sport and news: The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Amplify, Multistrike, and Readiness

Wednesday 27 November 2013

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Amplify, Multistrike, and Readiness

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

You may be asking "What are you talking about with this Amplify, Multistrike and Readiness stuff?" and if you are, it's a fair point. These are the new secondary stats (note that I said secondary, not tertiary) coming with Warlords of Draenor to replace hit, expertise, dodge and parry. And we know this because Celestalon, technical game designer on WoW, explained them on twitter. So, what are these stats? Well, I'll let him explain.

X% Amplify means: +X% Crit Damage Multiplier and Multistrike Damage Multiplier, and +X% more Haste/Mastery/Readiness/Spirit/Armor from gear.

X% Multistrike means: Each ability has two separate (X/2)% chances to hit each target an additional time for 30% damage. Multistrikes count as hitting the same target twice with one cast, not multiple casts. (i.e. Mind Blast won't generate 2 shadow orbs) Multistrike is split into two (X/2)% chances, so that you can occasionally get a triple-hit (fun!), and the cap is 200%, not 100%.

X% Readiness increases the cooldown recovery rate (aka, divides the cooldown by (1+Readiness)) of *some* class abilities. The number of abilities affected by Readiness will vary by spec (will be listed in spellbook, like Mastery). Coefficient likely to vary too.

Celestalon via twitter

Amplify is basically the ability Thok's Tail Tip currently gives, Multistrike is similar to our arms mastery (or this Agi trinket), and Readiness is basically the Evil Eye of Galakras. Celestalon notes that Readiness won't be linked to the exact same abilities as the trinket, but the basic effect is the same - the more readiness you have, the more some of your cooldowns will be reduced. It's very important to realize these will be secondary stats, on the same statistical tier as Crit, Haste and Mastery are now.

These are interesting stats for a couple of reasons. The first is because, like Mastery, they have broader effects than just "hit faster/crit more" - Amplify in particular is a stat that magnifies other stats, so stacking Amplify affects a variety of other stats (the ones listed above that we would care about are Haste, Mastery, Readiness and Armor) as well as the damage of our critical hits and Multistrike extra attacks. This means that if Mastery was a big stat for warriors in Warlords, it might be very worthwhile to stack Amplify/Mastery gear.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Warlords of Draenor