Guide

WoW's numbers, explained simply

Updated September 18, 2026 · Vanilla-style WoW: Classic Era and Forever

Every stat on a piece of gear is a promise about a fight. This page says what each promise means in plain words, with one example you can picture. No formulas you have to remember — the site does the math; this is so you understand what it did. Every “?” on the builder links back here.

Health and stamina

Your health bar is how much damage you can take before you die. Every point of stamina is 10 health (the very first 20 points give 1 each, which never matters). So an item with +15 stamina is +150 health.

Example: a level 60 rogue with 3,000 health takes a 1,200 crit and a 900 hit — still alive with 900 left. Add +30 stamina (+300 health) and the same two hits leave 1,200. That is the whole story of stamina: one more hit's worth of time.

Armor — and the first kind of diminishing returns

Armor makes physical hits hurt less: swords, claws, arrows. It does nothing against spells. How much less depends on the attacker's level; at level 60, roughly:

Look at the steps: the first 3,000 armor removed 35%. The next 3,000 removed only 17% more. The 3,000 after that, 10% more. That is diminishing returns: each extra point helps a little less than the one before it. It never stops helping — but a tankat 9,000 armor gains less from +500 armor than a rogue at 1,500 does. (The rule the game uses: damage removed = armor ÷ (armor + 5,500) at level 60.)

Hit chance — and the cap

Some of your attacks simply miss. Against a raid boss (three levels above you) a normal character misses about 9% of the time with weapons and about 17% of the time with spells. Hit chance takes that away, one percent per percent.

Example: 100 swings with 0% hit: about 91 land. With +5% hit: about 96 land. With +9% hit: all 100 land. With +12% hit: still all 100 — the extra 3% did nothing. That is the hit cap: 9% for weapons and abilities against a boss, 16% for spells (spells can always miss 1%, so that last percent is not for sale), and only about 5% against another player, because they are your level.

This is why the builder marks hit “over the cap” in gold: it is stat budget the item spent on something that no longer changes the fight. Hit is the best stat you can have until the cap, and worth nothing after it.

Crit chance

A critical strike is a hit that does about double damage (spells: about one and a half times). Crit chance is how often that happens.

So every 1% crit is roughly 1% more damage over a whole fight. It is luck in the short run — you can go ten swings without one — and reliable in the long run. Agility gives melee crit (about 1% per 20–30 agility at 60, class dependent); intellect gives a little spell crit. In Forever, crit comes as a rating that turns into a chance: about 14 rating per 1% at level 60.

Attack power, strength and agility

Attack power makes your weapon swings and physical abilities hit harder. The rule of thumb: 14 attack power is about 1 more damage per second on your weapon. So +140 attack power on a 2.5-second weapon is about +25 damage on every swing.

You rarely see attack power on its own; it comes from strength (2 attack power per point for warriors, paladins, shamans and druids; 1 for rogues and hunters) and agility (1 attack power per point for rogues and hunters, plus crit and dodge for everyone). That is why the same “+20 strength” item is better on a warrior than on a rogue.

Spell power and healing power

Spell power makes spells hit harder; healing power does the same for heals only. But a spell does not get all of it — it gets a share based on how long it takes to cast: cast time ÷ 3.5. A 3-second Fireball gets about 86% of your spell power; a 1.5-second Flash of Light gets about 43%; a 10-second damage-over-time spell gets its share spread over its ticks.

Example: +100 spell power adds about 86 damage to a 3-second bolt and about 43 to a 1.5-second one. Fast spells are fast; slow spells hit harder per cast. That trade is most of caster theorycraft.

Haste

Haste makes you swing and cast faster. 10% haste turns a 3-second cast into a 2.73-second cast and a 2.5-second weapon into a 2.27-second one. More actions in the same time, so more damage and more healing — and more mana spent, which is why casters treat it carefully.

Mana: intellect, spirit, mana per 5 and the five-second rule

• Intellect is the size of your mana bar: 15 mana per point, plus a little spell crit. +100 intellect is +1,500 mana.
• Spirit refills mana (and health) over time — but in vanilla-style WoW, spirit-based mana only ticks when you have not cast anything for 5 seconds. That is the five-second rule. Healers who stop casting for a moment get a burst of mana back; healers who never stop get nothing from spirit.
• Mana per 5 seconds (mp5) ignores that rule: it ticks even mid-cast. 20 mp5 is 240 mana a minute, no matter what you do. That is why healers prize it.

Dodge, parry, block and defense

A tank has three ways to not take a hit: dodge (step aside, zero damage), parry (knock it aside with your weapon, zero damage — melee only), and block (the shield soaks part of it). 10% dodge means about 1 in 10 melee hits does nothing to you. Defense raises all three a little each (about 0.04% per point) and makes bosses miss you more; at 440 defense a level 60 tank stops taking the boss's extra-hard “crushing” hits, which is why tanks chase that number first.

Diminishing returns in PvP

Crowd control — stuns, fears, roots, sleeps — gets weaker when it is used on the same target again and again, so nobody can be chain-stunned forever:

1. The first stun lasts its full time — say 6 seconds.
2. The second stun within 15 seconds lasts half: 3 seconds.
3. The third lasts a quarter: 1.5 seconds.
4. The fourth does not work at all.
5. About 15 seconds after the last one wears off, it resets and the next stun is full length again.

Effects that share a “category” count against each other (a rogue's Kidney Shot and a paladin's Hammer of Justice are both stuns). When someone says a target is “on DR”, they mean: wait, or your control will be short or fail. The PvP trinket breaks control but does not reset diminishing returns.

Resistances

Fire, frost, nature, shadow and arcane resistance make that school's spells hurt less, and sometimes miss you entirely. They work a bit like armor for one kind of magic, and only matter on fights built around one school (Molten Core is fire; Naxxramas has frost and shadow).

Threat

Every monster keeps a list: how much each player has annoyed it. Damage adds to your line; healing adds to the healer's line (about half as much); some abilities add extra. The monster attacks whoever is highest. A tank's job is to be highest; everyone else's job is to stay under the tank. If you pass the tank, the monster turns around — that is “pulling aggro”.

Cooldowns and the global cooldown

A cooldown is how long you wait before you can use an ability again — a 2-minute cooldown is 30 times a hour, at most. The global cooldown (GCD) is a shared 1.5-second pause after almost any ability, so you cannot press two things at once. Some abilities are “off the global cooldown” and slot in between.A rotation is just the order that wastes the fewest of those 1.5-second windows.

What the rating on this site is

A report card out of 100 for the job you picked: gear up to 50, talents up to 35, how well they fit together up to 15. Gear is scored against the best item you could wear in each slot; talents by how many points went to things that help the job; fit by set bonuses, hit chance and having a weapon in every hand that needs one. It is a planning score, not a fight simulation — a 90 means “close to the best this game allows for that job”, not “beats a 70 in a duel”.

Stat weights and “damage points”

To compare two items you need one number. A stat weight says how much one point of a stat is worth in a common currency — here attack power for melee, spell power for casters, healing power for healers, stamina for tanks. If 1% crit is worth about 22 attack power for a rogue, then an item with +2% crit and +20 agility scores 44 + 38 = 82 “damage points”. The weights come from vanilla theorycraft and are adjusted per class, spec and job. They are opinions with math behind them, and the reason two sites can disagree about a ring. Hit past the cap is weighed at zero.

Item level and required level

Item level is how much stat budget an item has — higher is more stats, but not necessarily the right ones for you. Required level is the character level you need to wear it. In the builder, a level 40 character only sees items it can actually equip.

Questions people ask

Want to see these numbers on your own character? Open the builder — every stat there has a “?” with the exact amount explained. Words you do not know are in the glossary.