Very Important Reaper Stat Changes

You may have noticed "Project StatSlash" showing in the realmlist for some time now. This announcement will explain what this is, and what it means for Reaper.

StatSlash is the name of an upcoming Reaper update. This update focuses totally on stats. As you all know, Reaper has massive stats, insane stats even, on pretty much everything. While this can be fun, it causes a number of underlying problems:

Software has limits - the maximum possible number that can be used by WoW for a stat is 2.14 billion. You will notice that bosses such as Deathwing and the VIP LK boss are fast approaching this limit on their health. What happens when new content and harder bosses hit the limit? Then we can no longer make any tougher bosses. And so we cannot keep making better items and content because they would have no match.

Scaling issues - many spells in the game scale their effects with certain stats on your items. Because the stats are so large, the scaling becomes massive and you have spells that one-shot everything. You already see the effects of this as a number of spells are already disabled.

Reforge - The high stats caused issues with reforging, which was a popular feature. It was eventually disabled for this reason.

Caching system - having high stats on gear to match our custom content involves the Ice launcher needing to modify your cache and game files for it to work. This of course causes issues when playing multiple private servers that use different items.

There are more issues we could talk about, but you get the picture. It's becoming a hassle for us to maintain these stats.

Now, what is StatSlash?

It is the solution to these problems that we have been working on for some time now. To explain it simple and direct: it is going to massively reduce the stats on all items and custom creatures and bosses on Reaper. The reduction of numbers is around 95%. This means that all items and custom mobs and bosses will go down to about one twentieth of the stats they have right now.

You might be thinking that this sounds awful. But if you think about it, it's not really. You are not being disadvantaged in any way. Remember, everybody else, including creatures, are being reduced the exact same as you. So any players that you can beat right now, you can still beat after StatSlash. So the bottom line is: nothing is actually affecting your gameplay. The numbers are just all smaller.

Some advantages of the update are:

• Many spells may be re-enabled if they no longer cause issues with stat scaling
  
• Reforging may be re-enabled
  
• Much more new content is able to be created
  
• No more launcher cache problems, no cache download
  
• Dungeons and items may actually become relevant
  
• Makes future Reaper upgrade to 4.3.4 far smoother and quicker
  

A public test realm will be opened for a short while before the update goes live, to let players see what the changes are and know what to expect. We hope you will accept this update and see all the advantages of it.