With Midnight, your damage numbers in World of Warcraft will shrink again. A new “Stat Squish” is coming.
If you have displayed damage numbers in World of Warcraft, they have now reached absurdly high levels. Some classes hit for well over 10,000,000 damage with a single attack, resulting in the entire screen being filled with numbers that are increasingly hard to read and interpret. To limit this a bit, a “Stat Squish” is coming soon to World of Warcraft, meaning we will have to say goodbye to large numbers for a while.
Why is Blizzard doing this? A “Stat Squish” has occurred in the past for World of Warcraft several times. The idea behind it is to reduce the displayed numbers in the game back to smaller, more readable values. This affects both the numbers for damage and healing, as well as the attributes on items.
Instead of several million hit points on a critical hit, after the Midnight pre-patch (Patch 12.0), you will encounter smaller hits, in the range of a few hundred or low thousands of hit points.
The same applies to equipment. Currently, characters have an item level around 700. On items, there are often bonuses of “60,000 stamina” or “8,000 intellect”. The maximum item level will be reduced to approximately 100, resulting in significantly lower attributes – more in the range of two- to three-digit attribute values.
Will the level also be lowered? No, there will not be a “Level Squish” like there was during the Shadowlands era. In the Midnight expansion, you will be able to level from 80 to 90 and likely in The Last Titan again up to level 100. What happens after that remains to be seen – but at least your level will remain high for now.
Will you really be weaker? Only in the Damage Meter. Your relative strength compared to your enemies should remain nearly identical. If you currently defeat an enemy of your level in 10 seconds, that should still be the case after the reduction. Because the health points and the damage dealt by enemies also decrease proportionally. In the past, it was often the case that Blizzard made the current enemies a little more weakened than your own values.
What is the community concerned about? Blizzard has already conducted a “Stat Squish” multiple times in the past, and something has always gone wrong. Sometimes it’s certain bosses in dungeons and raids that suddenly “one-hit” with every attack, and sometimes it’s certain trinkets or enchantments that are significantly stronger than they should be. Fixing all these issues often takes several weeks, so the initial time after a Stat Squish tends to be relatively “wild”.
Although these adjustments have occurred several times in World of Warcraft, they affect thousands of abilities and tens of thousands of items – it’s probably expected that some will slip through the cracks. We can only hope that it does not lead to such absurd scaling problems that a player like Rextroy can exploit them again for mischief.
