You have to stop with these Affixes

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
41

Because scaling to easier difficulty is easier than scaling to hard difficulty. You have a much wider margin of error on the easy end.

There is no necessary perfect final number.

It is whatever blizzard chooses.

All that really matters is how much difficulty should be added per step in order to fit the smallest increment of reward increase and that the maximum difficulty should probably be beyond the maximum gear reward.

Sure… and how do you perfectly and quantitatively measure difficulty. Keep in mind we also need the fights to be engaging, fun, challenging, and balanced. If you can perfectly quantify all these factors then scaling up is easy as well. But since we can’t, blizz needs to scale downwards, not upwards.

42

Which is, again, entirely arbitrary. The theoretically perfectly performed BiS run for a tier does not have to become impossible only at precisely a +31 (making +30 the cap), nor any other number so long as it is above the reward cap.

Perfectly? You don’t, because there is no need nor incentive to do so. But generally speaking, yes, getting Mythic raid gear should come from content as near in its difficulty to Mythic raids as is possible.

Scaling up is working just fine. There’s no issue there. Every spec is capable of reaching the reward caps in terms of both gear and achievements. That there is something modestly beyond those reward caps by which the top 1% can compete among each other isn’t a problem; it’s an added benefit.

Your proposed progression of dungeon difficulty labels preceding as…

  1. Least difficulty (Normal Dungeons) to…
  2. Moderate/Liminal (Heroic Dungeons) to…
  3. Highest Difficulty in the entire game, beyond even the hardest Mythic raid (your new "Mythic 0"s at the former difficulty of, say, a +30) to finally…
  4. Mythic Dungeon ranks whose difficulty increasingly fall back down to that of Heroic-dungeons-but-with-an-extra-boss-mechanic (M30s)…

…has no benefit, makes tuning yet harder because it has to aim for a fixed ceiling instead of an open one, and is painfully unintuitive.

Even if you throw enough positive affixes at your “M0” (formerly a +30 or so) to make it doable from the start, and then “tear away” those mechanics until you’re left with the raw product, that’s still as disjointed as heck.

  • Why have fresh i359 players jump straight into content tuned around extremely skilled i418, bloated with positive affixes or otherwise, let alone increasingly reduce the apparent/experienced complexity as those players gear up? We’ll skip ahead to the literal hardest content in the game, but will give you a bunch of extra stuff to optimize so that, after you figure out how you’re supposed to use this cacophony of positive affixes, you’ll eventually be able to progress to… a more barren state that has none of those optimizations?

???

1 Like
43

He asked you what makes you think it’s easier to scale down and you answered “because it’s easier.” Do you understand the problem with that?

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you’ve made this claim more than a hundred times in different threads. If you’re so confident that it’s easier, please explain in detail what leads you to that conclusion instead of just restating the claim as the answer.

1 Like
44

I have, repeatedly. But I’ll repeat it again…

Balancing a dungeon consists of hundreds (perhaps far more depending on how pedantic you want to be) non linear systems that all contribute in non linear ways to the dungeon outcome. All different class/specs, all their abilities, buffs/debuffs/stats/gear/enchants, NPC choice/hp/dmg/abilities, spell effects, the dungeon geometry, lag and server latency, human reaction and perception times, etc… The list is unimaginably long. The devs task is then to tune all these numbers, so that the end result is an interesting, engaging, challenging, and balanced encounter.

The greater the difficulty of the encounter, the narrower the margin of error. The easier the encounter, the wider the margin of error. This is why it’s easier to balance easier content than it is to balance harder content. At the high end, just a slight difference to any one of these systems can make or break a dungeon; on the low end it often doesn’t matter.

But on top of that, scaling causes another issue; because you then have to predict how these systems will change/evolve as you scale up/down. For simple linear systems that’s a trivial task. For massively non-linear systems that is VERY hard to do. The more you scale (project) from your original point, the greater the inaccuracy/error of your prediction.

An analogy… It’s like shooting a target. The harder the encounter, the smaller the target. The easier the encounter, the larger the target. Scaling up in difficulty is like trying to hit a shrinking target at increasing distances. Scaling down in difficulty is like trying to hit a growing target at increasing distances.

45

Well whatever number it is, it’s chosen (intentionally or inadvertently) by Blizzard beforehand.

Except it wasn’t even close to ‘fine’ even if you consider +20 to be the ‘cap’. The dungeons have been tuned, re-tuned, and adjusted repeatedly; on top of endless class rebalances. The current set of dungeons, affixes, classes, timers, loot, etc… is nothing like what we started with on release.

You would also scale boss hp/dmg etc… down. Whether you scale up or down, you will have a ‘disjoint’. Better the disjoint where the margin of error is the most forgiving, rather than the least forgiving.

46

This entire answer just uses more words to say, “Scaling down is easier than scaling up.” There is nothing in this except your opinion on the matter, which would be fine if you expressed it as such. But you don’t. You say it like it is a fundamental truth that is as unassailable as mathematical proofs and as obvious as the sky. As it stands, it is neither.

1 Like
47

Who gave little joe his keyboard back.

An apple is still an apple wether it’s upside down or right side up.

48

Because it is fundamentally math. I could write a mathematic proof proving it. And I did repeatedly state WHY one way is harder. Over and over.

MARGIN OF ERROR!!!

How many times do I have to say it? The margin of error is smaller. That means in a mathematical sense, that the domain of the variables in harder difficulty encounters is smaller than the domain of the variables in easier difficultly encounters.

49

Well balancing dungeons is not the same as an apple. Non-linear functions, by their definition, do not project linearly. So it is not the same ‘upside down or right side up’.

50

That’s not an explanation.

This would be an explanation, if you can actually do it.

51

You asked why scaling up is harder than scaling down. The margin of error is the reason.

That would be easy, the issue is no one would understand it. Certainly not you or the other monkeys in here stating ‘scaling up is the same as scaling down’ and who don’t even have the slightest clue what a non-linear function is.

But this one’s on me. My mistake to expect you or any of the usual trolls to respond in any other way. I get it, you cherish your ignorance like a badge of honor, a trustworthy teddy bear to steel you against the monsters online. Have at it then, bask in your glorious ignorance, you’ve certainly earned it.

52

That’s just another way of saying it’s harder. You’re not explaining your reasoning to get from point A to point B. Assertion is not explanation.

I don’t do it professionally, but I’m a space program buff and I can handle the calculus behind orbital mechanics and transfers, so I’m very certain you have no chance of losing me with math.

You made the offer of a mathematical proof and said it would be easy to do, so just walk the walk. If no one understands then you’ve lost only the time it takes to put your easy math into a post.

1 Like
53

No, it’s not. Again, here the “margin of error” as you call it falls beyond any reward cap. As long as every spec can reach all the rewards, anything beyond it is wholly irrelevant to all but MDI/“The Great Push” sh*ts-n-giggles.

If we were to instead do as you suggest in putting that nebulous area at the start, where it matters to everyone, instead of after it even matters for anything but epeen and friendly competition among a top 0.0001%, and it would then become an actual problem.

It literally is. Every spec can make it to a +20. Every spec can make it to a +25. And beyond that, it does not matter.

For parity among each other and because of bugs or other oversights. Not because they’re trying to make sure that a perfect DeepAI with the perfect comp with a perfect gear can only barely finish a +30 and no further. There is no obligatory cap. Everything beyond the reward cap is just margin that doubles as a venue for friendly rewardless competition.

So you literally want an M0 to be the hardest thing that would ever be fundamentally possible in the game, and then you literally just waste that tuning anyways so that there’s no reason to have flipped the order from 0 to ~30 in making it go from -30 to 0?

???

No, you don’t. Disjointedness, or discontinuity, only happens when you skip ahead.

Assuming a fixed ceiling, as you’ve suggested, here’s the order from easiest (1) to hardest (32) that you’ve suggested in going from Normal to Heroic to the Mythic (1-30, fixed, in your case) span:

  • 1 2 32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24… < > …3.

As compared to the current model of…

  • 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14… < > …32.

Do you sincerely not see how the first would be disjointed and the second is not?

54

I wouldn’t mind this. No affix runs drop 1 item 10 ilvls below the affix key. Just to make sure the reward matches the effort.

55

Well, I’m sold, so long as the reward is at a fair (or just faintly undertuned) balance point opposite using Affixes.

56

What you’ve posted makes zero sense.

No, no… and no. I really don’t know where you’re getting this stuff, and you’re clearly conflating multiple issues.

Not true at all. Nearly every week that altered/adjusted specs, dungeons, timers, and gear to get everyone to that point. It took them months of adjustments, and the vast majority of the season, to get to that point. Something that wouldn’t be required if they knew it was balanced prior to release

There is a cap, whether blizz/the community knows it or not is up for debate, but it certainly exists.

Again where are you getting this? What you’re imagining is not what I described.

M0 would be the easiest mythic. M1 would be a bit harder. M2 a bit harder than M1… and so on until you hit M30, which would be the absolute hardest, and something only a handful of people would have the skill to accomplish.

There’s nothing here about where max loot should stop. They could stop it at 20 like they do now, or 15, or 25. It’s not really important to the discussion of balancing affixes. And of course the last few levels would be reserved for only the absolute best of players, but that’s no different from now.

The main difference is it would be a more balanced, interesting, diverse, challenging, and engaging experience which would require far less tweaking after release, while still being ‘hard’.

57

Which the direction of scaling does not change outside of which direction is made irrelevant to reward increase (the lowest difficulty, or —as per the current designs— the highest).

Then in what way are you “starting from the top”? In what was is this “scaling down”?

You’ve described

  • starting from a set point of greatest difficulty

    • This would, btw, have to predict the effects of any quadratic stat scaling across the time going from newly leveled to the raid tier’s BiS, atop tier set values, atop any necessary balancing to be done during that tier’s progress, all at once — rather than needing only to predict the next incremental step — and forcing cascading changes to the entire span each time.

  • using positive affixes to fortify players against that difficulty, and
  • scaling “downward”.

    • Which, if by the term you do not mean anything that term would normally mean, is nebulous BS.

58

Don’t bother with him. He doesn’t realize that whether scaling up or down, you start from a baseline either way; it basically will boil down to having 0 effect where the majority of players exist on the most played key levels. It will however have a negative effect on the high end by creating an actual limit at say the level 30 key he uses at an example, when the whole point m+ from the beginning was infinite scaling difficulty.

2 Likes
59

I don’t know if English isn’t your primary language, but you need to start adding punctuation. These punctuation lacking run on sentences do not make any sense. And you’re using quotes but I have no idea where they came from (certainly not something I said) mixed in with bullet points?

Then in what way are you “starting from the top”? In what was is this “scaling down”?

Ok. Let’s say the best players in the world, with the best gear, on a particular boss, average 100k dps on a fight that’s supposed to last 2 mins. So we’ll say 350k dps (50k for tank/healer) over 2 mins = 42M hp. So you give said boss 42M hp at M30. Tweak it a bit on the ptr (maybe due to mechanics it’s a bit high, or it’s too low) until it’s just doable in the intended 2min mark.

Now we scale down to M0 and do the same. Let’s say M0 players are expected to be doing 20k dps. So we have 70k hps (10k for tank + healer) over 2 mins = 8.4M hp. Now scale the rest of the dungeon hp modifiers.

Do the same thing for all the bosses, pulls, timers, damage done, etc… Add in a few fun positive affixes at the lower end (M0-M3 gets 4 affixes, M4-M7 gets 3 affixes, etc…) to make up for the fact lower end players will not have perfect execution like the top players, relax the timers a bit, and we’re good to go.

Sure, what I’ve suggested is a linear predicter, which tend to be inaccurate the further you predict from the original point. But because we’re predicting downwards, not upwards, were going to have a much easier time since the margin of error grows in easier content. We’ve also tested (extensively) at the top end, so we know out target is exactly where we want it to be at.

Hence you can have balanced, engaging, interesting, diverse, challenging, brutally hard content, while still having interesting affixes in the lower levels. It’s a win win for everyone. Lower end players get more diversity, higher end players get better balance/more challenge, blizzard spends FAR less time tweaking/balancing, the forums are filled with far less ‘I hate dying to random affix because of some unforseen interaction between affixes and dungeon mechanics’.

60

Not only was that never the point, it’s not even remotely possible.