When the 7.2 update launched for World of Warcraft, Blizzard made a change where creatures not only scaled with your level but also your item level. This was kind of snuck into the patch (although not really) and was eventually explained by Blizzard when the patch released.
This was quite a change for players and not everybody was happy with this non-surprise. Blizzard realised the system wasn’t perfect when it launched and have now pushed further changes live to address the scaling.
It’s clear that we need to make some changes here, so here are our current plans:
- We’re removing the increase to damage dealt by creatures in the world. Our overall goal with this change is to keep the amount of time it takes to kill a creature from getting ridiculously short, and increasing the damage they deal is unnecessary for that goal. Instead, this was making you feel like they were becoming more dangerous, which was not our intent.
- We’re significantly reducing the rate at which creature health scales with your item level. Again, all we’re trying to do here is prevent cases where monsters die too quickly for players to react to their presence, particularly around World Quests. Our initial tuning was far more aggressive than it needed to be, which could make it feel like your upgrades weren’t actually helping. This change will make it very clear that you are still becoming noticeably stronger than your enemies as your gear improves.
- Those two changes are already live, and you should be seeing them in-game now.
- Later today, we’ll be correcting a separate issue that’s causing unequipping an item to drastically alter the power of enemies you’re facing. The above changes make it so that’s never the right thing to do anyway, but this is still a strange/buggy interaction that needs to be fixed.
So why the change now? According to Blizzard, there was no significantly negative feedback from players when the changes were live on the World of Warcraft PTR servers prior to release.
