WoW Classic – Glancing Blows Guide

What Is A Glancing Blow?

A glancing blow is sort of the opposite of a crushing blow. The effect of a glancing blow is that you lose some percentage of damage from your attack when it hits. A player versus a mob whose defense score is higher than their weapon skill will suffer some number of glancing blows as they attack. Only white damage attacks are subject to glancing blows. Yellow damage (special attacks) and ranged damage are not subject to glancing blows. The number of glancing blows you will get depends on the difference in levels between you and your opponent:

The damage reduction for glancing blows depends on the difference in your weapon skill and your opponent’s defense score (note that mobs have a defense score equal to 5 x level):

Note that we’re looking at warriors in a PvE setting here, and assuming that the warrior has maxed out their natural weapon skill. We can easily see in-game that a level 60 mage with 250 weapon skills will get glancing blows against level 55 mobs. Do we much care about this? No, not really. Well, I care about it a bit because it does indicate that the presence of glancing blows is actually related to the difference in weapon skill vs. defense score as opposed to level difference, and it does warrant more research to find out. For the purposes of this text, where we assume maxed weapon skill for the warrior and (5 x level) defense score for the mob, using +1/2/3 levels works just fine (corresponding to weapon skill vs. defense differences of 5/10/15) and produces the correct results.

What Can I Do About It?

The bad news is, you can never reduce the frequency of glancing blows. When fighting an opponent three levels higher than you, you will always get 40% glancing blows, and that is that. The good news is that as noted in table 2, the damage reduction for glancing blows depends on the difference in your weapon skill and your opponent’s defense score. Raising your weapon skill will reduce the damage lost to glancing blows. Against an opponent three levels higher:

We see that +10 weapon skill reduces the damage lost to glancing blows effectively to zero. In real numbers, 40% of attacks landing for 70% damage is a loss of 12%. Adding weapon skill when fighting higher-level opponents is a very effective way of increasing your damage output, to the tune of recovering the whole 12% with +10 weapon skill against boss mobs.

There’s Still More Bad News

One other side effect of glancing blows is also bad news: Glancing blows cannot critically hit, and so overwrite chance to a critical hit in the combat table. This means that your effective critical hit chance is reduced by the presence of glancing blows. This affects dual-wielding much more than it does two-handed weapon wielders. Here are basic combat tables for 300 weapon skill (level 60) vs. 315 defense (level 63):

Note that hit and crit are lumped together in the table because we don’t know what any individual warrior’s crit chance is, and critical hit chance overwrites hit chance in the combat table. The importance of +hit for dual wielders is underscored here. A dual-wielding warrior with 25% crit and no +hit will be effectively capped at an 18.6% critical hit chance, and 6.4% of the critical hit gear is wasted. Everything else is going to be a miss/dodge/block/parry or a glancing blow, none of which can be a critical hit. Note that these numbers are correct when facing the opponent. If attacking from behind, the Hit+Crit cap increases to 29.8% for dual wield, and 48.8% for two-handed, since the chance to parry is removed.

Note that by adding +hit, you can cause the hit+crit cap to grow. This will increase the maximum effective critical hit chance, which is extremely desirable for dual wielders. For example, a dual wielder adding +5% to hit will change the basic table above (again for level 60 vs. level 63) to:

The Moral of the Story

What it comes down to is this: +weaponskill is your friend. Getting to 310 weapon skill versus world bosses will result in an increase of your DPS output on the order of about 12%. Getting to 305 will give you 6% (hello humans with sword or mace, and orcs with axes!) Starting with patch 1.12, Rogues will really have it good with the new talent that gives them +weaponskill.

You May Also Like

WoW Classic – Best Leveling Methods Guide WoW Classic – DPS Pets Guide WoW Classic – Ignite Stacking Guide WoW Classic – Tank Pets Guide WoW Classic – AoE Grinding Guide WoW Classic – Best Hunter Races Guide WoW Classic – Best Mage Races Guide WoW Classic – BEST WoW Classic HORDE Class & Race Combinations Guide WoW Classic – Glancing Blows & Weapon Skill WoW Classic – Pet Commands Guide WoW Classic – Proficiencies and Leveling Guide WoW Classic – PVP Commands Guide