Attributes, and what a point is worth

What each attribute does

Five attributes, and only one of them means the same thing to every class. What a point buys is below; how much of it a point buys is the next section, because that part is not a constant and is not the same for a rogue as for a hunter.

Stamina10 health per point

Health and nothing else — no class gets a second effect from it. The first 20 points give 1 health each, so the tenfold rate starts above that.

Every class. The one stat with no wrong answer.

Strength2 attack power, or 1 per point

Melee attack power, and block value if you hold a shield. Warriors, paladins, shamans and druids get 2 attack power per point; everyone else gets 1.

Warriors and paladins first, then feral druids and enhancement shamans.

Agility2 armour, plus crit and dodge per point

Critical strike chance, dodge and 2 armour per point, at a rate that differs by class and gets worse every level. Rogues and hunters also get attack power from it — 1 melee for both, and 2 ranged for the hunter.

Rogues and hunters above everything. See the table below for why.

Intellect15 mana per point

Mana, spell critical strike at a class-specific rate, and the speed a weapon skill rises. The first 20 points give 1 mana each. It does nothing at all for a warrior or a rogue, who have no mana bar.

Every caster. Worthless to warriors and rogues.

Spiritregeneration per point

Mana and health regeneration out of combat — and in combat only while the five-second rule is not running, which is what makes mana per 5 seconds worth more than its face value to a healer who never stops casting.

Healers who get pauses. Priests most of all; nearly worthless in a fight you never stop casting in.

The attack power and health-per-point figures are the 1.12 formulas, not a table reading: those coefficients live in the server rather than in anything the client publishes. Everything in the tables below is read from the game data.

Agility, per class

How much Agility one percent of critical strike or dodge costs, at level 60 and at level 1. These two columns are the reason a stat-weight argument that does not name a class is worthless.

At level 60 a Rogue pays 28.99 Agility for 1% critical strike and a Hunter pays 52.91. Those are the two classes built on Agility, and the same +10 ring gives one of them 1.8× the crit it gives the other. For a class with no Agility scaling the number is academic — a mage is not buying melee crit — which is why a stat weight quoted without a class is worth nothing.

Agility gets weaker as you level. Every class pays more for the same percent at 60 than at 1 — a rogue goes from 2.3 to 28.99. That is why a low-level character feels like it crits constantly and a level-60 one needs gear to reach the same number, and why percentage-based crit from talents is worth so much more at the cap.

Dodge follows the same shape with different winners: the rogue is the cheapest at 14.49 Agility per percent, which is what makes a rogue's Agility a defensive stat as well as an offensive one.

Health and mana before gear

What a level-60 character of each class has before a single point of Stamina or Intellect from equipment — the base the ten-per-Stamina and fifteen-per-Intellect rates are added to. Warriors and rogues have no mana bar at all; a warrior's rage and a rogue's energy are not stored here because they do not scale with anything.

What your race starts you with

Base attributes at level 60, by race and class, before gear and buffs. The spread is small — a tauren warrior has 10 more Strength than a gnome one — which is the useful finding: race is worth choosing for its racial abilities, not for these numbers. 40 race and class combinations exist in Classic, and all of them are here.

What the gear actually carries

How many of the 7,856 equippable items this site holds carry each stat. It is worth reading next to the list above, because two of the things a player calls a stat are not attributes at all: in vanilla only Stamina, Strength, Agility, Intellect and Spirit are stored on an item. Spell power, mana per 5 seconds, critical strike and hit are auras the item casts when you equip it, which is why a tooltip reads differently for them — and why this site has to read them out of spell effects to know they are there.

Counted from the gear planner's collection, which is where you can put them on a character and watch the totals move.

The rest of the basics

• Elite, rare, rare elite and bossWhat the dragon around a mob's portrait means, and how much harder each rank actually is.
• Creature typesThe ten types a creature can be, what can be tamed or skinned, and which spells only work on one of them.
• Schools of magic, and resistanceThe six schools plus physical, what resistance does to a spell, and which creatures are immune.
• Which weapons each class can useEvery weapon and armour type by class, what you start with, and where the eight weapon masters stand.