'World of Warcraft' players are becoming too powerful so Blizzard secretly made the game harder

As you earn better and better max-level gear in World of Warcraft, one of the satisfying side effects is being able to go back and steamroll through enemies and dungeons that used to give you trouble. Blizzard quietly put a stop to that in the latest patch by making enemies' health scale up with the quality of your gear.

A handful of WoW players took to the game's forums yesterday after noticing that enemy non-player characters (AKA mobs) had higher health when players' item levels (the quality of their gear) were above a certain threshold (850). In the latest expansion, Legion, mobs' levels and corresponding stats scaled up with your character level, but stopped increasing once you hit the max level: 110. That's no longer the case.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in the 13-year history of the game, and Blizzard never told players it was happening.

Player Darthknight shared his findings on the forums of how a level 110 elite Illidary Enforcer's health stayed at 15.6 million until his item level surpassed 850. At item level 857, the same mob had 16.5 million health. At item level 875, the mob had 18.9 million health.

This only effects players at level 110 because lower level characters can't reach that high of an item level. Each piece of gear has an individual item level that basically represents how good its stats are, and your overall item level is an average of all your gear.

You can't enter certain end-game dungeons or raids without reaching a minimum item level. Until patch 7.2, that was the only way item level affected players.

Because this change wasn't in the patch notes, some players thought the new enemy scaling was a bug, but World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas said it wasn't.

"This reflects a deliberate change, but it's also not working exactly as we intended," he said on the WoW forums Wednesday. "The scaling may be too steep, and the fact that unequipping a piece of gear can ever be helpful is a bug in the system. We'll be looking into making changes to correct this in the very near future."

The reason for the change, Hazzikostas said, is that non-raid content is still relevant to max-level players who would rather do world quests, which have a chance to give them the same high-item level gear that raiders earn. He also said they don't want players with high item levels taking mobs away from lower-level players.

"We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging," he said. "But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5-second cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken."

The scaling still gives you an advantage over level 110 mobs if you have an item level higher than 850, just not quite as much of an advantage.

As for why this changed wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes, Hazzikostas said the developers wanted to let players feel the change and allow Blizzard to gauge their response.

"It was not to be deceptive; we know it's impossible to hide a change from millions of players," Hazzikostas said. "But the system was meant to feel largely transparent and subtle, just like level-scaling does if you don't stop and really think about it, and so we did want players to first experience the change organically. Your feedback and reactions and first impressions of the system are more useful in this particular case when they are not skewed by the experience of logging in and actively trying to spot the differences."

The reactions have not been good. After Hazzikostas posted his reply, players were not happy to hear that the change was deliberate and, for the most part, expressed that they did not like the change.

We'll see if World of Warcraft rolls it back anytime soon.