Being "Hit Capped" means that you no longer receive any benefit from getting more +Hit; you have already pushed all of the "Miss" off of your table when rolling your attack and additional hit will not help you.

Being "Crit Capped" is just the same, except for crits (duh); +Hit pushes "Miss" off of your attack table and +Crit pushes off "Hit", meaning that you'll eventually get to a point where you can Crit, Glance, or be Dodged(/Parried/Blocked). Note that nothing pushes glances off the Attack table and +Skill pushes Dodge/Parry/Block off.

WoWWiki Link: Attack Table

The above link is a bit out of date, numerically, but the mechanics are still identical.

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Yes, I'm bored at work today ^^;;

The crit cap is really never relevant for feral druids; it's only a concern for dual-wielders, and even then, only for those without solid +hit.

A feral attack table (attacking from the front, no +hit gear) might look something like this:

5% miss
5% dodge
5% parry
5% block

15% glance
35% hit
30% crit

With this table, you'd have to have a 65% crit rate before you hit the crit cap.

If we assume a dual-wielder (again, attacking from the front, no +hit gear) we might see a table like the following:

24% miss
5% dodge
5% parry
5% block

15% glance
16% hit
30% crit

This character would be at the crit cap only if they have a 46% crit rate and are attacking from the front. When you attack from behind, you turn 10% (5% block / 5% parry) of avoided attacks into hits. These hits are then eligible to crit, raising the crit cap to 56%. Additionally, every piece of +hit gear (until you hit the hit cap) also raises the crit cap by the same amount.

Doh--completely forgot to put my spreadsheet up last night; ended up running Gruul's + Mag + Nightbane as part of a guild-app process and it completely slipped my mind. I'll make sure to get it online tonight.

Edit: Where would one host a spreadsheet on the interwebs these days? ^^;;

post deleted, found the answer.

The only thing that comes into my mind is RapidShare. I'm sure there are better options (heard about google spreadsheets) but this gets the job done just fine.

I'll play with google spreadsheets as that's probably accessible from work whereas rapidshare may be hit or miss. When it gets online I'll edit this post to indicate that it is up and running.

Edit: Ok, it's online and seems to be functional as a google spreadsheet here. You'll need the following to use it (Apologies for the sheer messiness of the sheet, but I never really thought it would go into public consumption :P.):

• Your Feral (CAT) AP
• Your Feral Crit%, not rating (enter as a whole #; it'll get converted to a % later)
• Your Hit%, not rating (enter as a whole #)
• Your Feral Weapon Skill Rating (yeah, I'm consistent, aren't I? :P)

You'll want to enter the above in the BASE column starting at Cell B8.

Once these are entered, it'll do the standard 'what if we had 1 more of Y' to your stats (I never made hit work because it would require some extra formula changes and I'm lazy; just enter +1 hit rating into a custom gear set if you want to see how valuable the sheet thinks it is) as well as provide two areas to plug in custom additions/subtractions.

Here are the assumptions the sheet is making:

• You have my talent build; the AP and Damage multipliers are hard-coded in.
• The attack cycle you are using is 88 seconds long, starting with 0 energy and a mangle debuff that has JUST been applied (t=0) to the completion of that cycle (t=88) with a new mangle being applied and 0 energy being available.
• Cat Form's MH Weapon is a 55dps 1.00 speed 1H weapon with 8.64% Miss Chance on both Yellow and White attacks.
• Glancing blows occur 25% of the time and reduce damage by 25%
• You are attacking from behind and thus not subject to Block & Parry (only 5.6% Dodge / 8.6% Miss)
• You never use Ferocious Bite or a 4 CP Rip
• You receive 0% damage reduction from armor (so, best case scenario). I didn't put in DR because this was simply made to show relative effectiveness and not tell you your theoretical damage output ^^;;

Caveats:

• Some of the formulas may be slightly off; I corrected them and updated some things last night but there is plenty of room for error remaining.
• The 'attack cycle' I generated fudges numbers slightly for critrates different than 25%; the base 88 second cycle worked FLAWLESSLY for a 25% critrate but a higher/lower rate will yield additional/fewer CP (and thus more/less rips). I just decided to scale combo point generation upwards by a fixed ratio of (YourCritrate - 25%) / 25% rather than do more exact calculations.
• Omen of Clarity is not taken into account. I decided not to model it because I'd have to resort to a fixed decrease in cost of all skills over the 88 second cycle timeframe and I'm not sure what kind of PPM I'd want to target.
• The 'AP' value of each stat is relative and compared to the raw stats that you provided. I generated a number to normalize by in order to get +1 AP to be worth 1 AP and +1 Str to be worth 2.4 AP but even that only holds true in the general case (it's close, but not quite perfect).
• Agi appears to be oddly overvalued. Considering that it contributes to not only AP but to crit as well as combo point generation may explain this though.
• The AP Contribution to Rip is based on my own testing; 0.24*AP was way WAY too low whereas 0.4*AP is about right.
• +Skill adds 0.1% Hit and 0.2% Crit; I know the hit is most likely correct but I'm unsure about the +Crit value.
• I made this a while ago so some decisions & values don't make 100% sense to ME anymore, such as why I decided that Rip DPS should be calculated over 13.5 seconds rather than 12. There WAS a good reason though... I think ^^;;.
• The "Additional Stats" table uses ratings and not % for Hit/Crit/etc.
• The "Paired" DPS entry is somewhat broken at the moment; it was going to indicate your damage output with someone else putting mangle up, saving you the energy cost and allowing you to shred instead. Unfortunately, I never really followed through with that and it's safe to ignore.
• No outside buffs can be applied. If you want to modify your AP/stats to simulate a buff, you have to do so manually ><.
• I'm sure there are more ><

I haven't heard of one, but I would look into Emmerald's work with the DPS lists, if you haven't already. PAWN values specify the relative worth of stats, right? Emmerald's lists assume something like { str=2.4, agi=2.39, ap=1, hit=1.7, crit=1.3 }. The numbers may be slightly off, but it's something along those lines.

Of course, if you're looking for values tailored to your current stats, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Yea I was looking for something that is relevant to your own stats. Just pulling numbers out of your arse (which is what your doing if you put in numbers without keeping it in relation to your current stats) isnt something that suits me very well.
Thanks for the info though.

*cough*I just posted a spreadsheet that should do that*/cough*

*innocent whistle*

I've started working on web page that will rank upgrades.

I want to be able to:
* Import Armory Profiles to get current gear and stats
* Load Optimal Gems
* Give a % upgrade value based on current items

Unfortunately I'm still working on the grid control so it is at least a few weeks off.

Talk about being blind -.-

The Rip formula seems to be (1092 x 1.3 x 1.1 + .24 x AP) x 1.3 x 1.1. The 1.3 and 1.1 outside the parentheses are from the Mangle debuff and Naturalist, while the 1.3 and 1.1 inside the parentheses appear to apply regardless of spec.

[Rogue]: Rupture Formula

Aha, now that would explain the slight discrepancies I've been noticing. Thanks for the correction! Modeled Rip values are now within 2 damage of the actual values (rounding error on 24% value for the AP scaler, most likely).

Updates:

• Added Independent +1 AP table to supply a correct normalization value
• Corrected Rip Damage
• +1 Agi is still reporting an overly high value. Workaround: the two custom stat builds appear to be reporting more accurate values, especially on large ranges from my AP/Crit (~2400 / ~34.8).
• Need to modify the sheet so that vastly different AP/Crit values in the raw data correctly modify the attack cycle (currently, the 'actual' cycle is static, resulting in errors when the cycle should be modified)

Edit: Corrected Str reporting issue -- multiplier was @ 2.2 vs 2.4 on all calculations. For those who are wondering, Agi reports at 2.57 at 2392 AP / 34.79% Crit when using a custom setup with only one point of Agi added; one break even point, in the current model, for Value Agi = Value Str is at 1943 AP / 34.79% Crit. If someone wants to play around with some more numbers, we can probably get a formula going for the curve that specifies where Agi = Str.

So how do you use google docs? Will I be able to modify the sheet if I sign up (I dont want to be signing up to places Im not going to be using later)

A while ago, I made a macro to pot--very quickly--in bearform while tanking. It has occurred to me that a similar one may be useful for powershifting in cat. I think this should work.

That's untested, but should work. You can spam it to shift out and back into catform as fast as your lag allows you to. You can optionally add a couple of lines to use a pot or healthstone without losing any time.

Here's the bear thread, for the interested.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...sid=1&pageNo=1

Might be a stupid question, but do Druids really have a 8.6% miss rate like other 2h using classes? I am actually below this cap by a bit and I never noticed or recorded a miss. Granted, I don't get to DPS alot on level 73s and yesterday was the first time I ever DPSed throughout Kara and could record some stats.

I have 88 Hit rating which is around 5.56% Hit and 9.67 Feral skill which is according to latest information worth 2.467% hit (2% hit for the first 5 skill, 0.1% hit for every following Skill). Granted, it's only a 0.8% miss chance but shouldn't I have noticed missing or if not me, my CombatStats atleast? I am thinking the example size might be too small so would be great if you could share some of your experiences regarding hits and misses.

I still showed misses with just below 8.6% and I still get the random freak miss recorded now :-/

Everything I've looked at has 8.6% for both skills AND white attacks (which IS odd, but I digress) so I've modeled it to reflect that.

Have no such option

I needed to be logged in, so I assume you need to too.
Interesting spreadsheet by the way, will be deciphering it now.

They work just fine. I use them all the time. Best feral temporary weapon enchant for staves.

I'd like to propose either the outright removal of strength, or at least the reduction of it, on feral druid tier armor. This is something that has come up from time to time in various druid threads, but I was wanted to see it discussed a bit more directly, so here goes.

For cats, this would mean -1AP and +.04% crit. For most druids, I'm going to call this an even swap, although the exact merits depend on what your starting AP and crit are. Cat threads have talked about the break even points, where once you have enough AP, agility becomes your best stat. Another bonus is increased combo points and more finishing moves. Some may loose out, but this would be mostly the undergeared druids in greens/blues, who don't have the tier armor anyway. By the time you are getting tier 4/5/6, I would think that the agility would be superior to strength for nearly all cat druids.

There should be no problem with ever reaching the crit cap (certainly not by T6 at least):
Feral Druid DPS
Whether or not Blizzard would be comfortable with T6 druids having 50-60% crit, I don't know. It wouldn't break anything per se, it may *feel* broken. Other classes may complain because having 60% crit would make you appear to be stronger, even if you actually aren't. A side effect is increased dodge in catform, which may not be your main goal, but it would certainly help counter the idea that melee dps is more healing intensive and therefore less desirable than ranged dps. A few more cleaves dodged would make your healers happy.

For bearform druids I think the increase is much more obvious. While there's a chance your threat may go down, I feel it would be fairly equal to before. Increased crit rage and the +5 rage bonus would mitigate losses due to increased dodge, and rage is rarely ever a problem anyways. The biggest potential loss with this change would likely be the worst case threat scenario. Average/Best cases, meaning you are being hit at regular intervals and not getting long series of dodges followed by long series of hits, would be very similiar to how they are now.

I happen to fall into the Armor/Stamina tanking camp, but this change wouldn't affecting armor or stamina, only strength. If you can find druids who insist on having high strength for tanking, well, I guess they'd be against this idea. The only concern I can really see here is that it could possibly be *too* good. Mostly for tanking, the increased dodge may get out of hand. I'm certainly not delusional enough to think that by merely posting about it, Blizzard can't wait to redesign the tier sets to my liking, but I am curious what other players have to say about this. Since they seem determined to give both cats and bears the same set, I figured it should focus on stats that they both want. Seems obvious enough, right? The stat the benefits both forms the most (and fairly equally) is agility. Bears don't need strength. Both need stamina, but in different amounts. Both get happier and happier the more agility they have.

Anyone who's more familiar with the itemization formula know how much agility we could get if we removed (A) 50% of the strength, and (B) 100% of the strength on the sets? Help in modelling the effects would be appreciated.

And without modest amounts of attack power, which Bear form gets from Strength only, how would we be viable tanks in any sense of the word?

Removing strength from the feral set, in favor of agility, is a ~bad~ idea. Ditto with removing the int; you wouldn't get any meaningful amount of agility nor would you be able to make up for the lost attack power in an effective way.