I really intensely dislike scaling, actually. I think the idea that the mobs level up with you is such a toxic and corrosive idea because what it means is that your character became less effective against everything for gaining a level, and you can see the real meaning of this result play out when you do a dungeon an the level 10 player vastly out DPS’s the level 59 player with a far simpler rotation while attacking the same enemy.
This is not appropriate for any RPG, and it’s certainly not appropriate for WoW.
At the same time though I feel like WoW has a tendency to overly trivialize things and to allow players to zerg or swarm things that should be too difficult for their character.
Some time ago I made the following suggestion:
First: Party sync or downranking is fine, but the mobs should not scale to the player
With that out of the way:
If we do an Azeroth revamp and it is meant to span the range from 1 to 80 (or whatever) that means these zones can have true hierarchy. We can split mobs into various types and ideas and rank them by difficulty, and we can therefore create a logical hierarchy of enemies that transcends zone boundaries.
When we have a hierarchy of enemies we can create encounters that combine these different enemies in interesting ways, and the difficulty of them will be determined by the zone in broad strokes.
If you have ever played Dungeons and Dragons you know exactly how this is gonna work - except of course we’re not getting 4-man party turn-based combat with dice rolls.
This means that mobs should become easier over time, but they should not scale out of all relevancy. The easiest way to do this is to simply remove the bonus damage against lower level mobs and lower the amount of power gained with a new level or item for both mobs and players.
In order to prevent players from killing things that are too hard by swarming it, use the mechanics of vanilla’s “skull mobs”; basically, when you face off against mobs much too hard for your character, they get bonus damage against you and you lose damage against them, and your CC becomes affected by diminishing returns.
But mobs do not scale. And so if you level up the mobs you can already deal with becomes easier - it will take more of them to take you out, and you can now defeat mobs you couldn’t before because they start to exit that “skull range” and come into yours. This is the literal exact opposite of the current design.
Further, since we’re overhauling Azeroth, I think it’s time to take down the mountain ranges. In the presence of flight, they don’t really do much, and it would allow Blizzard to really deliver on those epic concept arts overlooking Ashenvale towards Mount Hyjal and really do them justice finally.