The Hit Cap is No Longer Important

This is a follow-up to my last post, to try to focus on what I think is a rather important point. I want to start establishing an idea that I think will eventually spread through the Balance community as people start to better understand Cataclysm gearing (and how it's different from WLK). That idea is that, as the title indicates, the hit cap is no longer important.

What do I mean by this? Basically that gear-selection decisions will almost always be made without the hit cap in mind. This is a major reversal from WLK, and in fact one of my motives in writing this is to try to start making headway against the mass of questions about hit rating and the hit cap that will start appearing as we try to spread Moonkin theorycraft ideas after Cataclysm release.

Before I go on, one thing I want to make clear: the hit cap still exists (1742 rating)--I'm in no way saying otherwise, and it still has significance in that you need to reforge down if you are over it. That very simple point, though, is ultimately a distraction or a red herring from proper thinking about gear selection. The point is knowing how to choose gear--reforging to 1742 once you have it is easy. Moving on:

In addition to what I said in my last post, where I described how reforging means that the hit cap no longer prevents you from using more hit gear, I want to add one more major change between WLK and Cataclysm:

Hit is no longer significantly better than haste. In fact, it might be slightly worse, although I have to look into it more before I say anything definitive. But it is definitely similar in value, and far weaker than Intellect.* Let this sink in for a moment. Review why it was that hit rating and the hit cap were so important in WLK: because hit was by far the best stat if you were below the cap. This meant that, as a logical result, any optimized gear setup would always be at hit cap. And over the course of an expansion we all internalized the idea that being at hit cap was a defining feature of a proper character setup.

But if hit and haste have roughly the same value? Well, now there's nothing particularly wrong with being under the hit cap. You still want hit, because it's one of the two best secondary stats (and all items have two secondary stats). But if you simply wear the best item you have in each slot, and wind up under the hit cap, it's fine (this is actually quite likely with the low hit level on pre-raid gear).

As what about going over the hit cap? Well, that was the focus of yesterday's post that I linked above. Reforging means that going over the cap is not a factor anyway--continue wearing the best individual item in each slot and simply reforge away any unused it.

Conclusions
Because hit is no longer a clearly dominant stat even where it applies, it is no longer imperative to reach the hit cap. Because excess hit can be reforged away, nothing changes in gear selection even if you do reach the hit cap (up until the top of the hit window I described yesterday, which is very high--2745 hit rating).** Therefore, when selecting a piece of gear, you choose the one with the best total stats, whether they be hit or otherwise, regardless of where you are in relation to the cap. This conclusion is, I think, sufficient to justify the title of this post.

--------

*A question you might ask is why this is the case, given that hit and haste work in fundamentally the same way as they did in WLK. The main reason is that in WLK, haste was always hampered by the GCD-cap on many (around half) of our spells, drastically reducing its value. Pre-cap haste was actually around as good as hit in WLK, but the haste softcap was so low that everyone was over it.
**A slight caveat here that I didn't get into yesterday is that, if you get near the top of that window, you may run out of places where you can reforge hit to haste. You might need to reforge hit to crit instead. So hit may be worth only as much as crit at high enough levels.