While this is technically true, also remember that hit rating transfers to your pet, and unless you have 8%+ hit rating, RNG can take you for a walk mid-boss fight, causing a string of misses, regardless of the probability of it. It's usually just safer to cap hit first, especially when the dps difference is as close as what you've quoted above.

That's the dps value, not the per item budget value.

That doesn't sound right and is very different from anything I've seen in there. Are you sure you're not looking at pet hit?

I had also never seen a case where AP was valued higher than hit for someone who wasn't hit-capped, but I loaded him from the armory into the spreadsheet, and with no or minimal buffs, this is the case. Interestingly, I show intellect as his most valuable stat, followed by raw AP, followed by hit.

Obviously you don't need to socket a 16 hit gem if you only need 10 hit (note that is not the case with the guy I was responding to: he was about 30 points short of the cap if I remember correctly).

The whole "almost never miss" argument is flawed in two fundamental ways:

1. Nobody is claiming that if you are at 7.9% hit that it is a huge dps loss. There is nothing "magic" about being hit capped. However, the question isn't the absolute value of hit, it is the relative value. Should you add a hit gem or an AP/AGI gem? It is almost always the case (this guy being one of the rare exceptions), that hit has a higher impact on dps (for the same item budget) than any other stat -- all the way up to the cap. If you are only 10 points shy of the cap, however, it may be the case that a hit/agi gem (that still leaves you 2 below the cap) provides a better dps gain than a straight hit gem (where 6 of the 10 points are wasted).

2. Hit is transferred to your pet in whole percentages. So if you were at 7.9% hit, your pet would only be at 7%. While you'd only miss an average of 1/1000 shots, your pet would miss 1/100. For BM, where your pet will actually do more dps than you do on many fights, this is a real concern. Note that this is also why Focused Aim (whose hit does not transfer to pets) is often a bad choice -- especially for BM hunters.

Why would you gem assuming no buffs? To be brutally honest, Asarra's talent build is wildly different from anything that would be recommended for BM on this site, and that's obviously going to mean that the "common rules" don't necessarily work here.

i. as of 3.1.

Yes jc dragon eye cuts count as every color.

so how does it work with the new patch 3.1
it been said that players benefit 25% extra on the armor penetration, so what should a survival hunter choose the agility gems or the armor penetration gems?

Given that ArP only affects physical shots, no hunter should chose ArP gems over agility (SV & maybe MM) or AP (BM & maybe MM), as the increased damage from non-physical shots, e.g. Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot, Serpent Sting more than covers the gap and wouldn't get anything from ArP anyway.

The only possible exception is BM where, as TrevvyTrev likes to remind us, autoshot is a significant part of a hunter's damage output. Even there though, ArP isn't going to be a huge value-add because it doesn't transfer to your pet.

At this point in 3.1 I'm staying with survival and now that 8agi/12 stam gem is out I was wondering if it was worth it to swap my ap gems out seeing as I already have 36.5 unbuffed crit. Unfortunately I can't run the spreadsheet to figure the numbers out myself.
here is my armory link since I have the stupid characters in my name

The World of Warcraft Armory

Thank you in advance for your responses.