Understanding Statistics
Statistics play a large role in WoW. As a rogue, it’s important to know what statistics affect you.
1.Strength works by increasing your attack power rating. Power is the amount of damage you can do with a weapon. More power, more damage.
2.Agility increases your power rating, your critical chance, your armor and your dodge rate. Agility gives the exact same boost to power as strength does. At level 70, ~30 Agility will give you a 1% boost to critical chance. Critical hits give you a 100% boost in damage (e.g. from 100 to 200 damage). Agility affects rogues more than any other class except the hunter. This is a good thing.
3.Stamina gives you more hit points. For each point of stamina, you receive 10 hit points (hp). It might not seem like much but in the end area of the game, items that have 20 Stamina are common enough and that’s a 200hp boost. Very nice indeed!
4.Intellect increases the rate at which you learn weapon skills. You’ll be attacking so much that this isn’t even a factor. If you can, keep this statistic at its base level. There is no reason to ever put points here.
5.Spirit increases your health regeneration rate. There isn’t a reason to really put points in here since the regeneration rate is already very high in WoW. Yet another statistic you need not worry about.
As of yet, there seems to be no cap on statistics. Collect as many as you can. That being said, you want to try to keep a balance of about 60% Agility to 40% Stamina while you’re leveling. If you go solely Agility, you will have a very high chance of critical hits but not be able to take any damage. Going all Stamina means you will practically never get a critical hit and fights will take longer, therefore needing those extra hit points. Certain talent builds go for certain statistics more than others and those will be discussed later on in the guide.

Statistic Formulas
There are a fair amount of formulas involved in calculating rogue statistics. Here are but a few. Some of the terms might seem new and complicated, so you’ll want to come back to this point after you’ve read the guide. I’m laying out the details now though so that it can shed some light onto some of my findings. As you’ll see, Agility affects nearly every statistic, followed by Stamina and Strength. There is no need at all for any Intelligence or Spirit gear. Again, don’t worry if this entire section is way over your head, by the time you complete reading the guide and get a few levels in-game, you’ll understand it very easily and be applying them to your playstyle and choices. To note, that because the gain from stats varies every level, I have added approximations of what you should receive. Unless I indicate it, the formula works at 70 as well.
●AC = Agi*2 + AC from armor
●HP = Sta*10.
oAt level 70, your HP naked is equal to ~3525+(STA*10)
●Crit% = ~Agi/Level/2 + WeaponSkillBonus*0.1
oThe BC expansion added a new Critical bonus measurement. No longer will you see items with pure +%, instead you will have +Critical Rating. At 70, 22.1 Critical Rating = 1% Critical Chance
●At 70, 39.6AGI = 1% Critical Chance
●Dodge% = Agi/Level/4 + DefenseBonus*0.4 It’s actually more complicated but this is very close for practical terms
●The BC expansion added a new Dodge bonus measurement. No longer will you see items with pure +%, instead you will have +Dodge Rating. At 70, 18.9 Dodge Rating = 1% Dodge Chance
●At 70, 20AGI = 1% Dodge Chance
●Atk = Str + Agi + (level*2) – 20
●At 70, Atk = Agi + Str + 57
●DPS = Atk/14
●DPS for skills = (min weap dmg/2 + max weap dmg/2) / 1.7 (daggers) or 2.4 (others)
●To Hit = 1% less chance to miss, as explained further on.
●The BC expansion added a new To Hit bonus measurement. No longer will you see items with pure +%, instead you will have +To Hit Rating. At 70, 15.8 To Hit Rating = 1% To Hit

Also of note, when you are adding percentage values together, you need to add them and not multiply as we would in the real world. An example would be your critical rate. Let’s say you have a base value of 20% and a talent that increases your critical rate by 5%. In regular math, you would think you have 21% critical rate (20*1.05). Instead, you would have 25% critical chance (20+5).
When calculating damage, you calculate the weapon damage (including attack power bonus), the skill bonus, the talent bonus, the crit bonus (if applicable) and finally the crit talent bonus. In simpler terms it’s
●Weapon Damage + Enchants + ((Attack Power/14)*Normalized Weapon Speed) + Skill Damage + Talents + Crit Bonus + Crit Talent Bonus
Example is a Sinister Strike (+68dmg) with a Thrash Blade (66-124dmg/2.7sec delay) with an attack bonus of 450 and the Lethality talent. Max damage is 124+((450/14)*2.4)+68=269dmg. If it crits, then you have 269*2.3=618dmg.
With the same formula, let’s say you Backstab (150%+210dmg) with a Keris of Zul’Serak (49-93dmg/1.8sec delay) that has a +3 weapon enchantment, with 450 Attack Power, the Lethality and Opportunity talents. So we have (((93+3+((450/14)*1.7))*1.5)+210)*1.2 = 523dmg, with a crit of 523*2.3=1203dmg.
Also of note, Attack Power scales with “capped” skills such as Garrote and Eviscerate.
●Eviscerate Modifier =
● Atk*0.03*#of Combo Points
●Garrote Modifier = Atk*0.13
●
For example, Eviscerate10 at 1200AP with 5 Combo Points on average does 1062 + (1200*0.15) = 1242dmg. You can’t lose damage if your Atk isn’t high enough. That being said, most items past level 60 have +Atk to them for a reason. It’s a very important statistic to consider when choosing equipment.

of this makes a whole lot of difference because you’ll be switching armor and weapons at such a fast pace. Concentrate on Agility and Stamina while trying to keep both your dagger and sword skills maxed and you’ll be set later on.
Agility Equivalent Points (AEP)
Once you reach about level 50, or even before that point, you will find that you are forced to select one item over another. Would you take a Tombstone Breastplate over a Shadowcraft Breastplate, is the increase to critical hit worth it? This is where Agility Equivalent Points (or AEP) come into play. It’s a simple enough formula that lets you gauge the value of statistics on a given item. It works like this.
1 Agility = 1 Stamina = 1 AEP
2 Strength = 2 Attack Power = 1 AEP
1% Critical Strike = 10 AEP
1% to Hit = 5 AEP (only up to 5% to Hit)
1% Dodge = 1AEP
+1 Weapon Skill = 2AEP
This means that 20AP = 1%Crit = 10AGI or thereabouts. A concrete example would be comparing the 2 chest items I mentioned above.
The Tombstone BP has 10STR, 10STA and 2%Crit. That’s 5+10+20=35. The Shadowcraft BP has 26AGI and 13STA (not counting the set bonus). That’s 26+13=39. The Shadowcraft BP is 4AEP more than a Tombstone BP and that’s without any possible set bonuses. If you were to have all 8 items, that’s another 20AEP.
Now, AEP is all fine and dandy within reason. You should still be setting baselines for your stats. If all your items were Agility and you had nothing that had Stamina, you’d be dead in a flash. Once you hit 70, you should aim for getting to 7500HP above all else, it’s easy to achieve. If you plan on raiding or pvping a lot, then I would put the mark up to 9000HP (with enchants and jewels) and then use AEP to plan your items.
I user a UI mod to assist with AEP because sometimes the math is too complex. See the section near the bottom.

Combat Calculations
Since you live and breathe combat, it’s important to understand the mechanics. We saw a bit of it in the Statistic Formulas section but this part will more clearly define certain “features” of combat.
Damage mitigation is based on your opponent’s armor. A warrior with 5000 AC will take less damage per hit than a mage with 2500. The hard cap on mitigation is 75% and is a logarithmic curve. This means that you get more bang for you buck increasing from 1000(15%)-3000(35%) than you do going from 3000(35%)-5000(47%). At level 70, you would need 30000AC to reach the cap, that won’t happen for a very long time. You probably won’t even see 2500AC at 70 but since you’re not generally getting hit, it’s not a big deal.
Each point of weapon skill you have over the defense of your opponent increases you chance to hit and critically hit by 0.04, and also reduces the ability of the opponent to dodge/parry/block by 0.04. Since skills go up by 5 per level, you’re looking at ~0.2 increase per level difference.
Creatures that are 2 or more levels above you present a chance to have a glancing blow. This type of attack only deals 70% normal damage and cannot be a critical hit. Increasing weapon skill used to give 3% damage back per weapon skill, up to 100% with 10 weapon skill. Since the BC expansion pack, this is no longer the case. Currently, there is no known way to decrease the damage lost from Glancing Blows. Glancing blows have a 40% chance of happening. This only affects melee. This is the primary reason why you should not be attacking creatures that are above you in levels until you’re level 70; you decrease your ability to do damage by a fair amount.
Combat is not an “if then else” system, it’s a table system. This means that when the game rolls your combat move, it’s a hit, miss, crit, dodge, parry or block. You can’t miss a critical hit. This has an additional effect of giving a total amount of options in combat as all the options must come to 100%. If you have a 25% critical chance, the mob has a 5% dodge/parry/block and you have a 40% chance to hit, then there’s a 20% chance to miss (25+5+5+5+40=80, therefore the last 20 comes from miss). Modifying one affects the others.

Attacking from behind an opponent denies them the chance to block or parry, they can still dodge. The % of their chance to dodge is the same as the front, so you gain ability to hit and critically hit from behind. Increasing your weapon skill increases crit% by 0.1
Stuns decrease impact with use on the same target. If you were to open with a cheapshot (4seconds), throw in a Kidney Shot (6 seconds), Gouge (4 seconds), Vanish and Cheap Shot again, the second Cheap Shot would be just under 3 seconds long. After 3 stuns (from any attacker on a target) the effects dimish to the point where the 5th stun has no real effect other than interrupting an attack. Sap and Gouge share the same timer for diminishing returns which Kidney Shot and Cheap Shot each have their own.
Dual wielding increases your miss rate by 19% for melee attacks. Your offhand weapon only does 50% of its normal damage.
Weapon attack speed does not factor into damage formulas for rogues, when talking about skills. All daggers have a 1.7 speed and other weapons have a 2.4 timer. This doesn’t affect regular attacks, only special attacks, such as Sinister Strike and Ambush. You will generally want to get a higher damage weapon compared to a faster weapon. This does NOT affect Hemorrhage, so use the slowest, heaviest hitting weapon you can find if you take the talent. It is a waste to use daggers and hemorrhage for this exact reason.

To Hit And Weapon Skill
A lot of people are confused as to how these work when you’re at level 70. Please don’t confuse this with the previous section, these calculations are meant solely for raiding on creatures 3+ levels above you. This section has very little bearing on the damage you put out if you are not raiding. That being said, here goes.
Let’s try 2 possible scenarios. #1, you use swords and have a 25% chance of critical hit with Sinister Strike (~350dmg) and melee (~300dmg) with Aggression(6%)+Lethality(30% on crits). #2, you use daggers and have a 25% chance of critical strike with melee (~230dmg) and a 60% chance of critical strike with Backstab (~550dmg) with Opportunity(20%)+Lethality(30% on crits).
At level 70 vs a level 73+ creature, you have an innate 40% chance of a glancing blow that does 70% normal damage. There is absolutely nothing you can do to increase/decrease the chance of a glancing blow. Your default combat statistics are approximately the following:

Being behind the target lowers damage because the target can no longer block, it simply counts as a miss. However, being behind saves potential damage from the front and allows you to use certain skills. Also, adding +To Hit reduces the Miss chance from behind even more.
Now, remember, these combat tables are set in stone. Even though you might have a listed critical chance of 25%/30%, you are actually capped at 18.6 for melee attacks.
Skills benefit from an increases chance to hit, therefore dropping the damage lost.
So how do you increase your damage then? Two things, Weapon Skill and To Hit%.
Weapon Skill confers a 0.1% increase to Crit.
To Hit% decreases you chance to miss per point. Since combat skills have a 95% base chance to hit, going past +5 doesn’t give any large return as it will only affect normal attacks. Each point therefore also increases you Hit/Crit chance. Let’s see what +10 Weapon Skill and +10 To Hit do to the original table.

That’s a fairly large change across the board! Remember cases #1 & #2? On this board, #2 has had a much greater improvement than #1simply because you can use all the +Crit you were wasting originally.
To sum all these numbers up, here’s what you need to know when raiding a 3+ level monster.
●Crit% is capped at ~19% for melee strikes
●Crit% is capped at ~38% for skill attacks
●Each +1 to Hit raises your crit cap by +1
●
●After +5 to Hit, you will see decreased gains from the bonus
●Each +1Weapon Skill raises your crit chance by +0.1, if you can use it