I find hit hard to give any concrete, because it's so fluid. It's absolutely necessary until you're capped, but totally useless after that.

I was running on the assumption that if you're hitcapped currently, you're going to be hitcapped with 5/5 T8.25.

This is a wrong way to look at it. Hit rating is not particularly difficult to come by, so you're always going to be at the cap. Say you have a piece with haste and crit, which you've now replaced with a piece with hit and spirit (in the same slot). You can then take a different piece you had with crit and hit, and switch it for something with crit and haste. You still lose out, because while you have the same amounts of haste and hit, you're down the crit from the original piece (which was "converted" to spirit).

Now, the actual situation is not as simple. For instance, you're better off getting your hit from "native" stats, and not from gems. But the main point is that most of the time you'll just be shifting hit around (relative value zero), while converting crit or haste to spirit is always a relative loss.

To be fair, the "extra stats" are most likely going to be... Spirit. Here's how I see cloth and leather gear breaking down after 3.1 hits:

• "Tri-stat" SP/Haste/Crit gear, such as the Sarth cloak, the Malygos boots and the Gothic hat. This is the gear that GC hints they won't make anymore. It has the highest dps/ilevel ratio, and will be very hard to replace with Ulduar gear.
• "Bi-hit" SP/X/Hit gear, where X = Haste or Crit.
• "Bi-spirit" SP/X/Spirit gear, where X = Haste or Crit.
• "One-stat" SP/Y gear, where Y = Hit or Spirit. This has the lowest dps/ilevel ratio, and will most likely get sharded on sight.

Basically the gearing strategy should be to hoard tri-stat items, then make sure you have enough bi-hit gear to get capped, which should be rather easy. At that point the regen and 15% SP contribution favor bi-spirit over bi-hit, but not by much - I'm guessing around as many ilevel-equivalents as the difference between 10-mans and 25-mans. I can see ending up above the hit cap because the bi-spirit items sucked or were taken by healers - if not at BiS then well on my way to it.

All in all, not the nicest gearing picture if you ask me, particularly seeing how physical damage dealing doesn't suffer from a "Spirit policy" and thus gets plenty of new tri-stat gear, allowing it to continue to scale cubically.

On the humorous side: there are tri-stat caster items in Ulduar, but they're all plate.

4/5 pieces of T8 already have spirit, you won't exchange hit for more spirit.

I recently switched my main from a frostfire mage to a boomkin, pretty much because the guild needed one. im new to the boomkin so plz excuse my noobishness . is mp 5 better than spirit on a boomkin? also, what is a recommended rotation? im currently using 58/0/13 spec. my druids name is capncrunch on uldaman server. The World of Warcraft Armory any suggestions would help a bunch. thx guys!

One consequence of my gear "taxonomy" is that the only way not to have spirit on a bi-stat-or-better Ulduar item is to have hit on it, therefore the only thing you can really trade hit for (ceteris paribus) is spirit. Here's another way of looking at it, in matrix form:

The gear worth considering is in boldface. I didn't make much of a distinction between the one-stat categories since you should let those items go to healers or (more likely) to the disenchanter (edit: exceptions are the T8 helm and gloves of course )

If an item has any sockets its value goes up compared to a similarly-itemized item with fewer sockets, however the sockets don't affect the itemization layout, they just subtract points from the budget.

Nobody wants to replace spirit with hit, but it would be nice to have more pieces with both haste and crit and neither hit nor spirit.

Edit: fixed tables in light of a few pre-LK items

Good breakdown. One note though - there is tri-stat cloth gear in Ulduar. It's just very rare. Wowhead is our friend (keep in mind that loot tables are far from full yet).

That's pretty good sarcasm (though haikus are always appreciated), but a bad argument. Moonkins and trees don't want the same gear even if it doesn't have hit, because trees want spirit and moonkins don't. Putting hit on an item doesn't actually make it useless to trees, it just makes it badly itemized - one stat is wasted for them. In the same way items with spirit are badly itemized for moonkins - that stat is mostly wasted for them.

If only spirit was a decent stat for moonkins, then you would be right. Alas.

Our 4t8 is pretty weak at a 3% proc rate. So that robe will most likely find a spot in our gear, depending on what else there is.

According to my last test results with Rawr, the robe and the ring were both in the list. 4T8 really isn't the cat's meow we originally thought it was.

In my mind I tend to consider "tri-stat" and "bi-hit" together because they're both optimal gear if you can stay at the hit cap. I see your point that "bi-hit" gear becomes less valuable once we're struggling not to go over the cap, but I'm not convinced we're there yet.

Inside a 2-tier range the BiS list is always comprised of the highest level bi-hit (just enough to reach the cap) and tri-stat gear, with exceptions made for tier pieces depending on set bonuses and the weapon (where higher level trumps distribution). Once you go beyond that range sheer item budget can trump distribution.

As I keep saying it's too early to write the actual lists, because we're still missing most of the hard modes loot table.

I am very interested how you get the 810 haste. As of yet I have not seen any calculations that favor solar eclipse over lunar eclipse. I myself am thinking it will never be beter, this because the chance of clipping your wrath is simply to big. I can be mistaken and please prove me wrong if I am.

On the subject of spirit. I was very happy when they tried to implement it more into the game, sadly it did not work out the way I thought. I think they will need to change the manaregen in another way to boost the need of spirit, or as someone noted they should buff the spellpower conversion. I fear creating a good moonkin set will become harder into Ulduar.