WoD Squish Buff Information 16/10/14

In WoD there'll be 2 different types of behind the scenes buff that'll help our characters stay powerful against older content.

First buff I refer to as, "mob level scaling buff" and gives us a Damage/Healing and Damage Taken buff against mobs. It's directly related to our level compared to theirs but the mob must be from Cataclysm content and below. This buff is available anywhere, inside or outside instanced content.

Quick example, at 90 if you attacked a level 88 mob from MoP, you'd do your base damage. If you attacked a level 88 mob from Cata you'd gain a 13.35x Damage/Healing multiplier and a 0.375x damage Taken multiplier.

As a further point, the damage done multiplier is applied to each mob after the spell hits, so it can't be abused by storing things like a frost mages icicles from their mastery.

Also, the healing multiplier only applies to the mob being healed, not to you. There is two ways round this to gain extra self healing. Abilities that tie damage to healing work, like Death Siphon on a DK or Smite on Disc priest. And leech items, 3% leech isn't alot when you're doing 9k DPS, but when you're doing 108k DPS or 675k it adds up.

And lastly the damage taken component, this in theory should affect ALL damage and for the most part it does, it is capped at 98% reduced damage or 0.02x multiplier. Armor for melee attacks and other reductions are added onto this reduction, so although you'll never hit 0 damage taken you can get pretty close.

As of our last tests there was a few problems with this buff, for example a boss may put a debuff on you that does damage over time, sometimes the debuff was being modified by the players damage done buff and hitting incredibly hard. We hope that it'll all be fixed for 6.0 though, so no worries? :D

The second buff I like to refer to as the ilvl buff. It's the difference between the characters ilvl and the expansions base ilvl.
It's only available between levels 1 and 89. And is only active for that characters expansion level and above. As of our last tests, this buff is still only active inside an instanced zone. When the character does content below their expansion level they automatically get the mob level scaling buff instead.

Expansion	Max Player Level	Base ilvl
Vanilla		69			65
TBC		79			115
Wrath		84			200
Cata		89			346

For example to start taking advantage of the ilvl buff in Wrath content you'd need to be level 84 or below and have an ilvl over 200.

For example a level 80 with 320 ilvl would have a 3x damage/healing multiplier and a 0.02x damage taken multiplier.

Now because the ilvl buff is related to the characters ilvl, they'd do their damage and healing multipliers all the time. So on the above character I'd do 3x the damage on whatever mob I was attacking as long as it was from Wrath and inside an instanced zone.

This applies to the healing multiplier too, as long as you're inside an instance you can heal anyone and anything for the amount your ilvl buff gives you.

Damage taken multiplier works the same as the mob level scaling buff, except that it is only active in an instance and that it doesn't matter what level the mobs are.

Currently the only downsides to this buff are, it only works inside instanced zones so if you're in Icecrown questing you'll do and take the same damage with 365 ilvl as you would with 200 ilvl.

The other downside is that the buff doesn't seem as strong as it should be, so far we've put this downside down to retuning by Blizzard and the removal of the power creep from these lower levels.

An example of this would be my level 80 shaman, on live I can do approximately 6.8x the damage from my 200 ilvl gear to my 333 ilvl twink gear. In WoD it'll be about 3.2x. So at least lower levels/twinks will NOT feel as strong as they were in MoP.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V4GIK_ds5wpVFJwzl8pX9Go2lSOrLQU8QD62a5mqfdE/edit?usp=sharing - This should help those of you who care about how much damage/healing you'll be doing and how much damage you'll be taking.

Edit: As of 16 October 2014, the mob level scaling buff has been changed and this has been updated in the above spreadsheet. Old highest multiplier was 75x, is now 25x. This is an approximate 30 - 35% damage nerf to doing Vanilla - Wrath content and a 86~% buff to doing Cata content as the health levels were also adjusted.