Blizzard
Conventional wisdom about vanilla hit table mechanics includes the following:
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Mobs and players of equal level (more precisely, equal weapon skill and defense) have a base 5% chance to dodge, parry, block, miss (non- dual wielding).
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Mobs have (5 * Level) weapon skill and defense values.
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Each point of difference between defense and weapon skill changes those percentages by 0.04% per point (except miss, see below). For example, a player hitting a +3 mob (such as a raid boss) from the front without dual wielding will experience 5.6% chance for their attacks to be dodged, parried, and blocked by the mob. For the purposes of this discussion let’s stick to white attacks.
A guide on the old Evil Empire site claimed the source of the knowledge about 0.04% per point of difference between weapon skill and defense, and other information, came from the following three blue posts:
https://web.archive.org/web/20070105001622/http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-blizzard-archive-en&t=7
https://web.archive.org/web/20070105001622/http://forums-en.wow-europe.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-blizzard-archive-en&t=15
https://web.archive.org/web/20070105001622/http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-bugs&ThreadID=62388
Unfortunately these are no longer accessible, at least not that I could find so I can’t see the wording.
A few of us from one of the classic warrior discords have been doing some testing on beta to verify the hit tables and other mechanics work the way we think. The testing is slow going but we have some preliminary results. Good news is certain things like glancing blow chance and penalties seem to be consistent with previous understanding, at least for +5 wep skill and +0 wep skill. Some testing will need to wait until later beta stages (presuming level cap is raised).
However we have found some strange results for other parts of the hit tables. For each result we also report 95% confidence intervals. Admittedly sample size is lower than we would like but testing is tedious and time consuming to do manually. However, even at these sample sizes some important information can be gleaned.
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Parry appears to be much too high (13.61% +/- 1.18%) for +3 mobs (no extra weapon skill) and is more consistent with parry values from later expansions. This conflicts with the 0.04% from old blue posts.
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Dodge (6.73% +/- 0.86%) appears to match later expansion values (wrath, see below). This conflicts with the 0.04% from old blue posts.
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Block (4.52% +/- 0.71%) appears slightly lower than expected. This conflicts with the 0.04% from old blue posts.
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Miss (8.41% +/- 0.95%) unfortunately isn’t enough samples to resolve between three prevailing theories on base miss chance for +3 mobs (8%, 8.6%, and 9%), but it’s encouraging that there isn’t a huge surprise here.
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Based on the base crit (4.49%) for the “Antlered Courser” test, there appears to be an additional crit suppression happening for +3 mobs beyond the expected 0.04% factor. For that test we are seeing a crit of 1.34% +/- 0.6%. Similar results were obtained for the Giant Yeti test, though slightly different due to different paper doll crit. ~3% crit suppression for +3 I believe was a feature of later expansions but was apparently not seen in vanilla according to any old sources.
Combat logs and summaries can be found here:
https://github.com/magey/classic-warrior/issues/5
Additional references:
This site claimed parry was changed to 14% for +3 in cata pre-patch:
https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Attack_table?diff=2413116&oldid=2412483
This site claimed dodge of 6.5% for +3 mobs (wrath):
https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Expertise?diff=1923754&oldid=1918454
This site claimed 5.6% for dodge/parry/block/miss for +3 (5% for +0), perhaps based on the blue posts linked above
http://web.archive.org/web/20061115223930/http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=14381707&sid=1
All of this leads us to the following questions:
Is it possible that the creation of the 1.13 client led to some accidental setting of parameters from later expansions?
Would it be possible to verify that the beta is behaving as intended, or misbehaving, by devs comparing to their 1.12 reference client?