6.0.2 Stat Squish & Leveling Concerns

#1 - Oct. 14, 2014, 9:01 p.m.

With the launch of the stat squish the game has become much more difficult at lower levels. I'm not sure as to which level range this is true but from playing a few of my characters in the 70 to 85 range this seems to be the case.

When playing my frost mage just yesterday I was often able to 2-shot most mobs with ice lance and a frostbolt. Alternatively on my prot warrior I was usually able to solo dungeons between the high DPS of revenge/shield slam and the self-healing of second wind and victory rush.

Admittedly this made the game very easy, to the point where there really was no challenge at all. In this respect, I feel like the stat squish has made an improvement to the gameplay of leveling.

The problem is that, as this game has gotten older the level cap has readily increased higher and higher, meaning it takes longer to reach maximum level. To combat this Blizzard has reduced the amount of EXP needed to level up multiple times for the various ranges and also added the BoA items. Sometime in Wrath and Cataclysm the power of lower level characters also began to scale up which is what made them so relatively powerful. All of this combined made leveling much easier.

But with the launch of 6.0.2 we're taking a huge step back. The relative power of lower level characters in their respective content has been severely nerfed, despite Blizzard claiming otherwise. This is not just linked to the various class changes. This, in combination with no decrease in the total EXP needed to level up means that leveling a character just became significantly more difficult, to the point where I'd estimate it takes at least twice as long now to level a character to 90 than it did yesterday.

When you consider that Blizzard is now also selling level 90 characters it feels awfully convenient that the dev team overlooked this radical change in leveling.

So what's the deal? Will there be an EXP nerf? Will lower level dungeons/mobs be adjusted to as they were before? Or will nothing be done about it since Blizzard seems to be content to cash in on poor gameplay decisions?

Lore

Community Manager

#81 - Oct. 15, 2014, 6:57 p.m.

We have a hotfix in testing that will adjust creature scaling to better account for the stat squish.

Watcher

Game Designer

#123 - Oct. 15, 2014, 7:46 p.m.

10/15/2014 11:57 AMPosted by Lore
We have a hotfix in testing that will adjust creature scaling to better account for the stat squish.

To elaborate a bit, this isn't just about the stat squish. That was actually a relatively straightforward process numerically. But we made three separate changes that all affected the pacing and danger level of legacy content throughout the game:

The "stat squish" wherein items from level 60 through Mists of Pandaria dungeon gear were changed to use a linear instead of an exponential scale.
Doubling player health, enabling us to remove resilience from PvP and also make damage and healing less "spiky" in general.
Removing base points from spells to allow for better scaling and tuning across classes - previously a Frostbolt might have done X damage plus Y% of your spell power; now, in 6.0.2, it just does Z% of your spell power.

Any tuning issues that are being seen, particularly in level-up content (especially dungeons), aren't a result of the squish alone but rather the combination of all three changes. We've been following data and feedback closely, and are testing internally the change that Lore mentioned, which should hopefully be deployed within a day or so (it will require server restarts). In the meantime, if there are particular creature abilities that you encounter that seem disproportionately deadly, it's quite helpful to keep pointing those out.