Why is scaling a thing?

Community General Discussion
1

Hey! I just got back after a few years break.
I just wonder why mob scaling is a thing in wow? It takes away the “dangerous” aspect of leveling in specific zones and getting a friend in to help with a rare mob etc makes that mob scale up a certain amout of levels?
Why are you making it so easy for players and make Azeroth so small, I feel like there is no progression for me anymore

20 Likes
2

It’s so you can choose where to level up instead of being forced to go to the zones that correspond to your level. Scaling is still limited though, for example vanilla zones only scale to 60, while the BfA zones never go lower than 110.

3

Well, thats the point. They dont want you to “out level” a zone. Lets say you did 70% of the story there, but you are a too high level and its not worth it to finish the zone, also its cause they want us to have more options to pick zones instead always the same 1-2.

3 Likes
4

I liked the idea at first… go where you want, follow the story in whatever direction was most interesting to you. Worked very well for Skyrim and many others.

But then I realised there was no more tiptoeing along the border of a much higher zone and trying not to get aggro. What would the Ironforge-Darnassus run be without the shear terror of travelling through the Wetlands at level 2?

3 Likes
5

The real reason is effort. Every mob in the entire games on a dial now. You can turn up in a matter of minutes to change the difficulty of thousands of different mobs.

Now with a new expansion, where skills do more base damage for example. That makes it way easier levelling 0-110. They can turn the dial making everything 5% harder for example. Instead of going through every single Npc in the game 1by1 and adjusting.

Which let’s face it ends up with a ton of bugs every expansion. Look at the start of BfA. An old buff in a quest got missed with the stat squish. And made your chara have 4x the stats for an hour lol. An old bomb quest item got missed, that did 200k AoE damage etc lol.

1 Like
6

The zones still have low level cap tho…
Try to make a fresh toon, level it to level 2 and go to wetlands
I dare you.

1 Like
7

because DEVs are too lazy to make content so instead we get scaling to make current content more relevant.

5 Likes
8

No matter what, devs can hardly make the new content in the same speed the players can consume the said content. I like the scaling when I’m leveling up because I have the more options where could I level instead of always following the same order of zones.

1 Like
9

Lots of rays of sunshine in this thread :joy: LaZY dEVS!!!1ONE

Scaling is great. Really, really great.

It means we have more choice where to level, it means you can skip Outland and the bad Cata zones, it means I can level with friends and guildies without being the same level, it means you don’t have to leave a zone before you’ve finished the story just because the XP is too low for your level.

You can still go to more difficult areas. In EK and Kalimdor there are 10-60 zones which will be a challenge pre-10 and there are 40-60 zones that will be hard pre-40.

In Northrend, IIRC, Scholozar is 66+ and Storm Peaks and Icecrown are 67+. Go there early if you want harder stuff.

Pandaria, Draenor and Broken Isles are really short now. Your feet will barely touch the ground in heirlooms.

It’s brilliant!

(and now, some tedious chode will claim I work for blizz)

3 Likes
10

I get what you are saying, i really do… But i miss those days where u had to group up because a quest was TOO hard to solo. Now when mobs scale its not even felt in the slightest touch.

11

Fair enough, I don’t miss that personally.

I recently levelled a warlock through Shadowmoon Valley (felt fitting) and found the elite mob quests were challenging solo content. Some of them took a few goes. I enjoyed the change in pace.

There’s also the mobs who’re difficult because they’ve scaled badly :slight_smile: There’s a named furblog in Ashenvale that I just could not take down. Spent ages trying and gave up.

Went back when I was 100 and killed him eight times in a row. Because I’m petty and I don’t care.

1 Like
12

Yet again another person who entirely glosses over the rather important fact that it has always been the case that in all RPGs since the beginning of time you really want to be spending the VAST majority of your time fighting equal level mobs.

In WoW just as much as any. I was watching a video about how it really it highly inefficient killing even green mobs one level lower, and also killing orange and red mobs (because they take so much longer and hit harder).

It really seems absurd to argue that scaling has removed a comparatively very minor aspect when on the other hand we have gained so much.

It’s also the case that you bomb through levelling so fast now it’d be impossible to finish a single zone without scaling, before the mobs probably go grey.

Scaling also adds a huge amount of choice to where you can quest at say level 50, as an example: I like to go back to Ghostlands and treat it as a high level area on a Blood Elf. It adds a nice new dimension.

Anyway, the threat is still there to some degree because scaling isn’t universal. Can you venture into Burning Steppes as a level 20 from Redridge? Well, you try and see what happens.

It is so ridiculous how so many people look at the molehill lost, but fail to see the mountain gained. It’s also true that people who like to spend most of their time - or people who feel like the game is ‘broken’ because they see red mobs far less are not the only people who play this game.
In fact it seems like quite a confident assumption that BY FAR more people are happy and enjoying the benefits for the small cost of minor losses.

3 Likes
13

Mountains lost; molehill gained.

Advantage: can stay longer in lower-level zones.

Disadvantages:

  1. Removal of any sense of progression
  2. Removal of any sense of variety, since all mobs are now the same
2 Likes
14

Yeah? Well where’s my choice to turn it off?

9 Likes
15

I don’t understand.

Unless you were staying in zones way past your level, mobs always took about the same to kill. And I don’t get how this changes a sense of progression at all.

1 Like
16

How is progression lost, when in the process of leveling my character is raising up in the power and gaining more abilities with which I can defeat mobs easier, and also during long questlines I’m getting further in the chains ? One shooting mobs in the game was never fun for me.

How if they look differently, belong to different species, we encounter different types of them in different zones and some of them got unique abilities ?

1 Like
17

Bro, do you get scared in a video game?

18

No. No, they really didn’t.

Most of the attraction of WoW for me, when I started, was that I could feel myself getting stronger as I ventured further. When I first landed in Lor’danel, I was pretty well matched with the mobs of the area. As I quested and levelled south, I became more powerful, met new and more powerful enemies. And I may then have struggled against the Maddened Firbolg, but I could kill the Twilight Cultists in their camp back North much more easily. They became faster to kill.

When trying to pin down the scaling problems at Draenor entry, I levelled a mage. From 45 to 89, my standard opener did almost exactly the same amount of damage to every standard mob I met. There’s some small print about quest bosses. Also casters have exactly 80% or the HP of melee to compensate for being more annoying I presume. Also there are some clumps of 3 or 4 minir mobs. So there were also non-standard mobs. But in Northrend, I was hitting exactly the same mob, with exactly the same health, relative to my damage, all the way from Howling Fjord through Icecrown. Opener = 55%.

So, no. Before scaling, there were differences, some variation, not the dreadful monotony of killing the same mob over and over and over again all the way.

We lose any sense of progression because we measure progression by how strong we are relative to our enemies. When our enemies become stronger at the same rate, we are no longer becoming stronger.

I should add another factor, that fewer people seem affected by. The world lost its identity. There are no fixed points any more. How much health does Hogger have? It depends. How much +Str does that sword have? It depends. How hard is it to solo a Legion Mythic Dungeon now? Depends how they’ve changed the scaling this week. How can we even say we’ve progressed when we’re in the middle of a featureless swamp with no fixed reference points?

8 Likes
19

I definitely agree with this. The sense of danger is gone. You can’t challenge yourself, everything scales to you.

4 Likes
20

Go to a higher zone - many of us have pointed out in this thread that they do still exist.

1 Like