Difficulty Scaling

Raids and dungeons dynamically adapt to your group size — play with any number of players

How does it work?

When your group enters an instance with fewer players than the maximum capacity, all creatures are automatically scaled down. Health, damage, and loot adjust in real time whenever someone joins, leaves, or disconnects. At full capacity, everything stays at 100% — no scaling applied.

Interactive Simulator

Change boss
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Ragnaros

Ragnaros

Molten Core (40 players)

609K / 1.1M
55.4% of original

Loot preview

×
×
2/4
20/40

Health

609K

55.4%

Damage

85.7%

of original

Loot

2/4

items kept

Gold

47.8%

of original

Scaling Formula

ratio = effDPS(20) / effMaxDPS(40) = 0.478

HP = 0.4780.8 = 55.4% · DMG = 0.4780.21 = 85.7%

Scaling Table

PlayersHPDamageScaled HPLoot
116.9%62.7%186K1/4
516.9%62.7%186K1/4
1029.5%72.6%324K1/4
1543.0%80.1%472K1/4
20←55.4%85.7%609K2/4
2567.2%90.1%739K2/4
3078.5%93.8%863K3/4
3589.4%97.1%983K3/4
40100.0%100.0%1.1M4/4

What Gets Scaled

Health — scaled from base, preserving current HP %
Melee damage — reduced before combat log display
Spell damage — reduced before combat log display
DoT / HoT ticks — periodic effects scaled proportionally
Experience — XP from creature kills reduced proportionally
Loot items — equipment and tier tokens reduced (min 1 kept)
Gold drops — reduced proportionally

What Is NOT Scaled

Mana and resources — not affected by scaling
Player pets, totems, and player-owned summons
Trigger NPCs — invisible helper creatures are skipped
Materials and reagents — Fiery Core, recipes, etc. always drop
Quest items — never removed from loot tables

Lordaeron Configuration

These are the actual values used on the Lordaeron server

Min Players (Raid)5
Min Players (Dungeon)1
HP Exponent (Raid)0.8
HP Exponent (Dungeon)1.1
Damage Exponent (Raid)0.21
Damage Exponent (Dungeon)1.25
S-Curve Skew (Dungeon)1
Scale LootEnabled
Scale XPEnabled
Scale DungeonsEnabled
Difficulty Scaling — Lordaeron WoW Server - Lordaeron