For a combat rogue with combat potency (and especially with dragonspine trophy), hit rating is the most efficient use of itemization points up to the cap, but not all items are equally well itemized, so you still have to weigh them carefully. Maybe some of his +hit items are simply too low on other stats to justify the hit gains. If I have a yellow gem slot and I'm not hit capped, I'm going to put 8 hit rating in it, but if I'm choosing between Shoulderpads of the Stranger and capping out with Bladed Shoulderpads of the Merciless, I'm going to live without being capped.

Not to hijack into a rogue thread, but there are a lot of reasons one rogue may beat another beside hit levels.

Maybe the other rogues have dragonspine and he doesn't (yes, seriously, it's that good). Spec differences, haste pots, time on target, group buffs, and simply not performing the attack cycle quite as well can all have an impact.

Hmm interesting, I didn't know about that deep wounds tick, yes that has to be considered.

Yes Threat wise having a harder hitting slower weapon is certainly prefered, but I'm not sure if this can be modelled at all (introducing an artificial threat cap maybe, I'll think about it)

About gems/enchants, this easy optimization means easy automatic optimization, not buying each one and trying them.

@Katrael
Yes bloodthirst will also increase the flurry uptime, the uptime is a different problem, as is flurry modelling.

About Windfury, Windfury Totem is not considered an instant attack, so it does not suffer from ap normalization and has no 3s CD

Let's assume a 2.5s weapon, swinging swinging 6 times in 15s, and a 1.5s dagger swinging 10 times. On average we will have 1.2 wf procs vs. 2 wf procs

Obviously the question is 1.2*2.5 vs. 2*1.5, obviously both are identical, regarding +hit and flurry crits, the more wf procs you have the higher is the chance for critical one to renew flurry.
Obviously slow MH weapons might be nicer for harder hitting wf, but faster mh weapons are better for constant rage generation and flurry uptime due to more instants.



I'm going to modify my model to actually include that deep wound tick and think about limiting the gained threat, let's see if it prefers a slower mh then.

Edit: Ah yes here we go, with a fixed deep wound dot and some modifications to my hs code the ideal weapon choice for mh is now warglaive of azzinoth.

WF damage from auto attacks will be the same regardless the speed of the weapon.

But you also have to consider that the number of WF procs gained from special attacks will be the same with a fast or a slow main hand.

My point about windfury and instants was maybe less clear than it could have been. What I was trying to say was that barring instant attacks, a fast weapon and a slow weapon gain the same overall DPS. More procs for less damage, vs fewer procs for more damage.

The trick comes when we take instants into account. Assuming hamstring can proc WF(And while I think this is true, I don't know for certain), in a lag free environment you can have one instant every 1.5 seconds. Each of these instants has a 20% chance to proc windfury, using the damage of your mainhand. The only thing that will affect how many instants you can use in a given time frame other than lag, is rage, and whether you have to refresh rampage/battle/demo, or your the thunderclap bitch. In other words, weapon speed won't affect this section of your windfury procs, other than by changing how much rage your getting.

A faster weapon does yield steadier rage generation, but so long as you have sufficient crit to maintain a decent amount of flurry uptime having enough rage to use all your GCDs shouldn't be an issue(Crafted gear and blues is enough rage to do this raid buffed).

Let's consider the impact that these extra instants have on DPS from windfury between say, a [Blade of the Unrequited] and a [Spiteblade], with let's say, 2500 AP(Selected because that's how much AP I have with only self buffs and a nonenhance shaman in the group).

Average windfury hit with Unrequited: 476
Average windfury hit with Spiteblade: 804

So, at a 20% proc rate, assuming an instant every 1.5 seconds(realisticly lag will lower this slightly) blade of the unrequited gains 95 DPS from windfury procs on instants, and Spiteblade gains 160, for a differance of 65 DPS. Also note that the harder hitting procs from the spiteblade will result in more rage, thus allowing more HS to be used.

No.
Flurry Uptime benefits from slower weapons, as longs as your rage income is steady enough to use all your instants.

hmm i know Tsunami talisman has a hidden cooldown down of some sort(45 seconds I believe) but that would also greatly benefit crit > hit

makes up for the 72 ap loss from bloodlust brooch to hit about 32crit, while maintaining 2040 ap unbuffed in zerker and about 200 hit

After looking over endgame gear choices on wowhead for awhile, I dont see any pieces of plate gear with Haste AND crit, usually just haste and hit.

With that being said, is it worth it to dump crit for haste? For example, [Belt of Seething Fury] off kaz'rogal vs [Plans: Red Belt of Battle] a crafted belt from Tempest keep trash

After sockets, the red belt of battle has more ap, crit and hit, and I would lose all of that for 38 haste? after normalization, I dont believe haste gives more rage, while hit and crit still do, so I think overall the kaz'rogal belt is a huge downgrade, despite Itemlvl.

Basically what Im saying is, balance is really limited by blizzards itemization of the endgame gear. so even tho crit > hit, if you throw haste gear into the mix, crit gear is extremely limited.

i also have many problems with the endgame itemization issues right now. that is why i usually take comments about what stat is the best with a grain of salt. it usually only matters when comparing items of similar ilvls or when choosing gems. other than that, gear upgrades are pretty straightforward. like cataclysm's edge, i don't like armor penetration as a stat, personally, but i pretty much have nothing else to compare it with since it's about 10(?) ilvls higher than it's next comparable slot item. (ironic cause i'm dw fury)

Well everyone will have their own opinion, and even the smallest difference in interpretation on various theories can impact your view, but from my pov not all the current haste itemisation is end-game for my gear. I rate Red Belt of Battle above Belt of Seething Fury.

However there are some clear winner items with haste, such as band of devastation, swiftsteel bludgeon and pillager gauntlets

also, is it true that you lose RPS from gaining haste/flurry? i know you lose rage per hit the faster your weapon becomes but does it also lower your total RPS since you'll be attacking more often? i tried using my limited math and it says that you do in fact lose a small amount of RPS (very small amount though, you lose 1% rps from 30% haste). would be nice if someone back-tracks me, though.

i heard a quote a while ago on this forum about how warrior dps was king during BWL+ times because warriors could finally get enough rage to use abilities, but now they have all the rage but not much to use it on (i wish i knew who said it ><). haste will convert your RPS to real DPS in a way. haste is really good because it affects your autoattack dmg + heroic strike dmg. for me, that's usually around 65% of my total dps. since 1% crit (22.1 crit rating) will offer ~2.1% haste, crit would have to give me a ~1.4% increase in total dps for every 1% crit i gain. haste will give less RPS than crit, but the lose isn't that bad. the change will be better during threat-capped encounters because you won't be able to heroic strike as much (faster weapon and lower RPS). the haste should still deal enough dmg to not need heroic strike as much anyways. and during fights without threat-caps, it's a godly combination (as svag has shown us).

in simple terms, haste dps depends on your autoattack + HS dmg but will in effect increase your autoattack + HeSt dmg output at the same time. sick mechanics to be working with imo.

There were a lot of discussions about the "hit vs crit" issue in the past few weeks, which made me start thinking about it. All the maths about crit being superior to hit after you've reached the minimum of 8,6% are nice, but you also have to remember about the itemization of the raid instances. Most of the drops (especially the DPS sets T4 & T5) have a decent amount of hitrating on them. Hitrating has become pretty easy upgradeable since BC.

Referring to the conclusion that - on a 50/50 subdivision of white vs yellow - an increase of +1% crit also increases the dmg by 1%, while increasing the chance to hit by 1% only results in a bonus of 0,5% dmg (since hit only affects white-dmg while crit increases both white and yellow). So, +1% crit is equal to +2% hit ... rephrased: 10,55 critrating is equal to 15,8 hitrating. (I ignored impale or the meta gem in order to simplify the maths).

I will use my current stats for the example here:
I have 227 hitrating, which makes it a total of 17,4% +hit (including Precision).
My chance to crit is 28,13% in berserker stance.

Now let's decrease the chance to hit to the minimum for not missing with special attacks: 8,6%. I need to decrease the hitrating by 138 to reach that point (which is virtually impossible to reach without changing my entire gear, but that's another problem). To compensate that I simultaneously have to increase the critrating by 93 to reach the same damage result (mathematically).


Bottom line:
~2 critrating is equal to ~3 hitrating in this math. Impale or the +critdmg metagem will change the results slightly, so you need a little bit more hitrating.
Since the large part of the drops in raid instances provide both stats in decent amounts, it's important to find a good balance between those stats. In fact today, +hit isn't that important as it was before glancings were reduced from 40% to 25% in the hittable. But since it still benefits ppm-procs like mongoose, windfury or the haste-stuff on dragonspine or the weaponsmith-mace, it shouldn't fall completely into oblivion.

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but a large problem with having a lot of hit is that you'll end up with too much unused rage, or leads to aggro issues. Having a massive amount of hit rating will help your white damage shine, but at some point, you can only heroic strike so much. That being said, I'd never roll with 8% hit, that's rather atrocious. But anything greater than the 12-15% range could probably be better spent on AP or crit (or haste/armor pen when you get access to that).

That's an issue for me, I roll with 18.11% hit with 2 points in Precision. And if you check my armory, it's not really like I go for hit(I dont gem it, and I dont have any pure +hit items).
Sure my DPS would be greater if I transfered all my hitrating into critrating after a certain point, but is there really itemization to cover that?
No there isnt.

though this may be true that after that 5% +hit only affects white damage, but white melee dmg is usually 45% of my dmg done.

That doesn't mean that hit is superior, though. You are replacing a large amount of your white attacks with "on next attack" specials and using a large amount of "instant attack" specials which do not benefit from the added hit. Attack Power and Crit, on the other hand, affect every attack you make.

If you can keep up your normal Attack-Rotation, you don't need to stack more hit!
Thats the only problem that everyone needs to solve with hit!

Low hit rating --> not enough rage for BT-WW-HS Rotation --> low DPS
Middle hit rating --> enough rage for BT-WW-HS-Rotation --> good DPS
High Hit Rating --> more rage than needed --> good DPS because of white damage but isn't needed cause you probably lost AP or crit that both would benifit white and yellow dmg

That is what i was testing all the time i saw an item!

As a "hobbyist" rogue (when I play my alt) I got quite confused when some rogues said in this thread that Combat Potency and Dragonspine Trophy are the reasons +hit is superior to +crit... However, the Combat Potency tooltip clearly states that it procs of *any* successful attack...
Intuitively, this would of course include crits, right? Is there any crit chance penalty for the offhand that is not there for hit chance? What am I missing?

It's the same reason as why WF damage favours +hit.

Combat potency (and WF for that matter) procs of hits and crits (maybe also glancing blows?). This means that the total chance to get a proc is: proc% * (hit+crit). Now, if you increase crit with 1% this will also mean that hit goes down with 1%, thus (hit+crit) stays the same and you get no increase in procs. If you increase hit by 1%, your miss will go down 1% and the (hit+crit) will go up by 1%.

Back on topic...

I recently regemmed and re-chose (is that a word?) my gear choices, in some cases even picking a S2 arena piece over a piece with +hit but less stats.

Previous Stats: (all stats completely unbuffed)

1920 ap
287 hit
27% crit (in zerk)

Stats Now:

2008 ap
200 hit
31% crit (in zerk)

I've seen a marked (50-100) increase in overall dps with this change. Also, I don't think that Impale was mentioned in the early posts, but I'm almost positive that this, coupled with Flurry, will push crit ahead of hit as the better stat, as long as you have enough hit to push specials over the cap.

On a side note, the crit-heavy build is considerably more streaky. Sometimes, you'll just go off, keeping Flurry up for ages, watching the crits pile up. I don't think I would recommend this build without [Prism of Inner Calm], unless you have very good aggro management sense. Without it, you can spike ahead of the tank in no time, even when giving the tank a sizable threat buffer. I don't wear the threat trinket on Kael, since I dps-tank the staff, and I have to stop swinging at Sanguinar in phase one sometimes. Phase 5 gets a little tense when you're pumping out 3k+ sustained TPS as well.

Other times, though, you'll get dodge dodge miss. But as long as you keep pumping out those specials, sometimes by using Bloodrage at key times, you'll see a marked increase in overall dps.

This thread hurt my brain. There is a ton of mis-information in it. Thankfully, there were a few people who were acquainted with the generally accepted/tested theories about hit rolling and miss rate to keep it somewhat on track.

Some things I saw (some of which were already corrected):
1. 1% +hit is not a 1% increase in white damage. If you do 100,000 white damage and add 1% hit, your predicted white damage is not 101,000. 1% hits adds 1 weapon damage per 100 swings. If you hit 50 times out of 100 (neglect crit), 1 extra hit is in fact a 2% increase in white damage. If 50% of your damage is white damage, that 2% white damage increase is overall a 1% increase in damage. As you approach the hit cap, that relative percentage will decrease but 1% will always add 1 weapon damage per 100 swings.
2. Single roll system - learn it.
3. In general, with decent gear, you will never gem for hit. Never. It is quite possible to get 200 hit rating from pure gear and there aren't so many pieces that you have the option to take a pure crit piece of the same item level. Thus, you wind up with as much hit rating as you have. It would be very rare to have a higher level piece that has some hit on it be out performed by a lower level piece that does not have hit given that the other stats are properly itemized.
4. You can buff your crit percent by about 10% (LoTP, Kings, Mark, Stone, maybe an elixir) in a raid. Your hit % is more or less unbuffable.
5. High hit chance leads to more effective execute cycling.
6. Rage generation above and beyond BT/WW/self buff cycling is less valuable than the cycling rage itself. HS spam is a nice DPS boost, but it does not as efficiently convert threat cap to damage as ww/bt. Once you can cycle your moves reliably, rage generation its self I consider to be of secondary concern until it is execute time.

In the above example, 87 hit rating was converted into 88 crit rating. The second set of gear also had 88 more AP making it clearly superior. Clearly superior gear out DPSing inferior gear is nothing new.

I have crappy gear. I'm at about 1785 ap in zerker with 30.78% crit and 159 hit rating (from memory). I out DPS a fellow warrior in my guild who uses higher ilvl gear (mostly T4 + S2 Glad). His gear is less ideally itemized (S2) and he uses too much hit rating (using 4hit/4agil gems). In his case, he is getting less from his gems because 4 agil is inferior to other stats. He should have gone with 4str/4crit. Ultimately, when you get enough raw stats on your gear, your hit rating will wind up covered by default. Is it possible to build a T5/T6 equivalent DPS set without 200 hit rating ungemmed?

It may not be clear, but I value crit more than hit but not so much that I would take 10 crit over 20 hit. In general, I haven't had to decide between the two. Most of the time, the piece I upgrade to has more overall stats making the crit versus hit thing a wash.

This is actually both correct and incorrect at the same time.

From my combat log yesterday:
21:24:13 You crit Gruul the Dragonkiller for 432 (67 blocked).
10:39:08 Your Maul crits Gruul the Dragonkiller for 1021 (67 blocked).

Correct part: Crits/hits/misses are still in the same roll.
Wrong part: Its not a single roll system. Block is a seperate roll.

Edit: This of course only applies to Player hitting Mob (or player hitting player), not Mob hitting Player. Mob hitting player is, as we know, a Single Roll System.

This works differently for PVE than it does for EVP, so there is understandable confusion. If blocks were on a separate roll for tanks pushing Crushing Blows off the table would be impossible.