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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.