Secondary Stats

One sneaky little thing I found in the PTS notes was secondary stats.

"1.2.1 PTS introduces a number of changes to “Secondary” stats to give them a stronger effect on overall player performance. Please keep in mind that these new effects are in addition to existing bonuses that are already present in 1.2.

Critical hits: Critical bonus damage is no longer random, and is now a range of +5% to +75% based on stats (see below).
Critical heals: Critical bonus heal effectiveness is no longer random, and is now a range of +5% to +75% based on stats (see below).

Weapon Skill: Increases your Melee Critical and Ranged Critical bonus damage dealt.
Willpower: Increases your Magic Critical bonus damage dealt, and also increases the effectiveness of Healing Criticals from your healing abilities.
Initiative: Reduces your critical bonus damage suffered from all types of attacks.
Toughness: Increases the bonus Healing Critical effectiveness of heals which are used on you, and also grants you minor Hit Point regeneration while in-combat."

Hmmm interesting. The need to balance your stats is to me, very important for a game to have to avoid one button face smashers who stack one stat and use one skill. Giving stats more use in game and in fact for some classes a requirement to have to function well stands good for game balance.

I don't know what sort of willpower the average sorc or BW runs with, but I don't expect it to be too high, and with crits being quite a useful thing to have having to drop raw damage output to gain crit damage boost makes it a decision, do you go 50/50, or stack one at the expense of the other? Either way it should reduce the potency of one-stat classes if they have to find ways to balance them.

It may cause some headaches with itemisation but I'm certainly all for making people have to think of what they have to get on an item and balance it with the other stats.

Two Orcy thumbs up for this