Item Squishing and Old Raids

Okay, here's how it's going to work, guys.

The people that say it will become impossible to solo old bosses? You're thinking too small. The gaps aren't actually going to become any smaller; you're thinking in terms of numbers, not percents.

Let's use Ragnaros (Molten Core) as an example. He has 1 million health right now. At a conservative 20k DPS, it takes 100 seconds to down him.

Let's move to MoP, and item levels/stats get squished. Now Ragnaros has, say, 100k HP. You now do 2k DPS. At that, it takes... 100 seconds to down him.

The gap won't be smaller. They'll just have to retune the numbers. Instead of 1 Str giving you a 10 Dam increase, it'll give you 1. Or something like that.

It seems to me that some of those that have expressed misgivings about the squish are worried about feeling 'nerfed' when facing older content, but the item squish shouldn't mean that soloing older raid content will die, necessarily. Though we appreciate the feedback, I think it's safe to say that we wouldn't want anyone to turn their back on the idea purely out of concern for losing the ability to take down older raids solo or in small groups.

I aim to see giant numbers across my screen because they are "fun" and I enjoy it.

Isn't the point of big numbers that they're big relative to the other numbers in the game, though? I can't speak for you, obviously, but I enjoyed putting out big numbers in previous expansions, and I expect that once I got a feel for the new baselines, I'd likely feel the same way in the future as well.

I'm curious as to why you don't think you'd make the same adjustment, I suppose?

11/04/2011 06:51 PMPosted by Cathrynna

Daxx, if you go through with the squish, if everything goes smooth/properly do you guys see it affecting the numbers needed for old BC/WotLK raids etc? If so, how much?

It's very early days yet, and as Ghostcrawler indicated in the Watercooler, we don't even know which direction we'd be going in yet (if we end up pulling the trigger on it at all). So, with that in mind, I'm just not in a position to comment on it at the moment, but we are interested in the feedback that we've seen, including support for the idea.