You are right, I forgot to mention somethin about my gear. My stats -raid buffed- : 32k armor, 20/21k hp, 50% dodge, 2200 ap, 33% crit and 62 hit rating (still without GoA and BoM). Crit-immunity almost capped (0.4% to reach the cap) ora capped losing somethiing like 10 stamina and 1 dodge.
My idea is Brooch of Deftness + Shadowmoon Insignia (already passed 1 to our warr MT, next shall be mine) gaining enough def for crit immunity, giving away the Moroes pocket watch.

I don't get what you mean by DPS simulator in contrast to a DPS calculator (like Toskks). The only thing i can assume that you mean a simulator takes actual dice rolls instead of modelling statistically. The consequence would be that it is just more inaccurate than a DPS calculator.

I wrote a DPS calculator but it is just code atm (no interface). I pretty much gave up on it since i realised Toskk has effectively done the same and already a good interface standing. Just look over the code (it's simple javascript so you won't have problems if you know C) and you'll see that it takes quite some factors into account.

All simple combatstats (like haste as you mentioned) are calculated correctly and are as accurately as it gets in a model. The one thing that is hard to model are synergy effects with procs and haste and lag / human error.

I have a little question re: +hit, just to see if I've missed something or whether there are just some dark times ahead. As of 2.3 (which is to say, as of tomorrow or so) my Shapeshifter's signet will go back to the bank and I will be losing, like most of us, 3% hit right there. According to what I've read so far, +hit for ferals (talking about dps here) was quite good but not good enough to gear for it instead of agi (point for point). I still managed, grabbing things here and there, to get about 80 hit rating, which coupled with feral weapon skill would bring me reasonably close to the hit cap.

However this situation will change soon, and as much as missing 0.5% hit didn't look like a big deal for a kitty, missing 3.5% seems like another thing entirely. I have browsed the list of gear currently in game and I've noticed that most of the dps gear with +hit came from either Karazhan or t6 content, but few from t5. I think the fact that there is so much +hit on t6 gear is that there's about no itemization for ferals there, so we must share the loot of rogues, and rogue items typically have a lot of +hit.

Anyhow, what are the best options right now to close the huge +hit gap that we will experience soon? (and which won't go away easily since e.g. the Stranglestaff's replacement from ZA doesn't have +hit). I'm almost considering going to Romulo's Vial for the +35 hit (but not quite). And more particularly, what should a cat wear in t6 content, when not able to get t6 gear yet? The only competitive items I can think of with +hit on them are Edgewalker Longboots, Garona's Signet Ring, Worgen Claw Necklace and the Stranglestaff. There's also Midnight Legguards but they are not so good for druids anyway.

Or should I just forget about +hit altogether, accept my ~3% miss rate and just keep on stacking agi?

I suggest you to keep your +hit as close to the cap as you can. Can't access T6 uh? Well these new badges (off-tier slots) rewards will help you :
Nyn'jah's Tabi Boots - Items - World of Warcraft (better than Edgewalker)
Waistguard of the Great Beast - Items - World of Warcraft

+40 base hitrating (+3 socket bonus) and decent stats, total cost 120 badges :|

Almost forgot, try to get an arena staff, even the merciless'one after the cost reduction.

Very accurate given a very large number of cycles. Again, what is the practical use? Especially Toskk's work has been consistent and accurate enough to both ballpark my DPS limitations to a fairly consistent degree. Given the ballpark is right, all the practical use cases are covered in gear upgrades and so on, and there's simply too much gear to run a simulator for each piece.

I guess where the simulator would shine is in evaluating DPS cycles, but luckily Toskk has already done that legwork with his calculator.

First-- the testing available on OoC procs isn't at all conclusive as to the mechanism. The last I'd heard, the most extensive testing of OoC procs is that it has a high likelihood of proccing at the very beginning of a fight, and less over extended periods; but has no cooldown, as you can get back-to-back procs or refreshes of the OoC effect. Similarly, there's been no testing at all as to whether this proc is significantly affected by haste-- probably because no druids have ever been in a position to acquire a large amount of haste gear.

I could take a guess at mechanics (my first guess would be two independent timers able to proc OoC, one with a higher chance with cooldown and the other with a lower chance), but that's really all it is-- a guess.

Finally, while the scenarios you point out are relevant and show a weakness of a calculator, a simulator would still have to make assumptions of the perfect things to do in every single scenario (or at least perfectly typical). What do you do when you have 3CPs, you get feared, and you come back with no mangle up? OK, you mangle, and it crits-- then what? Rip, shred as long as you can? And you have every one of these odd situations to look at, because they'll occur on a long simulation (even on a sequence of misses). If you add to the REAL benefits of simulation, i.e. modeling actual bossfights, you get a lot more decisions that you have to account for.

I know that Toskk has rewritten his model from scratch at least twice and has made countless tweaks to it, in addition to evaluating several different DPS cycles to find the more effective ones. In addition, since we're talking code, while it will be true that YOU can make the changes, the typical end-user won't.

I will say that its most compelling use in for modeling multiple types of combat, i.e. different cycles on a static boss, or bosses where you have to run out every 40 seconds (thus needing very precise cycles), or bosses with interrupt/mind control procs, and if you do start on this project, that is where I believe the most useful information would lie.

Brooch of Deftness will be the de facto trash neck for most tanks, imo. The amount of avoidance negation you get from the one item is huge, and it has a gob of Stamina too. Personally, I'll be using it on quite a few bosses as well (Hydross, Leotheras, Void Reaver, Solarian) since I'm currently using Necklace of the Deep for tanking, not needing the defense on Juggernaut.

As people have said, it'll depend largely on what you're tanking.

Feral Druid DPS 2.3.0

- Fixed Rip damage to match the Wowwiki Data
- Fixed Double Dipping on Mangle Buff
- Improved the Import/Export Functionality
- Fixed (I hope) Dodge and expertise Calculations
- Updated AEP Values for Armor Pen and Expertise
- Added Pawn Export Strings
- Cosmetic Changes

Using the EU WoW Forum post in the OP, 39.4 resilience rating grants 1% crit reduction, so your 45 resilience gives 1.14%. 2.4 defense rating grants 1 defense skill, so with 64 defense rating you'll have 26 defense skill (floored) which gives a crit reduction of 1.04 (0.04% crit reduction per defense skill). This is a combined total of 2.18% which is still 0.42% short of the 2.6% crit reduction you need from gear to be crit immune vs bosses provided you have 3/3 Survival of the Fittest.

You have the [Ashtongue Talisman of Lethality] in your data when actually druids can only use [Ashtongue Talisman of Equilibrium].

Also, you have [Berserker's Call] set to Pre-BC in your Trinket page. I didn't even realize you had it in there until I dug around to figure out why it wasn't showing up. You should probably add an "Items from Instances: Zul'Aman" option.

On the topic of +hit, a much forgotten trinket is the [Icon of Unyielding Courage] from heroic Blood Furnace. I am currently using this in my tank and dps set, to fill the gap. (Nice on use too)

I've written a simple combat simulator for Cat Druids about 2 months back, to investigate the actual usefulness of +hit (it turns out that getting to the hitcap is overrated and point for point, hitrating is not as useful as plain stats like STR or AGI). It's rather basic, has no user-interaction (all DPS stats are hardcoded) and the coding is far from pretty (I'm more of a "I'm happy it compiles" programmer), but you can use it as a basis for your own program if you want. With the settings that it currently has, the deviation of the outcome of one run from the long term average is about 0.2%.

The program is written in C and compiled with the OpenWatcom compiler under Windows. I'm not entirely sure whether it will immediately compile on other platforms, but no more than minor tweaking should be required.

http://www.wormeester.nl/WoW/catdps.c