World of Warcraft Warlords of Draenor patch notes reveal stat squishing

There’s a huge update for the World of Warcraft Warlords of Draenor expansion today now that alpha testing is underway in testing. The update brings notes on some interesting changes.

One of the most important changes for anyone who’s a stat watcher, which is probably most WoW players, is that stats are being significantly changed, or “squished” according to Blizzard.

What this essentially means is that stats are being reduced to smaller numbers but Blizzard are keen to point out that this is not a “nerf” as it first looks. They want to bring the numbers down to a level where they are “understandable” by players. We assume that simply means less zeros to look at.

“In order to bring things down to an understandable level, we’ve reduced the scale of stats throughout the game, back to as if they continued scaling linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 90. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear, other items… everything. Your stats and damage have been reduced by a huge amount, but so have creatures’ health. For example, your Fireball that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of its 3,000,000 health (15% of its health), may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health). In effect, you will still be just as powerful, but the numbers that appear will be more easily parsed.”

These changes also mean that item stats and monster stats have been reduced so it’s not worth panicking when that mighty sword looks less mighty when you load up the expansion.

This alpha update is really quite lengthy and you can read the full update over on Blizzard’s site or read the TLDR notes below.

• Character stats have been squished into smaller numbers that are easier to understand. It’s important to understand that this is not a nerf as enemies have been squished as well.
• A new row of talents has been added for level 100, and new Draenor Perks from levels 91 to 99.
• The Garrison is a new feature available in Draenor, where you can build a base, recruit followers, and send them on missions.
• We’ve balanced the functionality of Agility, Strength and Intellect.
• Hit and Expertise have been removed; they’re no longer needed in order to reliably land attacks!
• The pace of healing have been adjusted to allow for more tactical decisionmaking regarding efficiency and throughput, on both single-target and multi-target heals. Passive and auto-targeted healing have been reduced in effectiveness in order to emphasize the actions and choices of healers.
• Racial traits have been rebalanced so that all races have similar combat performance.
• All classes have had several abilities pruned, with a focus on redundant and less-used abilities, to cut down on button and keybind bloat.
• The amount of crowd control in the game (primarily PvP) has been drastically reduced. Many crowd-control abilities have been removed, and many diminishing returns categories are now merged together.
• Several common buffs and debuffs have been merged, or removed, where they were redundant.
• All characters now learn a few important Major Glyphs automatically as they level up.
• The amount of instant healing in the game has been toned down by giving cast times to several instant cast heals.
• Vengeance has been redesigned and renamed Resolve. Resolve does not increase outgoing damage, but does now  increase tank self-healing and absorption based on damage taken.
• Facing requirements (character position) on some prominent abilities have been loosened or removed.
• The mana cost of Resurrection spells has been reduced to make it a little easier to recover from a wipe.
• Professions no longer have combat benefit perks tied to them.
• There are a multitude of class-specific changes, including things like improved distinction between different Talent specializations, and new Masteries.  Consult the class-specific sections below for more information.