Item bonuses

[vor_lord]

Is this information known?  Assuming the character and ability sheets are accurate, I got a few statistics for my level 23 tauren shaman (in an attempt to compare stamina vs agility):

+1 stamina = +11 hp

This is actually 10 hp. In the case of a Tauren, you get a 5% racial bonus which means you should get 10.5 (which would show up as 11 on a simple test).

+1 agility = +2 armor, +0.1% critical chance, +0.1% dodge chance
+1 armor = +0.02% damage reduction

The damage reduction you get per point of armor changes as you level up (it also may change based on the attacker's level too, not sure). This would be another interesting formula to completely figure out. For example, at level 10 1000 armor is a pretty impressive damage reduction. At level 40, it isn't very much.

My guess is that 1 armor = .02% additional damage reduction just works for your level 23 char against mobs of equal level.

effective dps = base dps * (1 + crit chance)
effective hp = character hp / ( (1 - dodge chance) * (1 - block chance) * (1 - damage reduction from armor) )

Don't forget special triggers (for example Overpower can get you whacked when you dodge, not sure if there are others). Just something to keep in mind, not sure if any mobs use this kind of a skill anyway.

the result on my particular character was that adding 3 stamina gave me about 50 more ehp (about a 5% improvement), and adding 2 agility gave me about 5. the agility also gave me only 0.2% more damage from increased criticals; I assumed stamina was more useful than agility for my character, but I didn't expect it to be this extreme, so if my calculations are accurate, the assumption I was making at lower levels that "a stat is a stat" was very wrong.

I think crit chance based on agility is highly class dependent, so some classes might see a greater damage increase? There are so many questions...

And then there are questions:
Did I miss some benefit of stamina/agility/armor for a melee+shield character?

What do the various other stats do?

How much of a LCS does WoW have?


How generally applicable are these formulas?  If the rules already availiable somewhere, a few people taking down their stats with and without a piece of armor and posting them in a reply would make it a lot easier to figure out.

Like Diablo II, there are a lot of factors involved in these calculations and it takes a lot larger number of samples than I originally thought. They have to be done across a wide range of levels and classes, and fitting the data to an equation becomes trickier with each variable. When you don't even know for sure what all the variables even are, it is hard. I just wish some nice dev at Bliz would volunteer some of this basic information for us to digest.

As for the rest of your questions, I wish I knew ;)

What does the 'block value' on the shield do? It doesn't appear to change the chance to block.

Does anything change the chance to block?

I assume you qualify for dodge and block (and parry if you've got it) on every incoming attack -- is that true?

Block is not equivalent to a dodge or a parry. A dodge or a parry is 100% damage avoidance. I think the block value on a shield is relative to how much damage it can absorb. If you watch your combat log, you will see that a mob does x damage (y blocked) sometimes. Particularly at low levels you tend to block 100% of the damage, but this doesn't hold true for later on.

Sure wish we had the game code. Probably the best way to gather some of this data is through many repeated duels and a combat log parser.

edit: misplaced quote ender