After leveling my monk as mistweaver in Shadowlands timeline to level 68, I wanted to start playing the current expansion content. All enemies being level 70 during the introductory quest line wasn’t much of a problem, but the damage of all of my abilities (including Touch of Death) dropped by 50-70% at this point. The tooltips still stated the same numbers they did in the Shadowlands, but that didn’t reflect the damage these skills dealt now.
Most notably my Touch of Death often failed to kill a target just below the health threshold, instead taking a rather big chunk out of their health, dealing about 50% of my max health in damage.
While I did expect to spend more time on solo questing as a healer against higher level mobs, I didn’t foresee this already longer time being tripled, requiring about a minute for “normal” mobs.
Healing skills were unaffected by this, I still healed as much as before starting the TWW campaign. Switching to brewmaster yielded the same damage problems, so I assume it’s not tied to specialization.
A friend suggested that my item level might have been too low, and seeing how the difference between displayed and actual damage slowly dwindled as I continued playing and getting gear (I’m now level 74, item level 425 and my attacks deal about 70-80% of the damage they should deal, ToD dealt 100% in my last few tries), he may have a point.
Still, I’d like to know for sure and know the numbers behind this - and whether this “mechanic” can be removed, because there’s not that much you can do about your item level while leveling and I don’t think forcing someone into a specific way of leveling would be intended.
this may have something to do with the change blizzie did to make early tww leveling more streamlined in terms of amount of damage. what i mean with that is the numbers on the tooltip may have not been lowered maybe? My only other guess is, you play monk physical damage and enemies have armor, probably this
Do you happen to know where to find official information on the streamlined damage in TWW?
I’d rule out armor or resistances because the same enemies took full damage from my other characters and Touch of Death doesn’t even list a damage value or type, rather stating “You exploit the enemy target’s weakest point, instantly killing them. Only usable on creatures that have less health than you.”
There’s one other thing I noticed: Leveling in the Shadowlands timeline, I apparently still was in this timeline when I started playing TWW content, getting notified at level 70 that I could leave it now. Could the damage reduction be related to starting “too early” into TWW? Then again, I’m level 76 now and still deal only 70% of the damage listed in my abilities’ tooltips.
Leveling Difficulty Changes Incoming i would presonally rule this one out as it seems like the leveling change and the numbers not being full damage seems wholy unrelated.
I also checked for you and touch of death is physical damage and did some testing and i have the same on only my physical damage classes so may i ask what other classes those were. And as for timewalking that wouldnt have anything to do with it or you wouldnt have a lower amount of damage done opposed to what the tooltip says
You do drastically less damage to enemies above your level and drastically more to enemies lower.
So if they didn’t scale the intro mobs to level 68, you’re gonna be in a bit of trouble. Should be possible to push through, but won’t be easy.
I really hate the scaling when going from 68-70 DF content to TWW because it takes ages to kill a single mob. Every time I level up a new alt, I first hit 70 in DF (or any other zone) and then go to Emerald Dream and do a few campaign quests there to get some decent iLvl 450 or something gear to make entry to TWW more smooth
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Ok, so armor it is. Seems like I failed to notice the gap on my enhancement shaman (which was level 70 when TWW was released) because most of his abilities do deal elemental damage.
Still, Touch of Death should ignore armor, meaning the level difference early on as mentioned by Ishayo is most likely the reason for that damage reduction. According to my observations, attacking targets two levels above your own would then cut all damage in half (in addition to reductions due to armor).
Thanks all for the clarifications <3