Blizzard is making changes to WoW enemy scaling following mass complaints

Recently, Blizzard introduced some changes to the way that enemy scaling works in World of Warcraft, a move that swiftly drew the disapproval of the player base. Now after receiving so many complaints, Blizzard has agreed to address concerns and make changes.

These significant changes were made during WoW's 7.2 patch. The biggest change was having enemies scale to item levels instead of character levels and it seems that Blizzard may have foreseen this being a controversial move, as this change was also kept out of the patch notes.

While the scaling changes weren't mentioned in the patch notes, it didn't take long for WoW players to figure out what was going on and launch their complaints in Blizzard's direction. As a result, the following changes are now being made:

• 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, (live by the time you read this) 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.

Interestingly enough, this particular scaling change had been implemented in the Public Test Realm back in January. It seems that Blizzard did not receive any negative feedback about it at the time, so it decided to bring it to the wider player base.

KitGuru Says: It is always good to see a studio react swiftly to player and make changes when needed. Hopefully the changes being made will help out. Are any of you still playing World of Warcraft? I haven't jumped back in yet this year, though I have been getting the urge to play again recently. 

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