Ol' Grumpy and the grimoire of gear inflation
by Matthew Rossi 
Nov 8th 2011 at 5:00PM
Gear inflation has actually been a concern of mine since about halfway through Wrath of the Lich King's expansion cycle. Back then, it was armor penetration that really set off my gear inflation warning bells, a stat that's since gone the way of the dodo. If you remember ArP, you remember that it start acting extremely weird at higher gear levels and often had to be adjusted and capped to keep it from doing things like reducing target armor into the negative.
In essence, for a brief period after Ulduar dropped, ArP could actually cause your target to have negative armor values so that their damage taken was increased by a percentage instead of just reduced by a percentage. This was very wonky. It was quickly capped and the stat adjusted. But by ICC levels of gear, it was possible again to reach 100% ArP, and doing so was absolutely your best bet as a melee DPS.
Now, let's be honest: Gear inflation is the inevitable by-product of a game where one increases in power via leveling and gaining new gear. It must happen. If you simply look at gear from original World of Warcraft's 1 to 60 game, you'll see that gear steadily increases in power and that raid gear from MC to BWL/AQ and to the now-vanished Naxxramas-40 steadily increases in power. Indeed, Naxx-40 gear was such an upgrade in power that it was roughly as strong as blue drops from level 70 instances. You could raid Karazhan in Naxx-40 gear. The Burning Crusade dealt with gear inflation differently than its successors did because it could.
What got us here
Gear inflation in the current game is the legacy of Wrath of the Lich King's runaway success and its extrapolation of the BC model of badge gear. BC introduced the badge system with badges of justice, which served as a form of currency allowing people running heroic mode 5-man dungeons and later raids (badges were originally only found in 5-mans but were later also given to raid bosses) to purchase items to supplement or even replace their current gear. It was intended to help players who simply couldn't get a specific piece to drop, but as new tiers of raiding were released and new item vendors were placed into the game, badge gear itself became a means for players to leapfrog content. Many guilds farmed Karazhan and ZA for badges they used to buy gear in order to raid Mount Hyjal, Black Temple and Sunwell, bypassing previous raids like Tempest Keep and SSC. (This was made viable by the removal of raid-wide attunements.)
By the end of The Burning Crusade, the system was fairly well established, but Wrath of the Lich King went further in making raiding accessible with both 10- and 25-man versions of every raid while also creating the first heroic mode raiding. When this was first implemented, it took the form of the infamous Sartharion encounter. You could go into the Obsidian Sanctum, clear all the adds and the three mini-boss drakes, and engage Sartharion for a fairly straightforward fight. Or you could leave the three drakes up, engage Sartharion, and fight each of the drakes as they added to the fight. You could do the fight with one, two, or all three drakes alive and get progressively better loot and a chance at a mount.
Rough beasts, heroic modes, and spiralling upwards
The inclusion of heroic modes in a similar vein in Ulduar (including Algalon, WoW's first heroic-only boss) marked the point where the game's itemization really started to inflate. Raids started to progressively produce higher and higher ilevel gear. Vendors also continually spawned, carrying gear on par with the raids. Finally, heroic 5-mans with increasingly better gear were successively introduced. Both the Trial of the Crusade and Icecrown Citadel launches were accompanied by 5-man dungeons (one for TotC, three for ICC) with gear on part with older raids, while each new raid effectively had three tiers of loot (10-man normal, 10-man heroic/25-man normal, 25-man heroic), which meant that by the end of Wrath we were looking at ilevel 284 gear from the Lich King. Comparing epic weapons from the start of the Wrath era to the end of it gives you an idea. Comparing the Burning Crusade equivalents sets it into stark relief.
The best two-handed weapon you could get in Wrath of the Lich King does nearly twice as much damage as the first epic you were likely to get. Meanwhile, the best two-hander from The Burning Crusade does less than half again as much damage, from 109 to 148 DPS. Believe it or not, Cataclysm actually does its best to combat this trend. However, with damage going up, even just comparing the middle tier of Cataclysm's raid content with the easiest to obtain epic weapon implies that by the end of Cata's life cycle, weapon damage will have nearly doubled again.
And none of this takes into account stat inflation on every upgrade, which is a huge cause of damage inflation. Gear inflation is relative to every statistical upgrade every piece of gear causes cumulatively, and it directly affects the game. The reason bosses have millions upon millions of health now is so they can stand up to 18 or so DPSers who can each do between 20 and 30k DPS depending on fight conditions. This statistical inflation is directly the result of itemizing so many continuous upgrades in Wrath of the Lich King due to the pressure of heroic mode content requiring superior gear as a reward for its superior difficulty.
Why each expansion pushes the next upward
This matters because the legacy of that inflation affects the design of leveling zones: Cataclysm had to provide green leveling gear that approximated that level of power, dungeons and zones that challenged that level of power, and so on. The Burning Crusade solution, where people who raided the upper tier of vanilla content didn't get any upgrades until Karazhan, simply isn't a solution. You can't design content that people who've been waiting for it will breeze through with no upgrades any more than you can design content that demands all people leveling through it go kill the Lich King on heroic first. Content degrades. You have to design for the people who will be running their Deathwing-killer main to 90 in three days and for the one who's going to roll a level 1 monk and may hit 90 by 2013.
Blizzard has been aware of this for years. It wasn't really much of an issue in vanilla WoW or BC because not enough people really got to raid past BWL/AQ, and so the majority of the player base did get upgrades in questing or instancing. And going from BC to Wrath, it wasn't a problem leveling from 70 to 80 because the itemization in Wrath quest zones and dungeons caught up to Sunwell gear by around level 75 or so.
But the Wrath heroic raid and 10-/25-man itemization, combined with the success of the Dungeon Finder system and Emblem of Frost farming and the wide plethora of raid-level gear from vendors (including the first tier of ICC-level item sets), meant that more people were well geared and geared in ever-increasing item levels than ever before. In essence, designing Cataclysm so that there were no upgrades for ICC heroic level raiders until 85 would have meant that even the average player would have had to wait a while before getting one. This is why items dropping in world quests and normal mode dungeons outshone Shadowmourne. It's either that, or don't design upgrades for most players until they're raiding, which runs counter to the idea of getting players to progress through 5-mans to 5-man heroics and then to raiding.
As I said, Cata does its best to combat this trend. Even the new 5-man heroics coming in patch 4.3 only match up with itemization in the current raid; they don't blow past it. But even so, gear inflation continues and will continue until we see numbers like on these two theoretical breastplates. We could see it in patch 5.3, or 6.3, or Blizzard could even slow it to the point where we don't see it until patch 7.2. Eventually, however, we will see it, unless steps are taken to give us an entirely new kind of reset, one that resets us in some manner as well as gear.
There are two solutions mentioned in the Dev Watercooler. They're not the only possible solutions, but they're two potential ones. You can read them in that post fairly easily, I won't belabor them. Either is serviceable.
Mega-damage vs. squish
The mega-damage solution is essentially just a change in notation. Rather than expressing health as 187,999 health for your level 85 tank, it's expressed as 187K. You don't crit for 22,198 damage; you crit for 22K. We do it all the time when talking about these numbers anyway.The downside of this is simply the weirdness factor of telling someone that your level 95 tank has 129M health. The biggest problem with this is that computers (even today's) don't love it when you throw enormous numbers at them all the time.
This also has the effect oif making older content more relevant, because it means that the numbers on the mobs there can and will be adjusted closer to the numbers you'd see in current content. If BC endgame bosses drop ilevel 90 gear, then that gear is clearly superior than most of Wrath gear until you get to Wrath's endgame, and the same for Wrath bosses and Cataclysm-level gear. The squishing effect will lead to rebalancing that brings all raids closer together in terms of numbers dealt and taken across the board. Illidan in Black Temple suddenly looks a lot closer to the Lich King.
Either way, we will need to see some solution proposed and implemented to this issue. Mega-damage may be the way to go in Pandaria while squishing is fully thought out, tested and implemented. In a way, squishing is to ilevels what Cataclysm was to the old world, a vast rebalancing effort that will do more than just compress gear ilevel, it has the potential to greatly extend the life of older content and make it valuable for more players.
The news is out -- we'll be playing Mists of Pandaria! Find out what's in store with an all-new talent system, peek over our shoulder at our Pandaren hands-on, and get ready to battle your companion pets against others. It's all here right at WoW Insider!Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
musicchan Nov 8th 2011 5:13PM
To be honest, I've been worried about gear inflation since TBC came around and item values really started to rise. Then when Wrath hit and item level was all the rage, it make me wonder how the hell they were planning on maintaining the trend.
I've been playing LOTRO since it came out (as well as playing WoW since it came out) and in that game, the stats hardly raise at all at each level cap increase. It does make it harder to do older content and you definitely can't solo some of the older dungeons, but playing that game always made me wonder what it would be like if Blizzard did something similar in WoW.
I'm curious where this whole thing is going to end up. I'm not sure if I'm excited or worried, to be honest, because running old content in a duo with my husband has been some fun times for us and I'll be sad to see them go. But I just don't think we can continue the way we have been; something needs to be done.
MikeLive Nov 8th 2011 5:17PM
I feel somewhat compelled to point out that GC's statement of large numbers and computers is a little misleading. Assuming they're using 32-bit integers and floats, integer-based numbers will be fine up to the billions. For floats, magnitude is a complete non-issue, but comparing numbers of two different magnitudes will. 32-bit floats only support about 6 digits of accuracy, so having over 1M health means that it can't precisely store how much health you have. If you get attacked by something that does 1-10 damage, as futile as it sounds, you actually won't lose any health due to roundoff error.
Of course, one way to solve this problem is to go full 64-bit, then we won't have integer issues until we start doing exadamage (that's 10^18) and floats will be handle up to nearly the trillions (teradamage).
Teaspoon Nov 8th 2011 7:24PM
There was some evidence a while back that they're using 32-bit ints for damage done, so I'm guessing the same could be said of health.
The evidence was in the cap on how much damage a single spell could do. There was a warlock who mixed talents and tier bonuses to get their shadow bolts to both reset the timer on corruption and increase its tick size. One corruption and a few bazillion shadow bolts on one of those unkillable ghosts in the blast lands later, we found out that the damage cap is 2^28 -1. The assumption is that there's also one bit for the sign and three bits for the damage type (white, physical, holy, shadow, nature, fire, frost and healing).
MikeLive Nov 8th 2011 7:26PM
2^28 is in the 27M range, which is becoming more and more realistically obtainable.
Noodlenose Nov 8th 2011 9:30PM
Nah 2^28 is 268M on my calculator, which gives us a bit longer.
MikeLive Nov 8th 2011 9:31PM
@Noodlenose My bad, I just checked log10(2^28) and got 8 digits, forgot that digit count is log + 1. It's still only a matter of time.
Teaspoon Nov 9th 2011 2:04AM
I'm not in a heroic-raiding guild, and I'm a tank so I don't see a lot of what sort of numbers individual spells are pulling anyway, but I get the feeling that individual spells hitting for six digits is still going to be a crit-only thing at the end of this expansion. I've kind of lost track of how things in Cataclysm have compared to Wrath because things have been different enough (HELLO, VENGEANCE) to throw off my sense of what was normal then compared to now.
Anyway, if we're hitting for 100k now that's only using 17 of the 28 available bits. We can double our damage (which we seem to do every two tiers or so, I guess) another 11ish times before we start using that 28th bit and needing to worry about hitting for cap. By then the game'll have had to move creature health to 64-bit integers so that we're not seeing individual spells strip away 5% of the health cap at a time, and if they're switching to 64-bit there they'll probably do it to the damage cap too and we'll have another 32 bits of headroom before we approach the damage cap again.
So... I guess I don't really see the damage cap being the limiting factor on what happens to stats. It's too far off compared to the inability to fit all the digits of a crit on screen in the big writing. :P
Hierakles Nov 9th 2011 2:57AM
I remember reading a thread in the Damage Forums recently where people were discussing the hardest hitting ability. Most of it seemed to boil down to either Arcane Blast or Mind blast, with crits reported over 200k. If that's the case, our number of times dps can be doubled is already half of what's predicted.
Kelly Nov 9th 2011 9:25AM
The only flaw in your argument - If Blizzard writes the code to work on a 64-bit machine (and thus, eliminating the need for the squish), anyone who isn't running a 64-bit machine is going to have to buy a new machine (or, at the very least, a new processor).
I run a 64-bit, but if things are given to my processor in 32-bit format, my computer takes it, computes it, and moves on. If I were on a 32-bit machine and someone gave me a 64-bit integer, my machine would weep in a corner as it realizes, it's not the best anymore.
Matt Nov 8th 2011 5:18PM
One thing I am REALLY worried about is soloing old raids.
I love to go back and steamroll those raids that I never got to see since my schedule hasn't allowed for any real raiding (other than an occasional pug) since Vanilla.
If they lower my current 150k health to 20k, but don't reduce the dmg and health of bosses and trash (in all instances... including Vanilla...) by a similar amount, then I will no longer be able to go and re-live killing Ragnaros in MC, or show my friends who joined late (right before Cata) in Wrath just how much of a pain the Sunwell was, or how much fun Ulduar and ICC were without putting together a full raid, and the interest in doing that, even with transmogrification on the way, just doesn't exist on my server.
Crispn Nov 8th 2011 5:22PM
I'm pretty sure everything in the game would be lowered if the squish were to happen.
FartyMcGee Nov 8th 2011 5:48PM
I totally agree; and wonder how they might address this, given that the implication is that older bosses won't be as simple to down. One idea I've thought of is to add a modifier like the do when you attack a mob 5-ish levels above you (crushing bow damage?). Leveling up, it prevents a toon from going more quickly than they should. Looking back into old content, you could be the one delivering increase damage not because of ilvl but because of some internal modifier.
Ilmyrn Nov 8th 2011 5:44PM
@Crispin: It would be lowered, but the lower level the enemy was, the less it would be affected. So Deathwing will get hit with a mega hit, Vashj will get hit in the middle, and Hogger won't even notice.
That said, I don't buy the complaint that 'Now I can't do old raids.' Really? So now you need, say, five people to do MC instead of soloing it? Is that really such a burden? You still need near enough twenty people to do heroic 25 Lich King, and honestly, even on my medium-to-low population RP server, it's not that hard to get a raid group in there to thump LK for titles.
Deathknighty Nov 8th 2011 5:58PM
No, that's the thing that no one whatsoever seems to get. Take a look at that graph. Right now, we can get up to around 400 ilvl, and as such, if I go to MC, Ragnaros won't be much of an issue. AFTER the squish though, a moderately geared lvl 85 like myself (about 365 ilvl) equates to a current lvl 70 in Sunwell gear.
Now, because Ragnaros is vanilla level, he's not going to be scaled down me at all, so it basically equates to a lvl 70 trying to solo Ragnaros. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's remotely possible.
The players will be nerfed much more than Ragnaros will because he is level 60 content and we are level 85, and therefore need more adjusting. If the ilvl squish happens it will NOT be a matter of making the numbers of everything in the game X% smaller. That seems to be a reallyt common misconception.
madfigs Nov 8th 2011 6:10PM
I think the only reason anyone is doing MC anymore with any regularity is to farm for legendary drops, which is frustrating enough without cutting your chances down by 80%. So that would certainly suck... but on the other hand we do we really need more people spamming Thunderfury in trade chat?
ahsanali Nov 8th 2011 6:27PM
Look at the graph - the squish would only hurt you while you were in your Cata epics or MoP fresh-95 greens. The moment you got raid gear in MoP you'd again be way OP compared to Ragnaros.
Worst case you'd need to get gear from the second tier of raids in MoP before you could go back to soloing old raids. Until then you may have to take a friend or two with you.
That isn't too bad, is it?
Hih Nov 8th 2011 6:54PM
One thing they could do to ease the pain of soloing old bosses if they do go with item level squish (since it WOULD be harder, and the people saying it wouldn't because everything gets squished are flat out wrong) would be to stop making those old bosses "Skull level" and instead make them the "appropriate" level. Skull level is always a MINIMUM of your level + 3. Skulls can be higher than that, but the lowest level they can be is your level + 3 for the purposes of crit, hit, miss, etc.
If they made MC Ragnaros level 63 instead of level skull, he would now have a hard time hitting you and it would still be fairly simple to solo him, even though your gear got squished down to item level 115 (Or BC's Kara level gear).
cmichaelcooper Nov 8th 2011 7:11PM
I think the answer to this is relatively simple, as long as it is acceptable to the playerbase. I think Blizzard should borrow an idea from RIFT and after an expansion is no longer current content, they create a difficulty level of the raid that can be done solo or duo with the assistance of a couple NPCs that fill in for real players. Since there is no reason to go back and get that gear other than for transmogrification purposes, that difficulty mode could even award cosmetic gear for transmogrification.
goldeneye Nov 9th 2011 4:45AM
Generally I'm for the iSquish idea as well.
I also second the suggestion that "old raid bosses" be levelled as the level cap when it is relevant + 3 instead of your level + 3.
Sure, it doesn't make sense that, after leveling to L70 the mighty Ragnaros is missing you left, right and center, but this is an excellent example of gameplay fun > "for the lore!".
On the other hand, look at the tops of each graph after the squish...
The iLvls are pretty close. If killing old raids still gives moderately powerful gear, then why shouldn't they by moderately difficult to kill?? Maybe old bosses can get an "old skull" designation: your level + 1 and you need half the ppl to kill him than you needed when he was current. Of course, to accomodate this, why not retune the old raids to the 10-man model? That is 10 x blue geared L60's can kill them. Then at L70 you'd only need 8 blue geared, 6 x L80's, 5 x L85's.
I can see the game improving over it. Suddenly old content is both still challenging AND rewarding !
Blayze Nov 8th 2011 5:21PM
I don't want the squish. The whole point of vastly increased iLevels, for me, was one of the ways I could increase my ability to do the stuff that had just been nerfed because it was now old hat for the hardcore raiders.
Whenever anyone talks about making old content "more relevant", I get flashbacks to Vanilla and TBC with having to gear up solo to gear up in groups of five to gear up in groups of ten to gear up in groups of twenty to gear up in groups of forty in each raid in turn and don't forget to farm specific resistance sets for everybody or you won't be able to get past a specific boss designed purely to stop your progress dead in its tracks and we might as well get rid of Valour gear and raid-quality craftables too because we can't have people taking shortcuts or plugging gaps caused by a stupid RNG system that always results in the same two items dropping from each boss until the end of time...
*breathes*