Combat Mechanics

This is a guide to some of the mechanics behind combat in World of Warcraft. I'm aiming the guide at virtually everybody and will try to split it into more complicated and less complicated sections. While the less complicated sections will be useful for everybody, the more complicated ones will go into the mathematics and implications of some parts of the combat system.

All combat in WoW is determined using result tables. Understanding how these work and how they are created is the most important first step in learning how combat operates. When an attack is made, a single roll is made on the result table, and this determines the outcome of the attack. Depending upon the type of attack being made and the various situations that attack might be made in, the table has a very variable number of different possible results. The percentage chance that a particular result might be rolled can vary wildly too, but the sum of these percentages is always 100%.

Below is the master table, a table containing all the possible results of an attack in no particular order.

No combat table actually contains all of these items at once! To understand them though, we should look at each item in turn.

An attack which acquires this result is literally one which fails to connect and therefore has no effect at all.

(WORK IN PROGRESS)