Historical DPS trends and Cata

They are just numbers. Automobiles used to cost hundreds of dollars a few generations ago and now they cost tens of thousands of dollars. But most everything else economic related has scaled up as well.

There isn't any inherent scaling problem with WoW's numbers getting absurdly large. The only real issue is comprehension when you're looking at a rogue doing 240,000 dps to a boss a billion health. But consider that we aren't that far away from character levels themselves being in the triple digits.

To fix the issue, we would have to go back and have level 1 characters do less than 1 point of damage, which would be pretty weird. Or we could use some kind of metric system where the last few zeros just get lopped off after a certain point. We joke about breastplates with megastamina and megadamage and megadps. :)

Q u o t e:
Yea. You can't chain lust anymore either so it's even crazier that DPS has gone up as much as it has.

It's a lot of things. Just off the top of my head...

-- Buffs affecting the whole raid lead to more per player.
-- Item levels increasing to support heroic modes and a 10 / 25 split.
-- We've gotten better at making useful talents.
-- Glyphs, gathering skill passives and other small bonuses add up.
-- Players overall have gotten more sophisticated in choosing items, talents and otherwise measuring their dps.

I think the only real danger of continuously increasing levels is you give players more choices, which they can then spend to specialize. If you add 10 new talents and 5 of those are damage talents and 5 are survival talents, then overall the balance stays the same, but players will tend to choose the 5 damage talents (and who can blame them?) which pushes a glass cannon to be even glassier and cannonier.

In hindsight, we probably should have done things like make you spend an equal number of talents on damage and survival (or even damage, survival and utility) rather than giving you more opportunities to zero in on the same target. For example, if you had to spend 5 talent points in tier 4 of the talent tree (rather than 5 points in tier 1, 2, 3 or 4) then we could make sure you took enough survivability along with the dps instead of letting you cherry pick the most optimized talents.

But I'm just armchair designing here. Overhauling the talent trees to that degree is too extensive for Cataclysm and probably for the game as a whole. I'm don't mean that in the lazy designer sense but in the sense that despite flaws that appear glaring to the designers, the game is doing well overall and too much change does risk losing some of what the current audience likes.

Q u o t e:

I think it's worth noting that cataclysm is only a gain of 5 levels where wrath and tbc were 10 levels.

That decision wasn't made because we were scared of big dps numbers though. We are scared of complexity. We don't want to keep adding 10 new talent points and 3+ new spells to classes that are already fairly deep. That's not to say the next expansion won't have 10 levels though. We don't know yet.

Q u o t e:
As a related issue, there are other numbers besides DPS and heath where scaling has reached a limit. That would be hit / block / crit / haste, which are reaching limits, and which are being scaled back.

The combat ratings already function to keep those numbers from reaching limits. It is happening in some cases at the moment because the ratings we picked weren't originally designed to support item levels as high as we ended up offering. If we made 5 more tiers of LK raid content we'd be in trouble. But we have a chance to adjust the ratings for Cataclysm and if we're smart we'll put in more of a buffer this time. :)

Q u o t e:
Not that it's really related, but the way everything was buffed to try and equalize didn't seem to really help this expansion. I mean I know there were nerfs every so often. Most of the expansion it seemed like "okay one class/spec underperforming buff them" and so on. I'm sure at least every spec had some kind of buff. I just feel that caused a bit of a problem later on because as we all know health never really scaled with this new damage. I'm sure cataclysm might make it easier to balance things now but I hope you don't keep buffing low dps and do instead nerf classes that might be too high every once in awhile. I mean it's cool to finally have dots scale and it makes balancing easier having most of the abilities benefit from stats similarly. And I know it's *easier* to buff one class than nerf more but please consider that every time you keep doing that eventually everyone's gonna do more damage then might be intended with stamina levels. Again, I'm not sure how it'll play out in cata.

It's interesting though. When we nerf someone, the very first response you see is "Why didn't you just buff everyone else?" What you're arguing makes a lot of logical sense, but it's hard for players to be logical when they see their numbers go down, even if the understand and agree why it's being done. Players get upset and contrary to popular belief that is something we try and prevent when possible. :)