Other than being a little less intimidating for new players and having more reasonable numbers to comprehend, what was the point of the squish?
I’ve been running BG’s and I see people that don’t even have 10k HP, they pretty much instantly get one shotted.
When new players ding 50 they are ilvl 55 and my casual DK here is 124. They don’t stand a chance in any way, it’s not even possible to compare. I have more than twice the HP and deal 4 times more DMG.
Seeing the numbers from Shadowlands, we’ll be hitting ilvl 200 and throughout the expansion probably progress beyond 300 and possibly op to the 400 ilvl.
This isn’t healthy for the game, I understand that the addition of M+ and more difficulties means that a significant increase in ilvl has taken place, but it is too much. Waaaay too much.
Would it be so horrible to have players rely more on skill than actual gear?
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We just got rid of pvp scaling, stop arguing for its return. Its an MMO. You get gear and crush noobs.
Should incentivize getting gear. More so than before. With your logic, you should be playing counter strike.
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This is MMO not mortal combat arcade.
Gear matters.
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Hey, let’s stop asking for people to be compatible with each other with such a vast difference in personal input, eh?
It is not about M+ or the amount of difficulties. It is the amount of new tiers we get per expansion. In Shadowlands we get 4 or 5 tiers. Each 26 extra ilvl.
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Squish or not, we’re still in our end-of-expansion gear. It’s likely that there will be a similar power discrepancy at the end of Shadowlands.
But when 9.0 rolls around… everyone will be the same ilvl, at least for a while. Over time, those who play more content will pull ahead and those who play less or join later will find them difficult to compete with.
But this is kind of how the game works. If I’ve spent 2 years grinding M+ and mythic raids, I do not expect some freshly-dinged alt to be anywhere near my power level. I did a lot of work to get where I am. I earned my power. They’re welcome to embark on the same grind I did and catch up and in turn be way ahead of the next generation of alts/newbies.
The lesson for BfA is for goodness sake stop trying to get gear from PvP! You can’t. It doesn’t work. If you don’t want to go to M+, then don’t waste your time playing at all. Hopefully SL will be better in this regard, but it’s how BfA has been and by now you’d think it was common knowledge.
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Gear and gearing is pillar of mmorpg.
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Completely agreed. Gear scaling is too high, and “squishing”, or multiplying with a fixed number below 1 to all values, an exponential curve doesn’t make it any less exponential.
It’s a real problem. 8k HP was normal in early tBC, 25k (as some have) was normal in mid-late WotLK.
It’s busted.
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No, but there’s plenty of those around anyway. It’s nice to be able to build your character and customise your character, and it’s nice to be earning that right by getting gear, and it’s nice to have your abilities do consistent damage that corresponds to what the opponent sees on their screen, too, giving a sense of persistency.
The game should offer gear of different powers, but it must never be so extreme that it breaks the playerbase into groups of the “haves” and the “have-nots” in any game mode, whether PvP or not. Around 50-60% stronger over an expansion seems reasonable, but right now it’s around 200% stronger.
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You completely missed the point. Crushing noobs is fine, 1 shotting them is not. It gives a really bad experience.
No we shouldn’t, I don’t want to return legion PvP system. You’re not very smart are you 
The points I brought forward were to close the gap, not remove it entirely or reimplement scaling.
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I think the issue which caused calls for removing scaling was the fact that Blizzard did not do the scaling right.
I did a fast research for ilvl rewards for shadowlands.
- Normal Dungeons drops Item Level 157 gear at Level 60.
- Heroic Dungeons drops Item Level 170 gear.
- Mythic Dungeons drops Item Level 183 gear
We are currently on ~125 ilvl (i am 128 with 475 ilvl before the squish). 157 for normal dungeons on lvl 60 is not that big of a gap, i suppose? We are also supposed to replace our gear while leveling 
It would not be fair for those people that did do the grind and all the hard work getting the gear… you had to grind to get to ilvl 124. idk what item level it was before update maybe 480 or so.
And yes someone who just becomes 50 is low ilvl that was also before update they were around 260 or so you also did not stand a chance in anyway thats why people always were raging about low health noobies in their team and told them to leave…
But just demanding a change to make everything equal in a game were you grind for gear is not logical at all
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You can make the same argument about M+.
It’s this problem where competition brushes up against the MMORPG.
It’s possible, indeed quite easy, to appeal to both.
People are low skill level and not competitive want to feel like they can work on their characters to become stronger and feel stronger despite their lack of skill, because getting stronger over time is just fun.
People who are high skill and competitive want to feel like their skill is rewarded.
How do you do that? Simple - you put the rewards toward the easier part. People who are really good will rise above it all and start competing purely on skill, and those who don’t have a ladder to climb.
It’s important to ensure that the strength of items peak before the game gets hyper-competitive at the end of seasons. That is to say: All good players should be able to attain the strongest possible gear well before the season ends.
And if it’s 50-60% stronger over an expansion, that obviously implies we’re talking 20% or so even for those who haven’t got the competitive drive and are just getting into the game and building their sets.
What do we get?
- People who farm more get stronger
- At low end, gear matters more, encouraging people to play the game, which causes them to practice
- At high end, gear matters less, but people are competitive and engaged already, and will feel the need to practice to win
- Nobody ever gets so strong that they can dominate all others with ease.
- We’re not messing around with numbers in strange ways. Just good, old-fashioned, honest items.
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Castle Nathria LFR drops ilvl 187 gear
Castle Nathria Mythic drops ilvl 226 gear
That’s not counting the last two bosses that drops gear with ilvl 194 and 233.
This thing on it’s own gives us at least +39 ilvl for just one raid tier. With how the game is going by 8.3 we’ll be getting at least ilvl 240-250 gear from WQ and the raid will give us loot with ilvl around 300.