It does make it a lot of fun to play your old main from the previous xpac in full mythic raid gear for the first time halfway through the new xpac and just absolutely terrorize people in pvp, though lol
Until you hit max level, ofc. Then, you get one shot by everyone again
It’s way worse today with mobs scaling up in level automatically. Previously you had the option of questing or grinding in lower level zones you may have skipped on the way. Green mobs and quests offered a bit of a reprieve from the scale down in player and gear power. There is no such thing now.
A whole lot of people who don’t understand how level scaling and gear scaling works.
Also a lot of people who either never played, or don’t remember playing, previous expansions before NPC level scaling was added to the game.
So here’s a story of two expansions: The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King.
In TBC, your purple raid gear was pretty much replaced by the first quest greens you got because TBC gear was just that much more powerful, especially when it came to stamina. So even I, as someone geared in Molten Core/AQ20/ZG level gear, replaced all my gear very quickly.
This was met by a lot of complaints about how their raid gear was useless for leveling. Obviously, I understand how it could feel bad since you spent so much time gearing your character only to have it all replaced by level 61. I get that.
In WoTLK, your raid gear from TBC actually mattered for leveling as the Wrath gear didn’t start to overtake it until about halfway through your leveling. I still wore some of my TBC raid gear up to about level 75. This is because wrath gear just wasn’t stupidly more powerful than TBC gear.
A lot of people also complained about this, about how they weren’t getting any upgrades to their gear and it felt bad. They complained that their characters felt like they were getting weaker as they leveled.
Understandable as well, as I experienced the same.
Now neither expansion scaled the level of the NPCs to your own level.
Now let’s add this NPC level scaling and ask how that changes anything?
Well, nothing really changes, because the problem isn’t the level of the NPCs, but the power of your gear compared to the NPCs.
If War Within did not scale NPCs to your level, you’d still be fighting NPCs who were around your level for the most part. While yes you can do a bunch of side quests and cause NPCs to turn green to you, that doesn’t make you more powerful, that just makes you fighting lower level NPCs.
But that doesn’t change the fundamental problem and that is if you enter War Within in high tier raid gear, you’re going to be an absolute menace. If you enter War Within in Dragonflight quest gear, you’re going to be at a more reasonable power level compared to the NPCs.
But level scaling changes little of this. Your own power level will still start to fall behind the power level of NPCs as you continued to level up and fight higher level NPCs, because you started off at such a high tier gear level but then start replacing those with questing greens.
You feel weaker, because you ARE getting weaker. This has been an issue with most expansions, unless they added insane jumps in item power like TBC, or insane jumps in player power from levels like Cata.
So why don’t they just do one, or both, of those options then? Because then we get silly things like people having 100 million health and required stat squishes. We get insane power creep. I HATED Cata’s player power gained each level as it meant going from 80 to 81 meant basically doubling my health and it just felt silly.
TBC’s method of adding insane item upgrades would just mean that the expansion after War Within would require another stat squish which is always messy.
So there is no perfect solution. You either “get weaker” as you level, or you implement a short term band aid solution that causes long term issues for the game.
Or do like other games do where expansions don’t add new levels or gear power to the game. But there’s a reason I play WoW and not those other games…
It won’t due to WoW’s aggressive, never-ending vertical gear progression.
Expansions are resets.
It’s just that the reset really starts at max level, not the beginning of the leveling process.
80s are fine.
They’re just not obliterating content like a 70.
Because they’re not supposed to.
Leveling scaling just sucks, no game has ever done it right. The old way works best - have content start low to mid gear levels from the previous expansion (it does that now anyway!) and if higher level people are doing it with you, whatever.
Instead of level capped/geared people helping out, you now have someone burning previous expac level capped alts tearing through content while the x6-x9s getting the carry.
Maybe, just maybe, and hear me out. Its not the level scaling thats the issue. As they pandered to the masses back when BC originally released. The community was up in arms cause they were replacing Naxx epics with quest greens. Now that were used to our shinies not being shiny forever, they dont need to scale so much but if you have high end mythic gear expect it to be outclasses by greens by 2 lvls in. Just my opinion.
yall are putting waaay to much focus on gearing when its all a meme rn
the only way to get scaling right in an rpg is to not do it…sorry, not sorry, the main reason for complaints like “i get considerably weaker as i lvl” is tied directly to that…as we lvl the mobs level with us which means the power gained thru greater main stats is negated, and the power lost thru secondary stat decay amplified leaving only a feeling of getting significantly weaker relative to the enemies you’re fighting with each level.
in the past…you know before blizz became wholely obsessed with the time played metric in legion which psst…thats what birthed this entire scheme, for each zone you got to assuming you were at its starting lvl, and each dungeon once again assuming at its starting level, the difficulty would spike a bit, and then slowly reduce based on you lvling thru that zone or dungeon and obtaining gear from it creating a firm sense of power growth that’s been gone since scaling came to be.
No they will never get it right how many years now have they been trying?
For sake of simplicity, say a max power in DF was 350 (level 70 * season 5)
Consider the new player power to be “season 6,” but when you’re levelling you’re gaining .6 each level so 70x.6, 71x1.2, et al until 80x6 as a maximum.
70x.6 = 42
versus power from previous expansion being 70*5 = 350
All this adds up to is you reach that “upgrade point at” 77*4.8.
However, that 4.8 assumes FULL SATURATION. When you go from 70-80 in 24 dungeons, your gear upgrades are spread across all those power levels and as a result you are very, very weak. Think of how many dungeon runs you’d have to do to get full saturation of say 74 gear.
End result: as you level, your gear is not levelling to keep up and its basically impossible to do it unless you can get BOEs for every level from the AH/trade.
the entire score is based off of your power vs. power of enemy, which cancels in a scaling scenario like this, so as you level you get weaker and weaker as it is simply a function of “your level and your ilvl”
So why can they not simply fix the levels of the enemies to not “scale”? Because the entire point of scaling is so a level 70 can group with a level 76 and not be weaker/useless.
There is no way to do that besides artificially dampening the scaling (which is what they’re doing).
you can’t balance scaling in context of equalizing different levels without starting everyone at the same gear power point.
As it stands we have level 70s at 5000% the power a level 70 “could” have according to the new expansion, versus a level 77 at like 25% of the power they could have. And so the 70 is that much stronger.
The only way to “get scaling right” is to basically disallow people of different levels to group together. But then that kills the queues times across the boards and isn’t “fun.” Think prepatch if you had a fresh character you were basically not contributing at all and getting smashed until you hit 70 and could equip that gear, even the blue drops were grossly underpowered.
They’ve had this in other expansions, where there were min levels to a dungeon run, and you’d get that level, say, mid-progression level player who had 0 upgrades show up and be useless / make the run painful. The fix is not just LEVEL capping access to dungeons but also ILVL minimums.
The enemy here is automated queues. If a player is eyeballing someone’s gear and level before going to a dungeon, they can judge the power and deny the group invite.
As it stands the automated queue = you win the lottery with overpowered, lower levels joining.
Their fix will be easy: a flat power diff increase (or a simple max ILVL cap) that diminishes as you level up. ie, you could have gear worthy of level 77 at 70, but it caps you to be 70.
The people with OP ilvl from DF/prepatch who would have dungeon spammed but didn’t for whatever reason will be hit the hardest. New 70s will be required to do quests out in the world or suffer in the dungeons. I have no idea what gear score a new player will be when they hit 70 leveling from scratch, but it surely won’t be at level 76-77 power like anyone who did prepatch was at.
The problem I have with their fix is that it still has the same void of “no upgrades/power gains” until it devolves into “less power.”
While I do appreciate the faster queues, gaining power used to mean something as you levelled, and losing power each level because now monsters are scaled to your new level but you haven’t gained any gear just sucks
It is time for them to move on to WoW 2 upgraded engine with a more modern look. Can you imagine a WoW game that has graphics on par with Black Myth Wukong? They will not do anything as long as they can keep milking this game though unfortunately.
the downtime message has been removed from the launcher, it’s possible they will let it persist till next reset
You’re assumption relies on the basis that the level scaling is supposed to scale upwards, but that’s not the purpose of the scaling
The purpose of the scaling is to serve as a reset, which means we should expect a decreasing power curve and one that’s exponential; that’s what we have.
Though that’s also why item level scaling exponentially is a problem. Buuuut blame the playerbase, they don’t like linear scaling!
Pretty much this. It also doesn’t help that they haven’t listened to beta feedback since Wrath. Open beta tests becoming a marketing tool instead of a legitimate vessel for player feedback is such a tragedy.
They caved at BC, thats why the ignored it i wrath. Its th players fault. Cause the 1% elite dont want their gear to be overshadowed in a lvl or two by a newbie with a boost.
Level scaling has been a mistake for some time IMO because it is harder to make adjustments when they do level squishes.
Getting one shot by open world mobs would require you to be wearing BFA gear. I’m not even sure you could manage to get one shot in SL gear. I’m genuinely curious now lmao.
I’ve thought about this before but I don’t know enough. I always wondered why they didn’t just break it down to percentages. At least while we’re leveling.
No. /10char