In the light of the stat squish, a lot of people have expressed the following concern: If the difference in power between, say, Burning Crusade content and Mists of Pandaria content is being squished, will that not make me relatively weaker toward much of the older content? Once one hits 100, one will be ten levels higher than Mists of Pandaria content, and thirty levels higher than Burning Crusade. Yet if that expanse of exponential growth that occurred between BC and Mists is transformed instead into linear growth, so that rather than getting three times as powerful each expansion (and thus being 27 times more powerful in Mists - numbers are made up here, by the way) you will instead be 90/70ths more powerful, or close to one and a third, it will clearly be a lot, lot harder to go in an clear old raids solo.
First off, I'm pretty sure the math is more complicated than that (this is just a consequence of my being neither a mathematician nor an engineer,) but the other thing is that there's another factor at play.
Level has always had an effect on our interactions with other entities out there in the world. In Warlords, that effect seems to be turned up to 11. While fighting the Iron Horde, you'll typically see your big, powerful abilities that, at the end of Mists, were hitting for, say, 300k damage, are now hitting for 20k or so. Yet if you return to the training dummies in Stormwind or Orgrimmar, hitting the level 85 ones, for instance, you'll suddenly see your numbers flare up to absurd degrees.
But all these numbers are not the point. They are there to determine whether or not you can kill things, and whether they can kill you.
For this experiment, I took a pre made level 100 Gnome Mage. I chose Mage for two reasons: the first is that having the ability to teleport would make the whole process a lot quicker. The other is that Mages are typically squishy. Admittedly, I did spec Frost, which is generally considered the hardiest of the Mage specs, but that's like comparing paper towels for material out of which you want to make your bullet proof vest.
My first stop: Blackwing Descent:
This was a tentative attempt. I've generally found that one can solo raids from two expansions previous with relative ease on a tank-capable class. Blood Death Knights tend to be best for this, given their self-healing. So how would a Frost Mage fare?
I killed the Omnitron Defense system before the first robot even got to me.
Impressed with this result, I went to Magmaw. Here, I would be forced to endure at least some physical attacks. Yet when struck, I was hit for a pittance of damage - only about 150 to my 100k or so. And again, I was able to kill the boss before any of the fight mechanics really made themselves known.
Every boss in Blackwing Descent fell to my might with great ease. My only moment of panic was when, after killing Nefarian, the room was still flooded with lava, which did continue to do a fair amount of damage to me, but thankfully receded before it took me.
With no way out of the hole, I decided to teleport again to Ironforge and round out tier 11 and try my luck with the Bastion of Twilight.
Bastion of Twilight:
Once again, everything fell with incredible speed. I played around a bit with Ice Nova, the Frost talent (with Supernova and Blast Wave as the Arcane and Fire equivalents.) Ice Nova transforms Frost Nova, which is typically used more for crowd control and getting a cheap Ice Lance shatter, into a pretty nice on-demand burst AoE ability (that still has the CC thing if you need it.)
Other than a couple of stuns on the first boss, the one moment of failure was when I fought Cho'gall. Cho'gall has a mind control ability that will effectively reset the encounter if you do not kill him quickly enough. The second time I tried, I was quick, and so I cleared out Bastion.
Icecrown Citadel:
Taking another step back into the past, the idea here was not to test so much the damage (because I knew that if I could handle tier 11, surely I could handle tier 10.) The test here was on those mechanics that would not be effected by pure power. So I very easily destroyed Scourge up through Lady Deathwhisper. Curiously, I did not see the Alliance and Horde forces fighting each other on the parapets of the citadel, so I merely made my way to the Skybreaker and donned my jetpack.
Two things I here learned: One was that High Overlord Saurfang cannot be killed. (I assume the same is true for Muradin.) His health rebounds from any fatal damage. The other is that one's cannon does not seem to scale with level or iLevel. So while I was dutifully smashing Orgrim's Hammer with cannon fire, there just wasn't enough to overcome the potshots the goblins got in while I was handling the battlemage. Even killing them, it seemed impossible to complete the encounter on my own, and thus I was barred from exploring ICC any further.
Siege of Orgrimmar:
I decided that what would be most educational would be to try my hand at Siege of Orgrimmar. I now outleveled the place by ten, after all, and while I was sure it would be more of a challenge than the raids of Cataclysm, I assumed that I might be able to make some progress.
Ah, but here the status of a Beta test foiled my intentions. Siege of Orgrimmar is begin updated to the new raid difficulty system of LFR-Normal-Heroic-Mythic, and thus there is a "buff" that puts you at the appropriate level - 90 - and an appropriate iLevel (actually, if I recall, it was pretty damn low for Siege, something like 476.)
So I moved on.
Mogu'shan Vaults:
In retrospect, the nearest raid was certainly Terrace of Endless Spring, but that must have slipped my mind, so instead I went to Mogu'shan Vaults. Here would be the appropriate place to do my testing. I walked forward, activating that first group of guard quilen and...
They killed me.
Now mind you, I got some good shots in, and perhaps with greater practice or crowd control I might do better, but the new system does not guarantee that you will be super-powered versus all old content. The effects of the level-buff will most likely grow more dramatic, perhaps exponentially so, as one goes farther down the list (I suspect that Ragnaros will be about as menacing as a candle flame.)
Also, I think that I should point out here that as a pre made level 100 character, I am outfitted in a full set of Nagrand quest reward gear. That is the highest quality of level-up gear, but it is also fully green and certainly not indicative of what your average player's power will be even a week after hitting the level cap.
Obstacles Still Remain:
Overall, I expect to see a lot of people managing to solo bits of the Mists of Pandaria raids. I think Cataclysm raids and everything below will fall into a diversionary slaughter kind of category. Given that so many achievements are based on doing things quickly or not allowing certain abilities to take full effect, it shouldn't be too hard to get a lot of the old meta achievements.
On the other hand, some may become very difficult. For example, the one achievement that stands between me and my Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher is "Been Waiting a Long Time for This," which requires you to allow the Lich King's Necrotic Plague to build up to 100 stacks before killing him. At this point, especially after this change, one will really have to just do no damage whatsoever while waiting for the plague to stack up. However, the other half of the change, which reduces the damage that one takes from enemy abilities if they are lower level than you, might give me some hope for this. If I could survive a stacked-up Necrotic Plague, perhaps I could solo this. (The real difficulty with this particular achievement is the fact that there's a cool down on Cleanse-type spells now.)
And certain things, without intervention on Blizzard's part, will make things very difficult. As it stands right now, for example, Valithria Dreamheart requires at least some healing capability to win the encounter. And the Gunship Battle likewise, as stated before, requires you to be in too many places at once.
Yet Blizzard has shown some intention to make these solo-impossible encounters... possible. Thorim, for instance, used to wipe the raid if there was not a person in his arena and in his gauntlet, but now you can run the gauntlet solo (you just need to deal with a bunch of adds when you jump down.)
It's not all that difficult to grab a friend or two to run these old places, but there's something nice about being able to go through them at your own pace. But if you had any fears that the stat squish would make things harder, well, I can very confidently say: No. It will not.
No comments:
Post a Comment