Speaking of Dragonflight - I saw some awesome looking gear I haven’t collected yet in the Dragon Isles raids - and now I’m definitely going to do some Transmog runs before any crazy squishes take place lol.
Transmog runs and just doing older raids in WoW is SUPER fun to do in the game, and like I mentioned before, I don’t believe Blizzard would take that fun away from players now for the first time. It would be VERY foolish and very unwise for Blizzard to do it, so again, I believe everything will work out fine in the end, friend. Cheers! - JJ -
Unfortunately it’s been too long and thus I don’t remember fully, but I believe our numbers were actually less than what our retail characters were doing against classic/BC/WotLK mobs at the time with the legacy buff. Not that we could ever sustain it of course.
Yeah it’s definitely not an even curve. I levelled a ton of alts lately (for class campaigns) and between levels… let’s say 10-30 I didn’t even bother changing gear because everything under ilvl 300 or so is of negligible difference. Past that point it started becoming noticeable though.
Wild thought - maybe this means we’ll get more gear with effect abilities, as opposed to just straight-up stat sticks. Imagine a Hammer of Crash Lightning or a Sword of Consecration, or a Helm of Voidform.
The possibilities aren’t exactly endless, but there are a lot of them.
So, the purpose of the legacy damage buff is to offset the power we lose during the squish. Which means they should be extending the legacy buff up through Dragonflight content once the squish goes live. But it remains to be seen how well they handle things.
That’s my biggest worry is how they’ll hand it. Surly we’ll get the legacy buff for BfA and Shadowlands, but I have a hunch they’ll delay giving us the legacy buff for Dragonflight for some reason.
Everything before TWW is going to get squished hard, like straight into the ground. TWW will still have some gear growth, so they’ll have to compensate for that with the legacy damage buff in Dragonflight.
I remember the first time they did a stat squish, it was a mess.
Legacy content like soloing raids was near-impossible due to the stats not working with older boss HP and mechanics, leveling felt like it was more of a grind than in Vanilla, and people’s motivations went from being hyper to wondering why they kept going.
Many people were complaining that they had gone from feeling like a powerful hero to a two-year-old hitting things with the force of a wet noodle. We play this game to see the numbers increase; it’s why stats, HP, and ilvl rise throughout the game. When you squish the numbers down, players start to feel like their numbers aren’t fun anymore.
It took almost a whole expansion for Blizz to rebalance and fix the game because the math stopped mathing… I know numbers were getting a bit out of hand, but squashing the stats every 3-4 expansions is not the answer.
I left in MoP and didn’t come back until SL (cause of Covid lockdowns). I came back and all my characters were like level 27. I was mad about for like a day.
They should have committed to a standard stat squish every expansion a long time ago. Making things consistent would go a long way to placate players.
A side benefit would be comparing numbers across seasons and expansions is then feasible. E.G. You’d know every expansion that hitting 30k dps in Season 3 means you’re doing well.
Every time they do a squish it involves the following problems:
Some gear or expansions’ gear becomes weirdly useless or powerful because of how stats were allocated differently across expansions (especially when you throw borrowed power expansions into the mix). Not to mention changing philosophies around gems, etc.
The curve across expansions, and zones within expansions, gets messed up. This also affects the content, since expansions where the starting zone was meant to be significantly weaker than the end zone, or with important group quest type things, just become wonky. Some of these have been revamped, but not all.
Heirlooms are always borked, and new/returning players have and can get heirlooms too.
Every single time, past content scaling gets messed up. Suddenly, you have random quest mobs with a oneshot ability, dungeon bosses that become health sponges that take 3x as long for lower level players, etc.
All of these ARE noticeable by new players. In a bad way.
ALL gear from previous expansions are borked and weirdly useless now. Not sure how the stat Squish can make it any useless than it already is. They aren’t going to notice a difference
Same with “the curve across expansions” A truly new player will do that starter zone and then get led by the nose to the current levelling expansion - DF. They aren’t even going to see any other zones.
A truly new player will by definition NOT have Heirlooms
Scaling is rubbish now. The stat squish isn’t going to make it any practical difference for a new player because they just wont know.
NONE of these are going to be noticable by new players. The only time it’ll get noticed by anybody is when old players try to level an alt.
Yeah, they have… The only problem is that they dont adjust the scaling afterwards. Even with a squish, a max level should still be able to one-shot old raid bosses.
And to all of those sitting there saying “Well high numbers are a bad thing”, tell that to diablo 3 and 4 that have numbers constantly running int he multi-billions. If the D3 and D4 servers have handled it for years without a “squish”, I seriously doubt it is a problem.
