<Warning, this post is mathy. You do not need to know/understand any of this to succeed in Legion. This is purely for the curious math-oriented players who want to know how things work.>

Secondary stats are going to scale a little differently in Legion. There are a few goals here.

  • Get players to the ‘feels good’ level of secondary stats sooner. (A Fire Mage doesn’t feel so good with 5% crit.)
  • Reduce the feeling of being nerfed as you level up.
  • Reduce the degree that players scale exponentially, especially at high gear levels.
  • Don’t reduce the degree of stat customization that players have.
  • Ensure that players still can’t get to crazy levels of stats that break the game, or reduce fun.

Using purely ballpark numbers, players in Warlords started their endgame experience with about 15% of their favorite stat, and 7.5% of the other stats, resulting in a total multiplier from secondary stats of about 1.54. By the end of the expansion, they had something like 50% of their favorite stat, and 20% of the other stats, resulting in a total multiplier from secondary stats of about 3.11. This effect is even more pronounced for tanks and healers, due to Bonus Armor and Spirit being an additional extra-strong multiplier. And since stats on gear scale exponentially with ilvl, that transition started off slow, then ramped up quickly near the end, spending very little time in the sweet spot in the middle.

For Legion, we’ll be making some changes to these systems, in order to improve this situation. Here’s what we’ve done in the latest Alpha build:

  • Conversion rates of Rating->% for secondary stats will not go up as much as they otherwise would, by a huge margin. The conversion rates will end up at 110 at less than half of what they otherwise would have, resulting in Legion dungeon blue gear providing over double the total secondary stat %s, as the it did in prior expansions.
  • Starting after ilvl 800, the exponential curve for secondary stats will be significantly reduced, nearly to being linear (this is per-item, not related to the character’s average item level). Primary stats and Stamina will continue to scale exponentially with ilvl at the same rate as before. This will mean that players retain all of the same customization they had, but with secondary stat %s not scaling higher than they had before, by the end of the expansion.

The removal of multistrike also affects this, reducing how multiplicative the total system is, while further concentrating stats into the other 4. That will mean that in dungeon blues, a player may have 30% of their favorite stat, and 15% of the other stats, resulting in a multiplier of 1.78. By the end of the expansion, they may have 50% of their favorite stat, and 20% of the other stats, same as before, for a total multiplier of 2.59. The net result is that the multiplier difference between start and end is drastically reduced, and players spend the vast majority of the expansion in the ranges that feel best, while primary stats still scaling exponentially ensures that player power grows as needed to feel rewarding.

Feedback on how this feels once you get to start playing with a variety of gear levels will be especially valuable. Thanks!