Item squish - why did you cause this problem?

#1 - Feb. 28, 2014, 8:53 a.m.

So we've all known this was coming, including blizzard who first made mention of it during Cata. Things are out of control and they need to do something about it.

So what did they do? near the end of WoTLK they increased our HP pools by a lot. Then in Cata we go for 30k hp to 100k - 200k HP with DPS numbers to go with it.

In MoP they went even further and tanks have over 1M HP, people are doing over 500k DPS.

This is insane, we all know that, but why did blizzard do it to begin with considering they knew for years things are getting out of control? was it to just speed up the item squish?

What's the deal blizzard, why did you give such huge increases when you knew things should have been slowed right down?

This isn't a negative thread about the item squish, I just can't work out why they went insane with the numbers to begin with when they knew there was a problem.

Bashiok

Community Manager

#54 - Feb. 28, 2014, 10:59 p.m.

02/28/2014 12:53 AMPosted by Paladiñ
This is insane, we all know that, but why did blizzard do it to begin with considering they knew for years things are getting out of control?

In simple terms: getting upgrades feels good. An exponential curve of player power inflation via item levels is fully understood and expected as getting loot that is better than your current loot is much of the tangible reward structure in the game. There is a "How much better does it need to be to feel like an upgrade?" factor, and while those specifics have changed over the years the philosophy remains the same. We could change how the game works, and your character's progression could be rewarded in other ways, but World of Warcraft is kind of all about being an awesome hero and slaying giant dragons to take their sweet loots. Regardless of the rate of inflation it is still inflation if people's gear is getting better, and we'll end up at a squish sooner or later if the inflation is having an unmitigatable effect. In this case it took about 10 years to get there. :)