Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Dev Watercooler: A New Look at Warlords Stats

Well, one of the things that I had long expected to be somewhat set in stone has changed. Blizzard just announced through their latest Dev Watercooler that we're going to see a different set of new secondary stats than what we had previously been shown.

The full list, as of June 4th, 2014:

Secondary: Haste, Critical Strike, Mastery, Multistrike, Versatility, Bonus Armor, Spirit

Minor (previously tertiary): Movement Speed, Avoidance, Indestructible, Leech

So let's go through them. Most of these stats are remaining unchanged, but you'll notice some new ones in the lists.

The old stats, or the ones that aren't really being changed, I'm going to leave out here.

Secondary Stats:

Multistrike will have a cap at 100%. Previously, the second potential extra strike had, I believe, half the chance to proc as the first one, making 100% a soft cap and 200% a hard cap. However, now both strikes will have the same chance, meaning that with 50% Multistrike, you will get either strike half the time (and thus have a 25% chance to get no strike or both, mathematically speaking.)

Bonus Armor, to be clear, is going to be tuned such that it's the strongest stat for tanks, which should encourage all tanks to get necklaces, cloaks, rings and trinkets that have it on them. So yes, you will need your set of tank gear, but at least it'll only be 5-7 slots (depending on weapon choice) instead of the full 16.

Versatility is the new stat in town. For each 1% Versatility you get, your damage, healing, and absorbs will be increased by 1% and the damage you take will be reduced by 0.5%. At first blush, this looks like a really boring stat, but the thing to keep in mind is that you get both bonuses. That means that DPS and healers can stack this for better survival while still getting a pretty clear bonus to their performance while tanks can stack it to increase their damage and threat (and self-heals, for that matter) while still making themselves tougher. I'll be watching this one closely to see how well they manage to make it scale (obviously they'll have to make it impossible to get 200%, or it might be a little on the over-powered side, as that would make you invincible.) I think it will just be a bit tricky to tune this so that it's no overpowered, but also does not elicit groans when someone gets it on one's gear.

Now, some of the previously-announced stats are going away. Amplify they cited as basically being too boring, and as gear progressed, it would become by far the most powerful stat for just about everyone. Readiness looked better, but they had a hard time making it actually provide a benefit that worked as well as other stats. If you have a cool down that increases your crit by 30%, how much readiness would you need to stack before that outweighed an equivalent amount of critical strike rating?

Minor Stats:

To reiterate, minor stats are the random ones that will sometimes show up on gear.

Movement Speed as a stat will have a pretty low cap, because they don't want it to have a huge effect on your character power. Class abilities are going to cover that area more, but this will give you a nice little boost.

Avoidance will reduce AOE damage taken, but at a far lower rate than class pets. While class pets are expected to stand in the fire, you are not.

Indestructible is the new name for Sturdiness, but it's simpler. An item with indestructible will simply not take durability damage.

Leech is the new form of Lifesteal. They want Leech to be beneficial for healers as well, so any damage or healing that you do will then heal you for your Leech percentage as well. I don't know if this also applies to self-heals.

Cleave is currently shelved, because they worry that while it's always good for healers, it's only situationally useful for DPS and nearly always worthless for tanks. They don't want people to see Cleave on a pair of gloves and say that it has to go to the healers, so for now they've taken Cleave out of the mix.

Obviously, we're still (still, grr...) pre-Beta, so these things could change, but it'll be exciting to try out the new stuff.

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