The character panel now explains every stat

The character panel of World of Warcraft: Forever tells a player what every stat does. Hovering over a line gives a full description instead of a vague one. The numbers that matter for raids and for tanking stand in there too.

What the old panel did not say

Every version of WoW before Cataclysm described its stats vaguely, and left the rest to the player. Forever puts the explanation in the panel itself, aimed at players who are new to it.

The tooltip for Attack Power shows how plain that gets. It names the number, what it raises, that Strength is what feeds it, and the conversion: every 14 Attack Power adds 1 damage per second.

One Crit line for attacks and spells

Hit and Crit apply to every school in Forever and are no longer split into melee, spell and ranged. The panel shows that as a single line.

One stat does not mean one number. In the tooltip, 6.1% Critical Strike works out as 6.08% for melee and 6.04% for spells, and the line underneath says Agility feeds the attack side while Intellect feeds the spell side.

The tooltip also answers the questions players keep asking. A melee critical strike deals 100% more damage, a spell or healing critical strike is 50% more effective, and most periodic effects can crit.

How much Hit is enough

The Hit tooltip does the arithmetic a player would otherwise look up.

At 3.0% Hit Chance it lists what never missing takes: 8.00% melee and 17.00% spell against raid bosses, and 5.00% melee and 4.00% spell against a level 19 target or player. The level in that second line follows the character, so the figure moves along with them.

The numbers a tank needs

Defense gets the same treatment, with the two thresholds that decide whether a tank can be hit for a spike.

Each point raises dodge, block and parry by 0.08% and lowers the chance to be hit or critically hit by the same amount. A creature crits for 200% damage, and one three or more levels above the player can land a crushing blow for 150%.

At 440 Defense a character can no longer be critically hit by raid bosses, worth 5.60% off their critical strike chance. Those two numbers are what players call the defense cap and the avoidance cap, which stresses that Defense keeps helping past that point.