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).

2^28 is in the 27M range, which is becoming more and more realistically obtainable.

Nah 2^28 is 268M on my calculator, which gives us a bit longer.

@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.

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

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.

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.