This Game's Statistics
MMORPG.com Warhammer Online Correspondent Michael Dennis writes this look at the various statistics in Mythic's Warhammer Online.
System Focus By Michael Dennis on June 01, 2009
Part 1 - The Eight Base Statistics
Please note all the numerical amounts provided have been worked out by the game's players and, while they represent a very approximate estimation, are not confirmed by Mythic and may vary. All relevant, known equations have been included.
Statistics are the numbers that measure your character's physical capabilities. Depending on what kind of archetype you play, e.g. melee DPS or tank, different statistics will be prioritised. There are sixteen statistics (or stats) in total that cover every aspect of combat in the game, this article covers the eight primary ones. Stats come into play every time you attack another player or NPC and every time you get attacked. They determine the damage you take, the damage you deal, the healing you do, the amount of hit-points you have; so, even though you never need to "activate" them like your abilities, they are behind the scenes playing a very active part in almost everything you do. The eight base stats are:
- Strength
- Toughness
- Wounds
- Initiative
- Weapon Skill
- Ballistic Skill
- Intelligence
- Willpower
Players that have experience with the table top predecessor of the game will recognize the first six from the rules of that game. They play more or less the same roles as their table top equivalents, only in a much more complex way.
When you first create your character you will have the default level for each statistic. This differs for every archetype and career. Melee classes, for example, have higher melee stats (such as strength, toughness, weapon skill) and lower ranged and magical stats (e.g. ballistic skill and willpower). Each archetype has a primary stat that is the most important for them to raise, however, disregard the other stats at your own peril, it is useful to have as many of them as high as you can make them. There are two ways for you to increase your stats. The first is levelling; every time you go up a level, your stats increase. You cannot control which ones or by how much, this is automatic and the same for every character of any given career. The amount by which each stat increases differs depending on your chosen career. The second is through items, you can gain temporary boosts through potions and lesser talismans or buffs but the main source for stat bonuses is through acquiring more, powerful, magical gear.
;)
Which stats you concentrate on is entirely up to you, but you will be limited to whatever bonuses the gear you have provides.
Strength
Strength is your character's brute physical power. Essentially: how hard they can hit things. This is an important stat for every melee class, but specifically for melee DPS classes. Strength has the following effects in the game:
- Increases melee auto attack damage.
- Increases melee ability damage.
- Increases auto attack speed by 0.1 second per point.
- Increases melee ability attack speed by 0.2 seconds per point.
- Strength also reduces your opponent's chance to block and parry your attacks.
Toughness
Toughness is your character's pain threshold, his (or her) ability to take hits without being effected by them. In game terms this means that it has the following effect:
- Every five points of Toughness increases your damage reduction by 1. This applies to every type of damage you take.
;)
Certain melee classes, such as the Witch Elf and Witch Hunter, have powerful debuffs that reduce toughness thus increasing the damage you take.
Wounds
Wounds represent a given character's stamina, aka their hit-points. In game terms this means:
- For every wound you have your total hit-points increase by 10.
Initiative
This is your character's ability to defend themselves from incoming attacks without the need for armour, essentially; your ability to avoid being hit and, at the very least, avoid having your skull broken open. This manifests in game mechanics with the following effects:
- Reduces your chance to be critically hit.
- Increases your chance to evade ranged attacks.
Weapon Skill
This is your character's finesse with their weapons (or hands!); their ability to hit the vital organs that your opponent is likely using as well as fend off incoming blows. Weapon Skill has the following effects:
- Increases Armour Penetration.
- Increases chance to Parry.
Ballistic Skill
This is probably the least used skill, only two careers specialize in it (the Squig Herder and Shadow Warrior) and most players consider it the least useful stat due to this. Ballistic Skill is a measurement of your character's aptitude with ranged and thrown weapons. The higher this stat gets the more likely your character is to hit that enemy hiding behind the keep ramparts rather than the menacing looking tree over to the right. In game terms you will experience the following effects:
- Increased auto attack damage with ranged weapons.
- Increased ability damage with ranged weapons.
- Decreased chance your attack will be blocked or evaded.
Intelligence
Are you a caster? Do you channel the winds of change? Or conjure fire using only your mind and a click of your fingers? In WAR, this statistic is not a measurement of your intellectual prowess but a determination of your ability to conjure hotter fire and bigger explosions. In game terms:
- Increases damage with mage abilities.
- Decreases your opponent's chance to disrupt your mage abilities.
;)
Willpower
If you are a healer, calling upon the winds of magic to nit broken bones and cauterize wounds, then you will not want to ignore Willpower. Your ability to heal under the duress of ferocious combat is calculated with this statistic. It also increases your chance to defend against your opponent's offensive magic. It has the following in game applications:
- Increases HPS (Healing per Second).
- Increases you chance to disrupt enemy magical abilities.
Those are the eight basic statistics. There are also eight defensive statistics, which will be covered in part 2.
so... the game is still boring....
Good write up - very concise. I wish the game had had something like that in the beginning.
And that is relevant how in this thread?
War surely has its weaknesses but information like this is very good, it makes it easier for new players to choose their class and learn the mechanics of the game.
I love this, it justs proves when i did play that i had full rights to ask why the hell witch elves had willpower on their endgame armor. that absolutely drove me nuts. purples or whatever color the legendary stuff was always had freakin willpower on them.
Very good write up, but to nitpick for a sec...ballistics is also the primary attribute for engineers. Don't ignore the stunties (unless ya wanna wind up with a grenade in your pocket, hehe). But overall good info for those who might not understand how the stats work.
I hear patch 1.3 will help to clear up a lot of the itemization issues on endgame gear (my swordmaster is also wondering why the hell all his stuff has willpower on it. The very small increase in disrupt is nowhere near enough to keep up with what a ranged caster can dish out with their intelligence).
You know you want to resub to the game and play the same thing over...and over...and over... Well atleast they added new content. I still have hopes for war. But its going to take alot to bring me back.
Yeah, hopefully WAR eventually clears up all the wacky itemization, or changes classes so that it's not wacky itemization (my Ironbreaker had a tactic for a brief 30% run buff and Health recovery when a spell was disrupted.)
It's interesting to hear that strength apparently increases autoattack speed according to the article? Maybe that explains why autoattack speeds are so slow to start out.
<blockquote><i>Originally posted by Axehilt</i> <br />
<b><blockquote><i>Originally posted by Telonos</i> <br />
<b>
<p>I hear patch 1.3 will help to clear up a lot of the itemization issues on endgame gear (my swordmaster is also wondering why the hell all his stuff has willpower on it. The very small increase in disrupt is nowhere near enough to keep up with what a ranged caster can dish out with their intelligence). </p>
</b></blockquote>
<p>Yeah, hopefully WAR eventually clears up all the wacky itemization, or changes classes so that it's not wacky itemization (my Ironbreaker had a tactic for a brief 30% run buff and Health recovery when a spell was disrupted.)</p>
<p>It's interesting to hear that strength apparently increases autoattack speed according to the article? Maybe that explains why autoattack speeds are so slow to start out.</p>
</b></blockquote>
<p>I'm not 100% on the strength increasing auto-attack speed thing...it seems kind of an arbitrary thing to attach to a stat when gear plays such a huge part in attack speed. (not saying that this isn't correct, just saying i'd have to see some evidence of it as it is the first time I've ever heard that claim). As far as I know, the only thing that increases auto-attack speed is the weapon's speed rating. I dunno, just doesn't make sense that it would work any other way (what if I stacked strength to insane amounts like virtually all melee DPS do? Sounds like the developers would just be asking for trouble).</p>
<p>And yeah, <a href="http://www.wardb.com/spell.aspx?id=1409">Avalanche</a> is a great tactic (at least in theory, I've never played an IB before) if you have a way to pump up your disruption. From what I've seen though, unless you have class abilities that give you extra disrupt, or maybe some very specific gear with "+disrupt" on it (not willpower, the bonus is way too low) very cool tactics like that are rendered worthless. So yeah, totally see your point.</p>
After discussing it with our Order counterparts we couldn't decide whether the primary stat for Engineers was WS, BS or intelligence. But I can see what you're saying, as a main stat BS seems to be the most logical choice for them.
Yeah, ballistics affects the damage output on all their ranged abilities, including grenades. The exceptions are a few weird ones in the Tinkerer tree that use strength (but there have been talks about getting that changed to ballistics as well, because engineer equipment tends to have little in the way of strength on it, not to mention they get crap for it when they level). Weapon skill is important, but I'd argue that survivability stats should come before it if your options are limited (a lot of engineer ability damage is Corporeal, especially abilities in the Grenadier tree, so not affected by weapon skill, only by the target's corporeal resistance and their mitigation stats like dodge and shield block. Ballistics also helps to offset target's mitigation, yet another reason why it's most important). Squig herders and shadow warriors work the same way, though I'd say weapon skill is definitely more important for them than it is for engineers, as almost all of their damage is straight physical and they need the weaponskill to get through their target's armor.
And I'm rambling now, so I think I'll stop there. I could talk game mechanics all day, hehe.
man the items in this game always felt like they were done by dice rolls, one to see what class its for, the another one to decide 1st stat, then another for value, repeat until itemcount > 10,000
pretty sure the levels of the gear had abosolutely zero correlation to the amount of stats either, nor that the devs knew themselves which stats were actually good for any particular class (engineer especially, many WTF moments on 'upgrades')
if they got this fixed the game woud be a lot less frustratingly stupid. theyd surely be able to start class balancing, alwasy felt like there was none because no-one knew what gear to wear nor did they have any useable numbers to work with. heres hoping it recovers
When was the last time you played, if I may ask? Because in the last couple of patches they've done a LOT to fix itemization issues. There's still some issues on some endgame gear, but quite a bit of it has been fixed, and supposedly the next patch will take care of the rest. Don't get me wrong, I'm not holding my breath that it'll ALL be fixed, but I'd say all in all, equipment in general is very useable and you should be able to achieve decent results with what's there.
a couple of 3 months now. was more a rhetorical question than a statement about how to fix things.
cant feel the drive to play again to see tho, just meant it in 'if people know what the stats do, the game might be more fun' kind of way. felt like the barage of random meaningless stats, well were meaningless, it detracted heavily from the game. unecessary confusion led to the feeling that the devs didnt know what they were doing :) hopefully thats fixed (regardless of how true it is/was, the feeling was there and thats all that counts)
Ahh, gotcha, I totally know what you mean and agree with you. There's been a lot of issues with stats in general, and on items specifically. I've been playing around on the test server, and they are doing a LOT to revamp some of the ways that stats contribute to your character's performance. Not sure how it'll all end up, but at least they are working on it . For instance, they've been throwing around the idea of adding secondary affects to some stats so that similar stats compliment each other. Take weaponskill and willpower as an example: in one of the proposed changes, willpower will also affect crit chance on damaging spells in addition to it's current use (boosting healing ability). Weaponskill will also affect critical melee and ranged damage (so even for grenade spec engineers who deal a lot of corporeal damage, weaponskill will still be useful because it can give them bigger crits). That's just an example though, and may or may not make it into the live game that way, but again, at least it's being looked at.
Mechanics talk aside, honestly the only reason I play anymore is because it's fun as hell when you have a good group of people to play with. If you're in a good guild/alliance that knows how to coordinate open RVR (and you're on a server where both sides can field decent numbers during your preferred play time, I'm lucky in that I'm on Phoenix Throne, which is one of the more heavily populated servers) it'll be good times even if you lose skirmishes. If it weren't for that, I would've probably bailed a long time ago.
ur last statement was said beautifully, and ur one of the few lucky ones who have found a group of ppl who know wth they are doing. I remember when i found a nice group for pvp and it was so much fun even losing because it was a good fight. I actually loved the games instanced pvp over orvr especially with a good group. orvr was so freaking lame and repetative. I had more fun hanging out at order camps by myself even if i was outnumbered. There was actually one camp i snuck into and could target the flightmaster without being caught by guards.
When was the last time you played, if I may ask? Because in the last couple of patches they've done a LOT to fix itemization issues. There's still some issues on some endgame gear, but quite a bit of it has been fixed, and supposedly the next patch will take care of the rest. Don't get me wrong, I'm not holding my breath that it'll ALL be fixed, but I'd say all in all, equipment in general is very useable and you should be able to achieve decent results with what's there.
this is addressed at ur sig, im assuming thats a white lion in the pic and if so, any witch elf u've owned was a sry excuse for one, white lions fail 1v1 witch elves lolol
my mistake, i meant swordmaster but its all the same, still fail
Hehe, I'm not going to get into an epeen match here, but will just say that in broad terms that DPS (like witch elves) are made to go after soft targets, tanks (like the swordmaster) are made to soak and/or mitigate damage from virtually all sources. That being said, one's performance one-on-one against any class is largely dependant on gear, level, and spec. When I'm specced to contend with melee DPS (like witch elves) I can take them. A Hoeth/Vaul specced SM geared and specced for avoidance (parry and bubbles) can definitely take a witch elf without too much trouble, all things being equal. If I lose, it's not because the class is deficient, it's because I was deficient (whether it was through lack of decent gear, improper tactics, or just lack of skill).
Obviously the sig was mostly meant in jest, but for a time (when WE were crazy sick when it came to the damage they could dish out) they were my first target priority. Still high on the list, but only after sorcs :P