I did a quickie. Grabbed a character, used the ilevel function of simc, set up sims every 20 ilevels (except for 415) single target, on same-level mobs, without long CDs, pots, flasks etc ('cos you’re not using those in the world!).
I do not have HP measures for some ilevels, so I estimated the trend. Also, I’d want to check this over a bit more closely, but I have to go now, so I’ll just drop the unchecked results in this rough first draft of a format here:
ilevel
Mob HP
% increase HP
DPS
% increase DPS
TTK (sec)
300
43400
7044
6.2
320
47100
8.5%
8026
13.94%
5.9
340
51000
8.3%
8907
10.98%
5.7
* Mob HP is estimated
360
54900
7.6%
11179
25.51%
4.9
380
60300
9.8%
13440
20.23%
4.5
400
66330
10.0%
16667
24.01%
4.0
* Mob HP is estimated
415
71300
7.5%
17930
7.58%
4.0
* Mob HP is estimated
Some of the gaps in DPS increases look a bit weird; too big for breakpoints? Should get a more standard agreed character to test. Someone without fancy trinks or effects. Then do a better table, and run it again on half the ilevel increases without increasing mob HP.
WoW must be the only rpg I know of where you get weaker against the same content as you level up. I understand their reasons for implementing it but it just seems like a terrible idea to me. It completely breaks the very concept of leveling ie you are supposed to improve with each level.
When I Complain about this horrible scaling that destroyed all levelling roleplay elements (a wolf in duskwood same difficulty as an ogre warlord in feralas) etc ppl called me to get over it.
So based on the information provided in the thread current scaling effectively reduces ilvl above 300(ion got it wrong then) to a bit above half. That is to say indeed halved progression we’d increase in power even slower.
To be specific 25 ilvl would be 13.63 is ilvl without scaling while 7 ilvl would be 3.88ish.
So yeah halving it would be slower and hurt everything that does not scale, ie everything but the world content.
I have around 7 chars at 120 already and, at 365ish I’m already moping the floor with any NPC by picking them 5 by 5 and destroying them with AoE.
Whatever are you guys talking about? Are you even doing some rotation rather than hit 1 button repeatedly?.
This isn’t a post defending RPG aspect (which is gone for reasons way, way unrelated to ilvl scaling), this is a lazy rant about wanting to be even more lazy. Honestly, what some of you want isn’t an RPG, but a hack-and-slash. Stop putting pretty words to justify your laziness.
And on 415 I can pulll everything within 40 yards. While leveling my moonkin I always pull mobs 5 and 5 if it’s possible etc. I bearly notice the world scaling anymore, It just feel natural to me that enemies are a bit more powerfull then in previous expansions.
I despise scaling. Both for levelling and end game.
Obviously if you are geared to the teeth you are stronger than someone who has just dinged but it had so much more impact before scaling was brought in.
For me, it wasn’t just that I saw that the numbers were getting bigger and I could take on more powerful foes, although especially the latter was a big deal too, but also that I knew that when I got that freaking amazing 4.5k pyroblast crit, EVERYBODY would see a 4.5k crit on their screen, and they would see the enemy health loss be exactly 4.5k health.
And this really grounded me and gave me perspective on what I could do, what I couldn’t do, and the way forward to do more, and I knew that others cared about how much I could do when they were making groups.
It’s hard to explain, really. I mean logically you can still say that we can anchor my power to my item level and achievements, and that’s true enough I suppose, but it just doesn’t feel real in the same way that it used to…
Man, I’m looking forward to Classic… Not to kill 4 trillion bandits in Westfall, of course, but just this feeling of persistency and reality and community of the whole thing…
I mean, you’re a demon hunter… maybe that’s true for you?
It was not true for me. Most of this gear dates back to November, and the sense of power progression in the open world was pretty slow. Yes, it got better, but the idea of pulling a pack of 10+ is basically suicide. Maybe it’s just monks, but I don’t have an AoE that can handle that before I die.
They nerf the importance of weapons each expansion. If you look at the damage tooltips you’ll find it goes up very little these days - this has nothing to do with mob ilevel scaling.
While I miss the era of high levels and items that mattered
We brought this on ourselves
Even in recent Maplestory 2, you had players trying to “Illuminati” in there to force the weak to stay weak and the strong to stay astronomically strong in dishonest, criminal ways.
This is Blizzards way of forcing everyone to stay even and play nice.
Now, YOU may not be the scummy player
But we all met them in other games, they ruined it for the rest of us.
We haven’t done any calculation of the non-scaling model. Just as you were wrong before when you multiplied increases directly instead of stacking them after being applied, we can’t just say “half” without applying it.
the quick scaling model I ran has gaps. They could be “right” because of breakpoints or Azerite traits I didn’t thinl would have breakpoints - or they could be user error. I’ll need to take some time at some point and do a more careful look.
Was focused on it earlier. Not so much now. Maybe at the weekend I’ll find the time. Or if anyone else wants to lay out a model, publish a specimen character and run parameters, feel free! I’d love to double-check my process when I do it.
I’ll also try to crowdsource some HP numbers so I don’t have gaps.
P.S. Created thread here, for anyone who would like to contribute observations to use:
I don’t even! Do you really not understand math? If we know the ilvl of someone, and the HP of the mob at that level, while also know the HP of the mob at 300 ilvl we just need to plug those into the calc of any made up DPS number and we can calculate the ilvl.
Having recalced without rounding tye 325 ilvl numbers equal 313.49372384 ilvls unscaled. And in reality unscaled is even slower, because while mob health scales linearly our DPS does not(again main stat is exponential, while secondaries are linear).
Literally just do this: (((BaseHP/(ScaledHP/(BaseDPS+0.01BaseDPS*(ILvl-300))))-BaseDPS)/0.01BaseDPS)+300=EffectiveNonScaledILvl
Fun fact you can choose any positive non oneshot number for BaseDPS, be it normal stuff like 6k, or you know trying it a DPS of 1 damage per second. Also to not just provide high numbers(because 325 is so massive!!!) Using the smallest provided 307 ilvl, it’d be 303.888143 ilvl dps without scaling.
Ergo slowing gear progression and removing max level scaling would keep the current pace of power progression or in most cases slow it down further(and again the higher the ilvl it’d be slower and slower than current scaling because main stat is still exponential) and this would then completely mess with player power in any instanced content that people in this thread have multiple times said is the only place where they feel powerful. Good news, it’d be just as slow or slower progression feeling in instanced content now as well, not to mention its effects on difficulty balancing.
EDIT: Did calc at highest ilvl provided. At 386 ilvl it’d correspond to 333 ilvl without scaling. Now that feels odd because at that ilvl things are massmurdered so what gives?
Remember how I keep saying mainstat gains this expansion are exponential? Let us assume it wasn’t exponential, but both main stat and secondaries were linear. Damage is essentially a multiplication of damage from Main Stat and various modifiers from secondaries. Guess what happens if you multiple a linear with another growing linear? It becomes exponential. Now back to reality, we are multiplying and exponential growth curve with a linear one, that just means it is even more steep in our reality.
My point is, 1 ilvl becomes more and more powerful than a simple additive +1%, especially now. So yeah what we see is this that the system in early ilvls is quite tame and attempts to curb the exponential power gains when they’d actually become a problem.
It is incredibly complex and impossible to calc this even if we had the exacts for stat curves and then multiplied that with the curve of effective non scaled ilvl. I am gonna assume it is likely close to linear or slightly leans in one direction until the cut off point.
It’s quite simple really: 30 item levels is A LOT. I assume you’re aware of the age-old idea that bringing a larger army not only allows your army to last longer, but it also deals more damage, so if you completely overkill an enemy, you reduce your own losses as well.
Gear scaling is kindda like that. Not only do you deal a certain percentage more damage, but you also have a certain percentage more health. So, if we work through your formula and find that we’ve been scaled from 386 to 333, then what we get is essetially outgearing the zone by 33 item levels; and 33 item levels is A LOT, like it’s almost a doubling of your damage output.
Your formula may or may not be correct, but there’s certainly a lot of things it doesn’t take into account. I’m an engineer in mathematical modelling, as it turns out, but I’ve just completely given up on trying to intuitively understand what in the heck is going on when I attack another entity in WoW. It seems to be different depending on what I attack, what level it is, what level I am, if it’s a boss monster, etc. etc. and it’s deliberately made to be as opaque and convoluted as possible, so as to hide its existance.
Sure, you can come in here with a formula like that and say “I worked it out” but nobody intuitively understands any of this even if they do abstractly, and so it just ends up being ridiculously hard to actually appreciate what your character is capable of. I think the fact that you felt the need to come in here with such a formula is the proof of the problem itself.
And yes, I know, vanilla had some pretty arcane systems here and there, too, but these systems were actually explained and explainable. They were pretty much lifted wholesale out of dungeons and dragons which, after all, is designed to be fully transparent in its combat system to the point where it can be played with dice, pen, and paper.
Well, it gets even more complicated than this. Firstly, 33 item levels is actually quite a lot as we already discussed. 33 item levels is almost a doubling of your damage output right now based on personal experience, and that’s before any scaling is applied at all like when you’re raiding or doing M+.
Secondly, there’s a certain irony in you flaming the poor sod you’re responding to for being unable to understand maths, only for you tell all of us that multiplaying multiple linear scalings together makes it exponential. So according to you, (kx)^4 = (ke)^(c*x) where k and c are constants, apparently. Very interesting indeed.
On the other hand, you’re right that a 1% gear improvement is a concept that’s so far obscured in all this scaling that it’s really difficult to actually understand what 1% even is, and 1% changes for every single activity in the game as well.
Do not try to twist what I put out. First lets address how much 33 ilvls are in a non scaling world.
If we ignore the exponential nature of ilvls, 33 reduces time to kill by roughly 25%. Now in reality these numbers are higher, but do not represent the actual even closely at those levels. Back in the day it was big not because of it’s impact but because of how much content was between both ends of it.
Secondly, scaling has nothing to do with the complexity of calculating power, just calculating it based on Main stat and all the Secondaries it is so complex, even if they are just individual multipliers(like shadow’s mastery) the complexity of mapping that out is well not really even drawable. At that point adding scaling to the mix to turn the exponential mess into something linear-ish in power growth would be fairly simple.
Tl;dr there is a reason people sim and then determine a temporary pawn string off that that completely changes and ignores it can switch around the second you listen(haste has higher weight so you replace a crit piece for it, re sim new pawn tells you to change it back). And lets not pretend that in olden times when items had like 30 different stats the calculations weren’t even more insane, and were only helped by the tons of items only 2-3 having that actually had preferred stat combos.
The scaling system is probably the best and nicest bandaid holding together a flawed system built upon 15 years of flawed systems.
Heck if your argument that 33 ilvls is so strong then we can’t even cut current progression down to 1/4th without still running into this problem, which would be insane to even suggest.
Not to kill 4 trillion bandits in Westfall, of course, but just this feeling of persistency and reality and community of the whole thing…