Players testing Midnight report that the expansion’s stat squish has reduced many legacy items to near uselessness. After years of escalating health and damage numbers, the new scaling cuts values so aggressively that older consumables and gear no longer function the way players expect.
Examples shared by players include Vanilla and The Burning Crusade era items and consumables. One concrete instance is the Major Healing Potion, which now reportedly heals for under 5 HP in the Midnight environment. That level of reduction makes certain old items effectively non-functional in current encounters and scaling systems. Players on forums and social hubs have been posting comparisons showing how encounters that once relied on higher raw numbers now behave very differently under the new squish. The change is not isolated to cosmetics or UI tweaks. It affects core item effects that players have used for years.
It appears this squish does not preserve the usefulness of older-design items. That creates odd outcomes when content designed around much larger numbers is evaluated against drastically reduced stats. Many are treating the results as a symptom of a broader pattern. After multiple stat squishes over the years, the underlying problem of rising item level, damage, and health persists, and the current approach can make legacy items feel obsolete rather than balanced.
Some players describe the effect as creeping. Even if only a subset of the player base uses those older items regularly, their removal from practical play highlights limits in how the game handles long-term numerical growth across expansions. Player reaction has leaned toward concern. The changes underline a design choice to keep numbers lower at the cost of breaking older interactions and consumables. Whether Blizzard will adjust the approach or overhaul how legacy items scale remains to be seen.
We got to a special point in level scaling.
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World of Warcraft: Midnight
Developed by Blizzard Entertainment
