So… I had an interesting thought. Maybe I look into a bit too much into damage meters and I know it doesn’t mean much. We had Level 10 twinks running around and absolutely demolishing Timewalking content while others are playing running simulation in dungeons.
We have lower levels essentially do more damage than a higher level characters. This got me thinking… Do levels make us stronger?
We get talent points but sometimes that can be either ahead or behind everything you do numerically. I find it really odd that levels do in fact, make us less capable of slaying monsters.
When it comes to Ratings like Haste, Crit, Vers and Mastery (Alias Combat Ratings), for every level you gain, you need more of their Ratings in order to get a 1% of whichever one of them you get enough of.
I know I am not the only one who experiences this when leveling characters and it has been this way for a quite awhile.
What do you think? Should they do away with Combat Ratings and just give Secondary Attribute % on items while using Primary Attributes (Strength, Intellect, etc.) become a scaling factor rather than your character level?
1 Like
Sorry, the stats part doesnt make sense. You saying that instead of giving an amount, they should make gear give percentage of a stat? Like instead of X amount of haste just give 2% haste?
How would that scale with levels? If low level gear gives 2% haste, will high end gear give 20%? Or will it also give 2% haste? How does that work with item levels and stat budgets? Higher item level pieces have higher stat budgets which quantifies how much of each stat point is on it, so how would percentage increases be allocated?
If everything just gave 2% haste, 16 slots means im pushing a flat 32% haste from start of expansion to the end. Would any gear I get just be Str/Agi/Int increases only? Kinda bland and would be really limit on gear you can have.
Secondary stats also have soft caps, with diminishing returns. How would static percentage increases work under diminishing returns.
As for the twink part, stop looking at detials. Details is and never was designed to accoint for scaling combat.
If a low level mob has 100 health, and the twink hits for 10 damage, then the twink is hitting for 10% of the mobs health.
At 80, the same mob may have 100 000 health, on your screen and details, that twinks 10 damage appears at 10 000, 10% of the mobs health.
No the twink isnt doing stupid crazy damage, detials just isnt set up to tell the difference between scaling mobs.
1 Like
I can understand where you’re coming from, it does feel like it would be simpler to just have % instead of hidden secondary stat weights which can even change between specs/classes like Mastery, but I feel it’s more of an issue with content scaling when it comes to the aspect of potentially feeling weaker per level, and there’s a much simpler remedy when it comes to the secondary stats: give an option that would make it state how much % that stat will give alongside the actual stat number, similar to how Wowhead will state it at the current max level.
I think if we just went back to raw 1-2% on each piece of gear for things, it’d probably have to be balanced in the same way as it is now but just on the other side of the “scale”, since things like Versatility would probably have to have a lower raw % than something like Haste or Crit, which kind of just makes it go back to square one. We also can’t have lower pieces of gear having high % of secondary stats since it can reintroduce the issue of equipping low level items instead of higher level ones because they can be worse in certain circumstances if a Class likes a certain secondary a lot.
Secondary stats play a huge role in feeling stronger as an xpac goes on, not just bigger number but often feeling. As you gain haste you will play faster and some specs will change how they play, crit will give juicy big numbers and again some spec change play wise. Mastery and Vers can feel underwhelming based on spec and content though. I don’t think WoW needs anymore RPG stat destruction
The entire thing comes down to scaling. Gear does not scale, so as you get higher levels your gear effectively shrinks until you upgrade it again. Low levels have much better scaling because they only need a few points for a massive gain but that was balanced in the old days by not even having every slot filled until midway through leveling and the world not scaling with you so lower levels had to deal with things like Miss chance and glancing blows when fighting higher level enemies, not even counting how a lot of damage was tied to abilities using different ranks.
Sure, they can completely redo scaling so that low levels are a complete slog unless they are wearing the best gear for their level but that would just be unfun. So the way it is a level 10 with the best gear for their level will be doing comparative damage to a Max Level character with the best gear for their level with the max level character having an edge from talents and other abilities while the low level will just be pushing one or two abilities with excessive amounts of secondary stats scaling.
Yes. They do. I have never seen a group of level 10s clear a current raid.
Edit : to clarify. the question shouldnt be “do levels make us stronger?” it should be “is scaling really really weird in leveling content?” which is…yes.
1 Like
Leveling makes you weaker as you level, which has to be counterbalanced by gear upgrades. Since mobs lvl with you, leveling is mostly pointless. You don’t actually start to gain power until after you hit level cap. One could also argue that gaining new spells and talents while you level makes you stronger.
2 Likes
Howdy!
One issue is just math. If they gave a simple % increase (e.g. +2% Crit), there is the potential for someone to get more than 100% Crit. Now, maybe they could do some extreme monitoring of all abilities, gear, buffs, and other combinations to ensure this does not happen; I’m sure they could. But it seems easier to make that % increase be a function of stat points instead.
(Getting mathy now.) You can create a function that maps those stat points onto a scale from 0% to 100% Crit in a way that 100% is never attainable. I don’t know what function they use, but what springs to my mind first is a logistic curve, /andymath.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Logistic-Function.jpg, which is like a stretched out ‘S’ shape.
They probably don’t use that curve, but something more complicated. But it’ll be similar, which is why stat points have “diminishing returns”. If going from 0 to 100 Crit gives you 5% Crit, going from 1000 to 1100 might only give you 1% Crit. That means that you’ll get to put more priority on other stats as well.
Another benefit to this is that you can use the same number of stat point on the item for all players. If the developers like the idea of diminishing returns, they’d have to specify that on each item, for you with 0% Crit, this necklace will give you 2% Crit, but for someone else with 5% Crit already, it’ll only give 1.5% Crit. Instead, they give the same crit points to everyone, and the behind-the-scenes math converts that into different numbers. This is probably also a PR move: imagine the chaos if players see different benefits on the same item.
Yeah, the abstraction does make it more difficult to understand. I wonder if there’s an addon that could convert, in real time, the points to percentages, specifically for you. Sounds simple enough? Not sure if the equations are public knowledge though.
1 Like