Attack Power/Critical Strike/AgilityFollow

I'm a big "read the sticky" guy but I'm in a good mood and knowing that you'll do that in appreciation of a nice response I'll give ya one.

Attack power (AP) dictates how hard you hit. Affects base damage, and then your special attacks are +X and/or X% of base damage so it ramps up DPS across the board.

Agility is a HUGE stat for feral druids because it does three things:
- Increases your attack power in cat form at a rate of 1:1
- Increase your critical strike %, which is huge in cat form and nice in bear
- Increases your dodge %, which is huge in bear form and nice in cat

So +12 agility is MUCH better than +12 attack power or +12 critical strike rating because it helps you in more ways than one.

Strength boosts attack power too, by the way, at a rate of 2:1 without talents and 2.4:1 once you get the Heart of the Wild talent because that boosts your strength in cat form by 20%.

In bear form Stamina rules because it gives you your HP, and agility is important for dodge.
In cat form Strength rocks because it ramps up your attack power, and agility is important for crit.

Get the addon "DruidStats" to eliminate the math...it tells you exactly how each piece benefits you in each form as you shift between them. Priceless.

Attack power in forms is a boosted version of your raw caster-form attack power, so putting on a piece of armor with +attack power should absolutely affect your attack power in forms too.

Difference between cat and bear:
- Cat leaves your armor alone but boosts your attack power big time, boosts crit by 5% with talents, and gives you special offensive attacks that give you melee DPS on par with rogues.
- Bear form boosts your armor and health so you can mitigate and soak up loads of damage as a tank or when fighting multiple or elite mobs solo, like a warrior.

Now go read the sticky. : )

Edited, Oct 4th 2007 11:26pm by JeeBar

When reading the original post, I was going to mention an addon called
RatingBuster, it shows ratings in %-chance in tooltips, but I guess
from the name that DruidStats already covers this. RatingBuster isn't really
accurate either...

Secondly, the other day I found a chart (which I ofcourse had forgot where I
found and had to browse through all kinds of crap to fins again hehe)
that talks about the value of +strength (more attack power) and +agility (attack
power + crit). Was a nice read :) Almost at the top is a chart assuming maxed hit
cap, and further down on the page is a chart with other +hit numbers.

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