Discussion Main / ParabolicPowerCurve

World of Warcraft AVERTS or AVERTED this really hard on the Firelands raid, back on Pandaria launch days. Unlike other raids, where boss' damage was based purely on raw numbers (and you being level 90, ilevel 450 with Pandaria greens, and this raid geared towards ilevel 200-ish level 70s or something) all the bosses damage on this raid were based on straight HIT POINTS PERCENTAGE. No beating around, a boss explicitly delivered "200% HP player damage" on hit with one of its deadly skills. Get hit, keel over, no questions asked.

In short, the Firelands raid really wanted you DEAD if you messed any single mechanic up, regardless of level. The upside: it was TOTALLY balanced for a party of undergeared level 90's that just got into Pandaria and had already curb-stomped every other old raid because they could be soloed. This one can't be soloed.

My former guild used Firelands as training for everybody: tanks, healers, and DPS alike, so they would a:) get some achievements (and rare mounts) done for people not used to raid and b) get them trained to do any other raid that would follow. I guess Blizzard noticed this, and rewrote the entire game, two expansions down, to make raids work regardless of level.

Yes, the parabolic curve is pretty much real otherwise. I made another character that at level 10 could one-shot enemies of the same level, and could not do that at level 30 or 40.

So when I see the name, the first thing comes to mine is Quadratic wizard, but that's not what it is. It's not directly clear from the parabolic power curve is referring to from the text, but I was able to tease our that they mean that you start before the maximum, and then it goes down. It's the sort of parabola that corresponds with throwing a ball upwards. It seems that more generally parabola is being incorrectly equated with local maxima as well with the sine description. Anyway, it could be rewritten for clarity.