What do attributes mean in wow

In patch 2. The math on this is incredibly complex and involves finding your base regen which is level dependent and doing lots of things to it, including multiplying and finding square roots. Instead, if you really want to know just how much the Intellect on a certain piece of gear is going to help or harm you mana regeneration-wise you can use an addon like Rating Buster which does all the math for you.

For many hunters Intellect does nothing for them other than give them a mana pool. However, Marksman hunters and other specs that choose to delve into the second tier of the Marksman talent tree can get Attack Power from their Intellect, point for point.

Enhancement Shamans are vastly melee based, though they cast a couple spells every now and then. The final attribute of Intellect is that it increases that rate at which you learn weapon skills.

This used to be noted in the tooltip and was removed without anyone really noticing, but testing still shows that even melee classes will gain weapon skills faster if they have an Intellect buff on them, so as ridiculous as it seems hit up a Mage before venturing out to raise your 1H Sword skill from A discussion of all of the different stats and attributes found in the game World of Warcraft. We look at how core stats like Agility relate to Attack Power, how Magic Resistance really works, just how much Defense a tank needs, and so much more.

The same is true for armor, though a lot of people have referred to it as armor class AC as a carry-over from table-top games. It's just slightly verbose to add rating in these cases. Rather than placing such a priority on defense, a tank would be better prepared for raids if he struck a balance between melee mitigation Stamina, armor, etc , resistance gear where beneficial , and threat gear hit chance, crit chance, etc.

Lastly, I want to say thank you for taking the time to write this and for putting all this information in one place. However, prior to this the stat was simply known as "Spell Damage". Might want to change that, to avoid confusion. Comment by Mutantsteak Warriors benefit the most from Strength. Warriors gain 1 melee Attack Power per point of Strength. Comment by marth It might be worth mentioning that higher stamina can be more useful for Warlocks than other casters thanks to their ability to convert health into mana which is extremely important in Classic.

Comment by Aerolite08 While I do hope that other people can enjoy this re-Vanilla thing, I did not enjoy the old system at all. Comment by Ryecoke A couple notes, take them or leave them: Defense gives 0.

Defense Rating from gear does not directly reduce crushing blows it is not calculated in the above formula , though it does help by adding to your avoidance. Comment by Sedlina Attack speed is multiplicative not additive in classic it turned into additive during TBC when haste rating was normalized. The maximum amount of mana of a character depends solely on its level and increases considerably with each level up, not becoming a cause of problems for mana-dependent classes anymore Table 5.

According to developers [ 22 ], elemental resistances are eliminated because they were difficult to understand. Although potentially interesting, they were not using them in World of Warcraft and therefore decided to remove them. Once the resistances have been eliminated, magic penetration has no use and is also removed.

With the elimination of the resistances, players no longer need to have a specific set of items with elemental resistances exclusively for some end-game encounters. There were rare cases in which this happened, mostly in Vanilla and Wrath of the Lich King expansions, but this type of battle did not happen in the last expansions. As in fact, elemental resistances were not being used in recent expansions of end-game content, the change has little impact on gameplay.

The simplification of intellect primary stat, removing its relationship with mana, allows game designers to control the exact amount of mana that each specialization will have available, as it no longer will depend on equipped items. In any case, the stat is still one of the most important for players, as it is the main form of improving damage and healing for spell casters, so the change does not have a substantial impact on gameplay.

At the end of comes Warlords of Draenor, the fifth expansion of World of Warcraft, which aims to return somewhat to the roots of the game. The maximum character level is increased from 90 to Many stats are removed, while new ones are added.

A compression in stats also occurs for the first time. Hit and expertise ratings are eliminated from the game and from the formulas used when hitting. That is, when a character attacks, the only thing that is considered to see if the attack fails to hit is the difference in level between the attacker and its target.

It must be clarified that when an attack does not fail, it is still necessary to check whether it is dodged, parried, or blocked. Dodge and parry ratings are removed from the items, and, instead, they start to depend on abilities, talents, and primary stats, such as agility, which increases the dodge rating, and the strength, which increases the parry rating.

Agility and intellect stop giving critical strike rating. With this change, all the uses that the intellect attribute had in the original version of World of Warcraft have been eliminated. New secondary stats are added in this expansion: bonus armor, multistrike, and versatility. A new type of stats, tertiary, is also introduced with avoidance, indestructible, leech, and speed, which have less in-game effect than the secondary stats.

In the same object, a mage sees that it gives intellect, and a warrior sees that it provides strength Table 6. According to patch notes [ 23 ], the elimination of the hit rating and the expertise is due to the game mechanics not being fun, since the goal of both stats was to remove a penalty, avoiding attack fail and attack being parried or dodged, respectively, and not to obtain an advantage. Therefore, designers decided to eliminate them from the game.

Eliminating expertise and hit ratings removes the need for damage specializations to maximize those stats to a certain level to be fully effective when attacking. This way, players can center their efforts on the improvement of stats that increase the attack damage, no longer worrying about cap values for hit rate and expertise. Cap value was the maximum amount that a character should have in a stat to perform at the best level.

Any additional rating above the cap had no in-game effects, so players needed a depth knowledge to avoid having an excessive rating that could be better used for other secondary stats. In the case of dodge and parry ratings, stats focused on tanks, designers decide to eliminate them in exchange for the bonus armor, a tank exclusive stat.

In the patch notes, they explain that they want to keep these stats in low numbers, to avoid the tanks receiving damage peaks, and to make their life more stable.

This will happen since the defense stat reduces all damage taken by a percentage, while dodge and parry ratings were based on attack avoidance. Previously, with high dodge and parry values, tanks could avoid many of the attacks received, but those blows that hit caused a lot of damage. Now, with the removal of dodge and parry ratings in exchange for bonus armor, tanks receive damage over time more homogenously.

This change simplifies equipping, as previously a player could be interested in an item depending on whether it improved parry or dodge ratings, and now the only option to consider is the bonus armor. Also, as the life is more stable, the work of the healer, who has more reaction time, is facilitated, and, in general, it will be easier to save someone who is receiving a lot of damage. The elimination of the critical strike chance from agility and intellect is done to compensate for their difference with strength stat, which did not provide critical strike chance.

This difference in primary stats made it challenging to balance primary and secondary stats. This simplification and the changes in equipment, which now adapts the primary stat provided to the specialization of the character using it, make strength and agility almost indistinguishable and facilitate, even more, the task of equipping a character. Regarding the remaining new stats, versatility, in the same way that mastery, is a useful stat in every class and specialization, as it improves both damage, healing, and damage reduction.

The tertiary stats are merely small and random bonuses for items, which do not have a very considerable impact but that are appreciated when they appear. The sixth expansion of World of Warcraft is launched in , Legion. The maximum character level is increased from to It makes few changes in the stats, except to discard some of those introduced in the previous expansion. The spirit is removed, thus finishing with the possibility of improving mana regeneration through attributes.

Mana regeneration, so crucial for healing classes, is no longer a stat and depends on abilities, talents, and items. Besides, the base mana regeneration for healing classes is increased. Spell power is removed from the items from weapons that provided it and now can only be increased with intellect. This way, it suffers the same change that happened to attack power stat in Cataclysm. Some other stats introduced in Warlords of Draenor are eliminated: bonus armor and multistrike.

Only versatility and tertiary stats remain. All these stats are replaced by versatility, which in turn gets much more important than before Table 7. As developers explain in patch notes, the elimination of both the spirit and the bonus armor is done to reduce the amount of equipment changes between specializations, that is to say, to make the equipment carried by a healer or a tank to be also useful for damage specializations.

This change facilitates equipping characters, allowing players to change specialization easily without needing to find specific items to play that role successfully. By eliminating the spirit of the objects, the regeneration of mana of many specializations must be compensated. The change requires mana user to manage mana with more care and more actively, as its regeneration now depends on abilities, talents, objects, potions, etc.

The removal of spell power from item seems natural, as it already happened with attack power. Intellect providing mana and critical chance was the only reason to avoid the unification of intellect and spell power, but since the simplifications of primary stats that happened on Warlords of Draenor, their unification was expected. Finally, secondary stats are adjusted to make them less relevant. Now the most crucial thing regarding item comparison is their item level, and rarely an item with lower level will have more benefits than a higher level one.

This facilitates character equipping enormously. In the previous sections, we have identified and qualitatively analyzed changes to the combat stats trough expansions. Some item stats were unified, others eliminated, and some others removed from items and included as effects of other game mechanics that depended on the character level, something we will discuss further later.

Amount of item stats through expansions. In Figure 2 we can see that, besides reducing the total amount of item stats, the number of stats required to play a role optimally has also been reduced, especially if we compare The Burning Crusade expansion, were the stat system had more complexity, to Legion, the last expansion analyzed.

The number of stats that the player had to pay attention to when equipping his character has been reduced by 3 for the attack role, 2 for the defense and spell healing roles, or 1 for the spell offensive role.

We can now answer research question 1. Amount of item stats specific for each role through expansions. Regarding research question 1. Many of the stats that were initially obtained through the items were moved to other game mechanics, such as talents and abilities, which depend on the character level. As players can obtain character levels much more easily than good items, this change can be understood as a facilitation for players to increase certain stats.

But this conclusion can be argued to be wrong, as talents and abilities have their own complexities. Talents require the player to make adequate decisions for his character, choosing some talents and leaving others out, while abilities require an active behavior from players in combat by activating the corresponding ability when they think it will be more useful. So instead of concluding that these changes have facilitated the increase of stats, it would be more appropriate just to say that the importance of items for stat obtention has been reduced in favor of other game mechanics Figure 3.

Comparison between item and non-item stats through expansions. Another way in which the obtention of stats has been facilitated is by making all stats useful for all characters. As we can see in Table 8 , in Legion expansion there are scarce differences between the stats that are required to play different roles optimally.

In the case of attack, spell offensive, and spell healing, the required stats are almost equal, knowing that items provide the primary stat that better suits the character role, so the differences between strength, agility, and intellect are nonexistent.

In the case of the defense role, it has even fewer stats to consider than their counterparts. The lack of variety in the role stats facilitates the increase of stats in two ways. From this perspective, it is clear that the obtention of stats has been facilitated through the expansions. Derived attributes are split based on role. Damage dealers either attack using physical attacks either from melee or at range , or spells. Healers as a rule cast spells, so their attributes are also listed in the spell category.

Tanks are primarily concerned with defensive attributes. In PvP only one such chance is available. This chance applies to damaging attacks, either single-targeted or area of effect, and also to heals, but not to status-affecting attacks like [ Polymorph ] or [ Fear ]. Additionally, each tick of a DoT or HoT had an independent chance to land a multistrike. Multistrikes crit independently of the original attack—that is, the main attack does not have to crit for the multistrike to crit.

Multistrikes are treated as procs , not additional casts. In general, multistrikes will not proc other effects, but there are a few class abilities that depend on a multistrike landing, much like the handful of class abilities that react to crits landing.

Bonus Armor is the tank -only stat, and provides armor that would not normally appear on non-armor items. It largely exists to give tanks items useful only to them, as tanks are generally vastly outnumbered in groups.

Bonus Armor was "re-added" in Warlords of Draenor to fill the role that dodge and parry used to. Bonus Armor also provides attack power through the passive ability [ Bladed Armor ]. This attribute had already existed prior to becoming official, as some legacy items namely: PvP gear, certain cloth and leather armor, and certain cloaks and rings had additional armor itemized on them. Spirit is the healer -only stat, and increases their mana regeneration. As with bonus armor, spirit largely exists to give healers items useful only to them.

Spirit has changed drastically since launch, and over the years has drifted from being a primary stat to a secondary. Spirit's status as a secondary stat was formalized in Warlords of Draenor. Spirit is of no use and should be avoided for any class or spec in a mana-using damage-dealing role such as balance druids , mages , shadow priests , elemental shaman , and warlocks due to how their classes' mana regeneration works.

In addition to the other secondary attributes, there were two PvP -only attributes that functioned as counterparts to each another:. Resistance provides a chance to resist spells. Resistance as a stat was common and important in certain legacy encounters, but was removed from the character sheet in Mists of Pandaria. Resistance still remains itemized on pre- Mists items, and can still function when worn in adequate amounts at lower levels.

Spell Penetration originally itemized as "Decreases the magical resistances of your spell targets by X.