With access to the Warlords of Draenor (WoD) Alpha in full swing it is time to start getting into what all the changes that we have heard were coming in the WoD expansion really mean.

One of the biggest changes coming to the World of Warcraft is the huge scaling back of character stats.  This is something that we have all known was coming since Blizzard announced that they planned on doing it when WoD was announced at BlizzCon.  What we did not know up until now is what exactly that is going to mean, but now we do.

As you can see in the image above the stats have changed dramatically.

Item Stats that are Gone

There are several stats that are leaving the game with the expansion.  The stats disappearing are Hit, Expertise, Dodge, and Parry.  All of these stats were viewed as important but non-optional or interesting stats.  They were all stats that you needed to focus on and make sure that you capped the ones that were key for your class, but nothing more than that. 

All of that meant that you didn’t really care about them other than to get them to a set value and then you ignored them.  This made them really boring and hence they are being removed and the benefits they granted are being rolled into the base abilities of the appropriate classes and specs.

New Stats – Enhancements

While some stats are disappearing there are many new stats being added.  There new stats are listed under the Enhancement section and include the following:

Avoidance – This stat reduces the amount of damage you take from AOE attacks and effects.  When stacked it allows you to be a little less cautious about AOE effects in certain boss fights.

Bonus Armor – This stat boosts your armor by a percentage value.  This is a Tank only stat.

Indestructible – This stat makes the item that it is on not take durability damage.

Leech – This stat provides a percentage of all damage or healing that your character deals out back to yourself as healing.  If you are expecting to take damage this could be a strong stat, especially for tanks.

Movement Speed – This stat does exactly as it states, it increases your move rate by a set amount.

Multistrike – This new stat grants a percentage chance to deal up to two additional effects at 30% of the same effect of the ability that triggered it.  This means that if the character has 50% multistike and attacks for 1000 damage, there are two separate chances at 50% to deal a 300 damage strike.

Versatility – This new stats grants a boost to your damage, healing, and absorbs equal to your Versatility.  It also grants half of that benefit as a reduction to the damage that you take.  This is a strong stat for all specs as it boosts all damage and healing as well as making your character more resistant to damage.

You can find more information about these new stats over on Blizzards Dev Watercooler post.

Stat Squish

The stat squish is fairly dramatic as can be seen in the main image above.  The stats shown in the image are for the same character in the same gear.  The first image is the character in Mists of Pandaria and the second is in the Warlords of Draenor Alpha.

While impossible to directly compare stats only as some gear has been changed to reduce the number of sockets or reduce the number of enchantments available the stats are roughly a 90% reduction.

The weapon shown in the image to the right is a good example of what to expect, and yes it is a shocking drop.  The thing to keep in mind though is that the overall power of the weapon has stayed the same.  You will kill enemies just as fast in WoD as you do in Mists of Pandaria as their stats have dropped by equal amounts.

There isn’t really a set % that you can go by here, as the different values drop by different amounts.  The exact calculations will become clearer as time goes on in the alpha, but just using this weapon as an example the stats dropped as follows:

• The overall damage per second dropped from 2,132 to 41.14 which is only 1.9% of the original value! 
• The values for Intellect, Stamina, Haste, and Spell Power all seem to drop by the same amount which is roughly 3.9% of the original value. 
• Crit drops to 6.5% of the original value.

What does all of this mean?

What all of these changes mean to you and your character is awfully hard to tell right now as it is early in the Alpha for Warlords of Draenor.  So far it seems like it doesn’t mean a whole lot as everything has been squished down equally and it feels like we are killing enemies just as quickly as we were before.  All of this will become clearer over time though as the effects are made clearer or as Blizzard tunes the numbers.

The most important chance though is that the numbers that players are doing for damage and healing are actually legible and are small enough that you can see a difference between one number and the next.  Gone are the massive numbers that you can not read at a glance, they are now back down to legible numbers, and that is a great thing.