mek

I understand that beta testing pegged it at 17%, but my experience as a raiding shadow priest contradicts that. I usually run with 182 hit rating, though previous to my most recent upgrade I ran with 133 on a number of fights where I forgot to swap in a hit trinket. In all circumstances, I never observed a single spell miss. My hit rating should be 6.97% from gear, 3% from Shadow Focus, 3% from Misery for a total of 12.97%, leaving a 4.03% chance to miss. This WWS parse of Naxx contradicts that:

Wow Web Stats

Two wings of Naxx and zero observed misses. My question is, obviously, where is the spell hit cap really, and is this a priest talent bug (Shadow Focus giving its old 10% instead of 3%?) or not? Parses of the observed hit cap of other classes/specs is what I'm really looking for.

 

Nicarras

In depth discussion going on here. Spell Hit Discussion

 

dukes

Not quite sure how that relates to this discussion, as it is in the Warlock forum and has no mention of shadow priests and/or bugs relating to them.

This is quite interesting - one of our SPriests (Milemarker) noticed the same. It definitely seems to be a SPriest bug, as I've observed misses with ~9.8% spell hit (+4% talent, +3% IFF) while being on 10.5% I've never noticed a miss as long as IFF/Misery is up (and this would point at 17%). Is it possible that Shadow Focus is still giving the old value (10%?) for the talent, instead of the 3% it's supposed to give?

 

gorsameth

It is indeed something i noticed myself aswell with a miss chance of 1.3% while having only 8.4% spellhit. its 1 run and subject to the whim of RNG but i'll try and test it tonight.

 

Milemarker

Shadowpriests do seem to have some funkiness going on with spell hit currently. Some of it is explained by a bug, some of it is still unexplained. There's a running thread over at Shadowpriest.com at shadowpriest.com • View topic - Hit Rating that covers the issue in more detail, but in summary:

Bug: Mind Flay doesn't generate any combat log entry for a complete resist. It does generate combat log entries for individual tick resists, but if the initial cast of the channel misses, there is nothing for Recount / WWS to report a miss from.

There does 'seem' to be a separate bug related to our spell hit however. We have seen multiple WWS breakdowns of Shadowpriests under the hit cap NEVER missing a DoT cast, Mind Blast or Shadow Word Death on ?? encounters. I'm personally unsure of how resists on individual DoT ticks should be working, but we aren't seeing those either. There are examples in the above linked thread to illustrate this.

It doesn't only seem to be Shadowpriests reporting issues with hit, I've seen another post on the WWS forum from a Hunter wondering where all the pet misses are - there is a chance this is an issue with how Recount / WWS process the combat log, but most other classes seem to have their spell_miss actions logged correctly by both.

Personally speaking I'm keeping an eye on my miss rate at the moment, both in Recount and WWS - but it's hard to work out if it's a reporting issue with Recount / WWS, a bug with the combat log (like the MF one), or an actual genuine bug.

 

mek

The Mind Flay "whiff" bug is a separate issue, as it has been observed to occur regardless of level of spell hit. It most closely resembles the old AM bug where you cast the spell but nothing came out.

I'm confident I would actually notice if this was a parsing issue - keeping up DoTs is pretty obviously interfered with when you miss, and I simply never miss.

You can actually directly observe this is not the case, by filtering the logs to look at whether spell misses exist or not. For example:

No Misses vs. Misses

 

Rhaegal

Or a stealth change to miss values in general! Hunters and druids are now both seeing 8% (down from 9%) physical miss against boss level mobs (though some, but not all, of this data was generated against a target dummy, which runs the risk of the mechanics not being the same as a real boss... but we'd hope not). I had thought at first that this was a totally separate issue, but if any casters other than shadow priests start seeing lower-than-expected miss rates, it almost sounds like Blizzard decided hit caps were too high and started lowering them.

Unfortunately it's not as easy to "autocast" against a target dummy and go afk for a few hours as a caster like physical DPS can do, but I've asked all of my caster friends who are raiding already to start regularly recording their combat logs.

Stand back! I'm going to try SCIENCE!

 

Spearrs

WWS from Sarth with 2 drakes last night

Wow Web Stats

armory has what I was wearing (144 hit)
The World of Warcraft Armory

Not one miss. There was a bunch that was mitigated though (around 4 percent mitigation)


Definitly Something amiss.

 

Milemarker

Yes and no. Anecdotally I can say that my 'whiffs' increase in number the more spell hit gear I remove when spamming MF on a heroic target dummy. Not of course that this really proves anything, as there's no combat log entry to verify results against. Having said that, MF using a GCD but not firing even when hit capped has been an issue as well, but without combat log events, I can't tell the difference between these 'whiffs' and genuine spell_miss events. You also can't tell the difference between different Mind Flay channels anymore, with the timing issues of Mind Flay ticks, and the lack of any entry for the start of a channel, it's made looking at Mind Flay issues pretty hard.

The Mind Flay combat log entries changed between 3.02 and WotLK release - whereas in TBC it generated an aura / cancelaura event on the target which was capable of missing, it now purely generates spell_hit events for each tick (or doesn't generate them in the cases where we experience the famed 'missing ticks'). Mind Flay has been broken in several ways since 3.0x however, I've pretty much given up on trying to make sense of the channel.

As for other casters seeing issues with spell hit, I can't speak for many, but testing these hit issues alongside a Boomkin turned up expected results for him (cap at 17%, 0% chance to miss there, 26.2 hit rating per %). Looking through WWS parses, every other caster does seem to be experiencing spell_miss events, and those I've spoken to about this seem to be experiencing them in roughly the correct ballpark.

 

mek

edit: I definitely spoke too soon, this issue is ongoing. Here is the filter from my most recent Naxx parse.

Once again absolutely zero misses, with only 110 hit rating on character screen. Interestingly, even if I am gaining an extra 6% hit from Shadow Focus, I should still be under the hit cap.

 

Malekithe

My experience over the last week indicates that the shadow priest issues with spell hit still exist. I ran 25-man Naxx and Sartharion with 4% hit on my gear and did not encounter a single miss during a boss encounter according to WWS (though I got plenty of unlogged "whiffs"). In light of this, I decided to run a few focused tests against the boss-level target dummy.

First, I stripped off all my hit gear and began chain casting smite. Recount logged the expected miss rate of ~17% over about 300 casts. Then, I began chaincasting Mind Flay with the same 0 hit rating. After 1000 ticks of mindflay, recount indicated a 3.2% miss rate. Note that these are misses of the actual mind flay pulses. I got many "whiffs" over the course of this second test. I didn't keep track, but, as I frequently encountered 2-3 whiffs in a row, the rate was much higher than the actual miss rate of the pulses.

After these two tests I began forming two theories:

1) Shadow Focus is actually granting 10% increased hit chance to shadow spells.
2) The initial application of the Mind Flay debuff does not count as a shadow spell for hit purposes (and, as such, does not benefit from Shadow Focus).

The first theory will need significantly more data in order to prove, but anecdotally, and in the limited amount I've gathered so far, it seems to fit. The second seems like it could be considerably easier to prove/disprove. I stacked as much hit gear as I could and got up over 14%, which, with the 3% from misery, should put me over the cap regardless of the value of Shadow Focus. I then proceeded to chain cast mind flay. After about 100 casts I hadn't encountered a whiff yet. I backed my hit back to 11% and began chain casting again and hit a whiff after about 25 casts. I'll have to do some more testing, but I wanted to get these theories out there so that people could start running their own tests and possibly prove/disprove them.

 

Vux

The spell hit cap is at 17% * 26.23 spell hit rating, which works out to 446. More details in my sig.

[3.0/WotLK] Vux's Guide to Affliction
(Sticky on Official Blizzard Warlock Forums)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...d=1&pageNo=1#0

 

virus5877

I've experienced this same spell hit bug as a raiding shadowpriest myself.

last night i cleared naxx 10 with 137 hit rating and saw 0 spell misses on any boss mobs.

I know my GM (frostfire mage) was running with about 230 hit rating and also saw 0 spell misses on boss mobs.


I plan on trying several boss level test dummy parses tonight, and i'll come back to report what I see...but honestly I'm completely baffled as to what's going on here.

the idea of a bugged shadow focus sounds right, but i'll have to get myself well below 4% from gear or spec out of shadow focus in order to test it out...

more to come later...

 

epoh

Ran a 25-man OS run the other night, with 251hit (9.57%). Had a SP (+3%) and a Draenai (+1%) = 13.97% hit rating. Here's the WWS - WWS Loading... Not a single miss from me. Interestingly enough, my Mirror Images seem to have inherited the hit rating correctly and did infact miss with between 1 and 2% of their spells.

Obviously FFB is benefiting from the 6% ghost hit, but none of my other spells should be.

I may have to test this some more on some dummies after removing some +hit gear.

 

Pitbuller

You have precision. 9.57% + 3% + 3% + 1% = 16.57%
Only 0.43% chance to miss. I think that mirror images don't get that talent and that's why they missed more or jsut bad luck.
Don't jump to conclusion.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

epoh

I agree, needs more testing. Plus there is the upcoming change anyway. But at 15% hit I haven't seen a single scorch miss. Haven't thrown out thousands of them or anything though. If you look at that WWS I posted take a look at the other mages and their hit rating. You'll notice Drax, the arcane mage had next to no hit at all (less than 80, iirc) and he missed about 7% of the time. Perhaps that fight is just too short to be much of an indicator.

 

Asmo

Heh interestingly before I saw this thread here I made a post on shadowpriest.com that reads almost exactly like the one above. I ran almost exactly the same tests and came to the same conclusions. Not sure how to link to specific posts on that forum so I'm copy pasting it here, hope mods don't mind.
Strange that we both ended up at almost the same 3,2% missrate and not 4%. Any statistics math guy can figure out what the likeliness of getting a 3,2% instead of 4% value over roughly 4000 events are?

Additional information since. I tested with a level 70 on ptr (EU character copy broken) and mind flay is giving a miss event on the application there. Attacking the +10 lvl 80 dummy you clearly saw almost all mind flays missing, and when one landed the individual ticks would also miss. So that spell definitely has 2 resist checks, just the one for the whole spell is currently invisible on live and appears to be not benefiting from talented +hit which explains why people are seeing them miss while over the expected hitcap. I'm betting this same thing is happening with other spells also like I see warlocks are reporting this with immolate and paladins with judgments I believe?

 

Physicist

As a rule of thumb, error goes as the square-root of the sample size. So square-root of 4000 gives an error of +/- 63, or about 1.6%. So 0.8% discrepency is not distinguishable from random noise.

 

deadjon

As you can see from my armory I'm well over hit cap currently (like 309, misses some raids, and some meh drops..) however I still see this "whiff" issue several times per raid. Do we know what is causing this? What can I do to help figure out this issue? My WWS show 0 misses on Flay, but I'm unsure if that's WWS issue or combat log issue. I cast flay, GCD is triggered but nothing comes out.

 

Asmo

Read mine and Malekithe's posts above. There's some fairly good evidence for that the mind flay whiffs aren't getting any benefit from shadow focus and has a 14% missrate with misery.

Physicist: Ok thanks, in other words nothing to suggest it being even lower than a 4% missrate then.

 

Physicist

That's correct. 3.2% +/- 1.6% is consistent with a 4% miss-rate (and a 2% miss-rate for that matter). You need more data to measure these things more precisely.

 

SentinelBorg

Actually there is. Enhancement shamans have their Flametongue weapon enchant, which uses spell mechanics including spell hit. You just need two fast weapons, both enchanted with that buff and you can autohit the dummy all night long.

 

Handyhoof

Flametongue would fall off in 30 minutes.

 

deadjon

Naxx25 full clear. Flay had a .6% miss rate.

Wow Web Stats

However this does not explain the "whiff" mentioned above when you cast Mind Flay, no "miss" shows up in combat log (or scrolling text) and uses up a GCD.

 

Physicist

There were 918 hits. That gives you a measurement of 0.6% miss +/- 3.3%. Maybe you're just outside 4% miss-rate, but it's sure not conclusive. I wouldn't call this a statistically significant miss-rate. You just got lucky.