In the current version of World of Warcraft: Legion, the developers are adjusting the impact of secondary stats. What will change for players in WoW?
Benefits of Secondary Stats Will Be Linear in WoW
With the upcoming expansion “Legion,” the attributes in World of Warcraft are being revamped. Overall, the increase is intended to be linear, to ensure a more enjoyable character progression for players throughout the expansion. In the official forum, it was explained how this is to be achieved.
The stats in World of Warcraft can generally be divided into two categories: primary and secondary. The primary stats include all “class-specific” stats, such as intelligence, agility, strength, and stamina. Secondary attributes encompass all other values, such as critical strike, haste, and mastery.
The developers are dissatisfied with the effects of secondary attributes. These often have little importance at the beginning of an expansion but become too important towards the end. The reason for this is fairly easy to understand.
In the “starting phase” of an expansion, it is important to first increase the primary attributes, as these increase the “base damage” – the primary attributes act additively.
Secondary attributes act as multipliers, as they amplify the base damage – the higher the base damage, the stronger the effect of haste, critical strikes, or mastery.
This leads to secondary attributes becoming more important later on, and primary stats falling into the background, paired with the issue that values increase exponentially with rising item levels.
Therefore, in Legion, the increase of secondary stats is reduced. So, per item level, there will be less haste, crit, mastery, and so on. You can see the increase curve compared to now here.
If all of this is too complicated: Don’t worry. In the forum post, it is explicitly emphasized that one does not need to understand this adjustment in detail to have fun and success in Legion.
Mein-MMO says: Even without being an expert in mathematics, the planned changes sound good at first glance. At least the developers’ explanation seems coherent, and a continuous increase in values should bring a higher level of satisfaction than is currently the case. However, whether the entire system will actually work as hoped will probably only be assessed towards the end of Legion – certainly two or three content patches later.
For more news and articles about the game and the current alpha of the “Legion” expansion, check out our World of Warcraft topic page.
