I wrote this post about how leveling in World of Warcraft could be fixed without resorting to a level squish. But now that a level squish is practically confirmed, I’ve been thinking about it and I’m honestly not opposed to the idea.
I don’t know that it needs to happen, but at the same time I do understand the idea that once we start leveling into the 130s and above it starts to feel like there’s not much importance to each individual level. In fact, right now I’d say we’re already at that point — leveling my Kul Tiran I’ve really felt like going from say, 34 to 35, or even going up three or four levels in a night doesn’t really matter. I don’t get much — the only really important levels are ones where you get a new ability, or the big levels where you get a new talent tier, roughly every 15 levels or so between level 15 and level 90, and then one more at level 100.
While WoW Classic has once again given players the experience of powering up to level 60, proper World of Warcraft has been bloated with a whole lot of increasingly superfluous levels for years now. Blizzard have already stated that the level squish will not affect you going back and farming old raids just as we do now. Of course there will be bugs and problems when it first goes live, it would be unrealistic to expect anything else and no doubt the forums will fill up with ‘I quit’ posts because of various reasons associated with mentioned bugs and issues. It’s not like those old raids aren’t going to be squished as well, current level 60 content won’t suddenly become end game content again if they squish the level cap down to 60, everything else will be proportionally squished along with the level cap. Jarbek-thrall17 June 2019 22:24. A level squish is when a video game reduces the maximum level in a game, instead of raising it. This means all players who are already max level end up getting their level squished down to a lower. One of the biggest questions that arose when Blizzard announced the leveling squish in Shadowlands was “How is flying going to work?” And now that the Shadowlands alpha is out, we finally have an answer. On the live Battle for Azeroth servers you’ll unlock flying when you hit level 60, halfway through your leveling experience.
You can of course just accelerate the leveling speed, or make every new character an Allied Race to skip the first 20 or so levels, or play a class like a Death Knight or Demon Hunter that skips even more levels. But none of that actually fixes the problem. It just puts off dealing with it and compresses the issues somewhat. If you start at level 20, you basically just make level 20 your new level 1, and level 120 your new level 100.
So, if it’s decided that something more radical has to be done, how do you go about doing it?
How many levels do you want?
This is trickier than it sounds, because once you decide you’re going to squish levels to make leveling feel more consequential, you still have to decide how many to squish them by, and then you have to fit all the leveling content currently in the game into those levels. Done improperly, you’ll end up with wide swaths of content shoved into the same relatively narrow bands of leveling. That doesn’t necessarily have to be bad, but it would honestly feel very strange to anyone who’s been playing WoW for a while. For example, if we squish levels down to 1 to 60 for all current content, that means that vanilla WoW content would now likely take up 30 levels, Burning Crusade and Wrath an additional 10 levels (to 40), Cataclysm and Mists an additional 5 levels (to 45), and then we’d have Warlords, Legion, and finally Battle for Azeroth at 5 levels a piece for a total of 60 levels.
This may seem simple on the face of it, but then we need to consider things like talents. Are we going lose a talent tier? Currently we have seven tiers that fit within 120 levels with a few strange artifacts — we get our first talent at level 15 and then every 15 levels until level 90, whereupon we get our final talent tier at level 100. If we tried to keep those seven tiers in a 60 level system, how do we best do that? The simplest would be to start getting talents at level 5, then every 10 levels after that until level 55, which would be six talent tiers in total, with the seventh talent tier coming at level 60. It would be inelegant, but it would work for fitting seven talent tiers into 60 levels.
This would need to be done for every ability we gain, and everything else we get at specific levels (like mounts) — it would all have to be considered in terms of the new formulation for levels. The case can certainly be made that we spent a lot of levels getting nothing now, but with only sixty levels to carry us all the way to Battle for Azeroth‘s endgame you’d need to make some decisions on how many levels to wait for some pretty classic abilities. Do you want to wait until you’re in Northrend to get Vanish? Would it feel right to be just reaching Pandaria when you finally get Blink? If we want every level to feel meaningful, you can’t get all your core class defining talents and abilities at level 30, after all.
Wow Level Squash Shadowlands
How fast should you earn levels?
Just because you’ve squished down to 60 levels doesn’t mean you want them to fly by, but you also don’t want getting a single level to take so long that people feel discouraged by it. It could be argued that you want to level to 60 in the new system to take roughly the same amount of time that leveling to 120 does now. But do you? Assuming it takes roughly four days of constant play to get from 1 to 60 — and I’m aware that’s a big assumption because some of us level much faster and others much slower — you’d expect the first 30 levels to take the same length of time and contain all the things one currently gets in that time span. So in 30 levels you’d gain all the abilities and talents you currently get in leveling from 1 to 60, as well as epic and flying mounts.
But does that mean it will take twice as long per level?
How would that feel to players? Would taking twice as long per level matter to them, when each level is basically two of the previous levels?
This is compounded by heirlooms, because if you’re wearing heirlooms you’ll be leveling faster, but will it feel faster? We’ve had item squishes that have compressed almost all the gear we get in classic WoW content so that it barely matters, and heirlooms mean that most players vendor any quest rewards or drops they get. Will heirlooms make the new leveling game feel just as rushed as before? Will they make it feel worse? Will it feel too slow so that heirlooms feel mandatory even if you don’t really want to be wearing them? If you’ve currently scaled all your heirlooms to 110 content, will they squish down to work until level 55?
My personal preference is to get rid of them but since I doubt that will happen, these are questions that need to be answered. The effects heirlooms have on leveling need to be carefully considered when squishing levels.
The feeling of squishing
We’ve seen a lot of negative reaction to the idea of a level squish since it was broached — and that’s not something that can be ignored as we think about how to do it right.
Players don’t like the idea of feeling weaker. MMORPGs are games where we progressively grow in power. A lot of systems have evolved over the years to keep that power creep under control — for example, stat ratings that keep you from getting a +3 critical chance trinket when you’re level 20 and keeping it forever. Those systems will need to be carefully adjusted once we have fewer levels. But the idea of the rating decay getting bigger, so that you lose more crit or haste once you level up contradicts the very stated goal of squishing levels.
If you want gaining a level to feel big and important, making players dread all the stats they’re going to lose is one way to do it, but it’s not a good way. We saw what happened in Battle for Azeroth when the Legendaries players gained in Legion stopped working: a lot of players felt like they’d suddenly lost all of their strength and turned into easily killed tissue paper. This has always been the risk from the moment they added ratings, and compressing levels is going to exacerbate that feeling of “Oh no, I’m gonna level and drop 3% haste” unless it’s handled very delicately.
The fact is, this feeling isn’t merely justified, it’s an endemic problem with the entire concept of squishing levels. And it’s why I think squishing from 120 to 60 is too drastic. Squishing all current content to level 90 would give you an extra 30 levels to fit in talents, abilities, ratings decay and otherwise ameliorate the negative sensation of trying to fit the past fifteen years of World of Warcraft into the same levels as the original game debuted with.
When Blizzard does this, however they do it, there will be a host of issues that will need to be solved. Many I haven’t even thought of in this post, which I’m sure they’re already aware of. Some, no one has thought of yet, especially not me. If this is going to work, it will need to be done very carefully.
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A slide from BlizzCon 2013 showing an example of the item squish.
The stat squish[1][2] (also known as the item squish[3] or simply 'the squish') saw many numbers within the game scaled down, including stats on items, player and mob health, and damaging and healing abilities. The first squish was implemented in Patch 6.0.2.
The 'stat squish' strictly refers only to changes made to items, but in practice the term is often used to encompass three related changes, which in combination acted to drastically alter numbers in the game. Because these changes were implemented simultaneously, for many the sum total of the combined changes is viewed as the result of the stat squish.
- Items from level 60 through Mists of Pandaria dungeon gear were changed to use a linear instead of an exponential scale.[4] The result was that the amount of stats on items was reduced to be much lower than before. As this directly affected player stats, creature stats were reduced to compensate.[1]
- Player health was doubled (largely with the intention of making damage and healing less 'spiky').[4]
- Base damage was removed from spells and abilities, with damage now being calculated purely from Attack Power or Spell Power (with the intention of improving scaling and tuning across classes)[4][1]
- In addition, players were changed to deal bonus damage against lower-level creatures from past expansions, and to take reduced damage from them.[1]
The combined result of this was to drastically reduce numbers throughout the game, while maintaining damage and health proportions between players and creatures; to make damage and healing less 'spiky' and burst-oriented; to improve spell and ability damage scaling and tuning; and to make it easier for players to tackle lower-level content from past expansions.
- 4The solution
Official statement
- Character progression is one of the defining characteristics of a role-playing game. Naturally, that means that we're continuously adding more power to the game for players to acquire. After 4 expansions and over 9 years of this growth, we've gotten to a point where the numbers involved are no longer easy to grasp. And worse, much of the granularity that's available is tied up in tiers of older content from Molten Core to Dragon Soul, none of which are really relevant anymore. It's no longer necessary for Borean Tundra quest gear to be nearly twice as powerful as Netherstorm quest gear, even though the two zones are only a couple of levels apart.
- In order to bring things down to an understandable level, we've reduced the scale of stats throughout the game, back to as if they continued scaling linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 90. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear, other items... everything. Your stats and damage have been reduced by a huge amount, but so have creatures' health. For example, your [Fireball] that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of its 3,000,000 health (15% of its health), may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health). In effect, you will still be just as powerful, but the numbers that appear will be more easily parsed.[1]
History
The concept was first aired in a developer blog posted on November 3, 2011, regarding the numbers in the game growing larger than envisioned over the course of WoW's first decade. Blizzard is now trying to scale back the power that item level provides to make the numbers a bit more manageable. Stat inflation began in earnest during Wrath of the Lich King with the development of hard modes and the insertion of a fourth raid tier sending item levels far higher than they were originally anticipated to reach by the end of the expansion.
The stat squish was demonstrated in action for the first time to players two years later at BlizzCon 2013, and went live with the World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor mechanics pre-patch in Patch 6.0, a few weeks before the expansion was released with the new content.
Blizzard has stressed that the item squish will not affect the relative difficulty of killing any creature, or the ability to solo old content. As of Blizzcon 2013 they had yet to reveal how they will accomplish the latter, but an idea Ghostcrawler tweeted months earlier involved buffing high level players in low level raids to compensate for the reduced relative power. During a Q&A session, a dev said 'If players could kill Gulp Frogs on the Timeless Isle in five seconds before the squish, it will take five seconds to kill them after the squish.'
The squish will however affect damage and healing ability output more than player health, in order to reduce the importance of burst in combat.[5] For example, a tank may find their health reduced from something like 1 million to around 400k health at the start of the expansion. This is intended to make combat less concerned with burst and quick reflexes.
The issue
Level cap | Tier | Item level | Δprev |
---|---|---|---|
60 | 1 | 66 | N/A |
2 | 76 | 10 | |
3 | 86 | 10 | |
70 | 4 | 120 | 34 |
5 | 133 | 13 | |
6 | 146 | 13 | |
6.5 | 159 | 13 | |
80 | 7 | 213± | 54 |
8 | 226± | 13 | |
9 | 245± | 19 | |
10 | 264± | 19 | |
85 | 11 | 359+ | 95 |
12 | 378+ | 19 | |
13 | 397± | 19 | |
90 | 14 | 496± | 99 |
15 | 522± | 26 | |
16 | 553± | 31 | |
100 | 17 | 670± | 117 |
18 | 695± | 25 |
Over the course of five expansions, the power level jumps between tiers within an expansion have far outpaced character level. At the time, this made sense, as moving to a new tier of content should mean a jump in player power level commensurate with the creature power level in the new tier. In other words, a new tier of loot should always feel like an upgrade to the previous tier. Blizzard approves of large jumps between tiers, as they can tune raid encounters to be extremely punishing for cutting-edge raiders (still mostly geared from the previous tier) yet still accessible for other players who may not see the later fights or higher difficulty levels until they have grown much more powerful by obtaining current gear.
This is all well and good, but nearly a decade has passed since the release of the game. The power level jump between Molten Core (tier 1) and Blackwing Lair (tier 2), or even between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm is utterly inconsequential in the era of Throne of Thunder (tier 15) and Siege of Orgrimmar (tier 16). As a result of the successive power jumps, currently near the end of Mists of Pandaria, the average damage-specialized raider has more than 600,000 health (more than most bosses in Molten Core) and is individually dealing more than 240,000 damage per second (nearly as much as an entire 25-player raid attempting heroic Al'Akir).
Additionally, bosses have run into issues where their maximum health has grown too high. WoW stores health values in signed 32-bit integers, which have a maximum value of 2^31 - 1, or 2,147,483,647. Ra-den, the heroic-only boss of Throne of Thunder, starts at roughly 1,500,000,000 health in 25-player mode. As part of the fight, if players make mistakes his health could increase to the point where it would overflow. In order to avoid repeating the problem, Garrosh Hellscream must heal (from 10% to full) several times with a smaller maximum health pool than would otherwise be necessary.
The table on the right provides an overview of the item level-vs-character level change over the course of the raid tiers of World of Warcraft. For the sake of simplicity, the table only shows the 'normal' item level of most armor pieces and items in a tier. The table does not show Raid Finder, Flexible, or Heroic difficulties, nor Thunderforged/Warforged random drops, nor 10-man raids which varied from 7-13 ilvls behind during Wrath, nor raid end bosses' higher ilvl drops, nor Pandaria's NPC upgrades. It should be stressed that all of these give rise to considerable variation. By the time of the Siege of Orgrimmar items drop in no fewer than six different types (RF, Flex, Normal, Normal Warforged, Heroic, Heroic Warforged) and combined with the NPC upgrades, SoO gear ranges from 528 for stock Raid Finder gear up to 580 for 2/2 upgraded Heroic Warforged. As there will still be four difficulties in Warlords of Draenor this wide variation is expected to remain as well.
The solution
Wow Level Squish Flying
A chart showing player power by level before and after the squish
Please note: While the item squish has already been implemented in the expansion's beta, precise numbers have not yet been recorded and may still be in flux. The numbers here represent projections from earlier presentations.
Wow Level Squish Chart
Rather than having massive jumps between tiers in an older expansion, and from one expansion to the next, the plan in Warlords of Draenor is to flatten out the power curve. In all previous expansions' tiers, there will be a minimal jump from one tier (and one expansion) to the next, and the effective power that item level provides will be scaled back. The current expansion will still have notable power jumps between tiers, just like before.
From the 'Pruning the Garden of War' blog post:
Dev Watercooler: Pruning the Garden of War | 2014-02-28 02:00 | Blizzard Entertainment
In order to bring things down to a more understandable level, we'll be reducing the scale of stats throughout the game and smoothing out those obsolete spikes, so that power scales linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 85. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear... everything. And while that means your numbers for stats and damage are being reduced by a huge amount, the same goes for creatures' health and damage output. For example, a Fireball that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of his 3,000,000 health (15% of its health) may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health).It's important to understand that this isn't a nerf—in effect, you’ll still be just as powerful, but the numbers that you see will be easier to comprehend. This also won't reduce your ability to solo old content. In fact, to provide some additional peace of mind, we're implementing further scaling of your power against lower-level targets so that earlier content will be even more accessible than it is now.
Numbers
Prior to the expansion's alpha test, Celestalon tweeted that the 'squish [was] applied across the board (numbers about ~4% of what they were). Except player health, which is at ~8%.'[6]
As of July's beta build, many level 100 characters have around 250,000 health in epic ilvl 660 gear.[7] Items with around 2,400 stamina in Mists will provide around 100 stamina in Warlords.[8]
Earlier information
Using the numbers seen at BlizzCon 2013, the table below lists stats for a random level 90 gnome frost mage wearing similar PvE-focused item level 538 gear before and after the squish. Note that the stats are not exactly the same because the gear wasn't an exact match.
Stat | Before | After |
---|---|---|
Health | 525,775 | 38,875 |
Mana | 315,000 | 19,939 |
Stamina | 27,098 | 1,203 |
Intellect | 23,620 | 1,113 |
Spell Power | 33,225 | 1,473 |
Wow Level Squish Old Content
![Wow Level Squish Wow Level Squish](/uploads/1/1/9/7/119770223/887800204.png)
At the same time, level 90 mobs drop from having 393,000 health to roughly 40,000 health. Main attacks (like [Frostbolt]) also fall from doing nearly 50,000 damage to roughly 2,000.
Notes
- A new stat squish took place in the pre-patch of World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. This stat squish also included an item level squish.[9]
- A level squish will occur in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.[10]
Patch changes
- Patch 6.0.2 (2014-10-14): Implemented.
References
- ^ abcdePatch 6.0.2#Stat squish
- ^Patch 6.0.2 Now Live: The Iron Tide Crashes into Azeroth (2014-10-14).
- ^Greg 'Ghostcrawler' Street 2011-11-04. Dev Watercooler - The Great Item Squish (or Not) of Pandaria. Retrieved on 2013-11-12.
- ^ abc6.0.2 Stat Squish & Leveling Concerns (official forums) (2014-10-15).
- ^Celestalon on Twitter (2014-06-30).
- ^https://twitter.com/Celestalon/status/442150239672094721
- ^Minor Upper Blackrock Spire Changes, Rob Pardo Leaves Blizzard, Stat Squish and PvP Tank Posts. Wowhead (2014-07-03).
- ^Feedback on the Stat Squish (2014-07-02).
- ^BlizzCon 2017
- ^World of Warcraft: Shadowlands#Leveled-up leveling
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