World Of Warcraft Mobs Scale With Item Level, Players Ain't Happy

World of Warcraft players are a bit upset to learn that level 110 mobs scale with their gear score, after a revealing post on the WoW forums by game director Ion Hazzikostas, aka Watcher. The change was not announced, or included in the patch notes, and was intended to have a subtle impact. Healers noticed.

As of right now, scaling seemingly needs to be tweaked, as players in top-shelf gear feel an underwhelming sense of power, the exact opposite sensation you want after dungeon stomping for epic loot. As of this writing, it's an advantage to take off your gear before fighting a mob, to weaken it thanks to the item level scaling.

The WoW team intends to tweak this issue, and Watcher explained at length the thought process behind the change: keeping world content meaningful (since it plays such a large role in Legion) by preventing players from mindlessly rolling through content with top-tier gear.

The intent of our change in 7.2 was to smooth out that progression curve a bit, not flatten it out, and certainly never to invert it. If you get a great set of item upgrades that make you 5% stronger, maybe the world gets 1-2% tougher. Perhaps instead of getting 400% stronger over the course of the expansion relative to the outdoor world, you only get 250% stronger. But you should always be getting more powerful in relative terms, and upgrades should always matter. From some reactions so far, it sounds like we may be off on that tuning. And as noted above, the fact that unequipping items can ever be helpful is a bug that we'll be investigating and fixing. -Watcher

Are you playing Legion? Have you experience issues with gear-level-mob-scaling?