Rogue Stat weights & AEP Values

Now that you have seen our stat breakdown guide, we can dive deeper into the subject to present to you how the stats are interacting with each other and what are their values relative to each other. This guide also gives more details on the system we use to evaluate and compare pieces of gear.

Note that you may have come across stats priority, which is a good manner to explain in one line what are the best stats for a class. But the reality is more complex than just that, since the value of a stat depends on your actual gear and, thus, of other if not all your stats.

Stat interaction

Let’s see how your stats interact with each other, as well as your abilities and talents, to have a better understanding of which stats are good to use as a rogue player.

Attack Power

Attack power

It gives you direct damage on both basic attack and most of your abilities.
The more attack power you have, the more valuable will be all your other stats.

Note that since this is the easiest stat to understand and the base of most of your damage, this will be the reference for the stats weight and AEP values.

Critical Strike

Basically, it doubles the damages on your auto-attacks and Eviscerate, and even more on your combo builder abilities, thanks to Lethality.
It gains values with every other stats but you don’t have a big talent that benefits from it, not like Retribution paladin (Vengeance), Warrior (Flurry), or Enhancement Shaman (Unleashed Rage). So this is actually one of the less valuable stats in PVE with a low scaling.

Agility

Agility impacts both Attack Power and Critical Strike, and benefits from Vitality & Blessing of Kings. This makes it one of your best stats since it increases all your damage (except poisons) and positively impacts every other stats.

Hit

This is by far the most important stat to get until the soft cap (to secure your abilities) since you don’t want to miss a combo builder or finisher which makes you lose energy and breaks your rotation.

Past the soft cap, improving your hit rating will benefit your white hits (which represents about 60% of your overall damage) and then gain value with every stats except expertise which have a similar role.

But what makes Hit even better for us is Combat Potency procs. That means that it will increase your resource generation!

Expertise

As stated above, expertise has a similar role to hit since it provides you with fewer dodges on your white attacks and combo builders (your finisher already can’t be dodge thanks to Surprise Attack).
That makes it a very valuable stat, even better than hit rating after the soft cap, but Expertise does cost a lot in your item budget. This is the reason why you won’t get much of it during the early phases (not to mention that this is a pretty rare stat early in the game)

Haste

Like hit or expertise, haste rating gives you more white attacks, this time by increasing the speed of your weapon. That also means more Combat Potency procs which makes it a very valuable stats that is scaling from every other stats.

Bear in mind that hit, expertise, and haste, on top of increasing energy generation will also add values to every other proc effects like poisons, windfury, trinkets, mongoose…

Armor penetration

Since most of our damage is physical, armor penetration will benefit us a lot (except poisons and bleeds effects) and gain values with every other stat.
On top of that, with the way armor reduction works, each point of armor penetration you add has more value than the one before.

It is important to note that since your DPS is a balance of all your stats, so when you increase one stat in particular it loses value relative to each other stats (except for Armor penetration which has an exponential scaling)

The weight of stats

The stats weight allows knowing, for a certain set of gear, which stat will benefit your character the most. The weight of stats preferably uses attack power as a reference. It is dynamic as you change your gear (because of the interaction between them as seen above) but remains quite reliable (except Armor penetration) for a certain level of gear.

The weight of stats shown below is extracted from Simonize’s spreadsheet and calculated for a Sword combat rogue with Bis gear for each phase. The purpose of it is to show you how much 1 of a certain stat is worth in Attack Power.

Note that Armor penetration has been left aside for reasons that you surely understand now, and we will add a dedicated section for it when phase 3 approaches (and armor penetration gear with it).

Combat sword	Strength	Agility	Critical	Hit	Exp	Haste
T4	1,1	2,26	1,83	2,54	2,77	2,2
T5	1,1	2,27	1,85	2,57	2,83	2,3
T6	1,1	2,31	1,93	2,59	2,84	2,4
SWP	1,1	2,43	2,11	2,85	3,09	2,3

In the next table shows the weight of stats for T6 & SWP content, when you’ve got both Glaives of Azzinoth. As you can see, this set has so much impact on your character that it even makes a difference in your stats weight.

Combat sword	Strength	Agility	Critical	Hit	Exp	Haste
T6	1,1	2,36	1,99	2,69	2,92	2,3
SWP	1,1	2,46	2,15	2,95	3,18	2,24

For every comparison, we’ll use « normal » stats weight as most of us won’t have two glaives and even if you do, it basically boosts every stats except haste.

EP Values

AEP values (or Attack power Equivalent Points) is a reference system commonly used to calculate the value to a piece of gear, and allow us to compare two or more pieces.

To obtain the AEP values of an item, you just have to multiply each stat of the item with their weight and add them (to take into account sockets we are putting 4 agility /4 hit rating gem in early game and 5 agility /5 hit rating gem in the late game since, also you should count the socket bonus if the sockets are red or yellow ).

Here one example to show the maths with Edgewalker Longboots in T4 :

(29 + 4 + 4) x 2.26 Agility
+ 44 AP
+ (13 + 4 + 4 + 3) x 2.54 Hit rating (with the socket bonus)
= 188,58 AEP

We will compare them with Fel Leather Boots which in a BOE LW craft :

(4+4) x 2.26 Agility
+ (36+6) AP (with socket bonus)
+ 17 x 1.83 Critical strike rating
+ (25+4+4) x 2.54 Hit rating
= 175,01 AEP

As you would expect (and even if Fel Leather Boots are amazing for the start), Edgewalker Longboots is better and you can confirm it by using Simonize spreadsheet, it does come ahead by 4,63 dps.
Comparing pieces of gear with AEP works great, but you should be careful when there is a very small difference and rely on a DPS spreadsheet for those cases. Another thing to note is that AEP values are not made to calculate weapon, trinket and gear with procs but we still give AEP to those by obtaining the same DPS as these pieces with pure AP).
Here are the value in DPS for 1 AEP in each phases :

Phase	T4	T5	T6	SWP
DPS	0.341	0.371	0.413	0.458

Now that you know everything about AEP, you can understand the value in () after each piece of gear in our gearing series.

And what about PVP?

Stats interaction

To practice PVP, you will use a completely different specialization, and get faced with completely different targets. Even though a lot of what has been said earlier holds its truth, there are some key differences.

– While Attack Power is even more valuable since it is the base of your damage and it benefits from Deadliness, Critical Strike will gain value as you improve your gear throughout the phases but in the meantime lose value with the opposing player having more resilience. Same story for Agility except that it benefits from Sinister Calling and gives you defensive stats
– Hit & Haste are no longer as valuable as they are in PVE by the fact that you no longer have Combat Potency, but will still improve your damage and allow you to get your stacks of wound poison faster. The PVP Hit cap is 5%.
– Expertise has very little value in PVP as players cannot dodge when hit from behind
– Armor penetration is very valuable against clothes wearers but not so much against big armor players.

Stats weight & AEP Values

First thing before talking about the stats, note that while AEP value for PVE is accurate since it directly translates to DPS, for PVP it should be viewed more as an indicator to compare your pieces of gear, as it does not take into account the variety of situations you will be exposed to, as well as the fact that AEP doesn’t put a value on defensive stats.

Below is the result of a simulation make with Simonize spreadsheet with the following parameters :

– Shadowstep talent spec
– Against a lvl 70 target with 5k5 armor, 100% uptime and a fight length of 3 minutes
– Expertise has very little value in PVP as players cannot dodge when hit from behind.
– No resilience
– Good build for each phase including PVE gear (except Warglaives).

Shadowstep	Strength	Agility	Critical	Hit	Haste
S1	1,1	1,9	1,18	1,14	1,2
S2	1,1	1,92	1,22	1,17	1,24
S3	1,1	1,96	1,28	1,18	1,33
S4	1,1	2,03	1,39	1,25	1,38

As you can see, stats weight are a lot closer from one phase to another due to PVP gear, how the specs operate with its talent (the absence of Combat Potency is a big one), and the fact that attack power is one of your most valuable stats. And if you add into account the resilience growth, both agility and crit rating should remain at a similar value throughout all TBC.
This is why we will use only one set of stats weight (and AEP values) by averaging the values and using a -0.05 for both Agility and Critical rating.

Shadowstep	Strength	Agility	Critical	Hit	Haste
PVP	1,1	1,9	1,22	1,18	1,28

Read more about the rogue stats & optimizations