While we know very little about the next expansion, we do know two things: the level cap will be 100, and we're going to get the long-awaited item squish.
What is the Item Squish?
Effectively, health, damage, and healing of all things in the game are going to be reduced. Right now, you might be doing 100k damage per second against a boss with 350m health, but after the squish, you might instead be doing 1k damage per second against a boss with 3.5m health. When fighting level-appropriate enemies, there should be no noticeable change in difficulty. You will only notice that all the numbers are smaller.
Why do this?
Right now, the numbers you see on screen are pretty huge. It's very rare at level 90 to have an attack that hits for less than 10,000 damage. Now, those numbers are pretty fun and exciting, but there's a problem. Every time you hit for 12,873 damage, the server needs to calculate a five-digit number. It has actually gotten to a point where you take the number of calculations that need to be performed (think about just how many numbers you see on screen that are from you, and then factor in the other 24 people in your raid, and then the boss, and then all the adds, and how they are affecting everyone else in the room) multiplied by the time computing time it takes to calculate a big number, and it actually gets to a point where it's causing serious lag.
We're also getting to a point where tanks will soon have a million health if something isn't done. That's just crazy.
Now hold on, is this going to make things more difficult?
The good news: if you are at the level cap, you won't see a difference regardless of the content you want to do. Siege of Orgrimmar and Molten Core will be just as easy or hard for a level 90 toon as they are now. Blizzard has assured us that one of the requirements they've set for themselves is that they keep soloing old content possible.
However, while level 90s will have a big boost in power to let them overcome old content, the power disparity between older level caps, or just older levels, will get condensed. Thus, if you have a toon at level 80 who likes to try to solo Karazhan, you're going to have a harder time. You should be just as able to run Halls of Lightning (in a group, as it is intended) as you are now, but you might not vastly overpower older content than you used to be able to. However, the remedy for this is simple: just get to 90 (or 100, in the next expansion,) and you will be able to solo Karazhan with ease.
I don't know about most of you guys, but I don't really tend to worry too much about old content while I'm leveling up, especially raids. Sure, I used the darkhounds in the servant quarter of Karazhan to help level my rogue's leatherworking, and that would definitely be harder after this, but in the long run, it's not the end of the world.
How will it be implemented?
I'm not much of a mathematician, but as I understand it, they will be applying some complex algorithms to make sure that level-appropriate characters can still do their content, and that max-level characters have the same difficulty (or lack thereof) in soloing old content. Given that they'll want level 60, 70, 80, and 85 (and probably 90) to use as focal points for this, I imagine there's some hairy math involved (and they might even use every level as a focus on which to base this. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. I said I wasn't a mathematician.)
What weird consequences will come of this?
Ideally, very few. The only one I can think of that I expect will be an issue (though not such a bad one) is that your gear will probably last longer. If you get a cool blue weapon in a dungeon while leveling up, it will probably remain a good weapon for longer than it currently does, as the difference in damage/healing/health from level to level will be smaller.
We're also just going to have to get over the weird factor of seeing our DPS take a nose dive. At the moment, really good DPS in LFR is around 130k (and soon to climb much higher, given that SoO is opening up.) Post squish, I expect that to drop by a factor of ten at least. We're going to be doing less DPS than we were at the end of Cataclysm, or even Wrath (I don't know exactly what factor they'll be reducing it by.) It may be disconcerting, but it's important to remember that, since enemy health is going down by the same proportion, we're not actually losing any power.
Finally, we will no longer be able to call one million health "one Ragnaros," as I expect that his Molten Core incarnation will have far less. On the other hand, perhaps Firelands Ragnaros will have a million.
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