Dev Watercooler - The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria

[Astronomic]

The upgrade is still meaningful due to its cumulative nature.

Only if you're assuming that players are rational and reasonable people.

And judging by recent complaints ("Blizzard is reducing the number of talent points from 41 to 6, GAME RUINED FOREVER"), they (or should I rather say "we") are anything but that.

That new talent point system is gonna be tits in pvp. Affliction lock with shadowfury ftw

imo icc heroic bosses are about as difficult as normal firelands.

[degre]

The upgrade is still meaningful due to its cumulative nature.

Only if you're assuming that players are rational and reasonable people.

And judging by recent complaints ("Blizzard is reducing the number of talent points from 41 to 6, GAME RUINED FOREVER"), they (or should I rather say "we") are anything but that.

Yeah, but you can't be listening to a vocal minority acting on emotion. Blizz did that and overtuned heroics on release, with the encounters being very binary. Why? Because that vocal minority were saying that cata needed to be hard/wrath was too easy.

Blizz did eventually acknowledged that they overdid it.

I can agree that they overdid it, but wasn't exactly a minority claiming that Wrath was easy, as Wrath really was a faceroll.

[Klaudandus]

getting things back on track.

upgrades are upgrades.

[KysenMurrin]

The way things look, we lose one tier of 5 man content in Mists of Pandaria (regular instances at level 90), but gain the Raid Finder tier. Heroic 5 mans, therefore, take on the position in gear progression that was held by the 333 gear in Cataclysm.

They want Heroics to be pretty easy, and judging by some comments they want RDF to serve the "learn to raid" purpose that Heroics were designed to do in Cata. It remains to be determined what they want the gap in gear to be between the two, but you'd assume they'll want it to be a meaningful upgrade over dungeon gear.

Given the above, and no major change in ilevel strategy, we're probably looking at first tier content in MoP having the same rough ilevel progression that Cataclysm did, with Heroic 5-mans dropping down a step and RDF filling the gap.

That still leaves a gap to open up when more tiers are introduced, but I would expect to see overlap between the Heroic version of one tier and the RDF of the following tier. If that's the case it's possible the actual ilevels we see will progress in exactly the same scale that they did in Cataclysm.

[Passionario]

As for the talent tree, perhaps they should stop calling it talent tree since it clearly is not. They should just call it Perk System and be done with that talk.

I prefer the term "talent tower". It goes up and up, and every 15 levels there are three doors to choose from.

[culhag]

Base gear is level 60 and you get a 64 item, woot, that's a nice upgrade!

Base gear is level 378 and you get a 382 item, the difference is in decimals, even changing your whole gear you will barely notice any difference.

I just wanted to point out that stat budget has an exponential relation to item level, so an upgrade from 60 to 64 has the same relative value as one from 378 to 382.

I can't find a source now but I'm pretty sure about it.

[Klaudandus]

Base gear is level 60 and you get a 64 item, woot, that's a nice upgrade!

Base gear is level 378 and you get a 382 item, the difference is in decimals, even changing your whole gear you will barely notice any difference.

I just wanted to point out that stat budget has an exponential relation to item level, so an upgrade from 60 to 64 has the same relative value as one from 378 to 382.

I can't find a source now but I'm pretty sure about it.

Yes, but i'm guessing they would change to a linear approach (or as linear as it can be) with the squish, so going from 378 to 382 is as meaningful as 60 to 64.

[Hrobertgar]

I'm not entirely positive what the effective "epic" ilvl of Cataclysm gear is, though - did everything get the epic stat modifiers, or did everything end up green-equivalent? That would make some difference - on the other hand, not being able to "upgrade" ICC gear with Cataclysm gems widens the gap again.

Everything Cata is green equivalent to Wrath. The colors now seem to code primarily for disenchanting results.

[Dantriges]

the original idea was that purple is reserved for raid only with blue rewards for hard quests and 5 man content.

[Kelaan]

Whereas now purple vs blue vs green simply denotes how early you get it. You get blue 308 gear earlier than green 312 gear, for example.

[halabar]

Whereas now purple vs blue vs green simply denotes how early you get it. You get blue 308 gear earlier than green 312 gear, for example.

This please. We need to ditch the "get off my lawn" attitude towards purples.

The challenge still remains that they need to make the new tier compelling, so you aren't keeping the old tier instead of upgrading to the new tier (this is their stated design goal, they don't want people keeping old tier sets for new content).

If they compress the levels too much, people don't see the reason to upgrade, and gear-math becomes too important.

I don't think they are going to solve it by squishing. They are likely going to need to add another variable like they did with diminishing returns.

[Astronomic]

I say do away with the color system, theres not really much point to it anymore. Just base everything off ilvl.

[Dantriges]

Puh they could increase the stats needed for increasing crit, hit etc. but well, avoidance is more or less dissapointing with the massive ratings you need. Don´t think that Spend 1000 rating for 1% hit would be satisfying.

[Flex]

If they compress the levels too much, people don't see the reason to upgrade, and gear-math becomes too important.

Also the problem of the inbetweener raiders. They raid, like getting gear, okay with some challenge but when the brickwall happens they stop raiding. If the gear incentive becomes too low then raiding for that population may see a large drop off.

[halabar]

I wonder if they could go to a percentages based system....

For current tier, you get a fixed % of hit/crit/whatever on a boss in that tier. If you are in previous tier gear, that % is reduced by 5%.

That would at least address the secondary stat mess, and get rid of diminishing returns, which most people don't understand.