Players need some way to gauge a FATE's strength or Devs to develop dynamic scaling

[Misplaced_Marbles]

FATE strength is determined by how many players were present the last time it was completed.

Which, of course, is the most counter-intuitive system ever. Why don't they just scale based on the amount of players present? The world may never know.

[Packetdancer]

Which, of course, is the most counter-intuitive system ever. Why don't they just scale based on the amount of players present? The world may never know.

Because the scaling is determined at the time of the FATE spawning in; it's not going to be able to easily adjust the mob health pools and such on-the-fly once the mob is already instanciated, especially if combat's already underway when the number of participants present increases (or decreases).

I suspect the reason they do it based on how many people participated the last time is that it works not as a measure of population but of interest. If you have a special FATE in the current expansion, and people are slamming it every time it spawns, it's going to scale up to account for that. If you have a special FATE in a previous expansion and people aren't really going to fight it any more because it's outdated content now... well, now it scales down, so it can be handled by smaller groups.

It's still annoying, I grant you, but there's at least some probable logic behind it.

[hobostew]

Because the scaling is determined at the time of the FATE spawning in; it's not going to be able to easily adjust the mob health pools and such on-the-fly once the mob is already instanciated, especially if combat's already underway when the number of participants present increases (or decreases).

IIRC HP adjusting on the fly has been a thing for at least world bosses in WoW since like MoP I think. Obviously they are different games but it's clearly not something impossible.

[Packetdancer]

IIRC HP adjusting on the fly has been a thing for at least world bosses in WoW since like MoP I think. Obviously they are different games but it's clearly not something impossible.

Honestly, the reason I think it's less feasible is not technical, per se, but because of how we tend to approach this game. If folks could figure out the scaling algorithm, do you really think someone wouldn't figure out how to optimize a FATE train such that you send one person on to fight a FATE boss down to like... half health or whatever (thus only one person participating and the boss is scaled waaaay down) and then the whole FATE train slams in at once, and sure the boss' health scales up, but...

If you had one person participating and the boss had, say, 500k HP, and they took out 300k of that HP, and then the FATE train lands and the boss' health scales up to a maximum of 4M HP... but the boss was already down to 200k/500k (so 40% of the health). So it scales up to a maximum of 4M health but only has 1.6M of that health on the bar (thus the percentage/position of the boss' health bar doesn't change). Now you only need to do 1.9M of damage total to the boss rather than 4M, but everyone still gets credit. Yay! Now the FATE train can go even faster!

Etc.

So it's not "there are technical reasons why scaling a FATE after it's already been engaged seems impractical" so much as "there are cultural reasons -- i.e., how we as a playerbase tend to want to optimize content consumption to an extreme degree -- that make scaling a FATE after it's already been engaged seem impractical to me".