Just a small update this time to make the calculation faster and more convenient. I added another box that shows how much Hit rating is needed to reach the crit cap. If the value is negative it shows how much hit rating you have more than needed to reach crit cap.

Of course, you can raise your crit cap with Expertise. This new box (the orange one) assumes you are Expertise capped already.

Crit cap calculator 2.2

The calculator is only to hasten the process. You should not use it if you have no idea how the numbers are being calculated. Understand how to calculate by hand first, then use the calculator to work faster.

I also find it curious myself that gemming hit for the crit cap would cause a dps loss, as the Hit rating value on a Spell and White attack Crit capped player is almost doubled compared to a non-Critcapped one.

For all melee classes, being over the Critical Cap is the situation where a portion of the player’s Critical chance does not benefit a part or whole of his DPS. This can happen for many reasons. This article will analyze how Critical Cap works on a PVE raid situation, while attacking a Boss.

Melee attack types

There are 2 kinds of melee DPS: white auto-attacks, and yellow special attacks.

White Auto-attacks

This kind of melee DPS’s Critical chance can be affected by the following factors:

• Glancing blows: This happens due to the de facto level difference of the player with the Boss. The player’s white attacks will have a 24% chance of doing a reduced damage white attack that is also unable to crit.
• Dodge: When a melee attack happens on a Boss, there is a default 6.5% chance it will get dodged, and obviously a dodge cannot be a critical strike. This can be lowered and be completely negated with the use of Expertise rating and talents.
• Parry: Attacking from the front of the Boss causes this and results in parries, failed attacks that cannot crit. Can be eliminated by attacking from the back. (The chance to get parried when attacking from the front is over 10%. It can also be eliminated by Expertise, but as a much bigger value than Dodge is needed to nullify Parry with it, it’s not advised.)
• Chance to miss: The white attack’s chance to miss for a dual-wielding Enhancement shaman is 27%, which goes to 21% if talented with Dual-wield Specialization. The remaining 21% can be reduced and totally nullified by the use of Hit Rating. Misses can’t crit either. Really!
• Crit Reduction: On a Boss-type mob, a shaman’s white attack Critical strikes will always be 4.8% lower than what his Character Sheet is saying. What does this mean for the player? Just that he needs 4.8% more crit in his char sheet in order to be doing the desired Critical strikes on the Boss. Earlier tests have claimed there is also a limit to the white-attacks that can be converted to Crits. This is not the case, there is no such limit, all normal white-attacks (not glancing blows) can be converted into critical strikes.

All these factors can be unified in a single formula, like this:

Maximum Critical Chance = 100% - (Glancing blows chance) – (Chance to get Dodged and Parried) – (Chance to miss)
This M.C.C. number is the highest critical chance a player can attack a Boss with in his current situation, and therefore when he reaches that number he is Crit Capped. He can raise his Crit Cap by adding more Expertise and Hit rating, in case he isn’t Expertise or Hit capped already.

However, in order to achieve this M.C.C. on a Boss, one needs an additional 4.8% on his character sheet, due to the Crit Depression. (For example, if your current M.C.C. is 70%, you can achieve having a 70% chance to crit the Boss by having 74.8% on your character sheet.). Thus, the Crit Cap formula is:
Crit Cap= M.C.C+4.8%

Special Attacks

The Enhancement shaman’s Special melee attacks repertoire consists of:

1. Stormstrike
2. Lava Lash
3. Windfury weapon

The same factors affect the Critical strike chance of Special attacks as White attacks, except one: There are no Glancing blows. This effectively means that at any situation, when attacking a boss, the Special attack’s M.C.C. number will always be 24% higher than White attacks.
Also, the chance to miss special attacks is much lower than dual-wield auto-attacks, it’s value is 8%. Like white attacks, it can be lowered and eliminated by the use of talents and Hit rating.
With that said, the special attack M.C.C. formula looks like this:

M.C.C=100% -(Chance to get Dodged and Parried) – (Chance to miss)

Being over the Crit Cap

When a player is over the Crit Cap, his White attacks (or both his White and Special attacks) can no longer benefit by adding more melee critical strike chance on his character sheet. This means that he has a character sheet critical strike value equal to his M.C.C+4.8% or more, effectively losing potential DPS. What he can do to resolve this situation is either reduce his melee Critical Chance, or increase his M.C.C. number to accommodate the higher over the Crit cap value of Critical Chance.

Properly dealing with Crit Cap

As Special attacks have an M.C.C. that is 24% higher than the White attacks one, we will focus mainly on the White attack Crit cap, which is the first and most common DPS bottleneck a Shaman will encounter.
The first thing an Enhancement shaman should do is reduce the chance for his attacks to get dodged and parried to 0% by the use of Expertise and also never attack a Boss from the front.
On an Expertise-capped player, it’s obvious that the White attack M.C.C formula is simplified to this:

M.C.C=100% - (Glancing blows chance) – (Chance to miss)

There is now only one alterable factor that can change the M.C.C: The Chance to Miss, which is affected by Hit rating. The shaman can either raise his Hit rating to accommodate his Critical Strike chance, or get rid of this excessive Critical Chance if possible (In the process a player should always make sure his Hit rating is enough to cover Spell Hit needs, as it’s very important to be Spell Hit Capped).

Is being under the Crit Cap a DPS improvement?

Making sure a player isn’t over the Crit Cap is at most times beneficiary, and for a good reason. While over the Crit cap, and in the case where removing Critical Chance isn’t possible or easy, a Shaman’s only choice is to add more Hit rating (provided he is Expertise-capped already as he probably should be).

We will now give an example to see why in most cases getting Hit rating in an over the Crit Cap enhancement shaman can improve his DPS.

Let’s assume an already Expertise, Special attacks and Spell-hit capped Enhancement Shaman is also over the Crit Cap. This means that he has an amount of melee Critical Chance that doesn’t benefit his White attacks at all. The shaman decides to add Hit rating, to accommodate his high Critical Chance. At this point Hit rating only affects his White attacks, as his Special attacks and Spells are already hit capped.

The moment this extra Hit rating is added, and thus lowering the chance White attacks miss, the extra attacks from this Hit Rating are immediately converted to Critical Attacks, due to the excessive Critical chance coming into play that was unused before. This means that this Hit rating’s DPS value is effectively almost doubled (as criticals do double the damage of normal attacks) than what it’s DPS value would have been if he wasn’t Crit Capped.
This leads most of the time to a Hit Rating DPS value that surpasses any other stat, but a Shaman should always Sim to see if this is indeed the case.

Inconstant Critical Chance during a fight

During a fight, there are two factors that can render your Critical Chance inconstant:

1. Elemental Devastation: This is a 9% melee critical chance bonus for 10 seconds that procs when a non-periodic spell critical happens. As such, at most cases it doesn’t have a 100% uptime. This factor cannot be avoided as it is a mandatory DPS talent. However, it slightly changes the value of Hit rating while over the Crit Cap. This is because if for example the ED proc has a 90% uptime, it means that 90% of the time you might be over the Crit Cap, and 10% of the time under the Cap. To make sure you are never during a fight over the Cap, this should be counted as a 9% solid and always active melee critical strike chance.
2. Trinkets and other item procs: Procs that give Agility or Critical strike rating can temporarily bring your Critical Chance over the cap, meaning you can possibly lose potential DPS these items could offer you. This means that those trinkets might need extra Hit Rating to accommodate their Critical chance procs, but as those procs might not always be active, that extra Hit Rating is “wasted”, as it could have been replaced by another more beneficial stat at the moment. Tread very carefully over this area, as many times not using those trinkets/items at all might be the best idea for your DPS, especially when you are getting close or over the Crit Cap while using them and needing quite a bit of Hit Rating to cover.

Critical Cap calculator Instructions

As calculating the Crit Cap and how Hit rating must be adjusted every time a gear-change happens can be time-consuming, I have created some time ago an automated Spreadsheet. This Spreadsheet takes for granted that the Shaman is properly talented (Full ranks on DW specialization, Elemental Devastation and Unleashed Rage), and also has the highest versions of every single raid buff that can affect his Melee Critical strike chance. Those buffs are Motw (talented), Kings, Strength of earth totem (talented), Heart of the Crusader, and Rampage.

How the Calculator works: While unbuffed, you enter your character sheet values on the red-colored boxes (Those are the only boxes that you should enter values into, the rest of them give info). The red boxes are Agility, Melee Crit chance, Expertise rating and Hit rating. If you are a Draenei or an Orc, you put the value 1 in the corresponding box, so your racials can be taken into account. Put 0 on the other box, or if you aren’t any of those classes, put 0 in both of them.
Then on the green-colored boxes various information about your current status appear, like your chance to miss and more.
On the yellow box the room for how much more crit you can take before reaching the Crit Cap is shown. If the number on the yellow box is negative, it means you are over the Crit cap and thus need more Hit rating to accommodate all the excessive Critical Chance. The amount of the Hit rating needed to do this is shown in the Orange box. If the yellow box’s number is positive, it means you can get rid of Hit rating (always watching not to go lower than the Spell-hit cap) without any problems. The amount of the excessive Hit rating is shown as a negative number on the orange box.

As general information, the amount of Hit rating needed to reach Spell-Hit cap while having the 3% spell hit raid buff is 367 for non-Draenei and 341 for Draenei. Also, the Hit rating needed to Hit-cap White attacks is 688 for non-Draenei and 662 for Dranei. So, an Enhancement shaman’s Hit values should never go outside those limits, or it is almost sure he is losing potential DPS.

Download Link: Crit Cap Calculator 2.2. If you have problems with Megaupload try Rouncer's link below.

Didn't see if this was covered, but spells hit, crit, or miss; one would think they have a higher crit cap, can someone enlighten me on this?


Also I do find this idea interesting though, but at what point is stacking crit going to "gimp" your other stats to reach said "spell" crit cap over melee crit cap?

Glancing Blows?

P.S. Great job mate. Thank you.

Yes I meant Glancing blows. Crushing blows is something completely different I hope I didn't confuse anyone. Thanks for your detailed reading.

I must miss something , but on my char sheet, i have melee crit rating 47.63% , but if i check Rawr, with all buffs unchecked melee crit is 54.14% . Can't figure it out where is the difference from...

Hello,
I have just returned from a break and I wan't to see if this spreadsheet (and in particular the 4.8% crit suppression figure) is still accurate. I remember reading some months back that this could have been a recount error, or something to that effect.

So is this spreadsheet still accurate?

Yes, versions from 2.0 and onwards are accurate.

I'm curious as to what testing has been done on any crit depression for the yellow special attacks for Shaman (and other classes) as well as the crit depression for straight up spells.

A while back I ran some testing on Shadow Priest spell crit depression across a variety of levels of +int and +crititcal strike rating and while I couldn't find a fully consistent explanation it was roughly around 2% to 3% (across hundreds of thousands of casts).

I know that Rogue poisons are also thought to have some crit depression as well (but not the 4.8% of their melee attacks) and I've been wondering for a while if more testing has been done by Enhancement Shaman on their yellow attacks and spells.

I'm not very familiar with Rawr, but did you make sure the hit buff from the presence is active? If not, Rawr should tell you that you are missing 20 hit rating for spells.
When I enter your stats into the critcap sheet it shows that you are far from being critcapped - you could drop 193 hit rating or get 5.9% crit without reaching the cap. I don't know exactly how you get the 104 and 3.x numbers; maybe you don't wear the pvp cloak and belt for raiding the armory shows, or you have entered your stats after adding the missing enchants and gems.