WoW: Item Levels go Squish (maybe)

Ghostcrawler posted a very interesting article and really, it was a topic that was expected to come up eventually. A guildie of mine mentioned that it should have been brought up for Wrath of the Lich King, and I definitely agree. I actually remember commenting about this when fighting Prince Malchezaar back in the Burning Crusade. 


What's also interesting is that, this is not just a problem with WoW. RIFT has some really crazy numbers with bosses that would quickly reach WoW Cataclysm health levels in a very short amount of time. Star Wars: The Old Republic will see this as well unless they figure how to deal with it early. 


MMOs have always been a numbers game at it's core. In PvE, the boss' health determines the length of the fight relative to how much damage the players are expected to output. Average player health determines how much that boss can reasonably do to pose a challenge to healing without overwhelming the healers. The situation is the same in PvP where the health/damage numbers have to be managed properly so combat can be enjoyable without getting frustrating (remember back in classic? 2 Holy Paladins going at each other can take hours). 


The numbers cannot go away, but right now, it's just ridiculously large. Back in WoW Classic, Ragnaros' 1 million health was pretty insurmountable, and bosses required 40 people to even pose a threat to The Firelord. Now the stats have inflated so much, a solo player can take him down is less time than when he was relevant content. 1 million just doesn't go very far these days. Good thing he's no longer a threat ...... oh. 

HA! Try to push me around now you meanies!

Now it generally isn't a bad thing, there has to be some incentive on getting good gear. Like Ghostcrawler mentioned, a +1 stat point upgrade is still an upgrade, but it's not that big a deal in the long run. Many people would like to feel like their characters are getting stronger as time goes by and nothing says that than a tank with +20k more health ... or 180k. But when the numbers get larger exponentially, it becomes just really difficult to manage. 


He goes to present a sample of what could be an item from Mists of Pandaria. He stresses that item levels are not set yet, but if they inflate the way they have been, this will likely happen. 

Courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment. I totally want this by the way

So what are the solutions? Ghostcrawler presented 2 ways of how it could go; compressing the numbers or "squishing" item levels. 


Compressing numbers, basically just shortening them so that 1.000 will be presented as 1K looks like a good solution, but it seems more of a band aid than a fix. Not going into the technical limitations of current computing hardware/software, while the numbers will become more managable, inflation is still actually happening at a silly rate and, when we come to it, 1B will still be 1,000,000,000. Also, DPS numbers don't really increment in large numbers. 50k dps can be anywhere between 50,000 and 50,999 and that is a huge difference. It provides a bit more challenge when it comes to theorycrafting.


"Squishing" item levels seems like a better solution. The idea is to go back to previous expansions and reduce the differences between max item levels of those expansions.  An example will be that an item level 70 piece of gear from Burning Crusade won't be as big an upgrade over a level 60 classic item. While current content inflation will happen as normal, the numbers won't be drastically high as the items they are compared to isn't very powerful. 


The effect will be that current gear will have their item levels lowered significantly and damage/health affected appropriately. Yes, it will make it feel like everyone was nerfed if this is implemented. And yes, going down to 20,000 health from almost 200,0000 would be a bit of a shock, but this solution gives a lot more room to grow, and when a new expansion arrives, the items from the previous can go "squish" to make room for it.  I would take the initial shock of a nerf over eventually fighting a boss and chipping away at 1,000,000,000 health. 

So I'm gonna get nerfed again? Screw that!

Are there other solutions? One thing that could allay issues with high numbers would be making encounters more complex. Heroic Shannox is actually a good example. He does not have a lot of health compared to other bosses in The Firelands. Were he a straight up tank/spank fight, he would be dead in 2 minutes. The fact that you don't need to kill his dogs means that his health is all you need to bring down but, in order to do that, the whole raid needs to execute the fight properly. Just standing there and focusing on killing him will lead to a wipe as Rageface takes out people one at a time. 


Of course, fight complexity can only go so far and gets limited as more and more people opt for 10man raiding. Not so much you can put into a fight if there aren't enough people to do it. 


 Perhaps another solution would be some combination of "Squish" and leveling out the stat curve to make it more linear than exponential. There may not be any need to lower the baseline significantly so there would be less of a shock. It would make it harder to solo older content if this happens, but it would make things more manageable in the long run. 


I have no doubt that Blizzard will be addressing this matter and hopefully in time for Mists of Pandaria. However they decide to do so is up in the air at the moment, but the sooner they do it, the better. Other games will also need to pay attention to this as they will encounter this very same problem down the road. Their respective solutions may be different, but at least it would be something they will address.