Stats

Hi Folks,

Yesterday I blogged a bit on the stats you should be looking to get as a ret pally. Today I'm going to give an explanation of these stats and why the numbers should be as high as they are. As a recap, below are the minimum "complete" stats you should have. More is better but if you meet the criteria below the WOW community considers you a veteran (non noob) Ret Pally.

1. Attack Power - 1,500
2. Health - 10,000
3. Resilience - 200
4. Melee Crit - 25%
5. Melee Hit - 81
6. Mana- 6,000


Attack power - Your friend and mine AP. This is probably the most often looked at statistic for a melee class. That's because AP translates directly into DPS, and Ret Pally's are made for DPS. More importantly now, other classes have loaded up on Resilience, and that means you're going to find yourself criting a lot less no matter how high your Crit rating is. So the higher your AP the better.

Health - You're not going to be healing yourself unless it's absolutely necessary. That's what the healing classes are for. Plus your heals are not going to be as effective then a full on healer, and taking time on half assed heals when you could be laying on massive damage is usually a waste of time. As such you're going to want a lot of heath; this allows you to take more damage before needing to heal. 10,000 health is more then enough to keep you alive even against some of the bust damage other classes give out.

Resilience - This is a stat that has been sorely needed. It reduces the chance to crit against you and the damage taken during a crit. 200 is not as high as it could be, but you'll really start to notice you're staying alive longer against burst damage when you hit the 200 mark.

Melee Crit - 25% is said to be the minimum amount to keep vengeance up at all times. That will give you a relatively permanent 5% increase to your DPS.

Melee Hit - 81 is considered the amount needed to never miss your target in PvP against a level 70 opponent. That's extremely important - if you're dealing 1,000 damage per hit and you miss a couple times, there's the difference between a win and a loss. There's not a ton of gear that adds to hit rating, but you can get a great yellow gem called a Rigid Dawnstone that adds +8 to your hit rating. A couple of these will get you much closer to 81. On a side note, if you're doing PvE the hit rating goes up to 142. That's because raid bosses are higher then level 70 so you need a higher hit rating. But for all PvP you will get no additional benefit going over 81.

Mana - Last but not least. Sure the other stats are important but with no mana you aren't dealing any damage so it's important not to skimp out on this skill . If you don't believe me wait till a priest or warlock man burns you for the first time and you're stuck doing auto attack. 6,000 mana means you won't run out of mana very often and you don't need to drink up after every fight in PvP or PvE.

I'll admit the post doesn't have as many hard numbers as I like to give, but there's no way I'm going into the math and theory crafting of how each stat is calculated, how much damage each level of armor mitigates, etc. If you're like most people you won't want it either. On the offshot you do, search it out on the wowwiki link on the side.

Come back tomorrow when I talk about my most nail biting arena match ever, and some strategies that can help you!