First Rextroy and now Venruki. Turns out that having full sockets with Versatility gems, which gives 10% extra Versatility will only increase damage done by 1%, when it should be 10%. What the actual…
It’s about time Blizzard released an official statement about how PvP scaling really works. Because this is messed up, you are lying to us Blizzard.
This is such a disgrace that they haven’t told us anything after 2 years of BfA.
Those who designed that should be ashamed. Not because of the system, but trying to hide it from players for whatever reason.
This needs to be adressed before Shadowlands.
Don’t get me wrong here, but I think scaling is great because it allows you to join PvP even at lower levels, but it’s not a great thing when competitive content is shrouded in mystery and you don’t know how your stats will scale.
Except it really doesn’t. A fresh 120 with 60k HP, no essences, no corruptions, etc, isn’t going to be saved by scaling.
Oh for sure, but even at around 430-450 it means you won’t get instantly deleted by a 470-480.
10% more damage coz gems is too much - if its scaling now as it is - all good. Its already too much advantage in PvP in gear purpose.
Or you know, it could simply be a bug instead of some sinister conspiracy. I highly doubt it is on purpose. If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my words.
Pure shadiness from blizz. I understand they want to level the playing field a little but why can’t they be transparent about it?
i THINK you see the damage you do before reductions, and he sees after reductions. reductions include versatility but it also includes armor and such.
its possible your pure defenses are simply higher than his but his pure dps is higher than yours.
2 gems does better possibly because versatility affects differently on opponents versatility than on total damage.
it make sense that versatility vs plate make MORE damage than on cloth because cloth has less armor.
we need to see the entirety of the stats of you and your opponent. versatility is just 1 of many.
thats all in THEORY. i dont know the actual formula.
true, but being on the receiving end of broken scaling is even worse.
I got deleted by 260k hp rogue in arena. I have twice as much health, grinded quite hard to purchase my versa corruptions and sockets. He had no issues chewing through my HP bar while my attacks barely fazed him. I’m 475 ilvl equipped with many sockets and corruptions.
If i knew that the scaling would be this busted i would never have bothered with any vision grinding. I am really fed up with them having done each one 50+ times.
Can we chisel them on granite for you? 
Honestly, I think Blizzard’s technical people are very, very good. I am particularly impressed by the guy who holds the client together. But overall, to keep software of this size and scope running 24/7/365 on millions of different PCs (and Apples) with different configurations is not a small thing.
Of course there are bugs, thousands of them, but outside launch periods the number of bugs that affect widespread gameplay is small, for such a huge deployment.
I think it’s more likely that this is Working As Intended™, and that the problem is with the intent, or possibly two designers got their wires crossed and overlooked the case.
Funny with all the arenas run and nerds with spreadsheets it was so noticeable it took them 2 years to figure this out. (And yes, I get that its magnified now people have more sockets)
Finding out about scaling has really changed my view on world PvP. I mean, it was always imbalanced garbage, but I figured if I geared up enough to where I could just shrug off a 3v1 etc I could at least have the satisfaction of laughing at the gankers.
The whole tank fantasy is about being immortal, to go around the world fearing nothing. I’ve soloed world bosses. Those level 122 rares people run in fear from I just jump in and start smacking.
Add to this the +50% damage done to tanks in PvP.
Basically, no matter how much effort I put into my character, there’s never going to be a point where I can fulfill that fantasy of being ungankable by a few people in world quest gear and I will be disabling war mode in Shadowlands.
The whole point of a MMORPG is to get upgrades from loot. We the players, put our trust in the numbers that are shown on the screen.
When those numbers lie and are untruthful, we loose trust in the systems and the developers.
There is NOTHING positive to hiding this from players and avoiding confrontation on this matter. All it creates is more negativity towards Blizzard.
Stop shooting yourself in the foot, Blizzard. Be open and transparent about systems and have numbers be truthful.
the philosophy is right there:
my actions (what you see)
what happened to me (how much damage was reduced from the health bar)
those doesnt have to be the same, because the opponent do as much as he can to reduce that number.
he was taking more damage, and doing less damage when he removed sockets.
without seeing ALL stats of BOTH characters, this test is useless.
if i get the list of all stats of himself and opponent and armor type(this test was cloth). then we can get more accurate result.
the true tests are tests with two characters of the same class and same items. one with gems and one without. and another with both with gems. and another both without gems.
I have a lot of things to say about this… here it comes. 
The rewards are not commensurate with the effort
One of the defining characteristics of an RPG is the notion that performing activities and making choices about your character noticeably increases its performance or grants it new abilities.
The idea, then, is to reward preparation as well as execution, the preparation being the research, the gear, the choices, the BiS lists, etc. The weight of these choices and this preparation in general is a source of endless debate, but I would argue that, if you are interested in PvP in an RPG, you will understand why there needs to be a balance here - we can’t just go all-out to execution. The game gets stale.
Farming for hundreds of hours and then ultimately wrecking your character, even if only slightly, is just not a great reward - to put it mildly. All your preparation work is basically thrown out the window.
Gear scaling is absolutely out of whack
Of course, the concern here, and the reason that the system exists in the first place, is because the gear scaling in the game is so vast that it goes up to 6-7x over the course of an expansion. Put into perspective, there is more power scaling in a modern WoW expansion than there is across the entirety of vanilla, tBC, and the journey to level 80 in WotLK, although this does not include the WotLK raiding scene.
This obviously risks splitting the playerbase into “have” and the “have-not” groups, where people who enter PvP for the first time just get instantly deleted and end up having no fun.
Unfortunately this is the case either way due to this system not taking account of trinkets and burrowed power, and PvP rewards being so poor that there’s no reason to use it for gearing up in the first place.
Thus PvP has been split into “have” and “have-not” groups anyway, in spite of this system, and PvP has become a side-activity available after gearing through PvE. Even my attempt to make a feral druid explicitly for PvP has ended up with my Druid having a grand total of 1 PvP item equipped.
Lying about the strength of my character
So… not much was really achieved other than some outright fantastic confusion where Blizzard are essentially lying about how strong my character is.
This isn’t the first time Blizzard’s design in PvP rests upon confusion.
In general, the game does an extremely poor job at providing vitally important information for PvP players.
Security through obscurity
The system rests upon poor knowledge of how it works to avoid exploitation.
In general programming there’s this concept called “security through obscurity”. The idea being that, by not revealing how you system works, it will be harder for people to engage in exploitative behaviour. In this case it’s usually to avoid people hacking the site or stealing data.
In the case of WoW it’s to avoid people equipping very specific sets of items that somehow break the game.
Security by obscurity is generally frowned upon for two reasons:
We’ve seen both of these effects with the gear scaling system hit us over and over and over again. In fact, Rextroy’s entire YouTube channel is primarily dedicated to finding and exploiting this system in order to cause 1-shots or other silliness that breaks the game.
Conclusion
This system’s garbage. The only correct solution is to reduce gear scaling. To reduce gear scaling, we have to reduce the number of difficulties in the game and reduce the amount of items that drop.
So get on with it, Blizzard. I’m tired of this. Real tired.
