That's extremely subjective. All the hard evidence points to hit being a less than ideal stat for ferals. If you personally like the stabilizing effects of hit, that's fine, but stating that the hit cap should be an important goal for everybody is misleading.

This is just plain wrong. Using numbers from the combat ratings thread, 131.16 expertise rating is required for 6.5% dodge reduction with Primal Precision.

I haven't done the simulation, but I very much doubt it. The only reason for hit rating to increase in value on the low end is the contribution of consecutive misses to over-capping energy; even with zero hit rating, you should still only be getting consecutive misses less than 1% of the time, and those will only over-cap your energy occasionally (mostly during berserk or tf).

If you want a precise answer though, the simulator ought to do just fine at simulating your gear; try swapping in one piece of hit gear on the simulator and compare the results.

The only times hit or expertise are ever worth like, magically more or less are:
-right almost hit/exp capped where going over its worth nothing
-some unquantifiable "i don't have to worry about missing/being dodged ever so i can just mash the next button knowing what i did before that landed." If you're focusing on your damage and such, that should be a pretty minimal effect anyway.

Well, there's also the case where a miss is a wipe -- for example, if you're the only one who can interrupt on Vezax.

Hey guys, I don't want to be a bother, but I have small problem and I'd appreciate some advice. Yesterday I swapped my 2pc T7 (head and shoulders) + 2pc T8 (hands and legs) which were gemmed with old ArPen gems (I was doing roughly around 4k dps on a dummy with shred idol - I know mangle idol would be more appropriate here, but that's not the crux of my problem) for 4pc T8 (in terms of off-set gear that means that I lost Winter's Icy Embrace (chest) and "gained" Treacherous Shoulderpads (shoulders)). Since I don't have Grim Toll nor Mjollnir Runestone I decided to put some agility gems in instead of ArPen ones (basically I have half of both), since my crit was lacking in my previous set (I had arond 47%self buffed, now I have arond 51,5%self buffed). My ArPen dropped from around 550 to 450. With my crit improved I replaced Mirror of Truth for Banner of Victory to gain some of my lost ArPen back. So far so good. I was glad to find out that Rawr agrees with my changes (even though the simulator still prefers agility gems over arpen gems).

The problem of this is that the theory doesn't coincide with practice, when I try my new setup on the dummy. Effectively I do approximately the same dps, but on most tries it even drops for around 100dps. If I was using SR at 5CP before, now I try to do it with 1 or 2CP (as proposed with 4pcT8), but somehow I still have more trouble upkeeping all the (de)buffs&bleeds on the target. More often than not both bleeds and mangle seem to be expiring in one second interval. And if I manage to find a good balance I never seem to be able to incorporate any FB into the rotation. If both SR and Rip have more than 8seconds left I rather clip SR than FB, since I've tried FB a few times and it resulted in daunting Rip and SR downtime. Any helpful input would be much appreciated. Currently I'm consisdering going back to the previous set.

Long Question, short answer: We are talking about raid settings, mostly even full support raid settings. We don't want to maximize dummy dps.
If you decide not to trust the math, you are free to do so.

Sorry for not updating my guide to the new patch. I'm on vacation in the US at the moment and will update the first post the next weekend.

To expand, in raidsettings you have much more agility and combopoint generation to keep the timers up reliably. If anything 4pct8 helps in tight timer situations as you can get away with 1/2 pt SR's (4/5 is still more desirable). Dummy dps doesnt scale linear with raidbuffs so you cant say that due to your dummy dps going down your raiddps will go down.

I updated my guide now for patch 3.2

Please correct me if I made any errors.

- new idol of mutilation is BiS idol
- 4T8 < 2T9 + 2T8 < 2T9 plus high iLvl offsetpieces < 4T9

I'm not so sure when it's wise to go for passive ArP and not using Mjolnir / Grim Toll anymore. I think this is gear dependent and I shouldn't include it in the guide.
I also didn't change neither the weapon enchantments nor the BiS list yet since I'm waiting for more input on this.

4T9 will almost certainly not be worth gearing for. The bonus is pathetic and only the T9 shoulders have armor pen, while there are 245/258 offset options in each slot that do have armor pen.

my feral theorycrafter buddy seems to agree that T9 is bad... I wonder how good 2 piece T8 + 2 piece T9 will be though. I mean, the extended duration on rake means you can apply it less often, but really, according to some of what I've read on here, the damage per energy that rake provides relies also on its ability to proc extra clearcasts. 4 piece T9 would remove rake's usefulness for that purpose. Would rake then become obsolete?
I mean, 5% increased crit on rips and ferocious bites... It just doesn't seem superbly significant. Now if the stat increases are so large as to overcome this, then sure, I'd believe it... but I want someone who's done the math to tell me this. Could it be that T9 is actually worse than T8.5, but the heroic version is actually better than T8 because of the change in stats?
Feral gearing just got stupidly complicated >.<
And what of ar pen? There's no ar pen on this stuff.
Meh... at least T9 is probably the coolest we've looked... like... ever. haha

anyway, at the moment, 2 pc T8/8.5 (Conq head, val legs) with T7.5 shoulders and gloves. I was wondering if the new badge shoulders and another pair of gloves would be better. I mean, I suppose I could live without the extended timers. Since I'm usually mangle b**** for my guild (-_- sometimes I don't get all 3 shreds to extend rip. It's manageable if you're smart about it.
Also, I was reading on the world of warcraft forums...
someone said something like if you don't use facemauler, you're and idiot and you must enjoy gimping yourself...
Is facemauler really that effective? I never tried it... I just use NeedToKnow

Try to use it (FBN) and you'll see.

I personally dont use the addon because i somehow dont like the idea of an addon telling me what to press next. I'd recommend however trying it out, just to see what you are capable of using the addon, and then if you dont like it you at least know where you should be damage-wise, and if you have something to improve or not.