- THE PROBLEM
The idea of letting level 20s join a epic bg is good, players that level and don’t want to spam dungeons or quest, or want to pre-farm honor, or just level up in bgs because they like pvp get to do so. It also pulls in more new players who are 20 capped as trial.
The problem is that scaling is absolutely broken.
Low levels do no dmg and get one shotted.
Tried Korrak on a 20 (twink, bis ilvl) I had the pleasure of finding someone afk and used him as my target dummy. Pumped dmg for 1 min, he lost 10% life. He came back, turned around, one shotted me. A lvl 20 has 2m hp and 50k dps, a lvl 80 has 6m hp and 500k dps.
How did anyone test this and thought it’s fine? Not even to mention all the passive tree bonus perks a 80 has vs 20. So yeah it’s hands down objectively undoubtly absolutely insane and unfair. It’s basically saying “yea come in sure you can join” with a hidden fine print “but you’re getting edited by moderator by everything and anyone non stop”. Which also falls into abuse and harassment so go figure why blizz devs made this a thing, willingly. Who does this serve and how?
Just tried a healer for the meme… priest 20. Have to spam flash lights 100 times to heal myself 50%. This is just beyond parody. And my best spells heals a lvl 80 for almost 2% of their life. Players are taking 10% life as dmg per sec, of which I can heal only 1%.
What are we even doing…
- THE FIX
Draw a equalizing line between a lvl 20 and 80, matching their final stats, to find the function for multipliers. That line is too much work for me and not my job, all the classes, attributes, gear stats etc. I don’t have all the spreadsheet data, but I can paint you a picture with a few MADE UP examples - so do not look at the actual numbers I know they are not reflecting current ingame values. Just get the idea behind it.
In this example we start by making a very rough 3 tier gear seperation,
1: naked/white items, 2: green/blue, 3: purple/bis.
This locks in the absolute min and max range for (virtually scaled) ilvl and attributes,
including every theoretical buff/debuff.
The real number of tiers is 6: naked, white, green, blue, purple, and finally bis with all enchants buffs etc. But let’s go with 3 simplified categories.
-
lvl 80 in gear 1/2/3 you have respectfully 4000k / 6000k / 8000k hp,
and 300k / 450k / 600k dps - outside and inside of a BG. -
lvl 50 in gear 1/2/3 you have respectfully 20k / 30k / 40k hp,
and 2k / 3k / 4k dps - outside of a BG. -
lvl 20 in gear 1/2/3 you have respectfully 1000 / 1500 / 2000 hp,
and 100 / 200 / 300 dps - outside of a BG.
You can see a clear trend, as the average hp pool growth is on a clear rising curve based on the clvl, multiplied by x100, x1000 and x100,000. Easy to draw and set the min/max borders. Same with dps, on average it’s 10% to 5% of the max hp pool. Starts high, diminishes as we go higher; logical, because lower lvl chars have less talent points which essentially are dmg multipliers and buffs.
So the lower you are, the stronger your raw hp+dps will be (slightly), because higher lvl chars have way more passive talents and abilities to compensate for, thus more balance in general.
Once all these multipliers are mapped out and you played around with sliding curve values, you will find balanced values where the gap between dps and hp is no more than 20-30% (between tier:naked and tier:bis) regardless of what clvl the player is. Yes, it’s much higher if you come in naked or in white gear with no stats, but that’s on you. Like, just do any quest, put on any green/blue gear, and you have a solid fighting chance against everyone else, and you no longer get one shotted.
So if a dev would just take some time and start drawing this data out we could actually have a very nice scaling system where anyone can join any BG event, at any level, in any gear, and feel like they are contributing on fair grounds.
Because that’s what it should all be about, no?
If you do this right and nail it, you could actually remove pvp brackets
(OPTIONAL seperate BG bracket “scaled: mega pool”) and have everyone from 20-80 fight in random BGs! The wait times would drop below 1 min, with all the players everywhere in the same queue! Players happy = higher activity rates = this helps get players back, being able to perform and have fun based on their IRL gaming skills, not having to rely absolutely on clvl or ilvl, not getting humiliated and one shotted “just because” some clown is higher/better gear.
This is fair. This is balanced. This is what everyone loves, once they get to try it out.