I don't understand percentages

Community General Discussion
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I’m stupid, but that’s not the point.

I don’t understand percentages in WoW. Like, what does 19% haste mean? It doesn’t seem like it is exactly “everything is faster by 19%”. What about versatility? Last time I checked, my damage increase/decrease doesn’t match the % displayed at my character window. What’s “mastry %”? I have NO IDEA what these % are supposed to mean.

Then I see items that say “adds 2% secondary stat” and I’m thinking here “I have 400 of that stat, 2% is nothing”… but then I find out 2% secondary stat doesn’t mean increasing my stat by 2%, but my percentage will go up by 2. So if I am at 4% it will go to 6%. Which is a 50% increase!

I really do not understand stats in WoW. I just sim what the best ones are and I go with that, but it’s not rooted in my understanding of the mechanics. It’s not like in Diablo 2 where if I miss too much I pump dexterity and I can check my chance to hit against any target simply by attacking it. WoW’s stats simply don’t make sense to me.

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the way i think of it is:

crit % is the % extra damage you do based on you total strength/agily+mast, ex: 5000 strech +10%crit =5500 damage (stupid i know)

then the same for other percentages

haste= x% of base cast speed(GCD)

versa= x% of armor

Mastery: % extra damage you do+ specia labilitties

bla bla bla basicly i tihnk

dont listen to me

i jsut want to feel part of it

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Item stats in WoW are not intuitive. It’s a big design problem that complex simulation software is needed to understand wether or not an item is an upgrade. :frowning:

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Haste increases your weapon swing speed as well as the cooldown reduction of certain abilities. If you hover your mouse over an ability and the cooldown timer is listed in green on the ability tooltip, then that means that this abilities’ cooldown is affected by your Haste stat, and its cooldown is thus adjusted according to your haste %.

Versatility is a flat increase in both your damage done and damage taken. Damage dealt is increased by the full amount of your Versatility amount, while damage taken is reduced by half the amount.

Say that I have 50% Versatility, this would mean that I deal 50% more damage, and take 25% less damage.

The effect that your Mastery has differs per specialization. Since you’re a warrior let’s take the Fury Warrior Mastery as an example here.

The Fury Warrior [Mastery] increases your damage done while under the effect of Enrage by “x%”, Let’s say that at my level ‘70 mastery points’ equates to ‘30%’ under the effect of this specialization’s mastery. This would mean that I deal 30% more damage while under the effect of Enrage.

Correct. Items and Abilities that increase any stat by a flat percentage often if not always give you the actual increase in direct percentages, provided that the actual stat increases is listed on your character panel already in %s (which is the case only with Mastery, Haste, Crit, Versatility and various defensive stats such as Dodge).

If an item or ability claims to increase one of your main stats (Stamina/Strength/Intellect/Agility) in %s, such as Strength, then it will instead give you a % based on the amount of Strength points you have e.g. if you have 100 strength, then a 2% strength increase will only give you 2 strength.

I hope this clears it all up for you.

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I’m not sure if it’s possible to get raw numbers to display by default, but I think it would be an improvement. So people can tell me as a frost mage “You should aim for 1000 haste” or whatever. Then I have a raw number that I can aim towards. Right now people speak in percentages and I kinda understand what they mean, but also it is incredibly confusing and unclear.

When I hover over the description of the stats, all is clear and I understand what each of them does. And I know the bis stats, I’ve gone to bloodmallet to check the best stat combination I can have. My issue is with taking a glance at my character window, I just see random percentages that aren’t exactly clear. I don’t even know if 400 haste on one character would be the same percentage on another.

But I didn’t know versatility’s damage reduction was half of the damage increase it gives! So thanks :smiley:

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  • Selected abilities will have their CD reduced by X % (mostly melee abilities)
  • Number of Auto attacks per second increased by X %
  • Time between dots ticks and overall duration will be reduced by X %
  • GCD is reduced by X % up to half its original duration iirc (formula is basically “Increase the number of GCD per minute” so 100% haste means half the original duration rather than 50%)
  • Channeled abilities will do their full effect X % faster.
  • Some abilities may benefit in a different way from haste (for instance Chaos barrage for Havoc increase the dmg by haste % rather than reducing the channel duration)

So yeah it’s easier to say “Everything is faster by X%” and call it a day.

Depends on your spec it’s clearly written in your character sheet afaik.

Wdym ? Part of the dmg formula for every ability in the game takes versatility into account so you should at the very least get the vers dmg increase.

There’s always some rng involved in abilities, especially for melee specs. Weapons are usually part of the dmg formula of melee specs abilities and since they have a range of dmg rather than a single value then you’ll have some degree of rng in your actual damages. Same is true to a degree for casters as there’s a 5% variance when you cast your spells.

That said your versatility should already be included in the dmg showed in your tooltip, so this may explain why you don’t actually “see” the dmg increase.

Finally PvP setting is a little weird as abilities and stats change in that situation. Your tooltip should be trustworthy but you’ll usually find that your abilities are half as effective in Battlegrounds compared to PVE content.

edit :

There’s three kinds of secondary stats increase :

  • “Increase stat by X” which is then thrown in a formula with diminishing returns to give you a %
  • “Increase stat by X%” which is a raw %, added on top of whatever the previous point gave you (Havoc meta gives 25% haste on top of whatever haste % you have already have)
  • “Increase the stat you receive from all sources by X%” like the 8.3 corrupted items. This will work with only the 1st point and stack on top of that. It won’t interact with the 2nd point tho. This will stack with other similar effects tho so you could reach crazy levels of versatility if you stacked 5 or 6 of these effects.
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They just mean to get however much of a stat until you hit the % listed.

It’s not. The amount of % out of a number depends on your class and spec.

A fire mage for example gains more % per x amount of Critical Strike as that is their main stat and their gameplay revolves around critting.

You’re welcome =)

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See the addon DejaCharacterStats, where you can switch on the display of percentages and absolute values separately

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For most dots that’s not entirely true anymore.

Haste decreases the amount of time between ticks, but it does not decrease the duration of the dot.

This means haste increases the amount of ticks a dot does during it’s duration.

The dot always does a partial tick at the end aswell for the remaining damage. So if your haste makes your dot tick 7.3 times over it’s duration, it will tick 7 times for the full tick dmg and then one time for 0.3 times the tick damage at the end of the dot.

Same goes for hots.

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I agree years ago I installed Pawn addon and just watch the green arrow.

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The green arrow also helps me with inventory navigation. I don’t always use pawn, when I’m skeptical of it, I go and sim my gear. But I really want to not have to sim gear. This is the only MMO where I’ve found myself completely confused by the stats and what I should be aiming for.

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Pawn is helpful to quickly see if item is an upgrade or not but remember to always sim your stat weights again after swapping an item.

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I miss the time when it said you did X damage with an ability and it turns out ya, that’s exactly how much you’d do with that ability.
The only other place you get these exact numbers are… Ironically, PET Battles. You can see if you can win or lose a pet battle by just anticipating how much damage your pet does or if the tables have turned if the enemy pet got a lucky crit or worse a lucky stun.

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Yeah, Pawn is ok for most things but I can give an example where it’s not so good- I got a ring from the GV yesterday which was allegedly a 20% upgrade for me. However that was only if I ditched my legendary, in the other slot it resulted in a 2% haste loss and 6% mastery loss. I was like ‘nope, imma keeping that ring and just grind out more ash’

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When was this? Armor and resistances always had a role in damage.

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How a percentage works is better understood if you have a known example/value.

Like you said, above, “If I have 400 of X, 2% isn’t much”. No, it never will be.

Crit. (chance): Crit. is the scale of how much bigger a crit event is compared to the base event; if base is 100 and Crit is 20%, a crit event will be 120 (Crit chance is how often a Crit will happen; 30% = 3 times in 10 events will be a crit.).
Haste (chance): How much faster events happen; if a base event takes 100 time units to happen, 19% haste will mean it happens in 81 time units (Haste chance is how often an event will be affected by Haste - see Crit chance, above).
Mastery: This is linked to an ability Event specific to the character in question & relates to how much more effective that ability is; if the base ability is 100, then Mastery of 25% will result in either an Event of 125 or 80, depending on whether it increases or decreases what happens.
Versatility: this is a increase/decrease in a core value; so, if core damage received would be 100, 10% reduction would mean 90 happens - at the same time, if core damage you do would be 100 the 10% would make that 110.

On top of all that, you get factors that change the above in some way that it isn’t always clear what they mean,
Example: +5% crit - how does that increase happen? Does that mean my crit goes up by 5 percentage points on top of what I have OR is it 5% of what a total crit is (not the same).

“Increases Crit. %” adds to the overall crit event, with above as an example, 120 goes to 125.
“Increases % Crit.” this adds to the overall Crit event, but as an overall amount of the total Crit event; 5% of a 120 Crit is actually 6, so the overall Crit is 126.
“Increases Crit. chance (or chance to crit; diff. words, same meaning)” adds to how often a Crit occurs, so 30% becomes 35%.

I get that ^^^ is a lot to take in, but I tried my hardest to make it sound easy to understand & I admit I may have failed.

EDIT:
A “Chance” to happen has ZERO bearing on when it last happened; it does NOT mean that 3 of EVERY 10 will happen, but you have a 3/10 chance OF it happening which may mean that it happens 6 times in a row, then not at all for ages… the overall outcome for every time an Event did happen compared to when it didn’t happen are 3 (times it did) to 7 (times it didn’t).

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Pawn is a weird ‘animal’ as the upgrades are based on an “individual item score”, rather than the “overall total gear score”.

That Ring being a 20% upgrade could even have been based on the worst of the two you already had.

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Haste rating is just one source of haste, the game uses precentages to calculate everything, for me it was kinda annoying when people recommended ratings, yeah it’s something to aim for when you don’t understand WHY you’re aiming for it.

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Giving a rating for a Class - even an individual spec. for that Class - used to be a known method of what the outcome would be, but for any given stat., the nett worth of (in the quoted example) 1000 Haste to any one spec., isn’t NOW consistent… sad days.

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It was, Eighjan - based on my 190 Signet of Tormented Kings, thats why i have to grind out more ash to upgrade it

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