I know blizzard has to give people a reason to buy the new expansions but I just saw a beta tank with 6 million HP, I felt it was already getting ridicules when they hit 200k as the lower end for tanks. Are the numbers this silly for all the classes or did I just see someone who has played way to much?

Nah. I remember thinking 80K health was crazy during the Burning Crusade (I think that's how the numbers worked out- sounds about right). HP and damage grow exponentially with each expansion, so it's expected, and it's not really more silly than any expansion before it. You've got more health, but enemies hit harder, so it all balances out and doesn't really matter.

They started to artificially inflate health pools starting with Cataclysm as a way of trying to change the way people play. If you are leveling straight through the expansions you go fairly organically from 10 hp or whatever at level 1 to 18,000hp as a fresh 80. From 81-85 you go from 18k to 80k hp, and I haven't played in a while now, but I imagine tanks that have really good gear have 250-300k hp. I don't know much about the numbers behind what they did, but they tinkered with the base health pools from 81-85 (and beyond, I assume) and itemized stamina on gear so that tanks wouldn't go from full health to dead in one shot, like they did on a boss fight in wotlk. The one shotting of tanks led to healers just spamming the same basic, low mana cost heal on tanks over and over again, Blizzard didn't like that and nerfed healers in conjunction with the big health pools. Whether Blizzard thought that players were lazy, or it was their own fault I can't remember from the blue posts, but this is what they ended up with to prevent that type of play.

Yes, I definitely think they inflated the numbers too fast. That was a result of the way they designed the stats though and not through any fault of their own. It's a bit unfortunate.

They have talked about deflating the numbers (it's more than healthpools, it's how big numbers on items are as well), even had it as one of their goals for Mists... but they clearly didn't find a way to elegantly do it for this expansion.

Basically, yeah, and apparently the developers agree, and want to do something about it.

edit: here's a dev blog about it: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3885585

@TooWalrus said:

Nah. I remember thinking 80K health was crazy during the Burning Crusade (I think that's how the numbers worked out- sounds about right). HP and damage grow exponentially with each expansion, so it's expected, and it's not really more silly than any expansion before it. You've got more health, but enemies hit harder, so it all balances out and doesn't really matter.

yep. there is always that moment of "this green item makes my epic look like junk" in any expansion.

you get used to it.

i'll leave here with these stats for the ultimate dagger from vanilla.

High Warlord's Razor

• One-Hand
• Dagger
• 95 - 144 Damage
• +7 Stamina

They have said they want to do an item squish. And they were going to for Panda, but they didn't wanna do it right at the start of an expansion. Eventually the item squish will come.

And yes the numbers are crazy, my Warrior tank on Live right now has 243K Unbuffed HP.