(If this belongs in the Feral Druid DPS thread, please merge. Posting separately because of the difficulty I've had trying to follow specific theory discussions in the mixed advice/theorycraft mega-threads, but it might be just me.)

It's pretty well established that one of the best uses of item budget in PVE for rogues and cats is Hit Rating, at least up til the point where special attacks aren't missing (currently thought to be 8.6% vs bosses).

I'm working on a yet-another feral spreadsheet and the first cut showed 1 hit rating valued at 0.95AP. The gear set I used wasn't hit capped (according to the model I used) and all the other stats appeared about right. I couldn't find any obvious bug and back-of-the-envelope calculations seemed to confirm it. Either something's wrong with my assumptions, or my model, or +hit is much worse than I thought. Here's my rough calculation.

Assumptions

• I'm going to treat dodges/parries as misses, as the mechanics don't seem to differ for our purposes. Dodges/parries can't be removed by +hit of course, but I'm looking at the marginal value of hit when not hit-capped, so this doesn't matter.
• I'm going to ignore cooldowns on abilities and assume you're limited by energy rather than cooldowns. If you're missing so much that your energy bar fills up faster than you can use it, your DPS is going to suck, but this doesn't happen. More realistically, if a druid misses a mangle then it messes up their cycle. (A naive approximation of this effect - reducing mangle-uptime-on-rip by an additional 0.35% per %hit increased Hit Rating's worth to 1.13AP)

White damage
White damage is simple, it crits, hits, glances, or misses. Hit rating converts misses into hits.
Your average swing is weapondmg * (2*critrate + hitrate + g * glancerate). I'm not sure on the coefficient for glances but let's say 0.8. With 30% crit, 15% glance, 55% hit, 10% miss/dodge/parry, this is weapondmg * 1.27.
If your weapon damage is X, then 1%hit increases your average swing by 0.01X, which is 0.8% of your white damage.

Yellow damage
When you miss a special, or it gets dodged or parried, approximately 82% of the energy is returned. That is, the miss cost 18% of the energy of the attack. On average it'll take you 1/(1-miss) swings to land the attack, of which 1 costs full energy E and the rest cost 0.18E each. Average energy cost is F
That is, 0.22% reduction in cost per 1% reduction in misses.
(Less math approximation: missing increases your energy cost by 20%, missing 1% less reduces your energy cost by 0.2%)
Since your yellow DPS is cooldown limited, a 0.22% energy saving per 1% hit means 0.22% yellow DPS increase.

Tying it together
This depends on how much of your damage is yellow and how much is white. According to the cycle i modeled I had 39% white, 61% yellow (34% shred, 20% rip, 7% mangle).
Total damage increase from 1% hit: 0.39 * 100.8% + 0.61 * 100.22% = 100.45%
That is, 0.45% damage increase.

I'm not going to run through the full math for other stats, but 1% crit increases 80% of my damage (no rip) by a bit over 1%, and increases my combo point generation and thus yellow damage by about 0.7%, for around a 1.25% damage increase, around twice as good per rating point. Agility and Strength are even better of course, my sheet puts them at about 3 times as good as hit rating point-for-point.

What am I missing?

I didn't study your model completely through since im limited on time at the moment, but it seems that you are treating missed finishing moves as missed special/combo point moves. Missed finishing moves always return 0 energy, and you get absolutely no compensation for that. This means that +hit is very valuable for using Rip, and for Ferocious Bite its also more valueable because hitrating is usually cheaper than getting critchance either through agility or critrating.

Have you taken this into consideration?

I didn't realise that was the case, thanks! That's a decent effect, but still far from the whole discrepancy.
This is as you would expect - 1% hit goes from a 0.2% to a 1% decrease in rip energy cost, rip is 1/6 of cycle energy, so it's a 0.13%ish increase in yellow dps, 0.08%ish of overall dps.

I was also allowing OOC to proc on a miss, fixing this was another 0.02% total DPS.

Possibly it's just a bunch of these tiny errors. I expected a 'big' reason hit was good, rather than a bunch of little interactions with talents.

I wanted ot remind you on proccing OOC on missed attacks wasn't possible, but i got an error page when trying to edit my former post.

Personally i don't care much abotu +hit for the reason that it normally automatically comes on DPS gear. I am personally a tank and sometimes healer, i rarely DPS, but for the few random DPS pieces of gear i have gathered i have 8.3% hit. It usually comes automatically with the rest of the stats. Once i get Illhoof staff i will be over the +hit cap and well need to cut somewhere eventually.

Edit: Also in addition to OOC procs, +hit also helps items like Dragonspine Trophy or Romulo's Poison Vial which are all decent Feral Druid DPS items.

It's not that +Hit by itself is such an amazing stat, it's that it makes all of your other ones better.

Lets say you have no +Hit and miss exactly 8.64% of the time--8.6 for the sake of this argument. Let's also say that you have the potential to do 1000 DPS, just to keep numbers nice and round. Due to misses, you are reducing your damage output by 86 DPS, without considering the combo-point, energy, and global cooldown mechanics. 'Losing' a GCD to a miss, without considering the lost damage or energy, costs you output by wasting a second of time. Considering that warlocks are modeling this effect so exactly on their spreadsheets, finding that the lost GCDs involved in recasting CoA reduce their dps below what is possible with a CoD + Shadowbolts during the extra GCDs, this effect on Druid & Rogue DPS must also be nontrivial. So, you easily lose 10% of your potential damage output by ignoring +Hit.

Furthermore, as Athinira pointed out, missing results in less procs. Simply put, this means you get less Omen of Clarity procs, discounting the ability to proc anything else. From everything I've been able to find, there appears to be a disagreement over whether OOC is a 1 PPM or 2 PPM proc--assuming worst case, we have a 1/60 (1.667%) chance, per hit, to proc OOC and we should be making ~1.25 attacks per second or 5 attacks in 4 seconds. Thus, every 4 seconds, there is about an 8% chance that Omen of Clarity will have procced. If we miss 8.6% of the time, there is a 36% chance that we have missed one of those swings! This results in a, reduced, expected procrate of 5.1% per 5 attacks (I think; I may be projecting with projections, which could be a statistical no-no but I'm fairly sure I'm on solid ground).

This isn't even covering lost combo points / energy due to misses, nor am I even considering dodge at this point; however, a raw 10% reduction in potential DPS, not including procs, and a 36% reduction in expected OOC procs is a pretty hefty penalty in my book.

Lost GCDs for melee classes are a lot less meaningful than for casters, since there's no requirement to be constantly casting. That isn't the difference.

The other effect of +hit is that it means you can manage energy cycles much better. If you can always make sure you mangle with 81+ energy (or rip->mangle with 70+) then you can get the most effect out of it. It you miss this attack even once, it can cause a missed partial/full energy tick, which is a lot of DPS.

Other than that, losing GCD's isn't an issue for druids (or rogue really), because of the energy regeneration system and that GCD is only one second rather than one and a half. Making a generalisation that it isn't an issue for melee classes isn't entirely true - warriors can be limited in certain situations by GCD's too.

The effect of +hit is certainly noticeable. I have ~6.6% hit in my current DPS gear; I still notice strings of 2-3 shred misses in a row, and the effect of missed finishing moves is pretty major, not to mention the procs missed from 2t4 or OoC.

The other benefit of +hit is that it comes in addition to other stats. The system for itemisation means that the more stats you have ilvl points spread over, the more stat points total you get (in very simple terms). Picking up items without hit on is a waste of the extra points you can get by stat-spreading.

I'm also amazed that you seem to have haste rating as worth more than hit rating, I was always under the impression that haste rating is one of the worst stats for druids (going by my own % of white damage compared to yellow).

Modeling yellow damage is very hard, but I tried to find a relationship for white damage and came up with this chart. When you factor in OOC, and energy loss from misses I think we can put this argument to bed and say hit is king.

While what you said about hit having low effect on specials is totally true, remember the rating cost of 1 hit, bumping it back up to a far less than useless stat. Remember that while 1% crit is clearly more DPS than 1% hit for the reasons stated in the first post, it also costs significantly more rating. I've done some rough numbers in the past and got that 1 crit rating is not too far off from 1 hit rating - and to actually tell which is better you'll have to run a lot more accurate numbers/models that include all components of your DPS (and then compare to str/AP too).

The problems with your chart are:
-As you already probably understand, hit rating is a huge increase for white damage regardless. But white damage is far far from the majority of your DPS.
-You make it based on AP, while the real "DPS function" is a multiple variable function and includes your current hit and crit as well. With that graph (if it's correct) you pretty much had to assume a certain amount of starting crit and hit.

Also since DPS is a multiple variable function and to tell how much it increases when you increase each of its variables, you can assume that dDPS/d(stat) hardly changes when you only swap one item and make an approximation that:
newDPS-oldDPS = crit*dDPS/dCrit+AP*dDPS/dAP+hit*dDPS/dAP.
Then recalculate (or better, have excel recalculate) the dDPS/d(stat) whenever your gear actually changes significanly enough to affect those values. You'll notice you need quite a few gear upgrades before those get changed by a little (which can also be somewhat seen on the graph above).

Yep; believe my sheet somewhat reflects this as well, modeling shred and mangle misses simply as % reduction on damage, but it magnifies the effect that you demonstrated since more damage is being affected.

Since the chart is white damage only, it more illustrates that hit is NOT the best stat available.

White damage is about 35-40% of your total damage. The rest being yellow. For yellow damage static AP increases are more valuable due to the multipliers in all the special attacks. Further, crit is WAY more valuable due to Primal Fury. Also with a white attack a miss removes 100% of the dps of that attack. For yellow attacks it only removes a portion (17% i believe) due to the fact that special attacks are energy limited for the most part.

To further illustrate this, consider white attacks (that cannot glance for simplicity). Here 1% hit and 1% crit (neglecting the crit increase talent) give the same increase in DPS assuming you are not hit capped, i.e., 1 crit and 1 miss is the same damage as 2 hits. In this situation it it clear that hit rating is better since it only takes 15.8 hit rating for 1% whereas it takes 22.1 crit rating for 1%. However in the yellow damage situation, 1 crit and 1 miss is superior to 2 hits. Assuming mangle, the 1 crit 1 miss scenario costs 48 energy, whereas the 2 hits scenario costs 80 energy, both giving the same damage. Including predatory instincts and primal fury it is clear that crit is FAR superior to hit when yellow damage is included (and thus so is Agi, even moreso since it adds 1 AP in addition to a similar amount of crit as 1 crit rating).

Glances or no glances, the effect of 1% hit and 1% crit for white damage is EXACTLY the same. The ratings are different though.
For yellow 1% crit is greatly superior to 1% hit and costs somewhat more.
When you add it up together, they come close enough for you to not be able to tell the difference between 1 hit rating and 1 crit rating without making at least a half-decent spreadsheet and calculating it taking everything into account.

For white damage, 1 hit is always superior as long as you can still benefit from it -- two hits, vs 1 crit / 1 miss, yields twice the chance for a proc.

True, but even still suppose it costs you the 2 seconds. That would mean in my scenario you'd have a mangle crit and a miss cost you 60 energy whereas 2 mangle hits would still cost 80 energy, which still makes crit superior. If you didnt lost enough to require another tick before you can mangle its even better.

As galzohar said with our without glancing it makes no difference. Take your scenario of: 60 hit /25 glance/ 15 avoid

This can become

68.6 hit/25 glance/7.4 avoid
or
51.4 hit/8.6 crit/25 glance/15 avoid

and it will be (neglecting PI) the same average damage. My point was a comparisson of Crit and Hit and their values with respect to one another not on how glancing/not glancing affects either (since it affects them both the same).

I wasnt simply pulling numbers out of nowhere. The order of stat values I gave
(Agi>Str>AP>Crit rating>Haste rating>hit rating>FCS) is the order (assuming equivalent item budget) that I get from both Emmerald's and Lolaan's spreadsheets which are both complete models of standard feral attack patterns. Even Tangedyn's program back in the day showed the hit was significantly inferior to crit considering equal values (ie 1% of each).

Yeah, I just checked my numbers and, as you expected, I was wrong and my sheet says so ^^;; (holy crap, its results actually match someone else's, making it a somewhat valid tool. Awesome!)

Problem: I wasn't looking at the big picture, just like I was accusing everyone else of not doing. The benefit that you gain from +Hit is superior to +Crit, but not by much (0.25 AP) with 0 hit/skill at 2400 AP / 35% Crit. In fact, it appears to report as superior all the time, but barely (same 0.25 AP better).

Agi and Strength always report as a better option; ~1 AP for Agi and 0.6 AP for Str (again, maintaining the ratio with hit increases).

What I missed was that rogue items, which generally have +Hit on them, also usually stack agility, which is the most valuable stat for a cat past 2200 ap or so. Thus, these items quite often end up ahead of the feral equivalent items simply because they have more of a desired stat (Agi) and non-trivial amounts of stats that, while they aren't amazing, aren't bad.

(Current) Conclusion: Str/Agi are better than +Hit, +Crit is roughly the same (past 30%), and gear that stacks Agi usually wins 'best for the slot' (past ~2200 AP). Skill appears to be worth 3 AP though (1.3 better than hit!) so it may be completely and utterly sane to stack +Skill for boss encounters. Either that or it's reporting incorrectly :P (good chance).

Agi gear winning best for the slot is only because there usually isn't any competition. Run a search for leather with str for ilvl 138+.

I prefer hit, personally, due to the benefit of easy management of mangle cycles. Having to rip at 3 or 4 cp because my mangle just timed out sucks.

Unless it got changed, Hit also increases your effective crit rate because crits are calculated for ALL of your swings regardless if they get dodged/parried/hit or miss.

If needed I can try and dig up a(n old) post that had a Blue explain this.

If you consider this, how much better does it make Hit?

EDIT: Might as well link the Blue before someone questions my source: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread....14551513&sid=1

That is not true. For a combat system like energy based on time, wasting Global Cooldowns means absolutely NOTHING. Wasted energy means something however.

Imagine that missed attacks didn't cost the 20% energy, and look at this cycle starting from 100 energy (energy ticks starting at 0.5 seconds into the cycle):
Total amount of damage done: 1 shred crit, 2 shreds a mangle and a Rip
Total amount of misses: 0
Total amount of energy at completed cycle at 13:0: 64

Now take the same cycle, add 2 shred misses and see the result:
Total amount of damage done: 1 shred crit, 2 shreds a mangle and a Rip
Total amount of misses: 2
Total amount of energy at completed cycle at 13:0: 64

Now this is of course with the assumption that misses doesn't cost any energy. However, as we can clearly see, misses mean NOTHING to Global cooldown cycle for the energy system besides lost energy. If we miss an attack we can just cast it again next second. For a cooldown based system like warrior (MS/BT cooldown 6 seconds, WW cooldown 10 seconds) and for casters time means something, it doesn't for the energy based system besides lost energy. The energy system isn't based on time.

How would hit increase your crit rate?

25% crit (for example) means 25% of my swings will crit. If I have 0 hit or 8% hit it still means 25% of my swings will crit. Hit just reduces your miss chance (which is what is shown in that link you posted)

An attack has to hit before it can crit.

I've gone a fair bit out of my way to hitcap my cat gear, with 44 feral skill (shapeshifter/EW) and 108 hit rating. (havent missed yet with this. I did miss with 44/104. so this would be proof that feral combat skill is worth 0.14 hit, or close, against skull mobs.. except I only got 108 hit this past weekend. Data set too small yet )
I mainly emphasised hit to get a clean rip->mangle->shred cycle, and to make my cat gear pull double duty as "must hold aggro at all costs" gear.
proper cycle is far more important for damage than the relative value of hi/crit, because it affects the percentage of your energy income that gets spent on mangle buffed shred / rips as opposed to being spent on mangles.

I've gone a fair bit out of my way to hitcap my cat gear, with 44 feral skill (shapeshifter/EW) and 108 hit rating. (havent missed yet with this. I did miss with 44/104. so this would be proof that feral combat skill is worth 0.14 hit, or close, against skull mobs.. except I only got 108 hit this past weekend. Data set too small yet )
I mainly emphasised hit to get a clean rip->mangle->shred cycle, and to make my cat gear pull double duty as "must hold aggro at all costs" gear.
proper cycle is far more important for damage than the relative value of hi/crit, because it affects the percentage of your energy income that gets spent on mangle buffed shred / rips as opposed to being spent on mangles. and since hit can in no way be actually bad value for your item budget (its so damm cheap)..