I have actively only followed my combatstats for the Twin Emperors, to see how many of those dreadful missed aimshots I really get. My sample is 2172 shots, with a missrate of ~1.75%. And as you guessed, my %hit from gear is 7.

So, anyone up for a fieldstudy on +1, +2 and +4 mobs with various %hit-setups to work out the specifics of %miss due to level difference? :P

Gwaihir I beg to differ with you here abit. Look at my stats: 5 misses on whole BWL boss fights essencially wearing +8 hit gear. The trash is usually 62 and some 63. Alot of trash before Broodlord. +6 hit gives you about 1% miss chance on 62 level which is about what you got in your sample. I must admit I would expect abit more misses. But I check my misses quite often. I use +7 hit gear as my raid gear (unless I need to do tranqing where I put +9) and I usually get a number arrounr 1.5% miss chance. When I use +9 I get 0% miss chance.
For me at least there is no question about 1% hit chance increasing my dps by 1% up to +8 hit. The only question for me is how much do I get no raid bosses with the last +9 hit which makes myself immune to misses.
Anyway I will try to do +0-+9 hit chance gear runs on MC/BWL and maybe some AQ bosses and get a pure stat on that.
Oh I also had an argument that there is no way to make your miss chance 0% or even below 1%. That was during AQ20 run. So i reset my damage metters and out +11 hit gear (just in case :)) and over a sample of abouy 1.5k arrows I got no ranged misses.

slightly seperate point but parsing MC data will probably skew your crit rate upwards slightly on autoshot & multishot as these tend to be the attacks most commonly used on smouldering core hound packs. Since the core hounds are considered to be prone, every shot on them crits.

And another seperate point, what is the best mod to use to analyse/parse this data - my damage meters mod is temperamental to say the least when it comes to this data.

Seems like the best guess might be:

Standard .2% per level from defense skill.
Additional 1% per level that is a ranged-only mechanic.

0.2% per defense level only for melee can't be true as it's possible to miss with a melee yellow attack with +7%, and it takes one miss to show this.

However, it might be that some mobs (most notably Dragonkin as the last thing I missed a yellow attack on that I recall was Ebonroc and some Wyrmguards) have higher defense than what's given for their level.

BUT, if it's 0.2% per defense level, then 64 and 65 mobs (or level+4 or more since there are no 64+ mobs to mobs to my knowledge) would be much easier to hit with special attacks than would indicate, and I don't think that the game changes it's hit table to something completely different for higher level mobs relative to player.

EDIT: Unless you mean mobs scale with 0.2% per defense skill point, which would indicate an extra 3% for 63 mobs for melee and 6% for ranged but that doesn't seem right.

FWIW, I missed a backstab on Firemaw with +8 hit the other week (i usually raid with +13 thanks to precision, but i'd respecced to seal fate/vigor to have some pvp fun after finally picking up 5ns).

Fun as it is, I avoided the corehounds ;)
The mod I was using is combatstats, it will store data until you mash it's reset button.

I do believe that they made ranged attacks consider defense when they checked their hit and miss. I *thiiink* that ranged attkcs used to use purely the level to check hits and misses, which meant we had a very low miss rate off the bat~ then around patch 1.6 or so (Somewhere before the hunter review, not sure exactly) they tried out the change that made ranged attacks dodged, and parried.. and it was rolled back as hunters could literally stand and shoot at warriors for 4-5 minutes and not do jack.

I think the compromise move was making ranged check against defense for its miss rate. Hence why I think the 5.6 numbers are probably closest to the truth.

In all, however whether you need +6,+7, +8, +9, or more to never miss is a moot point.. what we should be interested in is how low we can afford to get other stats, namely crit, to get our hit rate as high as possible. I'd much rather have, say, 25 or 26 unbuffed ranged crit, and miss .4-.6% of my shots, than give up 2-3 of that crit to move the .4% miss rate down to .00% Granted, +to hit is not a hard stat to come by, but if you stack it you often lock yourself out of the only crit gear you can get, due to what is availiable on certain slots.

all the more reason i need my damn ossirian's binding.

Ranged attacks use the target's defense skill instead of target's level to determine chance to hit.

Patch 1.4

Is this both pvp and pve? If so, get your MT in full defense gear and shoot him a ton with 5% hit on. Otherwise, what would the highest defense mob in the game be to get some solid data on?

I'm not sure, but when a tank is mind controlled by some mob, and I hit Multi-Shot, I do seem to miss them quite a lot more than any other mob.

We have a troll hunter who has been testing this out lately, I'm fairly sure he has never missed a shot at +8% hit, I know our other (non-troll) hunters have reported misses at +8%.

I'll try and wrangle one of our tanks into a duel tonight. I'm running with 9% hit gear, and I can spec up to 12% hit. I'm a tauren so there won't be a +bows skill variable to worry about.

Just to confirm a testing method,

0 hit gear vs 0 defense over 100 shots (is 100 a large enough sample? just worried about boring the warrior to tears for the sake of "Theory!")

Then 0 vs 100 defense, and see how much miss % goes up by.

Then increase hit% until the x hit vs 100 defense until the miss rate equals the 0 vs 0, noting for each hit % increment the miss % versus 100 defense.

Does this seem like enough data to send to the real theorycrafters?

-[offtopic] It would be interesting to get a group of players who may not be as mathematically inclined together to do sample legwork for these boards. Basically tell them what amounts of what to wear, and some test scenarios. It would get a much larger sample size for the ner...I mean theorycrafters to work with.

I'm fairly certain that the PvP mechanics of defense are nothing like the PvE mechanics. Mob based mind control is the most dramatic example- even though it is short lived, you can easily tell that your 430 defense target is much harder to hit compared to simply dueling a tank.

I've dueled our tank warriors for a long while (level 3 white bows and lowest grade vendor ammo works very well to get a large sample) to look at blocked shots and miss rates. Despite full wrath + all the other goodies like styleen's, over 400+ shots I didnt get a significantly higher miss rate than when I was fighting against mobs. I dont have those screenshots handy, but I can probably dig them up. IIRC, my miss rate was not quite one percent over the entire time, which matched my raid parsings. Incedentally, shots can be blocked, although it is a wierd occurance.. With shield block up to have over 100% block, a block doesnt always happen. At the same time though, blocks *can* happen, and show up in the combat log as such. Mobs can block as well, and even pets sometimes block 5 or so damage. I have several shots of this happening.

The usual no brainer GM response was that the blocks were UI/combatlog bugs, which I find hard to believe.. The warrior I was testing with told me he lost the correct amount of HP according to what I saw in my combat log. So, who knows.

I can't remember the exact source, but both weapon skill and defence are normalised to 300 in pvp (including duels)

This is easily demostrated by equipping a weapon in which you have low/no skill in, and using it in a duel against a lv 60 with 300 defence; your miss rate with your 1/300 or whatever skill weapon will be identical to your miss rate with your fully skilled-up 300/300 weapon.

i missed duel-winning scattershots against warriors twice last night wearing +4 hit, so that seems unlikely to me unless i just got really unlucky :-P

With 310/9% bows I've definitely gone thorugh an MC clear without missing, but very few of those mobs are 63.

The only parse i have with 310/8% on emps resulted in 0 misses in 309 shots, but it's pretty hard to tell, since yesterday with 300/8% I missed only once in 193 hits. Unfortunately my gear changed a bit in the past month so I don't have a large +8% population to chi-squared against.

Honestly though, the reason I personally stopped testing these myself was that imo it was pretty much determined that trueaim gauntlets still fall into the "not worth it" pile, since the 0.5% doesn't make up for the 4dps and 210hp 1% crit that emp gloves has. With the changes to dispel, I honestly don't see a need for it; on huhuran our hunters are in a pure-nr set (most of us at 3% +hit max), and with 2 parallel t-shot rots, we've never had her frenzyae over 2 months of killing or so.