I love how the 1st 5 comments were all about Rifts.

Mega damage just sounds awful. Especially considering it would also be applied to players health. "12M" doesn't work out so good when you have to display a damage on a scale much smaller than the "mega" scale would show it. So "11.0432M" ? No.

Flatten the stats. Let the people who are worried that their health or damage no longer displays in a 6-digit number complain for a couple of weeks, while the rest of the people get used to it. The people who would complain never realized or played in Burning Crusade when 7000HP was a shitload to a non-tank.

Oh yeah - remembering a laser gun only doing 1-2 damage. 1-2 mega-damage.

I would feel very weird if that meant that non-crits did no damage to my prot warrior...

Well, to be fair, this isn't a matter of 1.2 MEGADAMAGE, it would almost cetainly work like the current health where it goes up to 99,999 and then becomes K or M.

So you'd be doing 12,000 MEGADAMAGE.

12,000 MEGADAMAGE seems pretty reasonable to me. And honestly, I ADORE the feeling of ever exponentially increasing godlyness - knowing that I am now mathematically millions of times more powerful than I was when I was level one is one of the things that I love best about WoW.

So in short, if they did implement MEGADAMAGE (especially if they implement that little crit graphic. :D) I'd be delighted.

Some day, I want to go to Molten Core and one-shot Ragnaros. This will let me do that.

@Deathknighty - The compression method would let you do that too, because his health would go down the same percentage that your damage did. Everything will stay exactly the same in relation to each other, it's just reduced overall. At least that's my interpretation of the post.

No, that's the thing, it wouldn't work like that. The high levels are compressed more than the low levels. This is what would happen if they put it in the way you are imagining it:

Level 85 character with 120,000 health becomes level 85 character with 4,000 health.

Level 1 character with 42 health becomes level 1 character with 1.4 health.

See the problem? They will never implement that because it would just be bad. What they mean by "squish" is not squish as in squish from the top down, but squish the top and the bottom together.

They wouldn't be reducing health by 30 times, they'd be reducing the rate of power gain as you level by 30 times. This would destroy soloing, and make leveling a character to max level much less satisfying.

All they need to do to make the mega damage system work is not have 1.2, 12, 120, or even 1200 mega damage but have it start the way K and M start with health numbers. There's nothing at all ridiculous about 99,999K damage, the number looks reasonably large already. And then when it moves to M, it's starting at 100M. They could even make it start at 1000M, that works just as well. And the math problem could be sorted (I assume, I know nothing about programming so forgive me if I'm wrong here) by keeping all numbers at 5 or 6 significant figures, and then adding the zeros back on at the end.

I'm saddened to see how many people find the big squish to be a good idea, if they do end up implemented it I'll be a sad pandaren. :(

Talia, it wouldn't work exactly like that. Item Squish is basically just cutting out all the ilvl jumps in previous raid/season tiers, since they're no longer relevant. Please excuse me while I got into bullet point mode...

A) Molten Core mobs probably won't be scaled down because they're the first raid tier. BWL and AQ mobs might be scaled down closer to MC levels. The gear from all these raids, however, WOULD be scaled down closer to MC levels.

B) All BC mobs - from Hellfire Peninsula to Kil'jaeden - would need to be adjusted so that the power curve continues from the start of Vanilla's raid levels, as opposed to the end of Vanilla's raid levels (although in this scenario, the end would be the same, or close to, the beginning...but nevermind that). Further, all later raids might be scaled down closer to the beginner raids.

C) All Wrath mobs - from Borean Tundra to the Lich King - would need to be adjusted so they start from BC's newly adjusted beginner raids. Further, all Wrath raids might be scaled down to Naxxramas levels.

D) So on and so forth.


The main thing to take away from here is that, while most raids WILL be scaled down, your relative power level will be much closer to these old raid bosses than before the squish. The giant jumps between each expansion would no longer exist, which Figure 5 illustrates very well. Cata gear would only give you 2x - 3x the required ilvl to defeat Ragnaros (with a raid), compared to today's 7x - 8x the required ilvl.

I could've shortened that...

tl;dr:
Cata gear would only give you 2x - 3x the required ilvl to defeat Ragnaros (with a raid), compared to today's 7x - 8x the required ilvl.

Attempting to solo Ragnaros in post-squish Cataclysm gear would be roughly the same as attempting to solo him in pre-squish Burning Crusade gear. Good luck with that. ;)

Rifts! I had flashbacks to Robotec (where they first brought out the MDC system) but back then it kind of did not feel as weird because that was human tec being "juiced up" by Robotech (thus Robotec weapons could damage Roboteched objects but normal "SDC" tec was gona get squashed)

Back then a 1-2 MDC shot was no big deal because that was still enough to junk most "light armor" objects like trucks.

"I love how the 1st 5 comments were all about Rifts."

Maybe it's because that's the game (pen and paper) that the term "mega damage" came from...

Not to be that guy, but Mega Damage was first used in the Palladium series of Robotech roleplaying books. Those predated Rifts by a number of years.

Not to be that guy, but Mega Damage (MDC) was first used in Palladium's series of Robotech roleplaying books, that predated RIFTS by a number of years.

Um, not sure what happened there.. but sorry for the double reply.