World Of Warcraft's Surprise Enemy Gear-Scaling Changes Explained

Blizzard Entertainment has responded to the feedback surrounding World of Warcraft's controversial enemy-scaling changes. It was recently discovered that enemy health values in the MMO could change depending on the level of the items you have equipped. This significant change, which Blizzard reportedly said it was against last year (via Eurogamer), is now being changed in response to what players said about it.

In a forum post today, Blizzard said it is now "significantly reducing the rate at which creature health scales with your item level." In fact, this change is already available in World of Warcraft.

"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," Blizzard explained. "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."

Another notable change that is now live in the game is that Blizzard is cutting back the enemy damage-dealing values. "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," Blizzard said. "Instead, this was making you feel like they were becoming more dangerous, which was not our intent."

Blizzard went on to say that some of the above-mentioned changes were already available in World of Warcraft through the 7.2 Public Test Realm patch, and even date back to January. The developer did not tells players about it right away because the studio wanted "raw and honest feedback."

"When that feedback never came, we assumed that meant it was an acceptable change--i.e., those who hadn't noticed it weren't bothered by it, and those who had noticed it thought it was fine," Blizzard said. "Clearly that was a false assumption, and we should have drawn attention to it later in the PTR cycle, so that we could have caught these issues before Patch 7.2 went live."