I figured this would be one of the better places to troll for someone who knew what they were talking about.

Short version of the question:

Is 'Suppression' a useful talent in pvp?

Long version of the question:

Even when gearing oneself purely for pvp a caster will pick up a bit of spell hit. Since it only requires 4% additional spell hit to get 100% spell hit chance on a pvp target it is worthwhile to know exactly what suppression does.

If suppression only gives spell hit in the form of direct %spell hit then the answer is no (maybe worth it to put 1 or 2 points in). It would only be worthwhile if suppression negated some of the effect of resistance, or spell avoidance. (by 'avoidance' I am reffering to abilities such as the druid talent 'Balance of power')

More than anything I would love to know if suppression had any 'spell penetration' like effect in negating shadow resistance to affliction spells. Any thoughts on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

You only need 3% to hit an equal level player 99% of the time (theres always a 1% miss chance).
Hit/miss chance is nothing to do with resistance, if you want to hit those 300+ shadow resist players with shadowbolts you just want 3% hit and stack penetration gear.

If you're using binary spells like frostbolt/mindflay it's always useful to have a decent amount of spell pen gear to get around buffs.

Not 100% sure on 'chance to resist' talents but I'm pretty sure + hit works against them.

I could be wrong but i knew that Suppression counters specific resist talents, like Unbreakable Will

This is true. Talents like the moonkin tree 4% spell resist, Unbreakable Will, and in general "x% chance to resist" are really "chance to be missed by spells" and are countered by +spellhit.

This is amazing news if it is true. My rogue struggles verses Orcs purely due to Stun resists, but if I slap my pve gear on with 200 Hit, can I negate his stun resists?

If this works the same as spells then it's amazing, but I have yet to see any hard evidence to this effect.

I've always been under the impression spell hit countered resist talents like unbreakable will.

Either way I would get 3/5 Suppression if I went afflction spec because I spam CoEx on Rogues when they pop CloS and that's an extra 6% chance for it to land.

Hrm, sounds like this is something worth testing at some point. A real pain to test though.

In the mean time I'm fiddling around with imp HS and a second point in imp CoA instead of 3 of my suppression points. I figure I'll stack +spellhit on my pve gear to counter the loss, this way my shadowbolts will benefit a great deal, all in all probably a good idea.

As far as the rogue comment above: I don't think stun racial counts as you 'missing' them on an attack, so I doubt +hit would do anything for you. It's not the attack itself they are 'resisting', it's the stun effect.

I was wondering the same thing (from a mage perspective) and from the mage pvp thread just below this:

Someone else in the thread ran a test with molten armor and clos I believe. If anyone has additional evidence about abilities other than Cloak of Shadows, I think it'd be worth posting.

How is this hard to test? Find a priest (with unbreakable will), spam improved counterspell/silence on him. I beileve you'll find it varies little from a 15% chance to resist. Having PvPed with over 10% spellhit on both my shadow priest and mage for the last two years, I can assure you that the chance to resist my silences is far above the <5% it would be if my +hit helped fight so-called -hit talents.

You can't really spam improved CS/Silence, it'd be more time effecient to spam fear.

Tseric posted about this on us mage forums when the talents got changed before naxx patch. Basicly talents like elemental precission which reduces chance to resist by 1%/2%/3% works like a talent that adds +1/2/3 to your hit. Arcane subtetly works like spell penetration ie 5/10.

As stated before in this post, you need +3% to hit the same lvl player character (4% being the miss chance and it can be capped to 99%) Hit itself has 0 impact on any kind of resistance gained from talents or gear that would get the spell resisted, thus blizzard used to use white and yellow resistance markings on combat logs. Spell penetration is the sole factor that can be used to counter resistances gained from gear, now since I've used most of my time thinking resistance pve-pow im not exactly sure how talents are worked around. But one thing im sure of, +hit and talents that increase spell hit wont have any use in pvp past 3%