TL;DR at the bottom.
Sorry to de-rail this very heated argument about tooltips. But yea, looks like Shadowlands is going to make it into Chromie time
https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/bl...ght-interview-with-jackie-wiley-and-tina-wang
I'll be daggone. That might be of the biggest predictions in WoW I've ever been wrong about. Here's the quote from Ion that really surprised me (props to
@Eleannor for pointing out this one):
"Our current plan is to rescale all of the existing expansions including Shadowlands from 10 to 60 so that its come out of Exile's Reach or play the starting experience of your choice and then pick any of the single expansions that you want to play through and that will get you through to Dragonflight."
I'm glad that covenant abilities are getting rolled into the talent trees so at least those won't bugger up 20s, but man oh man, scaling down Shadowlands to Chromie time opens the door for a number of broken things for 20s. Have a seat, and let's talk about 49 and 59 twinking in Shadowlands, and how this could play out for 20s in the next expansion.
Shadowlands sees four non-endgame zones, in order of increasing level: Bastion, Maldraxxus, Ardenweald, and Revendreth. Gear comes from five sources: quests, rares, treasure chests and other lootable items, dungeons, and world quests. The first time you play Shadowlands, everything you loot scales to your character level until you reach 60/endgame. At that point, you get access to the "Threads of Fate" option where you can remove the main questline and immediately gain access to all four zones for that character
and all characters/alts you have or will make on that bnet account, individually decided per character. Here's the interesting part: activating Threads of Fate turns off scaling for some Shadowlands gear sources.
With Threads of Fate, rares in all four zones will scale
up (or down) to character levels, rather than remain in their zone-appropriate ranges, and treasures in Revendreth will
not scale down. 49s use Threads of Fate to get big gear out of Revendreth treasures, and 59s used Threads of Fate to get rares to scale up their drops. Here are two favorites:
Slumberwood Band
Rotbriar Sprout
Ignore the sockets -- those have never (to my knowledge) appeared on those items, nor any SL twink gear for 49s and 59s, despite what WoWhead claims. The AoE smash from the trinket is a riot, and when SL first came out, the Slumberwood band had a much lower cooldown. Players pouring into battlegrounds with that ring brought on the patch of a 30-minute cooldown a couple of weeks later.
World quests offer a number of interesting scaled-to-character level drops, including the
Instructor's Divine Bell, expanding trinket options (ignore the socket on this one as well).
The Revendreth treasures are my main concern. If Blizzard intends Shadowlands to scale all the way to 60 (which is of course the current scaling cap), then it's likely Blizzard will neglect to look at the unscaled treasure chests in the highest zone, Revendreth. Chests like
these. Which means enterprising twinks, with little effort, can score ilvl 128 (ilvl 140 with an epic proc) weapons and other gear.
Overall, if Blizzard fixes a couple of gear scaling issues in Shadowlands, then 20s have some fun trinkets and other doodads to look forward to. If Blizzard misses those fixes, we're in for a very interesting first few weeks.
Beyond what currently doesn't scale in Shadowlands, there are some current level-locked gear in that might indeed scale come Dragonflight. Ardenweald sees a couple of treasures that require level 60 (including a weapon that proc'd a tertiary stat when I looted it, opening up questions of which Shadowlands gear can proc terts and sockets), and if Blizzard makes a careless pass at removing level 60 requirements, then Revendreth's treasure situation may expand to other SL zones.
Scaling of enchantments and other SL professions could provide some new options as well.
The other side of this puzzle is scaling
all of the other expansions to 60. Ion made it sound like this was relatively simple, so either he's dead wrong, or whatever scaling tech Blizzard put in place at the launch of Shadowlands has some adjustment levers in it to make it that simple. But the 50-60 part gets me. Given that ilvl scaling accelerates more quickly from 50-60, how will the zones accommodate that? Screenshots of Dragonflight gear show ilvls in the 300s, so Blizzard doesn't intend to squish 50-60 back down to linear progression like 1-50. Getting ilvl 128 gear as a level 58 character out of TBC dungeons seems odd, but maybe Blizzard has that solved.
TL;DR: Gear from Revendreth treasures doesn't currently scale, and could stay at their high ilvls even after Blizzard scales Shadowlands 10-60.
