The Spell Power Problem Everyone’s Talking About In WoW Forever

So, a few people linked this to me. I haven't looked at it yet. I'm I mean, I just kind of just saw the title. There's a post about like how much spell power each spell needs to match Wild Classic damage in Wild Forever. So, let's take a look. So, when we're looking at this chart, this guy has made a chart that's basically how much spell power is needed to hit the Wild Classic base damage. Wild Forever highest rank at level 60 damage per cast {slash} full dot duration. Well, okay, hold on. So, so people have been asking me to look at this, but this is talking about like level 60 like numbers and stuff like that. Man, you cannot take any of this stuff [music] as as fact. Just to kick it off, when it comes to Wild, particularly Classic Wild, people are real pearl clutchy. There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions, overreactions, whatever you want to call it. Something happens like, "Oh my word." Now, there's a lot of good reason for this, to be fair. And it's really just comes down to people have a very people [music] hold this game very near and dear to their hearts. And there's been a several years, maybe you know, a decade or so of distrust that has kind of been developed with Blizzard. So, people just get scared of everything. People overreact to everything. It's understandable. You know, I get it. But, we should know if we're playing a level 20 level 30 beta and we're looking ahead and we're looking at other spells and stuff, that keep in mind all those numbers might not be set in stone yet, and that's something they're actively developing and they're going to be updating over [music] time. So, just keep that in mind as like a preface to any of this stuff. You know, obviously people are making posts and stuff like that. I don't I don't want to be reductive or I don't want to downplay people's feedback or anything at all, because I think it's really important to give that feedback. This is probably like I would say this is probably the most important period of time, maybe ever, for Classic Wild at this point. Before this, I would have said it was probably like 2018 to 2019. But now, I mean, this is definitely like the most important time [music] for giving feedback and being vocal about like, "Hey, like we don't like this thing or this thing's good or bad or whatever." With that being said, let's dive in a little bit. Wow forever highest ranking level 60 damage per cast {slash} full dot duration. Okay, let's see what he's What is he trying to say here? Since each base damage of these spells reduced, I made a chart comparing Okay, which is true. By the way, this part is true. They reduced the base damage of a lot of spells. The reason why, and particularly at lower levels, they reduced the base damage of a lot of spells because what they noticed, and Blizzard was absolutely right about this, was There's a few parts to this, and I'm probably going to leave leave some parts out just because I'm not thinking about them. Before level 20 in classic Wow, spell power coefficients are reduced. Everything has a reduced spell power coefficient. It doesn't have the full spell cast time divided by 3.5 or any other like custom Some of them have like some spells have custom percentages, but the like kind of bread and butter is spell cast time divided by 3.5 equal spell power coefficient. It scales downwards from like level 19 on, and level 20 is the first level where you get the full benefit in classic Wow. What they've done in classic plus [music] in Wow forever, they were like, "Hey, let's get rid of that and just give them the full value at lower levels." But as you level up, there's going to be like a cascading scale down whenever you down rank, and it's going to be roughly the same at level 60. But [music] at lower levels, you'll get full spell power benefit, and this does two things. One, it makes it to where if you have gear with spell power on it before level 20, it's actually useful cuz that is something that is not a thing before level 20. And two, they're going to take the base damage values of spells, and they're just going to drop them. Why? Because they said, "Hey, it's crazy that melee have such a big emphasis on how good their weapon is and their damage and all that. Everything's based off of that, right? [music] So, why is it that casters, their weapon just straight up does not matter because there's no there's no real weapons with a lot of spell power on them at lower levels. So, they said, "Hey, we're going to scale everything down as far as base values go, but we're going to give you the full spell power benefit, and we're going to give you some gear with some actual spell power on it at lower levels." So, again, keep this in mind, when you have a mace that gives you plus 50 spell power, that doesn't mean I'm casting a 1 and 1/2 second flash of light and getting [music] 50 more plus healing on that flash of light. What's actually happening is I'm getting about 21 or 22 healing from that flash of light because 1.5 / 3.5 is like 0.4289 or something. It's roughly 43%. [music] Now, if it was a 3.5 second cast spell or higher, cuz it caps at 100% in vanilla, unless they change something. I made a chart comparing damaging spells across mage, warlock, shadow priest, balance druid, and elemental shaman to see how much spell power needed to reach their base damage in classic WoW. Each bar shows how much plus spell power in WoW forever a spell needs to match its WoW classic at zero spell power at level 60. Longer bars mean a bigger gap, and the dash line is the average for that class. For spells that use the highest rank available at 60, for spells with a damage range, I compared the midpoint. For dots, I counted their full duration. The base damage values come from WoW forever's talent spell book comparison, wowforever.talents.com. And the spell power values are calculated using spell power coefficients. This is a comparison of spell damage before talents, crits, and resistance. It isn't overall DPS ranking, but I thought seeing all the spells together made the difference is easier to judge. Short bar good, long bar bad. Here's the graph for healing, results are quite funny. For those who are asking about smite and holy fire, it's really bad. Spell classic base damage forever base damage forever coefficient spell power needed. Smite, 385 to 429 is the classic base damage. The forever base damage is 167 to 186. The forever coefficient is 71.4. So, you need 320 spell power to do [music] the same amount of base damage as you did before. With Holy Fire, you're looking at 355 to 449 damage, 145 dot. But in forever, you're doing 184 to 232 and then a 75 damage dot. So there's a 100% spell power coefficient, so you need 264 spell power. Now, here's my thing. We can't really take these numbers 100%. We just can't, because we don't know if stuff's going to change. But also, something to keep in mind. So what this is saying is like a fireball needs 211 spell power to do the same amount of damage at zero spell power at level 60 in vanilla. This is a max rank, you know, level 60 fireball, frostbolt, whatever. And then, as you go down, it's like warlocks need more than mages do, priests need less than mages. But warlocks, druids, and then shamans, shamans need a crap ton of spell power in order to do the same amount of damage they did before. This is something that I think is very important to note, but I think this is also a big jumping the gun, and you got to change what you're used to, because we just don't know how things are tuned exactly. We don't know how they tuned the game for like how much expected damage there is. Like how much damage do the developers expect you to be able to do in a raid environment, in a dungeon environment? Maybe they're trying to take everybody's damage and just reduce it. Because one big problem that SOD had was that they just started throwing everything at everybody, and everybody was just doing way more and more and more and more damage. Maybe something else that you should consider is, man, I have an awful lot of spell power on a level 20 character. In fact, I have like as much spell power on a level 20 character than I had whenever I hit level 60 on my caster originally, like in early vanilla patches. So maybe I'm going to have a lot of spell power whenever I hit level 60. Maybe there's just going to be more spell power on gear. So because of this, what they had to do is they had to reduce the base values and make you a little bit more gear dependent than you used to be in original vanilla. Not to say that casters weren't gear dependent at all, but melee were heavily gear dependent [music] and casters are not very gear dependent. You have a lot of high base damage in like the early patches on private servers. You have a lot of high base damage. I The reason I bring up private servers by the way and not era is because private servers had progressive itemization. So, you had the early itemization of vanilla wow that then later on changed to give you more spell power. So, I'm specifically comparing like a low spell power level 60 versus a level 60 with like early patch melee gear and some spell power. And the spell power is going to like outscale it pretty hard early. And then as vanilla goes on, as the as the game cycles through, you know, warriors scale a lot harder with their stats, all that. Rogues have like a higher floor because they just their kit and how their scaling works, whereas warriors snowball out of control. That's a whole separate discussion on like how like the meta shift and stuff from patch to patch to patch with progressive itemization stuff. So, a lot of people haven't experienced that. If you've played If you didn't play like Nostalrius, Lights Hope, Elysium, Northdale, like that era of private server and those aren't the only ones. Those are just the ones that come to mind. If you didn't play that and then you played classic in 2019, you got a more different experience playing classic 2019 from Blizzard than you would have gotten playing those private servers compared to the original vanilla because that original vanilla Nostalrius core focused on a Blizz-like representation of the game with an actual patch progression with updating the items, adding the new content in, updating the items, and doing all that stuff from patch to patch to patch to patch. And that's what made it so juicy. That's what made it so good. I'm going to not talk about that because progressive itemization is essentially a moot point and I don't think it'll ever happen from Blizzard at this point, which sucks that we never got like that version of vanilla wow from Blizzard cuz it would have been amazing. I would love to see them do that on like a fresh era or something someday. Even if I don't play it, I really think people should have the opportunity to experience that. Separate discussion. Let's keep it the spell power. I think that it's super important to consider all these things and I think that people have a tendency to kind of knee-jerk react to a lot of these things. How much plus healing restores classic base heals? I mean, the same thing. It's like, "Okay, well, you need roughly 140 plus healing across the board to reach the same sort of base healing." I think this could be okay. We just straight-up don't know. The spirit of classic we decided to keep the hyper tax. True. Good choice. Yeah, that's right, brother. They're going to have to work on tuning constantly. We don't know how the itemization points formula even works. The way they're doing their itemization, I'm sure you could figure it out, right? I'm sure you could figure out like the item level of something and like reverse engineer it, probably get the formula. We could just straight-up ask, like, "What's the itemization formula?" And if it's the same. But, your itemization formula is basically a formula based on the item level of something and the quality of something. And those two variables are thrown into a formula and you have X amount of itemization points, and the itemization points are distributed. And I'll show you another graph here. This is a real nerdy talk. I'm sorry. All right, so this is the nitty-gritty. This is just like a little bit of insight, just so you guys understand. So, there's a whole sort of like calculation that happens here to see like green item level is item slot value this whatever blah blah blah, right? Blue epic. So, basically based on the quality and based on the item level of the item. It's funny this calculates item level. You need to do it in the reverse. You start looking at the stats. This is how itemization works. So, stat mod, this is like an arbitrary itemization point. So, each point of armor is like 22. Each point of plus healing is 100. Each point of attack power is 115. Block value 150. You can see each point of spell damage is 159 if it's like a fiery wrath, if it's one school, but if it's all spell damage, it's 192. So, that's why whenever you see like something is Maybe you see something that is like eight all damage, but you'll be like 10 or 11 if it's of fiery wrath. If it's like a random green legs. Like green legs of fiery wrath might be 11 fire damage, but green legs of damage of the same item level would be like eight. The higher the number, the more budget you're spending. That's why all damage is less, right? Does that make sense? And then of course like you go all the way down to here where like parry chance is super expensive, crit chance is super expensive, spell crit is super expensive. Why am I bringing this up? This is something from vanilla wow. What do we know already from classic plus from wow forever? Here's what we know from classic plus. What we know from wow forever that melee crit and spell crit are now merged. So, because they are merged, this thing that we had in vanilla wow where chance to crit with spells is a 2600 budget cost and chance to crit with physical attacks with melee is 3200, this can't exist because these are now the same stat. So, given that we know this has to change, I don't know if they're going with this value for crit or if they're going with this value for crit or if they're going with an all new arbitrary value that they've come up with for crit. We don't We don't know that yet. I think it's pretty easy to infer that they're going to treat the budget for spell power different as well, which is why we're seeing so much spell power at low levels for the level 20 beta. So, I don't think this is something to have a huge concern over. I think it's important to know and I think it's important to understand, but I don't think there should be like this big [music] pearl clutching knee-jerk reaction to it because there's so many things behind the scenes and like under the hood of vanilla wow that a lot of people just they don't really interact with. Like a lot of people don't know because it doesn't really matter to the average player. Now, the building blocks of this game are very intricate. That's what makes this game so cool. Like I love stuff like this. I love the itemization. I love going through and like looking at the attack table and how that works and all that kind of stuff. I'm really really into that kind of stuff and I think it's great. But on a day-to-day basis, how often do you really interact with this stuff or how does it How much does it really matter? It doesn't really matter for most people. But if you are looking at the game in this way and you're trying to critique stuff like this, I just think it's important to be aware of the stipulations and what's going on and how the game is changing. So you shouldn't be worried about oh, I need 140 plus healing in order to have an equal value of a heal at level 60 with zero plus healing in vanilla wow or here with, you know, this needing like 211 plus damage for your fireball be equal. Now, I will say this. This kind of looks crazy to me. I think this looks kind of wild looking at the looking at the shaman numbers compared to the other numbers. I do agree with that, but I also don't know exactly how the class changed. Maybe they just want the individual attacks to do less damage. They just want the individual attacks to scale less because you have different ways of administering damage to your target. I don't know all this stuff. We don't know, but we'll figure it out and we'll see. And I understand people being like, let's say if you play a druid and you're like, "What the freak? Priest doesn't need anything to do the same damage they used to and I need all this." If you're a shaman like again, they might have changed the class so much that it doesn't really matter as much and and we'll get to see that throughout the beta and they're still testing this stuff. This kind of all ties back into big point of class design that that I've had and I've talked about for a long time is [music] point number one, I don't think you should be moving too far away from the original play styles. I think it's important to maintain the original play styles that are available to you in vanilla wow. Look, I'm a vanilla enhanced shaman for example, two-handed weapons. I need support to be able to do DPS with two-handed weapons. Cool. Now, with that being said, I also think it's cool to find a way to give Shamans the ability [music] to dual-wield to support that as well. I think it's important to give them kind of like the underserved or something that maybe like if you started dual-wielding in Burning Crusade, I think that it still resonates with a lot of Shamans, and I think you just need to find a way to be like, "I want to be dual-wielder or I want to be two-handed." [music] Now, this inherently makes the Shaman talent tree really complicated to to deal with and build out because if all of a sudden you want to have two-handed, you want to have dual-wield, hell, you want to have tanking stuff in the enhanced tree. If you want to do all those things, then it makes it really, really hard to do all that. Maybe like if you want to do tanking things, you really need stuff in all three trees, and you need to run like a tri-spec. I I don't know. This is kind of like wishful thinking at this point, and there's a lot of stuff that probably won't even happen, but I do think that. Maintain the original playstyles as much as possible. They should be available. Develop underserved playstyles, and then three, help to promote new playstyles to be figured out and let people be creative with their builds. Those are like the three like main principles of class design that I think are super important for this. With those things kind of in mind, it could make sense that you need way more spell power than before. But yeah, I mean, we're in the Wild West. Everything's new, man. I think it's cool and interesting that somebody went through and looked at this stuff, but take it with a grain of salt. We we don't know exactly what the values are for level 60. Everything is subject to change, and we also don't know how itemization points are going to be distributed at higher levels and what all's going on there. Long story short, good to know, interesting to know, nothing to be too concerned about just yet, but stuff like this is cool. I think it's interesting. I wouldn't be too worried about it. They're working really hard on balance, and I think that I mean, they might be working even too hard on balance. I don't know. But hopefully they're going to figure this thing out, and I think it's important for us to look into this stuff like this. Whether we're right or wrong, I think it's interesting. I think it's important to look into and I think it's important to give feedback on what you want cuz maybe even if, you know, this is wrong, there's something to learn from this and see the direction of like how things are being perceived and there's something that can be learned from it. So, anyway, leave a comment, like the video, subscribe, all that stuff. I hope I give you guys a little bit of insight on on some of the behind the scenes stuff, under the hood stuff of Classic Wow. I hope you guys enjoyed. People have been really, really loving the YouTube videos lately and you guys have been showing a lot of love and it's it's been really cool. Whether it's on Whether it's on stream, whether it's on YouTube, whether it's, you know, social media, everything. You guys have been unbelievably supportive and it makes me feel really good. So, thank you guys for being a part of this and we're very, very excited. It's a It's a great, great time [music] in Azeroth right now. So, >> Yo, you got those VIP >> Wait, I'm still in here. I Have I been in the raid Discord since raid and then just talking the whole time? >> Yeah. >> The freak. >> those VIP better keys that you're talking about? >> VIP I'm leaving Discord. Unbelievable wires for me. >> [laughter]