It does exists, but it's in the Subtlety tree, so...

Gear Discussion Thread

(1) Similar to many people out there, I'm trying to wrap my head around the ideal mix of HIT and EXP relative to other stats. And I know there is no 'perfect' level since a lot of it is gear driven and you just want whatever gives you best dps, but I'd still like to get a sense of what to shoot for ( ie. soft targets so to speak ). Can you please confirm if my below thinking is correct, or if I"m out to lunch? This is for a combat swords NE with 5/5 precision. From my understanding:

Target 151 HIT rating
Target 132 Expertise rating


(2) Am I also correct in thinking that I should gem Agility > Expertise > Hit ... regardless of whether I've achieved either of the two soft targets above?

Thanks for any assistance & cheers,

Lyphe

There's no soft target, there's no hard target, there's just nothing like that. It's whatever combination of gear gives you the best dps possible.

In Terms of Hit, you want to hit the Poison hit cap as soon as possible. As Combat, from TBC, the percentage contribution from white damage has gone down while the percentage contribution from poisons has gone way up.

I'm not convinced by anyone's anecdotal evidence that we actually "need" a damage buff. I do feel like we're a lot more gear dependent than some of the other classes, but I absolutely know that for instance, I'm running about 1.5-2k under what my actual DPS cap is (because my gear is terrible, and it's easy to compare my numbers now to my geared out beta numbers). I think our DPS scales a bit more linearly as we approach our cap, whereas other classes seem to have a more asymptotic approach to their cap. So I do contend that when we're fully geared out, we will be very, very competitive (eg., top 3) on fights like Patchwerk, with our only competition being a Hunter or a Mage with some good Frostfire streaks. Keep in mind, the design is that Hunters, Mages, Rogues, and Warlocks all do nearly equivalent DPS, so it will come down to who has better gear, performs better, and/or is more favored by the RNG.

I do feel like Fury Warriors are a little higher than they should be at the moment, but I'm waiting to reserve judgement until I can see what it's like in a couple months when we're fully geared up. In any event, this is a pretty stupid post though. You can't make an "educated guess" on when Blizzard is going to make any change, especially when it's unclear that anything even needs to be changed based on just some anecdotes.

So, most math suggests that at least for Mutilate (and possibly for Combat), you actually want to go for the spell hit cap as your "soft" cap. So (16 - 5 - 3 - 1) * 26.23 or ~184 hit rating assuming 5/5 Precision, 3/3 Misery (or equivalent), and a Dranei in your group. This is also more than enough rating to cap out your specials, so you're good there.

For expertise ratings, the numbers for the hard cap (6.5% dodge prevention) are:
Mutilate or Combat 0/2 Weapon Expertise (not sure why you'd do that), no racial bonus: 213
Combat 1/2 Weapon Expertise OR Combat 0/2 Weapon Expertise w/ racial: 172
Combat 2/2 Weapon Expertise OR Combat 1/2 Weapon Expertise w/ racial: 132
Combat 2/2 Weapon Expertise w/ racial: 90

Quick question: Isn't 17% the spell hit cap (not 16%)? Or am I missing something? Thanks.

Here are the hit cap tables for special/spell/white:
http://elitistjerks.com/956961-post3931.html

It is 17%; 16% was used for a long time because there was a 1% to miss that could not be removed. This 1% can now be removed so the spell cap is now 17%.

I apologize for any stupidity in my questions - just want to make sure I don't mis-spec or mis-allocate gem slots, etc .... Lemme see if this sounds a bit more close then ...

210 Hit as a respectable raiding mark
132 Expertise as a respectable raiding mark

And yes, I know there are no magic numbers, but I'm basically trying to get an idea of what to "think" about when looking at my stats and deciding how to gem, etc ...




The 151 number for Hit was what I had been thinking was the poison/spell hit level, but I understand that I was off on that ... 132 on expertise was what I was thinking was the cap for Expertise, and from what I read above, it "looks" like I'm correct on that.

For Agility > Expertise > Hit , it still seems to be correct ( per the post you referred me to ) assuming you are above the poison/spell cap and hit is then reduced to an EP of 1.6 ... or it is at least equal to expertise which I also saw rated at 1.6.

Feel free to correct me if I screwed that up somewhere ...

For Combat, being expertise capped really doesn't matter. Worst case your SS misses, but costs so little that it doesn't lose you much other than a GCD. Your finishers can't be dodged, so you don't have to worry about that. That's not to say expertise isn't useful, but it's not quite that bad if you aren't capped.

For Mutilate however, having your finisher not land at the wrong time can force you to reboot part of your cycle, which not only is frustrating but will cost you DPS. While it's true this can be mitigated by pooling energy and/or making sure you apply say an Envenom with 3s left instead of 1s left. But I like the additional cycle flexibility you get by eliminating the chance your finisher won't land, which is why capping that was one of my first gearing priorities.

Is there a simple rule of thumb for mutilate for how much weapon damage per second .1 speed is worth? I ask so that I can quickly compare, say, a 1.8 speed dagger with higher dps to a 1.4 speed dagger with lower dps without having to plug the particular weapons into a spreadsheet. This would be similar to how, for combat, an offhand the equivalent of a weapon 10 dps higher for every .1 it was faster. I.e, a 1.4 speed 90 dps was equivalent to a 1.5 speed 100 dps offhand. What is a similar conversion for mutilate?