Exactly. In many cases, this is another situation in which we have to just chalk it up to personal preference (unless of course you're at 50 hit rating and 5 expertise). If you can manage your rotations well and keep track of misses and dodges, and the occasional miss or dodge don't bug you, then you'll more than likely experience a dps increase by prioritizing str over spell hit and expertise cap.

With the complexity of fights these days, however, keeping track of missed attacks becomes harder and harder, which will almost certainly result in totally fudged rotations and significant dps loss. Fights are sooo much less stressful when you don't have to worry or watch for misses and dodges. But, again, once you approach the caps, it becomes a playstyle issue.

An interesting topic in my mind is where to aim in gearing for Hit. Since we have talents that lower the soft cap for strike hits but have a much higher roof on white damage then 2 hander counterparts.

There are many stat values in this thread and I have seen them all from page one to this point and I myself (not a math person) am still confused. what is the "ideal" range for hit?

I see many long time DK members have a very large range from 180 hit up to 450 range. I myself currently run 320 hit, I miss on average 12% white strikes with no dodges due to exp cap.

Is there any conclusion as to what is the ideal number range to aim for? If I missed the answer in this thread somewhere, please feel free to point me in the right direction. Thank you.

Aside from getting hit capped for specials and spell hit capped, hit beyond those points will lead to a lower DPS than gearing for other stats (STR, ArP). The amount of DPS gained from extra hit is low, since it will only affect your white damage, while STR would affect all your damage, and ArP will affect a higher percentage of your damage.

As stated previously, gearing for specials is a must. Gearing for spell hit leads to a non-variable rotation (ie. personal preference).

Well, technicly the DPS gain from hit vs. str is qualitatively different, in that hit raises the floor (but not max) dps you can do, while strength raises both floor and max.

If you really wanted to have a very high top end damage, you could simply ignore hit and expertise altogether, as you could always "luck out" on a run and not miss anyways. The cost of course would be the opposite end of things, when your DPS suffers due to an unusually bad run of misses.

I mention this because we tend to treat one 7000 dps spec/rotation as being equivalent to another, when in fact they are only equivalent over very large sample sizes. We dont always treat behavior over small sample sizes with the necessary respect.

The complexity of a fight is enough to even need no more than 1 hour (or maybe considerably less) on a simulator or real fight to see that loss of melee hit and loss of soft expertise will drop DPS even in the short term. The whole "I will luck it out" notion is a fallacy in the not-so-grander scheme of things. The DPS drop is so noticeable and the occurrence of misses so often in a complex set of abilities (that occur in rapid succession) in a game like wow, that lucking it out doesn't occur beyond the scope of a single non elite mob or if you're ..lucky, elite trash.

It is worth talking about luck when it goes to spell hit cap though since then the number of abilities being affected by it are really low. An even lower set of them can devastate the rotation which is a short-term DPS loss. Spell hit though comes out in EP calculations to be worse than strength. This will show up in the mid-long run which means, it may be better to ignore spell hit cap if overall maximized DPS is the goal. But because some people may aim for reliability (a good example is for when having a dedicated role to kill buf-giving ads and you want your rotation to work and to work now), it is not always a bad idea to go for spell hit cap but by doing so knowing your overall (long-term) DPS will lower.

EDIT: Sorry i mistook the quote for it regarding spell hit cap, but the poster was refering to special hit cap and expertise cap.
Either way, the essence of the post still stands. I think that in general a lot of people overestimate the occurance when a couple of percent under the hitcap.

You are overestimating the numbers quite severely here.

We're talking about a 2-3% spell miss chance, not a 20%+ chance to miss your spells.
We're talking about missing 1 icy touch in every 5-6 boss fights, missing 1 rime HB every 2 boss fights, and missing Pestilence every 3 bosses.

This is a general train of thought I see very often, also relating to dual wielding and miss. People are thinking that the effect of not having a cap is huge, yet if you check what the numbers really represent its not so bad after all.

For GoD its already known to be a higher dps loss, but nontheless you can take a shot at a perfect fight without miss.
If you ignore hit (after special cap) and go full for strength you will see a DPS increase in every fight, when you go for hit you won't see a dps loss (this is the difference that Sakuratei talked about on the last page) once every 3 bosses.

And this is where the simulator is right, to put it in crude imaginary numbers (just to make the point). If the strength you gain gives you an extra 100 dps on each boss and the lack of hit drops your dps by 200 every 3th boss. Then ignoring the spell hit cap and aiming for full strength is better.

There are some parts i disagree on though, and that why i personally think getting the spell hit cap is of a higher priority than ignoring it. A bit for the same reason as you mentioned in your second paragraph.
The simulator is the ideal raider. It only needs a milisecond to consider its options after a miss. If i were playing and i would miss my IT i might not notice it before i recast my PS, in which case i have to juggle around a bit with runes, which might lead to a much bigger dps loss than a simulator would have.
Also, I prefer reliability over top dps. I'd rather do 5.5k dps every single fight than 6.0kon 2 fights and 5.0k on the other 2. But again thats a preference call, some might like it the other way around.

However, a maybe even more important question in this regard is: Does it matter much ?

I don't know about your situation but i seem to be well provided in hitgear. A lot of the BiS gear also has hit, and if you need to fill a yellow socket your best option (pre-spell hit cap) is a 10 strength / 10 hit gem.
Even if you tend to ignore prioritizing hit over strength, it still does not take away that pre-hitcap it is the 3th best stat we can get !
I probably couldnt even reach as low as 160 hitrating if i tried.

What?

Prioritizing Str over hit and expertise will result in higher dps in fights when the observed miss rate is sufficiently higher then the average miss rate. Wether this is advisable is another discussion entirely, but if you want the absolute highest dps parse possible for a fight, stack str and prayer will over sufficient time yield the highest dps parse. Your average DPS may go down, and down substantially, but there is that chance you really hit one out of the ballpark.

My point wasn't that this is a smart way to go about your business, but that we dont talk about is that any given boss fight is a small sample, and that certain stats and builds have a greater potential variability, and that variability leads to a different range of possible dps outcomes.

What this could mean in terms of analysis, is instead of simulating 1 500 hour long fight, we could simulate 5000 6 minute fights, and graph the resulting DPS curve in 25 or 50dps increments (ie, counting the number of runs that fall within those small bands of dps). The resulting curves would not only tell us the average DPS per run, but also give a sense of what range of values you might see in a generic patchwerk style boss fight.

Specifically, you would expect large fluctuations of Str and Hit to effect the shape of the curve, not just the average value of the entire run.

I have a question.

I have been wielding the [Aledar's Battlestar] togheter with the [Peacekeeper Blade] (As I havent been able to get another decent offhand.) Last night I got my hands on the [Lionhead Slasher]. As I belive its an upgrade over my current weapons, but how long will it hold. As its way to fast to be ideal for an Dual Frost DK.

Would slower weapons of Ulduar 25 man standard, be an upgrade or is the [Lionhead Slasher] one to keep untill ToTC or ICC drops a slower weapon for me ?

You could probably switch to an unholy DW build for the time being since you have a nice offhand like that or even one of the other unholy DW builds that doesn't require a slow MH. It's a great weapon to have but you just have to decide on whether you'd like to switch up your spec to really use the weapon effectively.

Tonight our guild did XT hard for the first time along with hodir hard among other bosses. I used this build which gave me great results. Our other frost DW dk was kinetica in the raid. I'd definitely say that using the GoP build/rotation yielded a higher dps for myself compared to when I was supplying IIT. If you get an enhance shammy supplying 20% haste or another DW DK go ahead and try out this build. Here's the WoL report from tonight along with the night before with our ignis speed kill.

XT hard
Ignis Speed Kill
BTW I realize that Ignis is a little skewed due to KM Rime procs also hitting the adds around our tank. We used 1 tank and he tanked the boss along with the adds. We all stood in the water while the boss was facing away from us while also standing in the water. Hopefully these logs can give you all an idea of how GoD build is performing vs IIT builds.

Here's my armory and yes I'm aware I have too much hit but I'm waiting for some new boots to drop before I decide to reenchant my boots.

Also something to note was I typically would start the fight by getting greatness to proc + FC and then I'd pop UA and disease the boss so that I'd be at my max for dot damage during the fight.

Not only slow ulduar weapons would be an upgrade. That weapon is about as good as a slow blue reptuation weapon (like [Reaper of Dark Souls]) . If i remember correctly from my deduction a few posts back going from 2.6 speed to 1.5 speed is only worth it if the faster weapon has about 60 DPS more. That means that Lionhead Slasher is upgraded by anything from naxx and beyond with a speed of 2.6 and slower.

[Grimhorn Crusher] is easy access too since it only costs 25 [Champion's Seal].