Sunday, October 27, 2013

Level Scaling Seems to Be in the Works

Through a couple of glitches and bugs, there have been reports of people running old dungeons with their level and iLevel scaled down to match the appropriate level for the instance. Blizzard has said they're working on some kind of level scaling, and it appears that the guts of the mechanism are in place, and it's just a matter of implementing it in the UI and tweaking it.

I'm very excited about this, but I also wonder how it will be implemented.

First off, I'm sure that this will be an optional feature. Blizzard has said time and again that the item squish coming in the next expansion will only be done if they can guarantee that people can still solo old stuff the way they can now. Thus, I can't imagine this level scaling will be anything other than optional.

But, given that option, I'm extremely happy to hear about it. There are a ton of old dungeons and raids that we don't really get to experience anymore. Sure, you can see the fights, but when Algalon only lasts about two seconds against your group of level 90s, you know you aren't really experiencing the fight.

But the main implementation I can imagine for this is to allow people of disparate levels to run content together. I remember how, back before the dungeon finder, I would simply run my friend through the low level dungeons, letting him DPS the bosses and just keeping the occasional heal on him (even when not in a healing spec, the smallest heal would top him off.) These were fun, but not really the kind of dungeon-going experience that you crave. With a scaling feature, you could truly run the dungeons together. Hell, Death Knights don't even really get out into the world until Outland. It would be kind of fun to run through, say, Gnomeregan on a DK.

DKs actually highlight an issue with level scaling that I think could arise. Put simply, I think that while health, damage, and healing should be scaled down, the player should still have access to their actual-level kit. You might be scaled down to level 26, but you should still be able to use your Chaos Bolt, or your Runic Empowerment.

A lot of classes really don't play fluidly until they are higher-level. You let people learn the basics of the class over time, but by the time you get to 90, you should understand how to use Storm Earth and Fire, or Berserker Rage. These tools make the class feel complete, and it would be pretty unattractive to suddenly lose a bunch of your capabilities.

Now granted, that means that even with a scaled-down iLevel, you'll be far more powerful than you were at that actual level. But currently, old dungeons are already tune very forgivingly. I would even argue in favor of beefing things up (actually, the only thing I'd do is increase enemy health pools. Currently things die so quickly that most people can't even get a spell cast off before the tank's killed it.)

Another question that I'd have for this is whether you actually need a low-level player to queue for these old dungeons. There are some places I wouldn't mind going back to. As I was saying earlier, opening up the entirety of WoW's heroic dungeons would be a great way to provide a variety of content for the late-patch doldrums. I'd love to run End Time or Forge of Souls again.

Anyway, I don't know when or if this will be implemented. Supposedly there is a new classification for dungeons called "Timewalker," which points to some lore-based explanation for this scaling (and maybe hints at a time-travel expansion?)

Anyway, great stuff here. I'm so looking forward to Blizzcon (12 days to go!)

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