Blizzard runs into problems rebalancing end-game challenge based on player gear.

https://youtu.be/ixtWdYkJbdE

Keeping a massively multiplayer online game fresh and challenging for longtime players while simultaneously staying accessible and fun for lower-powered relative newcomers is always a challenge. In World of Warcraft, a hidden change to the way end-game enemies power up alongside players has unintentionally thrown that balance out of whack, and Blizzard is working on a fix.

Shortly after yesterday's release of Patch 7.2 for the long-running MMO, players quickly began noticing that high-end enemies were scaling up in power depending on the power of the gear the player characters were wearing. The specific power numbers involved seem to make it so that players could perversely make a fight easier by taking off their high-end gear and replacing it with slightly worse weapons and armor, reducing the enemy's health and power greatly in the process.

The change in how enemy scaling works took many players by surprise because it wasn't explicitly mentioned in the extensive patch notes Blizzard released yesterday. Furthermore, WoW assistant director Ion Hazzikostas spoke out specifically against this kind of gear-based enemy scaling in a Twitch interview last year.

"There would be problems if we tried to do that," he said at the time. "That would go too far in undermining the core sense of power progression that is part of an MMO ... The intent is that the content is is something you outgear and outpower eventually."

In response to a quickly developing fan uproar over the discovery, Hazzikostas took to the battle.net forums last night to apologize for the newly implemented system not working as intended. "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."

That said, Hazzikostas defended the general idea of scaling enemies along with gear as a necessary way to keep late-game fights interesting for high-level characters:

We absolutely want you to feel overpowered as you return to steamroll content that once was challenging. But there's a threshold beyond which the game's core mechanics start to break down. When someone trying to wind up a 2.5sec cast can't get a nuke off against a quest target before another player charges in and one-shots it, that feels broken. And even for the Mythic-geared bringer of death and destruction, when everything dies nearly instantly, you spend more time looting corpses than you do making them. You spend an order of magnitude longer traveling to a quest location than you do killing the quest target. You stop using your core class abilities and instead focus on spamming instants to tap mobs as quickly as possible before they die.
Our goal is basically to safeguard against that degenerate extreme.

Hazzikostas went on to defend the secretive rollout of the new enemy leveling setup. While he says he knew players would notice the change, the effects were "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."

Hazzikostas' full post addressing the leveling issue is well worth a read for both WoW players and anyone simply interested in the challenges of rebalancing a game as it's being played by millions of people at very different experience levels.