World of Warcraft: Current Year

Chersk said:

(general gripe)

I'm pretty sure scaling in general is the worst mechanic to come to RPG's. It completely removes the veil, its all bullshit, go run on a treadmill you fucking nerd.

ESO was one of the first MMO's to fully embrace this garbage and devs haven't looked back.

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Bethesda was the level scaling pioneer in RPGs, with Oblivion. It's one of the reasons why Morowind is still their best game.

That said, running alts in WoW through the "timewalking" level scaling, where it allowed you to pick an Xpac and spend your whole time there was nice, since WoTLK was the best content the game ever saw. Not having to look at another assface panda NPC was also a nice bonus... until you get to the current xpac leveling.

It does make leveling alts in WoW more bearable that you can replay past expansions but that doesn't stop the shit feeling of seeing mobs level up around you when you're in them.

It would be more work (oh no) but they could still have timewalking with proper leveling paths within those expansions. It would mean less grouping between dissimilarly leveled players** and less freedom in where exactly you can go until you're of the proper level.

**This was touted as a feature and to me its the worst reminder of the problem. Nothing like running dungeon finder and having a level 10 character (not even talking about Panda remix) do all the work. Its fucking stupid. If you want to play with your friends then level the fuck up or reroll together.

I'm pretty sure a game designed around scaling in a controlled way could work. None of them really are though, so you and to with level 50 squirrels and dumb shit like that. You lose that entire feel of early MMOs where some areas are super dangerous and later you faceroll them.

MSV is absolutely the fastest thing to run for your daily raid boss quest. Takes 5 minutes and you are done. Just going through each LFR for first daily run bonus is huge amounts of bronze. And you will get max +xp on your cloak hella fast.

To be clear, I've hated auto-scaling for literally decades (e.g. Final Fantasy 8).

While the goal of having all content be useful at any level is a good idea on paper, it's extremely difficult to tune right. The normal outcome is to have enemies get stronger as you level, which goes contrary to all power gain concepts. The 'best' result is usually to have enemy strength remain flat vs your level... which makes all player power gains (and time spent) irrelevant.

(The best system imo is what was in use in Fallouts - if player levels range from 1 to 100, Deathclaws in area X scale from 30 to 60. So the level 1 can't be useful everywhere and gets bodied, encouraging them to gain power before returning, but the 61+ crowd still gains power vs the enemies and (eventually) rewards power collection. But you've now rendered that content non-optimal for levels 1-29 and 61-100, which is broken to the 'scaling everywhere' design crowd.)

Again, Remix has two problems.

The first is that the instanced scaling at 60+ is broken, or at the very least heavily desires a full set of the jewelry achievements and their rewards, which nothing in the game told players they were intended to get before that point.

The second is that it doesn't give players ANY indication of what the level 70+ progression should be. Apparently players were supposed to spend mass quantities of bronze by doing dailies and repetitive decade old content for weeks if not months (in a mode that only lasts for three months) until they could do Heroic / Mythic raids to earn more Bronze than they spent on upgrades quickly.

Well, three now: when players realized the two issues above and tried to remedy them by killing enemies to increase their personal power (e.g. frog farming) as instruced by the mode, in the same method people had been using for a decade, Blizz became alarmed people wouild get done with the mode sooner than their engagement metrics wanted and reverted their power gains, despite zero communiction that this was unintended. As someone who didn't kill a single frog, I still think that sets a horrendous precedent that Blizz can and will retroactively nerf you, with no warning, if you outpace the accountants' intended power cuves.

Wombat said:

To be clear, I've hated auto-scaling for literally decades (e.g. Final Fantasy 8).

While the goal of having all content be useful at any level is a good idea on paper, it's extremely difficult to tune right. The normal outcome is to have enemies get stronger as you level, which goes contrary to all power gain concepts. The 'best' result is usually to have enemy strength remain flat vs your level... which makes all player power gains (and time spent) irrelevant.

(The best system imo is what was in use in Fallouts - if player levels range from 1 to 100, Deathclaws in area X scale from 30 to 60. So the level 1 can't be useful everywhere and gets bodied, encouraging them to gain power before returning, but the 61+ crowd still gains power vs the enemies and (eventually) rewards power collection. But you've now rendered that content non-optimal for levels 1-29 and 61-100, which is broken to the 'scaling everywhere' design crowd.)

Again, Remix has two problems.

The first is that the instanced scaling at 60+ is broken, or at the very least heavily desires a full set of the jewelry achievements and their rewards, which nothing in the game told players they were intended to get before that point.

The second is that it doesn't give players ANY indication of what the level 70+ progression should be. Apparently players were supposed to spend mass quantities of bronze by doing dailies and repetitive decade old content for weeks if not months (in a mode that only lasts for three months) until they could do Heroic / Mythic raids to earn more Bronze than they spent on upgrades quickly.

Well, three now: when players realized the two issues above and tried to remedy them by killing enemies to increase their personal power (e.g. frog farming) as instruced by the mode, in the same method people had been using for a decade, Blizz became alarmed people wouild get done with the mode sooner than their engagement metrics wanted and reverted their power gains, despite zero communiction that this was unintended. As someone who didn't kill a single frog, I still think that sets a horrendous precedent that Blizz can and will retroactively nerf you, with no warning, if you outpace the accountants' intended power cuves.

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No, scaling aside the rest of this is nonsense. You can operate just fine without the accessories, and in fact the vast majority do. The power in remix is 100% the 12 tinker gems and 1 meta gem. Even before going full on retarded easy I was doing just fine at 70 in a full set of 346 green gear. 4/5 of the accessories you can get with a couple easy peasy days. They are all achievements, so you can figure them out pretty quickly. The only one that sucks a bit is the neck, because you have to do all raids on N, which you can't LFR for. I suspect they may relent on that to allow LFR soon. Once you have the achievements done you can buy them for 10 bronze each on all future toons from the gem vendor.

The stat gem minigame is great for boosting sta and for making your secondaries go bonkers, but the 5 accessory slots that account for 15/21 of those gems do not scale. They are stuck at ilevel 342 forever. The 6 in chest/legs do go up with item upgrades, though. Hugely. The 15 gems in trinkets have tiny stats. They do add up a little bit, but even at 416 those gems are easily twice as strong.

Gear type only matters on weapon as well. Once you get a blue weapon it gets a huge +sta on it. The rest going blue or purple means dick all. Tiny +primary for blue. Tiny +secondary for purple.

wow scaling is the worst addition they introduced to this game. It has fucked so many systems, retarded

RobXIII said:

They can't do it right in MoP Remix, but either way it's overcome by the fast power creep gear and cloak upgrades get you.

I still think it's pants on head retarded they used the same currency you need to unlock collectables with for mandatory gear upgrades, then made it 5-10x more expensive than it should be.

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You get shitloads of bronze just doing your dailies. It goes stupid fast. First N lfg. First H lfg. First N scenario. First H Scenario. First LFR for each raid. Your 3 daily quests from bazaar. They just load it up hot and heavy. 2 lfg 2 scen 1 lfr is half a full round of upgrades, then if you are doing any faction grinds you get even more. My hunter has 3 more LFRs to go before all raids are done for the hopeful nerf to the necklace cheevo.

Chersk said:

(general gripe)

I'm pretty sure scaling in general is the worst mechanic to come to RPG's. It completely removes the veil, its all bullshit, go run on a treadmill you fucking nerd.

ESO was one of the first MMO's to fully embrace this garbage and devs haven't looked back.

Click to expand...

Agree on open world scaling, disagree with instanced scaling for groups (with exceptions)

Open world scaling feels bad because it removes the feeling of character power progression - you don't feel stronger.

Instanced scaling is good because it allows older dungeons/raids to remain populated. However, it needs the option to be deactivated. FF14 does this well - if you just do a normal queue up with randos, then you're scaled to the level range of the content. However, you can turn this off and run a level 30 dungeon as a level 90 if you want.

WOW used to do better with scaling by having caps on areas. They got pretty well and duly assfucked with the level squish. It's still ok once you get to max level and are basically a god in all previous xpacs, but yeah, it makes leveling up boring as fuck.

That said, remix is just a single xpac, no old world or anything newer. That has made the static relative power level a lot easier to deal with. Even moreso when you are just going HAM on everything and leveling crazy fast. Example: My lock was 46, and in 1 H LFG without 1st time bonus or rested or anything got 5 levels in 15 minutes. My hunter did all the quests and factions which slowed things way the fuck down. If you just stay queued up for LFR and H LFG you get insane amounts of xp.