To Nerd... or not to Nerd?

Credit To Disquette for doing most of the Calc's... its an informative post none the less... for like, 450,000 people out of what, 6 billion?

This post cover's how it looks like Combat mechanics in terms of stats and abilities work in WAR. This is taking out quite a bit, and is kind of simplied.. but hey; the games been out what, four days?

Lets cover Stats

     Strength - this increases your auto-attack melee dps by 0.1 dps per strength

    Toughness  reduces the dps done to you by 0.1 dps / toughness.

    Weapon DPS - Damage per second 

    Weapon Speed - how many seconds it takes for each auto-attack swing of your weapon

Ok, so for a basic weapon swing... this looks like it's the auto-attack formula.

Dmg = ((Str/10) + Wdps)*(Wspeed)*(1-Armor)

Where Str is the DPS increase from your base stats, and armor is the Mitigation due to your targets Armor rating. 

Now, keep in mind this is just for auto attack... or 'white-damage' for you WoW folks.  Now, this hits, what... once every 4 seconds? depends on the weapon speed... so most of what you're going to be doing are Special Attacks. These are attacks that can be injected into the auto-attack sequence, and are special 'abilities' that toss in additional damage and effects; We're just concerned about damage here right now tho. 

So; here's the forumla: 

Special = (((Str/10)*2 + Wdps)*1.5 + Add)*(1-armor)

So keeping the same variables as above, we just introduce 2 more:

Special damage - This is the total damage the hit is going to cause, after the ability is factored in. 

Add - Additional Damage listed on the Abilities tooltip (straight damage without variability)

The interesting thing to note... is that there is no variability here, aside from Crits (still working on bonus damage figures and coefficients). Whenever a tooltip says "Ravage: yadda yadda yadda... 63 Damage"  that's the bottom line... that additional damage is going to be 63 every single time. The only variability that really comes into play is your stats vs. the monsters toughness and armor.  Which, if you know those values, then you can actually calculate what your damage will be on every single yet (again, the exception being Crits) for every single ability. 

If you're looking for a RAW DPS increase... you're going to need to stack Strength, as, aside from the mosters attacks and your weapons, it's the only stat that has a direct influence on damage caused. Other ways to increase DPS would be via Toughness debuffs or Armor debuffs; as those stats come into play with each attack (special and auto). 

Weapon skill comes into play somewhere... WS being the ability to penetrate a certain percentage of mitigation from Armor; however it looks like it comes into play AFTER the initial damage calculation and reduction; thus making it a less than Ideal stat to stack. However, gaining a lot of Weapon Skill you would see an increase in damage, however it doesn't look like it comes into play as much as Strength. Also, you've got to factor in low-armor and armor-debuffed opponents.  Armor penetration is a less than ideal stat whenever a target is already debuffed to sub-5% mitigation anyways.. Talisman's and gear could yeild a stronger ROI on Strength, or furthering your own Mitigation (resists and toughness).