I'm pretty sure everything in the game would be lowered if the squish were to happen.

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.

@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.

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.

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?

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?

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).

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.

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 !