Mob Scaling

Hey guys! We've been discussing the continued concerns about the speed of leveling since the pre-patch and we have a couple of updates to share with you.

Since the pre-patch we've made a large number of hotfixes and changes to leveling content, and are continuing to find and fix bugs wherever possible. The intention was never to make leveling slower than it was in 7.3.5.

If you're still finding it slower that it was a couple of weeks ago after those hotfixes, specifics about where you are, what you're fighting, and what spec you're playing would be extremely helpful for identifying any remaining issues.

There is also a bit of weirdness at the moment with mob HP once you reach Legion content. Essentially due to de-powering the Artifact, we needed to make outdoor Legion mobs weaker than earlier content; otherwise, max level players would find themselves suddenly having a much harder time with outdoor world content such as World Quests. The development team realizes that this is resulting in a very jarring experience moving from Draenor to the Broken Isles, and plans to adjust Legion content to be more in-line with where it should be as leveling content in a future patch.

Thank you guys for your continued feedback on this!

07/25/2018 10:21 AMPosted by Beps

Thanks for an actual response this time Ythisens. Unlike last time when you were discussing philosophy with the playerbase instead of acknowledging the elephant in the room.

Yeah the confusing thing about that thread yesterday was that it was about philosophy of feedback, but once I stated it it was quickly bombarded (understandably) with things that are currently issues.

07/25/2018 10:21 AMPosted by Beps

The issue is that it STARTED getting slower in 7.3.5.. Going back to 7.3.5 leveling is better than what we have now sure, but it's not what we want.

You're right the curve was adjusted to be smoother and a little bit slower in 7.3.5, so in comparison that would feel amazing, however that change was one that some players actually do enjoy. While its not what you want, some players did like that. I personally think it's slower and preferred it before the 7.3.5 patch(cause I'm the kind of player that wants to level really fast and just have more alts) but I understand why it was changed and recognize there are players that do like that change. I thought it felt equally jarring that someone could go from 1-100 in a matter of a few hours. The 7.3.5 patch felt like a solid middle ground between how it was in Classic/The Burning Crusade and to how it was pre 7.3.5 at least to me.

07/25/2018 10:39 AMPosted by Gohtak

Anecdotal evidence as seen through these threads would indicate that the majority of your player base fall squarely on the other side of the issue.

I totally get what you're saying but, you only have your side of what you see which people who are usually complacent and happy don't have complaints about it. Also critical posts typically are the ones that people rally behind rather than positive, which is just how the internet works, but its fine just explaining the perspective. You also have to realize that WoW has millions of players, only a small percentage of them post on the forums. So while it seems anecdotal, for the development team they have data for these kinds of decisions.

07/25/2018 10:41 AMPosted by Gigabear

I'm having a lot of difficulty finding the players who enjoy this slowed leveling in the sea of those complaining quite loudly that they do not. Not saying they don't exist, just saying they are proving very uncommon. And while it is true the forums heavily favor complaints, I did not see a massive outcry over the inclusion of Elixir of Rapid mind and Ancient Knowledge.

Also, WoW has been iterated on for many MANY years since BC/vanilla. The players who enjoyed that sort of thing have gravitated away naturally over time to be replaced by players who acclimated to a certain leveling speed.

This trend was accelerated by the LFD tool, and likely made irreversible by the inclusion of LFR. It's simply not the same playerbase you had. And those same players who prefer the old style will be getting it back 100% when Classic drops anyway.

Retail should be retail. WoW is a themepark MMO now, and there is simply too much waiting in line to get on the rides.

Yeah its kinda hard to see the positive sometimes, I spoke about this in the first reply in this post so just copy past that here! (That was kind of convenient!). I was surprised at that as well. Really the flasks were kind of a niche thing that didn't really have a whole lot of use with players. Especially since they weren't as easy to get, I do miss the gold you got from selling the Rapid Mind flasks though.

It's like you said a challenge when you're used to something for so many years. It was something the team had identified and wanted to fix for awhile but finally had the chance with that patch.

07/25/2018 10:43 AMPosted by Cameryn

Ythisens, have you looked into the issues regarding the drastic reduction in leveling XP in dungeons when grouped with someone who is at the max level of that particular expansion?

Thanks for this! I'll pass that on.

07/25/2018 10:45 AMPosted by Aedyrdrys

This character has been leveling completely after the prepatch came out and I've tried to keep records:

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20766256516#post-8

This is pretty great! Pretty cool treating the experience as a journal and the decisions you're making, as well as how it feels post 7.3.5.

If any of the communication thus far, or the lack of visible action, has given the impression that we don't consider the issues raised in this thread and others like it to be a problem, I'd like to emphatically state that nothing could be farther from the truth.

At this point, the feel and pacing of the level-up experience is a top priority for the team. We made deliberate changes to the feel of combat six months ago in 7.3.5, moving away from a world where low-level players (especially with heirlooms) could often kill outdoor enemies in 3-4 seconds, and where dungeon mobs died so quickly that a caster with a long windup might not even get a single spell off. Those changes were controversial at the time, but we stand by them as an improvement to the overall pacing of the game. But we also think that those changes went quite far enough, and have absolutely no desire or intent to continue moving in that direction. Nothing about the pre-patch was deliberately intended to make combat take longer than it did previously.

So why haven't we fixed it yet? Honestly, because we genuinely don't know where exactly the problem lies, and we don't want to make a blind blanket change that actually misses the real source of the problem. That's why much of Ythisens' and others' messages thus far have been asking the community for detailed examples to guide our search.

We "squished" stats and item levels, but this was done with the aim of being neutral with respect to the duration and lethality of combat. When we heard complaints about things taking too long to kill, we immediately assumed we'd gotten those calculations wrong. But a look at the raw data didn't suggest any clear anomalies. So we started testing empirically: We can run internal 7.3.5 builds, so we set up test characters (e.g. a level 70 wearing appropriate quest gear awarded by quests around that level - Item Level 115 in 7.3.5, Item Level 79 in 8.0.1) and fight outdoor enemies in 7.3.5, and then take the same character in 8.0.1 and fight the same enemies, and compare.

We are seeing the same sort of discrepancies that folks in this thread and others have pointed out, but still have yet to pinpoint the exact aspect of scaling that we failed to account for. We want to understand WHY the numbers are off and fix the underlying cause: Were stats on gear reduced too much? Some aspect of creature armor or other combat calculations? Are our baseline values accurate, but the shape of the scaling curve wrong such that it’s particularly far off the mark in the 60-80 range? We would prefer a targeted solution versus just applying a bandaid fix that could mask deeper issues that could cause problems down the line, but at some point it’s not fair to give you a degraded experience for the sake of that investigation, so we’ll likely go ahead with a blanket health reduction in the near future while we continue to investigate.

Either way, the current state is not the game experience we intended, and it’s something we will fix.

There is another issue tangentially related to this discussion that I also would like to address: Many feel that it takes too long to level in the 60-80 range in particular, and that the combat pacing issues discussed here are just a piece of that larger problem. We agree – currently players are taking about 15% longer per level, on average, in that range as compared to before 60 or after 80. We’re in the process of assembling a set of changes that will smooth out the experience curve at level 60 and beyond, reducing the experience requirements for those levels.

We’ll have further updates as specific changes roll out, but we’re prioritizing our work on this problem and hoping to get these improvements out to everyone in the coming days.

We've just applied a hotfix that reduces the damage dealt by creatures between level 1 and 100 by up to 16%, and reduces their health by up to 24%. Until a subsequent fix (targeted for next week) to update clients with the new data, unit frames may not reflect the change in creature health, but combat should be faster and a bit less lethal across the board while leveling.

Thank you for your patience - we'll continue to monitor both logs and feedback closely, and will make further tweaks if needed.