I've always considered it best to use TotT on a melee dps with a threat dump (can you imagine a ret pally or fury warrior with more threat getting offloaded to him?). Sometimes a range dps may be better in terms of damage, but you cannot always guarantee that they will be within 20 yards of you, and having TotT not go off and wasting time getting it on the right person is a waste of total dps when you could have just slapped it on the rogue next to you.

Anyway, I think it's best to change the person you put it on on a fight by fight basis, seeing as how some fights WILL have ranged near melee for most/all of the time, and some won't; some fights also are more melee or ranged friendly, which adds to how effective tricks can be. The one overriding principle I would go by is to keep it on people who can wipe threat unless it's a fight like 4h, where the tanks will either have a huge threat lead or will be swap-taunting such that threat will be irrelevant. It's just not a good habit to assume that you'll always be fighting bosses that will be tauntable, as taking that particular mechanic away from a boss fight can lower the margin for error a good deal (if you've ever had someone pull aggro on Sapphiron you know what I mean), and I'd expect to see much less in the way of tauntable bosses as WotLK goes on.

Supposedly the giving TotT to a shadow priest right at the beginning of a fight gives them a respectable dps boost (say 3-5% or something like that) because they roll their shadow word: pain the entire fight and it retains its initial value.

That was the assumption some time ago. However, getting to the poison hit cap is fairly important now - not only does it give you DPS for not missing poisons, it gives you more cycle stability. At the best in slot gear, hit rating post 99 is only so slightly ahead of AP/Agility (for Mutilate); I definitely wouldn't recommend gemming straight for hit rating, for two reasons. One, with your gear, you should easily reach 237 hit rating (all you need with raid buffs) without a single pure hit rating gem, and two, if you do that and then upgrade to a piece that gives you a lot of hit, all that hit you gemmed for will lose substantial value; unlike the Agility or AP gems that you could have used. The drop from pre-poison cap to post-poison cap is pretty huge.

With that said, it's definitely beneficial to attain the poison cap; although the difference is not *that* big.

I wonder whats the case in spreadsheet. The poison hit cap might be rather important for Mutilate but for my Combat dropping 100 hit rating or taking away Misery hardly has any impact on DPS, even when below poison hit cap. Basically you could run with 5/5 Precision + 100 hit rating from gear without Misery and still be fine, that's how low hit rating value is for Combat (if I haven't mistaken with spreadsheet).

I know it's not possible to drop all hit rating from BiS items to AP for example, but hit rating for Combat seems really weak stat, even when miles away from poison cap. Also I signify that you should always go for highest DPS output but can we make conclusion that for Combat hit rating has no value and poison cap doesn't have almost slightest affect on DPS?

You appear to not understand the Rating system Blizzard has implemented. With Rating, they made it diminish in value as you level up. So yes, back at level 70, 1% hit is 15.8 rating. But at level 80, 1% hit takes about 32.89 hit rating. That's why the numbers shot up so high. Currently it is 27% for the dual wield white hit cap.

And there is a seperate column for poisons because it uses the Spell Hit mechanics, so Spell Hit Rating values for that. I believe it's around 22.8 for 1% spell hit. Also the cap is different there, at 17%.

Thank you,

my mistake, indeed it is not 15.8 as it was for lvl70 at BC but 32.79 (and not 32.89 as you mentionned). A simple division on a character sheet gave it to me.

So we have 722/32.79 = 22% of missed white hits when we attack a lvl83 boss with 5/5 in talent Precision (27% with 0/5).

Now I see there is a great debate on stopping at the "special hits" cap (99 hit score) or going further. I read somewhere that white hits (auto attack) represented more than 60% of the total hits during a fight, so it would be crazy to stop at this cap. We didn't do it at BC why would it be different now ? And especially when the white hit cap is much higher than never...

Moreover I noticed that hit bonuses on new gears tended to disappear. We find commonly haste, critic and expertise but rarely hit. It doesn't help us to be capped

So, the thing to keep in mind is what factors made hit so important before. And the answer is, primarily, Windfury. In terms of regular autoattack damage, hit, while a perfectly reasonable stat, is nothing particularly special. What vaulted it into importance is Windfury, and to a lesser extent Sword Spec. And the reasoning is something like this:

For white damage, the amount of damage you gain depends on all the usual stats - AP, Crit, Hit, Haste, ArPen, and Expertise. A 1% increase to hit, haste, or crit each gives - to a first approximation - roughly 1% increase to white damage.

However, consider Windfury: in terms of number of procs you get, that depends on hit, haste, and expertise; in terms of how much damage they do, that depends on hit, crit, expertise, AP and ArPen. So all stats count towards increasing WF damage... but hit and expertise count twice. Thus, a 1% increase to most stats gives a 1% increase to WF damage, while a 1% increase in hit or expertise is, effectively, a 2% damage increase. Hence, for damage of this sort, hit is twice as important as other stats.

So, with WF changed to a haste effect rather than a proc-based DPS effect, hit (and expertise) become a lot less important. The scaling from 70 to 80 also hurt rating stats more than AP, so that's a further disadvantage to hit relative to other some other stats. And past that, with Prey on the Week, crit has become significantly more important for combat specs, as your crits do more damage. All of this adds up to hit being rather dramatically less important than it was at 70.

Now, the astute observer will not that the same proc mechanic now exists for poisons, and this indeed does increase the value of hit below the spell hit cap. Hence, until this value, hit does have a somewhat higher value, particularly for Mutilate builds that get something like 30% of their damage from poison procs. But for combat, poisons are less significant - Deadly, as it's not being envenomed off, does not need the hit for restacking, and wound poison accounts for only 10% of one's damage (as opposed to the 30% for Mutilate). So hit is *better* up to the spell hit cap than it is beyond, but it's still not your most important stat.

Fundamentally: it's not that hit isn't still good - it is. It still increases DPS, and it's not like you should actively items with hit on them. But by the same token, the game has changed enough since 70 that it's no longer your most important stat. Stacking hit up to the white hit cap simply no longer makes sense - you lose too many other stats by doing so. So as always, you should check the various spreadsheets and assess which of the options available to you do the most DPS, and you will generally find that this results in relatively lower values of hit than one might expect based on the situation at level 70.

This is something that can be tested using one of the Spreadsheets available in other threads here.

In case you are unable to use one though...

Testing using the Spreadsheets and experience in PvE has shown that energy pooling before using finishers is the best way of boosting your DPS.
The Envenom buff was designed to reduce the loss to DPS caused by eating DP stacks. The longer the buff runs for and the more CPs you have for Envenom the better.
A low CP Envenom with a small DP stack would be a considerable net DPS loss that cannot be compensated for by the increase in DPS from [WP: incorrect] reapplying your DP stack or IP (in the case of Mutilate).

It has been documented on this Forum that lower CP Envenoms on a [nearly] full DP stack is almost as effective as full CP Envenoms on a [nearly] full DP stack. Part of the reason for this is the way DP stacks are reduced in size after Envenom but also because of the way Envenom damage scales according to CPs and DP stack size.

I urge you to use the search facilities on this Thread if you wish to find out more about this though.

Lest misinformation spread, the poison-proc buff from envenom applies only to deadly poison and instant poison. This is one of the arguments for not using Envenom as combat, because your poisons should be wound/deadly.

What is the reason for Mut hit value going to 2.2 on this guide? I still get dps loss if I switch from my 32AP gem to 16hit on Spreadsheet both buffed and unbuffed scenario. So which to trust? So far, I am leaning towards Vulajin's spreadsheet.

That's because the EP values on the Pocket Guide are based off Aldriana's spreadsheet.