Flux

Which stat is the best? What should you be stacking?  There is a bewildering mass of over thirty five of them. And if that isn’t confusing enough their value depends on talent spec, unseen milestones/caps, and even each other. Without a degree from Gnomeregan your mechanical chicken mount has a better chance to scratch out an answer.

We have compiled a monolithic table of cliffnotes so you can skip Gnomer.

Primary and Secondary Stats

Depending on your class and talent spec, there primary and secondary stats. The primary are the most important to fill your role. You will want to stack them in the order listed. The secondary stats are useful, but not nearly as important as the primary stats. In both cases, they are listing in order of most important first. For example, a holy priest’s +healing is their most important stat followed by spirit. Haste, mp5, and stamina in that order are useful but often not critical. If you gearing for pvp battlegrounds and arena rather than pve raiding then these same stats apply except that you should stack resilience and then stamina first.  And mp5 is often more useful than spirit.

Milestones

These milestones are for pve/raiding.  They are either games caps or based on an encounter with a level 73 boss.  In general you stack the stat until you reach the milestone, and then you don’t need anymore.  For example, after 142 hit rating melee dps will never miss with their specials attacks.  You don’t need anymore +hit unless you are dual wielding weapons.  Or after 35880 points or armor, you have reached an in game cap of 75% damage reduction.  More armor after this is pointless.  When using pvp gear since you are stacking stamina and resilience you will find it difficult, if not impossible, to reach any of the caps.

Choosing

Stack your primary stat in order and then your secondary stat in order, while trying to reach the milestones.  However this doesn’t tell you how much one is worth compared to another, point for point.  This is a tough question because it depends on specific talent spec, the boss fight, duration, available buffs, and so on.  If you want to get to this level of detail, and you will if you are progress raiding, then you need to either use a math model for your character which weights each stat or you can compare items of the same item level and choose the one that has more of your primary stats.  In the second case you are letting Blizzard decide for you with their internal itemization weights.

Summary

These rules of thumb rely on untested gnomish formulas.  But they are guaranteed to be better than mechanical chicken scratches!

Note: I’ll may continue to add info for more classes, either in order listed or just plain randomly.  If you find it useful, have some references you find invaluable, or have some ideas.  Let me know!

Tags: deathknight, druid, hunter, mage, paladin, priest, rogue, shaman, skill, warlock, warrior
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.