IIRC late Wrath was ~150k HP max for tanks.
The most HP/dmg etc. ppl had was late MoP, with Destro locks hitting 1M Chaos Bolts, and tanks having that + a little more. IIRC Guardian had ~1.4M HP fully buffed.

1 Like
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180 item level at 60? I came into this expansion at 303 ilevel…

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Legion was worse. Pretty sure in 1 gcd my vengeance could deal 3-4m thanks to brand, carver and those buffs from vindicaar

Oh but if you’re talking about pvp. I’m not sure.

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No you’re right, I forgot about Legion, which had even higher stat inflation.
Druids had like what, 4M HP there? Crazy.

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The massive jump from a fresh 60 to heroic dungeon level is pretty massive. I don’t see why heroic dungeons couldn’t have been 315 or so because let’s be real, if you were in the high 300s coming out of SL your end game wasn’t heroic dungeons…

As for the rest, it’s all driven by multiple raid difficulties which tend to set the item level boundaries. Mythic+ is part of it, but they normally fit it into the +13 item level gaps between difficulties which started in Wrath. A few expansions like Legion and BFA (maybe others) used 15 item levels per difficulty.

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