This question, to me, seems rather elementary, however I have been unable to adequately find an answer to the question.

Mages, perhaps more than any other class, rely on a substantial amount of +hit and +crit for spells coupled with raw spell damage in order to be effective in the raiding scene.

My question is, when, if ever, is it better to gain 1%hit over 1% crit? Similarly, when is it better to gain 1% crit over 1% hit?

The concepts of how a critical strike may effect overall DPS and how spell hit effect overall DPS work in this fashion, to my understanding:

If, for example, an individual's fireball HITS for 2000 damage. A critical strike, then, would produce an initial effect of 3000 damage, along with a subsequent effect of 1200 damage produced from the ignite talent.

Then, +1 % chance to crit (14 crit rating) would equate to a DPS increase of roughly 7.33.

The base chance to HIT a mob 3 levels above your level is 83%. One cannot surpass a 99% chance to hit any mob, and therefore the optimal amount of hit to utilize is 16% (128 Hit Rating).

Then, +1 % chance to hit (8 hit rating) would equate to a DPS increase of roughly 6.67.

Why, then, would one ever choose to incorporate 1% hit over 1% crit?

Also, perhaps on a side topic, I was wondering if anyone had any solid information regarding spell penetration and its effect when coupled with fire. Some people have said that spell penetration has an effect on partial resists in a PvE environment, while others say that spell penetration is a statistic with use only in PvP.

Personally I go for around 12-13% hit (harder for me now that Elemental Precision was changed) and the rest crit. Also remember you can't crit if you never hit so in that sense Hit > Crit.

Spell Penetration has been found to be useless PvE because the bosses have a certain amount of resist that isn't affected by either Hit or -Resist. I would never go out of my way to get it. Enigma is nice because it has some tossed on there. On that note, I didn't notice a difference going from NW -> Enigma. But I certainly notice if i drop some Hit.

I do not think this is true.

From the various developer posts on the topic the only thing that can cause a partial resist on a non-binary spell is resistances. So what you have heard about spell penetration helping for that seems to fit.

Unless I am reading the blizzard page wrong anyway.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/...sistances.html

Your thoughts on crit make sense, since your crit percentage is supposed to be over all attacks, not just hits. In other words an attack doesn't have to be a hit to crit, if it selected as a crit that overrides hit. Hit ends up being valuable to melee because they have to deal with soft crit caps imposed by glancing blow taking up 40%. Since the inate 17% you have to deal with isn't nearly that high it's a non-issue.

Edit - I forgot the boss flag does give them a mechanism to partial resist without actually having a resist score in the particular school you are using.

Hit gives flat, static, predictable damage, as opposed to crit which gives you an unexpected burst of both damage and aggro, which sometimes is quite bad (speaking from a horde mage PoV) specifically on 4h.

Also it was shown a while back by someone in Overrated, if I remeber correctly, that there were seperate dice rolls for hitting and critting, and by that i mean that it is possible to "roll" a crit but get resisted, his proof was a SS of him hitting a mob and getting MoE back from a resist.

The other advantage of hit is that is applies to nondamage effects such as poly and counterspell, which agreeably is pretty minor for mages (especially when you consider that most mobs we poly in a raid environment are sub 63) but somewhat more useful for other classes (earthshocks on kt for example)

Otherwise yes, crit is much better then hit, especially for fire mages (MoE) and it is budgeted as such. The only problem is that mages are handed out a shitload of hit regardless of there gear choices because it gets slapped on everywhere (2% weap/off, 2% tear, 2% enchants, 3% precision is 9% right there). Personally i have 11% hit and the only peice i actively use over a crit slot is frostfire belt over mana ignting cord because the stats are somewhat nice(bad luck with cloth helms and cthun belts).

P.S. Hi! Don't know if you remeber me but i was speedybish on UsEast Pre-Wow, just wondering if moon still plays? I kinda lost track of him after he stopped playing his discordia-era druid. =)

Let's say you have +9% crit and +3% hit from talents. You cast a fireball on a boss, and a roll is made. With no hit or crit gear, said roll will look like this (ignoring Intellect and base crit for simplicity). Roll 1-9, its a crit, roll 10-86, its a hit, roll 87-100 and you will get a full resist.

Crit does not override hit. If you roll a resist you get a resist - one cannot roll a crit that gets fully resisted, it's one or the other, or a regular hit.

Just as the above poster mentioned, the 17% resist rate casters have is a lot better than the glancing blow mechanic melee has. Maybe it's just me but I seem to do full damage nearly every time in PvE (I have 20 penetration and assuming CoE). It's the full resists that hurt me. That being said I stack crit and use only a few pieces of hit gear, and I usually top the charts on trash and on boss fights in AQ, at lowest I'll end up number 3 or 4.

Crit makes the spell do 210% dmg up from 100%, and hit makes it do 100% up from 0%. Crit boosts DPS more, but the effectiveness goes down as one's target increases in level.

For a frost mage, hit can be very desirable because they can use it to counter otherwise uncounterable level-based innate resistances (not to be confused with level-based spell resists) due to the broken binary spell system.

In general, to hit can outperform crit if you have a lot of crit. For example a frost mage with 99% crit chance effectively does 1.99 times base damage. Getting that last percent to crit raises it to 2.00 for a gain of 0.01/1.99, which is only just over half a percent of effective damage gain. However, getting another percent to hit in that situation gets you a full extra percent to spell damage. The same principle applies to spell damage by the way.

The reason crit is usually superior is that crit starts at 0 (where it gains most per point) while hit starts near 100 where it gains least. If you had a 1% chance to hit, 1% to hit would *double* your damage. However as demonstrated above if crit gets extremely high it can be less effective than hit, because the minimum damage bonus you get from extra hit is 1% per percent hit (the max being infinite in theory) while the minimum bonus per crit is 0.5% and the max is 1%.

EDIT: As you can see above, a frost mage actually gets more extra damage per hit than per crit as long as he is not at the cap since the minimm damage increase per percent hit is 1% while the maximum per crit is also 1%.

One doesn't necessarily follow from the other. I remember the screen shot, but never did any follow up tests myself. My suspicion at the time was that this was entirely consistent with the resistance score resistance mechanism (as opposed to the level difference resistance/miss mechanism). We already knew crits could be 25%, 50%, 75% resisted. It's also the case that resistance scores can give rise to spells that are 100% 'partially' resisted (if I may butcher the meaning of the term partial). So it makes sense that on rare occasions you'll get a crit that's 100% resisted. Of course the only way you'd know that had been the case would be something proc'ing off a crit. (The target's resistance score would need to be reasonably high. Blizzard's webpage indicates it would have to be higher than 50, but not higher than 100. I can't recall offhand what the player in question was fighting, so I'm not sure what the likelihood of that is.)

I meant to test this out at the time, but never respec'd into MoE or got an item that proc'd off a crit.

False

Not quite.

There is one one for hit/crit/miss. If you have 10% to crit, and +5% to hit against a level 63 mob (83% chance to hit base), you roll one dice. 1-10 its a crit, 11-88 its a hit, and and 89-100 its a miss. After this, for non-binary spells, there is a resist roll, based on resistance. This is only for fire (for mages), and spells can either be resisted 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%. Therefore, that MoE proccing off of a resist was most likely a 100% resisted crit.

Also, for frost, hit = crit. Theres no such thing as if you have more, the less each one is worth. For example, lets go with 30% crit, and only 5% chance to miss. Let's say each frostbolt does 1000 damage.

Base damage on a 100 frostbolts
60000 (30% crits)
65000 (65% hits)
0 (5% misses)

delta by adding 1% crit
62000 (31% crits)
64000 (64% hits)
0 (5% misses)

+1000 over base

delta by adding 1% hit
60000 (30% crits)
66000 (66% hits)
0 (4% misses)

+1000 over base

For fire, it's a different story, since with ignite your crits hit for 210%, and MoE is nice, so crit > hit for fire.

I"m not that common with mage theorycraft, but if what you say is true, doesnt that Overrated screenshot prove that spell penetration actually has it use in PvE (or the mob must have been lacking CoE)?

My understanding is that there is a certain amount of resistance that cannot be removed in anyway, though CoE or through spell penetration. This base resistance makes it possible for partial resists of fire spells. I think I've heard the number 26 tossed around.

And also, as far as I know, spell penetration is truly worthless in PvE :)

From my understandings from a believe an earlier thread that floated around months ago this forum was that mobs had 2 types of resistance.
1) removeable resist, not sure how much but its irrelevant because it's lower then the amount removed by CoE.
2) nonremovable lvlbased boss resist, which is ~25-30 I believe.

Spell Penetration (and associated debuffs that achieve similar mechanics) does not appear to affect the unmitigatable resists that +x targets exibit. So it does still seem to be possible to have a 100% resist on a target even if you have infinite spell penetration, making it a very situational stat indeed. In fact, in the majority of cases, the penetration will do nothing at all. I am basing this on old threads here though and cannot confirm that the mechanics are still the same.

For the Hit v Crit debate though, I must admit that I value them essentially equally although always with an eye to keeping Hit high enough for reasonable reliability. Of course I also will trend to seeking gear that balances the two on a piece to piece basis so the item budget isn't being wasted too much.

My personal thinking is somewhat unscientific but works well enough. First off, I'm not always fighting +3 boss targets and in those situations the +Hit is less valued. However, I am on some occasions AEing with Blizzard and completely wasting the +Crit. To complicate this even more though, I am often polymorphing or snare-kiting or performing other odd roles where +Hit shines but Crit is meaningless. I also surely have talents or situations that affect or are affected by critrate in some way (MoE, the new AE caps, perhaps Shatter and so on) but in general I value crit more as a damage stat (especially as Fire but less than I did in the past of course) and hit as a consistancy/utility stat. Hell, if it were not for the way that the item budget is actually laid out, I'd ideally go for perfect hitrate with zero crit and roll all the points into pure +damage. Consistant damage is an ideal for PvE though and completely impractical given how the itemization actually is done.

No doubt I'll need to revisit the topic in more depth when we start seeing real raid itemization a few months from now but for the moment the choices are few enough that I don't personally min-max it much at all. Crit and Hit are both desirable naturally but for somewhat different reasons and depending on spec to a large degree. I'm honestly more interested in how a specific piece spends the available points versus an alternate piece and very rarely indeed is there a tight decision to be made.

I treat them basically as equal, with the tie going to crit. I do so for two main reasons. First, in situations where the utility aspect of mage spells come into play, it's usually against targets that aren't level 63. Thus even with a minimal amount of +hit, (through talents and gear) hit is easy to cap out. Second, at the margins it's easier to add on new gear if you are low on hit and high on crit. You never run into a piece of gear that requires you to change another item of gear to have value because of potentially capping out on +hit.

I've actually considered choosing a mage spec that maximized the value of crit as a means of distinguishing myself itemization wise from other cloth damage casters. I'm fairly certain no other cloth class can come up with a spec that can maximize the value of spell crit as well as a mage. The spreadsheets say it will be a sub-optimal spec for raid damage, but perhaps having a cloth caster spec'd this way can be a means to putting gear that drops to optimal use. (That is, assuming rational gear allocation!)

First off, level based hit chance (ie "misses") and crits are based off the same roll. The only way to have a crit that is resisted is if the resist comes from level based resistances (ie a boss mob) or actual resistance levels. All that this MoE screenshot proved was that the roll for resistances is done after the crit/hit roll (which was assumed already).

Additionally, while spell penetration does work in pve against normal resistances (ie not boss specific level based resistances), these tend to be relatively rare, and in a raid situation are usually delt with by CoE and CoS. There are a few situations in which it's useful (ie i believe it comes in handy if you wish to use fire spell on vael).
It is also a fairly situational stat in pvp, since most people don't go around wearing their fire, frost or nature resist sets in battlegrounds or arenas and thus you only have to deal with the relatively rare bonus resistance thrown on regular gear (which usually has a minimal impact on your damage anyway).

Crit and hit actually both have a sort of diminishing returns (and hit has a cap against raid bosses at +16)

Here's some (purely theoretical) math:

Say i have a 50% chance to hit. If i get +1% to hit, then i have just increased my dps by 2% (1 hit / 50 hit = 2% dps increase), assuming a 0% chance to crit. Doing the math, it is eventually possible to see that the minimum dps percentage increase that +hit can provide assuming you don't hit the cap is: (1 hit / 99 hit = 1.01(recurring) % dps increase).

If i have a 0% chance to crit (and ignoring the miss chances), getting +1 crit will increase my dps by 1% as a frost (fr) mage, or 1.1% if i am fire (f) specced. With the introduction of Spell Power, there are also 3 new numbers: .75% for arcane (a), 1.25% for frost with points in arcane (afr) or 1.45% for fire with points in arcane (af). However, if i have say a 50% chance to crit (still ignoring miss chance), my dps before i add the crit in has increased, while the amount of damage provided by my crit remains the same. Thus it provides a lower percentage increase.

This theory can actually be applied to any damage increasing stat (GG my wierd working brain lol), all it actually proves is that using actual damage increase values is a fair bit simpler when deciding what gear to wear (ie convert the damage provided by your crit to a flat +dmg value and compare it to your dmg piece, or whatever).

Remember also that crit provides an aggro surge, which is sometimes undesirable, notably early in a fight, or in certain encounters (i believe that four horsemen for example is one of these).

Personally, i prefer crit for a few reasons. First it means that when updating gear, I don't have to deal with hitting the +hit cap on my next piece and then being forced to rearrange my other pieces to get more dmg or crit. Secondly it means that my dps doesn't suffer in places where the hit cap is smaller (against <63 mobs or other players). Finally, because im quite a pvper and crit tends to come in alot more useful than hit there IMO.