What does ATTACK do?Follow

Attack increases the chances of a successfully landing an attack.

Not sure how long the ability has been there (somebody pointed it out to me just earlier this year) but if you hover your mouse over an ability on the inventory screen such as attack or strength, a pop-up will show what that ability does.

Maybe I'm totally imagining things (or misremembering), but I seem to recall that the attack value had two components just as the AC value does. Basically, you get attack from increased str and increased dex, one of which helps you hit more often,and one of which affects how *well* you hit. These values either do, or did, or were imagined, to correlate somehow with avoidance AC versus mitigation AC in the grand combat hit/damage calculation. Whether this is still the case (or ever was, cause it's been a really long time and my memory is fuzzy), is up to speculation. No clue how stuff like +atk items, or heroic stats, or whatever else fits in either.

For a tank, increasing ATK doesn't hurt, unless you're doing it at the expense of AC or HPs. I also am not sure if actually hitting versus attempting to hit (ie: potential damage versus real) makes any difference in terms of aggro. My fuzzy memory vaguely recalls some theories that each attack generated a given amount of hate, with damage done being an additional source (or that honestly could have been DD spells I'm thinking of), but they've changed the hate calculations so many times over the years, that who knows? Melee damage is kinda a lowball hate generator these days anyway, so I'm not sure how much it really matters for a tank. You're going to be using hate generators when tanking, and those blow away anything you'd get from your melee damage directly. Pretty sure that even if ATK might increase melee hate slightly over time, it's going to be lost in the wash.