Realities of the Stat Squish

When I was a relatively new player (I started in vanilla but didn't actually see the level cap until halfway through BC,) I didn't really pay all that much attention to damage numbers or meters. Meters can be a frustrating pissing contest, but I also think they are useful. Players should absolutely care about how much damage they are doing, and raid leaders need to know which players need to either gear-up or maybe fine-tune their rotations, but if the bosses are going down, that's when you need to step back and be satisfied.

As a new-ish player, my main concerns were how big the numbers I could see were. In BC, I remember that getting my tank up to 12,000 health was a big accomplishment. My rogue sat at about 7000 (and if those numbers look low for BC, I should add that I didn't do raids or heroics - just level-cap dungeons.) Dealing a thousand damage in a single attack was pretty cool, and tended to be more the realm of casters than dual-wielding melee or tanks.

We've seen the scale grow in each expansion, and by Mists, we've gotten to the point where a Destro Warlock in good gear can regularly get million-plus Chaos Bolts. Ragnaros, the final boss of Molten Core (and Firelands, but I'm talking about the vanilla version) had 999k health. We've gotten a lot more powerful.

So the notion Blizzard had was to implement a stat squish. The exponential growth in iLevel in older expansions has been flattened out into linear growth. What this means is that the difference between Karazhan and Black Temple gear is much smaller than it used to be, and likewise the difference between Naxxramas and ICC gear, and such.

There's been some outrage about the squish, making us feel less powerful than we did, but I can actually say that A: you barely notice, as things go down about as quickly (though there is the usual "my epics aren't as impressive now that they're nine levels old" feeling, which we've always had to deal with,) and B: we don't actually look all that squished.

You'll still have nearly a hundred thousand health after the squish (non-tank,) and once you climb to 100, it's clear that we're going to see Cataclysm-and-higher health levels at the cap. And given that that's all in questing greens, I think we're going to probably be hitting early-Mists health levels by the time the later tiers roll around. So ultimately, the squish is not going to be that crazy.

That said, I'm leaving one detail out, which is that health pools, post-squish, have been roughly doubled. So while you might have 140k health when you hit level 90, this is really more akin to having 70k under the old paradigm. The idea here is to make damage and healing a more gradual thing. Blizzard has always wanted to make it more likely that players will be somewhere in between totally dead and full health, which promotes a more interesting and strategic healing game. (When this is not the case, they need to make sure that healers have tons of regen so that they can spam their biggest heals and... healers become one-button classes.)

So your damage will be cut by a somewhat larger percentage. However, this health-doubling applies only to players, as far as I know. I'm sure this will make PvP feel a bit slower-paced, but that's what they're aiming for (even if they wouldn't dare use the word "slower," for fear of an uproar.) They want it to be more thoughtful and strategic, and the only way to do that is to slow things down.

But what about soloing old instances?

Well, first off, the Warlords-era stuff is still on the usual expansion-exponential-growth scale, and so if you have any trouble with old content at first, you'll pretty quickly be able to clear Ulduar solo once again. But even better, they've made the scaling of high-level players versus lower-level NPCs into a much bigger deal. Just hacking away on a level 80 target dummy in Acherus, I was Obliterating for well over a million damage a strike. Throw in an extra ten levels, and you'll be absolutely beasting old content. In fact, I suspect that even Mists content will be soloable by most decently-geared players at 100.

So the squish: I think the impact is pretty minimal, but I also begin to wonder whether it was necessary. In the future, I hope that they just graduate to abbreviated numbers. Once you're doing 297,382 damage with an attack, do we really need those last three digits? I wouldn't mind just seeing 297k pop up instead, and then when we get more powerful in whatever expansion follows Warlords, we can start seeing 1.82m.