Person that doesnt understand 9th grade math trying to tell people what scaling is, incorrectly to boot.
I’ll repeat it again, scaling is additive DPS gain per phase. The reason your understanding of scaling being a % increase is incorrect is because 1) no one understand it to mean that but you apparently and 2) you can easily inflate the percent of scaling by lowering the starting DPS, totally revealing the error in your concept.
Like when you tried to tell me that if a class went from 4k dps to 6k dps it scaled harder than if a class went from 6k dps to 8k dps because the former class had a 50% increase and the latter had a 33% increase… despite them both scaling parallel, the same exact 2k dps. To illuminate your error, consider if a class did 1k dps and gained 2k dps to 3k dps, it now has a 200% increase. Or if a class did 500 dps to 2500 dps, now it has a 400% increase. See how you can simply lower the starting variable and suddenly the percent increases? Or if you did 1 dps and now did 2001, wow a 19,999% increase!
The reason scaling mattered is because if in phase 1, two classes did different DPS, its possible that by the end phase they could do the same DPS or even swap places in the DPS meta. This only happens if one class scales more than the other. If they scale parallel, the lower class will always be lower. Also, if they scale almost parallel, but not quite, there might not be enough time for them to swap as well. I.e. if the lower class gained at a faster rate but phase 4 ended without enough stats to actually swap them places.
So, in phase 1 they can be 2k dps apart, and in phase 4 they can still be 2k dps apart, that was a parallel scale. But its never that clean. Rather, in phase 1 theyre 2k dps apart and then in phase 4, theyre like 1.5k dps apart. The lower class gained enough extra DPS to close the gap to 1.5k, so its better than being 2k behind, but its still behind by a large amount. In some cases like with arms you can actually get worse, having that gap increase per phase
This is what we have seen with warrior. We saw through ToC week 1 to the final week that warrior didnt really scale better than any other classes. Its not the worst scaling, but its not even necessarily the best. In Phase 2 rogue even got more dps. Feral, combat, ret, MM, etc all have the same scaling curve.
We’re seeing feral get almost the same DPS per item in ICC as warrior, despite being significantly ahead of warrior. Even on a cleave fight like Valks where a warrior spams cleave, feral’s single target DPS beats warrior. This is why in ICC feral becomes #1. It scales like warrior but is starting off 20% ahead of warrior because of meta breaking changes.
Ret is also ahead of warrior on most ICC fights right now, and actually scales harder than warrior, meaning it will continue to be ahead all of ICC. Thanks again to meta breaking, arbitrary “exceptions” (as Zirene the QA dev put it) to changing balance.