Attack Power Explained

Well, attack power is fairly easy to break down. For my previous post, I relied mainly on two wowwiki.com pages: Attack Power and Damage per Second (DPS). (Note: if you’re a stats junkie be aware I don’t think wowwiki has been updated much since The Burning Crusade. Everyone’s probably having too much fun…)

I’m not going to go over the DPS page, you can check it out on your own if you wnat. It just talks about how DPS for individual weapons are calculated and how certain individual stats and talents affect that base rating.

What was interesting to me was how AP added to that base number and how the additional damage is computed. For that, check out the Attack Power link.

Us Druids have different AP calculations depending on what form we are in:

Druid form: AP = (Strength * 2) - 20
Bear form: AP = (Strength * 2) + (Character level * 3) - 20
Cat form: AP = (Strength * 2 + Agility) + (Character level * 2) -20

So you see where my basic comments came from saying strength was most important for Bear AP and both strength and agility for Cat. As was correctly pointed out in comments to the post was that strength added in double for cat form. However, as agility benefits us in many other ways (dodge, crit, etc.), I recommend a balanced approach to the two attributes for your cat form.

The wowwiki page goes on to show us some very simple formulas for how AP translates into damage. At the simplest level, each 14 attack power translates in 1 additional damage per second. So the final computation of dps for your weapon ends up as:

DPS = (Min weapon damage + (AP/14)) / 2 + (Max weapon damage + (AP/14) / 2) / Weapon Speed

I really don’t think about formulas too much when looking at new gear, but it is interesting to understand how the different attributes affect final damage. Especially for our cat form, when damage is what we are interested most in.

So, take the wowwiki formulas with a grain of salt. If anyone out there can either verify these formulas are still valid, or point me in the direction of updated formulas, I will update this post to be current.

Otherwise - happy shredding…