plate gear used to have agility and it helped plate wearers do things. If a warrior, DK or paladin had agility stats now would there be just 0 beneficial effects whatsoever? Same with strength on a feral druid or things like that
they basically standardized attributes per class, if you wanted crit you’d get crit, plate armor won’t have agility
You’ll have to forgive me, because much of this is coming from 10+ years of unused memory, but way back in the day stats broke down like this:
Strength:
Increases Melee Attack Power
Increases Shield Block Value
Agility:
Increases Melee swing speed. (I think.)
Increases Melee Critical Strike Chance.
Intellect:
Increases Mana.
Increases Spell Critical Strike Chance.
Spirit:
Increased Health and Mana regen in and out of combat.
Stamina:
Increases hitpoints.
Agility used to be provided to plate wearers as a DPS stat due to the crit increase.
After the whole Paladins in dresses thing, Blizz started adding buffs to wearing your intended armor class to encourage you to wear that stuff only.
As a result a Paladin would receive more benefit by wearing all plate due to the stacking bonus to strength than almost any amount of agility could grant him.
There were also talents that converted a % of your strength into spell-power etc, that made up for the loss of the intellect gain on cloth vs. plate.
I want to say it was around Cata or so that they simply just locked down the main stats to no longer provide any side-benefits other than attack power, hit points, mana, and health/mana regen.
That’s also why you see almost no secondary stats on Vanilla era gear, and tons of it showing up in Wrath and beyond.
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So if I equipped something with agility as a plate wearer now, would it still give increased crit chance? Does it still help even though strength is far superior?
No. There is zero point to putting anything without your primary stat on it. In current content, it’s not even an option.
On retail it does not.
I used to have a really fun build in Ulduar that used Hunter mail and Shammy mail as a Holy Paladin that thanks to all the agility+holy spec talents gave me something like an effect 70% critical hit chance on my normal melee attacks.
Combined with a fast attack spell-power based 1-hander and spell shield you ended up with a Holy Paladin build that was built around the free instant-cast flash of lights that a melee crit would generate.
Almost these. Agility gave armor, crit chance, dodge chance and ranged attack power, while it never to my knowledge gave swing speed. Hunters, rogues, and druids in cat form also got melee attack power from it, at half the rate of strength.
Spirit only increased in-combat health regen for Trolls.
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