Is melee hit cap really 9%?

Here's a good place for you to start, next time. It appears to have applied to all melee/ranged, but not spells.

Some guildies and I were talking about hit rating and they said that at 8% I may not miss but I'm getting diminishing returns from the hits and still need to be at 9%. Any thoughts on this?

could you be more specific as in what kind of situations you get misses or is this a general problem?
I can't help but think that you may be exposed to some debuff that lowers your
hit chance as I have not noticed any misses if I'm capped to 8%.

Vault of Archavon comes to mind first.

No. There are no "diminishing returns" from hits at 8% hit and there is no need to be at 9% hit.

Your guildies probably still believe that 9% is the hit cap and that we're telling you 8% because you'll only miss rarely at 8%, hence their use of "diminishing returns". This isn't a correct use of the term "diminishing returns" but is probably what they're referring to. Either way, we're NOT saying that hit is worthless after 8% because you'll only miss rarely, but we are saying that you won't miss EVER unless under the effects of a -Hit debuff at 8%.

Bottom line is that you won't miss at 8% since it is the hit cap.

What your guildies might have noticed is speculation in the Focused aim reducing crit return thread, that the reason we saw lower crit had something to do with hit not being flly realized at 8% concerning crits - I believe I was the one who raised it specifically in those terms. There is, however, no data to back this up at the current time, and other sources are way more likely causes.
IOW, this speculation is not something to base anything on currently.

Thanks for the responses, what they were meaning is at 8% I will never miss but instead of steady shot doing say 4000 damage to a raid boss, it'll only do 3000 damage because I'm not at 9%.

I thought 8% was right but just wanted to double check.

The size of a crit is not affected by hit rating, and you will not get larger crits at 9% hit than you would at 8%. If your hit rating is lower than 8% you will get fewer crits, but the ones you do get will be the same size no matter what your hit rating is.

Though I have to admit that it would be a nice way to make Hit scale past the cap.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Currently the build I'm using and I'm only at 7% hit. Just wondering what would be better for my DPS: moving one point into Focused Aim or swapping Agility gems with Hit gems in my gear? Currently on my server, respeccing is cheaper than regemming but gold isn't a big deal.

If you're below the Hit Cap, either gem/gear for hit or eat +hit food. Its that simple.
Focused Aim should be a last-ditch solution for three reasons. The first is because it doesn't apply to Pet Hit. The second is that there's almost always a talent in reach that will gain you better dps. The third reason is that theres an abundance of well-allocated +Hit gear even at the Heroic gear level.

I'm not sure whether or not your armory's gear is up-to-date since its showing you at 5.31% hit but if you are below the hit cap, do as I said in the first line and either gem/gear for hit or eat +hit food.

I've gone all over this and I've seen results for player hit at just below 8% and just above 8%, but not at exactly 8.00%. Is there any reason we can't assume they're rounding the player hit 'percent' up to next integer? We've proven they're rounding DOWN for the player contribution to the pet. Rounding up for players would fit within the observed stats that have been posted and still fits within the 9% 'official' value (7% + (Defense Skill - Weapon Skill - 10)*.4%). It would also be logical for them to use integer values because they're computationally more efficient. 9% can also be written as 9 out of 100, if you want to use integers

Edit: A more 'sane' thought occurred to me. Instead of rounding UP the hit value before calculating the miss value, they could simply round down the miss value in the final comparison? 9.00 - 8.02 = .98, rounded down to 0. Instead of 9 - 9 = 0 . Either way works and there's no way to prove or disprove either rounding method, but we can statistically prove rounding if we get a sample of attacks at a perfect integer, preferably 8.00 hit.

meh

No... Seeing your number is pretty high though, you can still change a gem or two out of Hit. You only need 263, so if you can drop 12 Hit you are in Perfectland (and gain something in return of course). Chances are that you can only drop 8, but that's fine.

Hit is still a better stat than even Agi. If it wasn't then we wouldn't be going for the Hitcap as Survival, but rather just get whatever Hit there was on the items with the most Agi.

Might try the 8Agi + 3mp5 one till more gems are added. At least that's what the gem thread says here. Losing 8 Ap isn't alot, you gain crit and with talents it will more than make up for it.

Is the rounding down on pet hit confirmed? I'm currently sitting at 262 hit with a chance of 7.99%, but if what you say is true, I'll have to gem for the 1 hit.

Very confirmed. That last 1 Hit is the most value you will ever get from a single rating. Do whatever it takes to get it, save dropping a meta.

Those "misses" were dodges. Expand the WWS columns to get more details.

Each of those three misses seem to coincide with the first attack made by a new 'instance' of your pet. I'm not sure how WWS parses a pet into 21 different instances, but assuming it's that the pet died or despawned and was rezzed or resummoned, perhaps there is a slight lag in the time for the pet to inherit your hit rating, allowing it to miss on the first attack after rezzing/calling.

Yeah they weren't dodges, my pet had 44 dodges. The 3 misses were actual misses so must be like Nagisamuro said.

My bad, I was looking at the wrong thing.

Yeah, that looks like your pet just lagged in getting your stats. Your pet despawns during Malygos' Vortex, so when he comes back up, he must've gotten a few misses before he reaquired your stats.

If you watch your pet's health for a few seconds after dismounting, you can see it takes a second for it to dip into your stats. It must account for hit rating as well.

That hypothesis, "The pet lagged in getting your stats" seems thinly supported. I run around with usually 260 hit rating and my pet miss rate seems roughly in line with tobeymac. Here is a wws from a fight that is longer than the one in tobeymac's post in which I know I had 260 hit rating.

wws

Can someone with 263 or more hit rating post a wws of a fight 3 min or longer in which there pet has 0 true misses?

This WWS is from a full clear of Naxx-10. I run hit capped (I think I had 268 on this particular night) and as you can see, my cat, Puff, had zero true misses. All are Parries, Dodges, or Other. Nearly all our boss fights that night went right to the enrage timer, so they were obviously longer than 3 minutes.

(The WWS also gives an example of what dismal dps a BM hunter does in a 10 man group without full synergy -- this group was stacked for caster damage and I got to come along to contribute my FI.)