I've been thinking in the past few days about scaling in PvP. My suggestion for the ideal level scaling for a game was one where there was no scaling for PvP, so that "the numbers actually mean something".
But maybe exponential power inflation is unavoidable. Even if it's just 30% per expansion, which would be ~10% for three raid tiers, with 10 expansions that's still 14 times the original power. Even with just linear power scaling, 10 expansions from lvl 60 to lvl 160 would be 2.7 times the original power, and the tooltips for Season of Discovery in Classic WoW showed that WoW has always had a quadratic component to power scaling, to make the power increase going from lvl 59 to 60 somewhat more than 1.7%.
Definitely seems like games can do better than the 'everything is always your level', seen in retail WoW during leveling and in other games that I don't really care about and so won't mention. (During my military training in 2006, my roommate played an Elder Scrolls game that I think had this kind of level scaling.)
That is: an apparent increase in power by X% from gaining one level can manifest as an actual increase in power for 'same-level' mobs that a player is expected to be fighting, while being a lower percent or even 0% when fighting mobs outside of that level range. This suggestion that I made:
Level-scale mobs so they are always green-con, never gray
I don't think this is the best solution myself, but let's see how it does in votes compared to the survey question about retail-type level scaling.
Don't scale mobs that are above the player's level. Only increase the level of mobs, so that all mobs are at least green-con and award experience.
This means that at lvl 60, all mobs (except critters) would be at least lvl 48. Any mob that is above lvl 48 would be unaffected. Warlocks would be able to farm Soul Shards off of any mob.
Any level scaling has economic consequences, but let's ignore those and say that the economy (and economic incentives to kill various mobs) ends up fine.
I've been pointing out problems that result when the power difference between players is too large. And 'too large' might even be more than like, twice the health and damage. If one player has twice the health and damage of another, they can expect a 50% chance of winning even if the stronger player starts at 25% health and the other player at full.
So if you wanted to scale players in PvP, how would you do it?
It seemed like there would be a brief period, close to lvl 1, where players really would be weak; like, a 'potential strength' component, which starts at 33% at lvl 1 and increases to 100% by lvl 15 like a parabola. (Math is like X*(2-X/15)+7.5.) Then you would just restrict the power difference, to like three times as strong. A lvl 150 character would be three times as strong as a lvl 15 character. A lvl 100 character would also be three times as strong, and so would a lvl 50 character. The lvl 150 and 100 characters would be three times as strong as a lvl 35 character, but the lvl 50 character would only be 1.5 times as strong, depending on how the scaling works and how much is 'raw stats' and how much is combat biases like resist and miss rates when fighting higher levels.
You also have to ask, "what if one lvl 150 character has four times the raw stats of another lvl 150 character due to out-of-control power scaling? What happens if those characters fight? What if they both fight the same lvl 15 character?"
But anyway, this post is about a different issue. Apparently retail WoW has a class that passively heals 20% of its HP every five seconds or something. This is about why such mechanics are bad.
Not just unrealistic and stupid; not a 'roleplaying' type of mechanic. Bad for gameplay. Conservation of Ninjutsu: the more ninjas (or plural ninja, like "seven samurai") there are, the weaker each of them is. Players would like for fighting one opponent to provide a reasonable amount of challenge, but also like to try difficult things, and so would like for fighting three opponents to not be an impossible challenge.
"Regenerating 20% HP every five seconds" is like reducing total incoming rate of damage, which scales linearly with opponents. If it cancels half of the damage of one opponent (in Rav's video about endgame retail WoW, it healed all of the damage he did in an interval), it's like a 50% damage reduction against one opponent, but just a 17% damage reduction against three opponents or a 10% reduction against five opponents. It makes fighting more opponents even harder than Lanchester's laws would dictate, which say that fighting five opponents should be about 25 times as hard as one. (It could also be analyzed as 5+4+3+2+1 = 15 times as hard, with no heals or crowd-control like stuns on either side.)
Sort of like the armor mechanics in Aion: armor subtracted from damage, rather than reducing it multiplicatively. So if my cleric's armor reduced damage by 40, and one opponent had 200 attack and another had 80 attack, my armor reduced one attack to 160 (20% reduction) and the other to 40 (50% reduction). Making the easy fight even easier, but not affecting the hard fight much. This is why I wore cloth armor: I valued the outcome of a bunch of low-level characters being able to kill me (I saw this as a good thing) more than I valued a slight increase in my survivability against a strong opponent.
Good mechanics should work the opposite: provide less benefit against an already-weak opponent than against a strong opponent.
WoW has always had healing-over-time spells, like Renew. In combat they act somewhat similar to the "regenerate 20% HP every five seconds", in that they seem less effective against many enemies, but using them was a choice that cost mana. In 1v1 combat, these HoTs could sometimes provide little real benefit, compared to using the mana for immediate heals. The benefit in Classic is often just that Renew is instant, so it means 1.5 seconds that can be used to run in a certain direction (whether or not combat is occurring), potentially 1.5 seconds more of mana regen if no further spells are cast, and the cast cannot be interrupted the way Flash Heal can be if used in combat. The mana efficiency is similar, though Renew might be a little better if talented; and mana is the real limiter in many situations. Being able to use Shadow Word: Pain on multiple enemies is an example of mechanics that make fighting multiple enemies easier, not harder, at least until the priest's mana runs out while most enemies are still at half health.
Written 01 Apr 2026, published 17 Oct 2026 at 20:12.
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