Precision is one of the core attributes for characters in Diablo III. It governs the chance of making a critical hit when a character attacks.
All attributes have changed since their original conception. Bashiok made an announcement[1]about these changes on the Battle.net forums on December 20, 2010:
Precision: Increases crit chance
- This will be tuned to be comparable in power to Attack increases for the most part.
- So why have Precision? Mainly so we can play into it with affixes, runes, and traits. Linking effects to crits gives us another hook for designing skills and gives the player options to create ‘crit builds’ that play different than normal attack builds. Examples of the kind of crit effects we 'could' do (not saying we are, these are examples):
- - Cleave crits cause monsters to explode and do damage to those around them.
- - Lifesteal could be an ‘on crit only’ affix.
- This is a more finesse stat, and we’re fine with that. Most people will want Attack by default, but they won’t mind getting precision.
- This stat has no secondary effect.
More details on exactly how Precision will work in Diablo III are not yet known. What is known is that attribute points are not assigned by the player; they are auto-assigned. See the relevant section in the attributes article.
History
Originally, Precision was part of Dexterity which governed a character's chance to critically hit a target, doing more damage. Dexterity also increased the character's chance to dodge an attack and lowered the character's chance of being interrupted by getting hit.
1 point of Dexterity gave: (based on Class)
- +x% Critical Strike Chance
- +x% Dodge Chance
- Lowered chance of being interrupted by getting hit.