To the devs:

What are you doing in 2.3 to correct WoW's scaling mechanics? What are you doing in Wrath of the Lich King? We've already heard about the resilience cap coming into play, as well as armor penetration. How do you intend to continue itemizing when your own scaling system is making it increasingly difficult to do well?

For those less well-versed in scaling theory, I present the following treatise. I expect you're already familiar with the principles, just not willing to implement them.

Reference Material

Threads by me on scaling and mechanics.

Top 5 Best Scaling Spells in WoW v2 - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=106865398
World of Mechanicscraft - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=108235377
Bliz devs failed this test. Can you pass it? - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=965746796
The Haste Problem: Mechanics in 2.3 - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2366551947
Armor, Penetration, and Normalization - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2512083816
Math by Blizzard: 11 + 11 = 18 (itemization formula theory) - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2765971363
When is 1% really 1%? - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2968664522
The Futility of Class Balance - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4068015324
Haste must affect the the Melee GCD - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4311224809&sid=1

A Treatise on Scaling Mechanics

Scaling mechanics in WoW are in a terrible state--they contribute to an ever-shifting balance between classes and between abilities that forces Kalgan and company to continually rebalance every time new gear is introduced. We've already seen their rebalancing effort in progress; indeed, new changes are put into play every patch. But that was for just up through the tier 6 level, and in fact most of those changes could have and should have applied at BC release months ago, when only up through tier 5 was available.

You can see where this is going: it's taken months for the devs to get remotely close to balancing all the new gear and abilities Blizzard put out for the Burning Crusade. Scaling mechanics make it such that every time new gear is designed, balance changes, and more corrections, more time, must be spent compensating for those changes or deciding whether they are "intended" after all.

Balance Is Proportional

People have many intuitions about what is and isn't fair, what is or isn't equal.

Is adding 1 DPS for every 14 attack power fair, whether it's to Mincy the Rogue or Asperan the DPS Warrior?

Is adding 10% of DPS via Curse of the Elements fair to both me, Muphrid the 61-point Frost mage, and Verilyn, the 10/48/3 Fire mage fighting me on the damage meter?

At first glance, you might say these are both fair. 10% is 10% no matter who it is, and 1 DPS is 1 DPS no matter who it is. But, we can see that these cannot both be fair. If Verilyn deals 900 DPS and I deal only 800 before CoE, then she gains 90 DPS and I gain 80.

So, is +1 DPS to everybody fair, or is +1% DPS to everybody fair?

To resolve this situation, we must consider some scenarios.

Let's consider Verilyn and I going at it on the damage meter. Again, I deal 800 DPS, Verilyn deals 900. What happens as we (a) add equal DPS and (b) add equal percents of DPS?

(a) Let's add 800 DPS. Verilyn deals 1700 DPS, I deal 1600 DPS.
(b) Let's add 100% DPS. Verliyn deals 1800 DPS, I deal 1600 DPS.

In both cases, I gain 800 DPS, but Verliyn gains either 800 or 900. But which one is "fair"?

Let's pretend, for the moment, that Verliyn and I, because we're awesome, are the only two DPS classes, that the tank deals a sufficiently small (negligible) amount of damage. How would the damage meter look?

Baseline:
Verilyn - 900 DPS, 52.9% of group damage
Muphrid - 800 DPS, 47.1% of group damage

Case (a):
Verilyn - 1700 DPS, 51.5% of group damage
Muphrid - 1600 DPS, 48.5% of group damage

Case (b):
Verliyn - 1800 DPS, 52.9% of group damage
Muphrid - 1600 DPS, 47.1% of group damage

It seems that case (b) is the one that doesn't shift balance. We see, then, that percentages are what preserve balance.

We can be more precise here; indeed, this example has been rather simplistic to illustrate the principle. A favorite analogy of mine is the case of a fraps video: you can take any fraps and adjust the numbers based on fixed multipliers (increases by a percentage). Damage, healing, and health are all measured in terms of hit points. You can arbitrarily double all of these, and the events of the fraps would not change. You can do the same to mana, you can do the same to time (speed up or slow down the tape). It's fairly obvious that increasing everything by a percentage has not changed balance.

We can get even more precise. Indeed, we can say that values in WoW are "measured." They have units of HP (as damage, health, and healing do), units of time (seconds), units of mana. We could easily define, for example, a half-hit-point (HHP, if you like), where 1 HP = 2 HHP. Thus, someone with 8000 HP health has 16000 HHP health. As long as we're measuring in the same "units," ratios are preserved. The numbers have gotten bigger (as always, by a multiplier, by a percentage), but the balance hasn't changed.

At this point, I hope it has been sufficiently clear that balance is proportional, based on ratios. As always, I anticipate that even these examples will not be enough to convince nay-sayers who adhere to the belief that balance is based on absolutes.

Nevertheless, let's continue.

Uniformity and Symmetry

Uniformity refers to how or whether a stat gives equal benefit. Since we just established that balance is proportional, this means equal percentages. For example, if we go back to Curse of the Elements, we can see that CoE is uniform across Fire and Frost spells--it gives them all equal benefit (10%).

Obviously it would be boring if we just had one stat for all damage, all healing, and all health. Part of the fun of this game is that there is melee damage, spell damage, ranged damage, all of which benefit from different stats. At face value, this appears non-uniform: AP, for example, does nothing for a caster--it only applies to melee or ranged damage and is thus not uniform across all damage. It is for this reason that we introduce the concept of symmetry: for every stat that affects only a portion of all abilities, there must be a symmetric stat or stats that cover(s) what the stat does not. In simpler terms, we have AP for physical damage, but we have +spell damage for...spell damage. Thus, all damage abilities have a way to scale (more or less).

In the strictest terms, there are actually two types of uniformity:

Uniformity across abilities: the stat or effect affects all abilities (or some set of abilities) equally. As we said earlier, CoE is uniform, but more specifically uniform across abilities--the abilities, in this case, are Fire and Frost spells.

Uniformity across gear: the stat or effect has the same benefit regardless of how good or bad your gear is. Again, benefit is measured in terms of percentages. Curse of the Elements is also uniform across gear--you gain 10% DPS no matter whether you're in grays or purples.

In evaluating the mechanics of WoW, we have to keep these two types of uniformity in mind. In particular, I postulate the following:

1. Abilities must be uniform across gear, but need not be uniform across abilities. In my opinion, an ability should be equally useful at all levels of gear--otherwise it shifts balance. An ability, however, need not affect all other abilities an an equal fashion. This can be considered part of the initial balance. The effect of abilities on other abilities is naturally uniform across gear, so it has no effect on scaling mechanics. A good example here is dispels: you can assume that it takes a healer X seconds to react to a debuff and dispel it, on average. This means shorter DoTs get more of their damage in before the dispel and thus see a lower average damage reduction. Thus, each DoT loses a different percentage of its damage to dispels. This percentage, however, does not change with gear (as reaction time doesn't change just because you got epics).

It is worth noting that making abilities uniform across other abilities is fine; you only run the risk of making the game too simple or "boring", something that the rest of the principles in this post already skirt the line for (and some say cross it).

2. Stats must be uniform across abilities and (ideally) uniform across gear. Both of these are consequences of proportionality. Stats must increase the power of all abilities at the same (percentage) rate in order to keep balance in line. Stats must also be equally useful to people in different levels of gear in order to preserve the gear gap: note that this does not widen the gear gap--it only ensures that having better gear is always as significant as it was before. How significant it should be is up to the devs. If you want to keep the gear gap in check, then it should be shallower, in my opinion, at all gear levels.

Another big reason why stats must be uniform across gear is buffing: consider a(n exceedingly simple) case.

Player A deals 30 DPS and has 300 health.
Player B deals 15 DPS and has 600 health.

In a duel, both players kill each other and die simultaneously.

Add a low ranked Fort buff, say, 60 health.
Player A: 30 DPS, 360 health
Player B: 15 DPS, 660 health

Player A now wins, killing B in 22 seconds compared to B needing 24 seconds.

We see that the effect of the buff must be proportional to the health pool size, which is dependent on gear.

The Principles Applied

We've now constructed the extent of how scaling mechanics must work. Let us now see what must be fixed in WoW to implement those principles, as well as what problems arise when we do so.

Ability Uniformity and Symmetry

These stats are not uniform across abilities or do not have the symmetry of other stats covering what they do not.

+damage, +healing, attack power: these all work by a system of "coefficients" (in the case of AP, the coefficient is usually swing time / 14). The easiest way to make them uniform is to make them into a rating system, increasing damage/healing done by a percentage. The problem then becomes figuring out how much rating should equal 1% benefit, if there even is such a number that would work across all classes.

Crit, crit bonus, resilience: not uniform because of differing crit bonuses. A "simple" solution is to abstract out crit bonus talents as specific %DPS increases and force the real crit chance to fit. With resilience, the problem is the same, except you must start with a specific damage reduction in mind. In addition, there is no symmetry stat that covers DoTs the way crit benefits direct damage.

Haste: there is no symmetry stat that covers DoTs the way haste covers direct damage. Haste provides no benefit to yellow damage either, or to spells that are 1.5 second cast or at or below the GCD. The easiest thing to do is view haste as "time compression" making attacks and ticks of DoTs come faster (but DoTs would expire faster--same number of ticks, just faster). The problem is that you would not want buffs to go faster, nor would you want CC to expire faster. Some possibilites include another stat to address the buff time problem.

Block: reduces a fixed amount of damage, rather than a fixed percentage. The obvious choice is that it reduce a fixed percentage upon block.

Gear Uniformity and Symmetry

This is by far a much longer list. Indeed, no mechanics in WoW follow the principle of gear uniformity. To be fully gear uniform, stats must follow exponential growth and decay curves. This naturally involves some measure of rebalancing, but for many stats. There are only three unique, particular problems with applying this principle above and beyond the process of rebalancing.

The first has to do with caps. Caps represent a case in which benefit abruptly goes to zero. For mitigation stats, caps can be soft--exponential decay never allows you to reach 0% damage taken, but mitigation stats would still have the same benefit. For damage stats, this is more complicated: you have to give meaning to +spell hit and +physical hit over the natural 100% limit. You can, then, make +hit over the cap equivalent to AP/+spell damage and/or crit.

The second problem is with avoidance and mitigation. To keep burst damage in check, damage must scale the same as health pools, but to keep overall DPS in check, damage must scale with both health pools and mitigation. This leaves no room for doubt: net mitigation can't change with gear. An easy solution is to give out anti-mitigation and anti-avoidance stats (room for more +hit, armor penetration and spell penetration) in equal doses, so that balance doesn't change. This would apply both to players and to mobs (thus, you would start to face bosses that are more than +3 level).

The third problem with gear uniformity arises with mana, energy, and rage. Rage in particular has always been a muddled mechanic, but this is a problem for all regeneration in general. To put it bluntly, while everything measured in terms of HP can scale up and give the illusion of progress, the same cannot be said for power regeneration. To inflate everything measured in terms of mana, for example, you'd be increasing both mana pool sizes and regeneration but also mana costs, which is, to say the least, undesirable. This, I feel, is the only problem with no clean solution. To be perfectly candid, there is no way to increase longevity or regeneration rates without changing balance, and yet this is a very desirable dimension of customization. The only solution I can think of is to put regeneration in the players' hands, introduce some trade-off for increasing staying power, and make it separate from gear altogether, but that would be a far cry from WoW, even farther than the total mechanics revamp that I have advocated.

Conclusion

It is my hope that, though technical, this treatise on mechanics has been enlightening in some way. I cannot hope that all will agree with the consequences or changes I have advocated, but I do hope that the basic concepts--the core principles of scaling--have become clear. If you have read this far, I hope that you keep these principles in mind--even if you don't fully subscribe to them--the next time you read or argue about class or ability balance around these forums. It is my belief that such issues, though pressing, are merely symptoms of a greater problem at hand: the flaws in scaling mechanics.

well at least you do!!


an you stand on that soap box preachin the way so well

In before the QQ

Kalgan does care about mechanics.

Someone needs to fix his Jetta.

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Q u o t e:
Kalgan does care about mechanics.

Someone needs to fix his Jetta.

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Pft, Jettas aren't important!

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Q u o t e:
Kalgan is sexy. You aren't :(

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Ah, but how do you know I'm--

Meh, who am I fooling...

I wish children would put in as much effort into their schoolwork as they do about complaining about something they have no idea about.

Unless if you are out of school, then I simply feel sorry for you because your life makes you so unhappy that your emotions are controlled by a video game. , , A video game.

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Q u o t e:
I wish children would put in as much effort into their schoolwork as they do about complaining about something they have no idea about.

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Does it seem from my post that I have no idea what I'm talking about?

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Q u o t e:
Unless if you are out of school, then I simply feel sorry for you because your life makes you so unhappy that your emotions are controlled by a video game. , , A video game.

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Does it seem that I'm particularly emotional about this issue?

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Q u o t e:
I wish children would put in as much effort into their schoolwork as they do about complaining about something they have no idea about.

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Just because YOU have no idea what the OP is talking about doesn't mean he (or everyone else) doesn't.

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Q u o t e:
Unless if you are out of school, then I simply feel sorry for you because your life makes you so unhappy that your emotions are controlled by a video game. , , A video game.

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Whatever gave you the impression that he was unhappy? If anything, the vigor and comprehensiveness with which he researched and attacked the problem of BALANCING AN ENTIRE GAME speaks volumes about how enthusiastic he is about WoW.

its funny... you typed that huge wall of text and all you had to do was read the website about game mechanics.

when level increases, u get less benifits from crit, armor pierce, defense, and im going to assume resilience.

your complaint is already in the game and when we all start leveling to 80 the current effectiveness of say, 300 resilience will lower every time we level up.


*sigh*

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Q u o t e:
BTW, FWIW Kalgan actually does seem like a pretty cool dude so don't be too hard on him. I just wish he'd interact with us a little more . It's so very interesting to read his posts as he's "the dude" as far as game systems such as these are concerned. Would be great to see his thoughts on some of the more well thought out posts instead of replying to generally whining players...

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Well, I make it a point to be critical because it's the only way to even have a glimmer of a chance of things happening. I really do feel the devs are entirely cognizant of these principles; I believe it is only some unwillingness to push a revamp, however slight, that keeps them from acting.

Prinsesa, Draele, Spidget, thanks for the support. We're all in this together, looking to make a fun game even better.

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Q u o t e:
Haste: there is no symmetry stat that covers DoTs the way haste covers direct damage. Haste provides no benefit to yellow damage either, or to spells that are 1.5 second cast or at or below the GCD. The easiest thing to do is view haste as "time compression" making attacks and ticks of DoTs come faster (but DoTs would expire faster--same number of ticks, just faster). The problem is that you would not want buffs to go faster, nor would you want CC to expire faster. Some possibilites include another stat to address the buff time problem.

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Very nice post. I applaud the amount of thought you've put into this analysis. Regarding haste, I think you'd want haste to be a percent-based time compression for both cooldowns (including the GCD) and cast times. For DoTs and HoTs, you'd want either a time dilation (retaining the normal tick rate), or a tick rate increase (retaining the normal time length).