Nobody saw it coming, but the results were exactly as expected. In World of Warcraft Patch 7.2: Tomb of Sargeras which launched last week, Blizzard sneaked in a little PR disaster which they are referring to as enemy scaling was quickly discovered to be more than just basic scaling in the wild, it was actually dependent on the gear that you had equipped.

Massive fan outrage occurred on the official forums and various other World of Warcraft fan websites as a result, particularly because details of the enemy scaling where not included in the patch notes. Players have angrily stated it was beneficial for them to just remove their best weapon when attacking enemies. This has since led to an immediate response including a live unscheduled update to the game.

Check out the official response from Blizzard below:

• We’re removing the increase to damage dealt by creatures in the world. Our overall goal with this change is to keep the amount of time it takes to kill a creature from getting ridiculously short, and increasing the damage they deal is unnecessary for that goal. Instead, this was making you feel like they were becoming more dangerous, which was not our intent.
• We’re significantly reducing the rate at which creature health scales with your item level. Again, all we’re trying to do here is prevent cases where monsters die too quickly for players to react to their presence, particularly around World Quests. Our initial tuning was far more aggressive than it needed to be, which could make it feel like your upgrades weren’t actually helping. This change will make it very clear that you are still becoming noticeably stronger than your enemies as your gear improves.
• Those two changes are already live, and you should be seeing them in-game now.
• Later today, (live by the time you read this) we’ll be correcting a separate issue that’s causing unequipping an item to drastically alter the power of enemies you’re facing. The above changes make it so that’s never the right thing to do anyway, but this is still a strange/buggy interaction that needs to be fixed.

The sixth World of Warcraft expansion titled “Legion” successfully launched on the 30th of August, 2016 with fans saying they feel like the game is returning to its roots after a couple of mediocre expansions. The game is now in its 12th year, with fans showing continued support however Blizzard is no longer releasing information on how many active subscribers are still playing.