This had been randomly talked about in a few posts in various threads, so I thought that a consolidated place to have all the discussion (however brief it might be) would be helpful to people as they gear up.

Spell Hit Cap

• 17% / 446 Hit Rating
• 26 hit rating = 1% Hit

Raid +hit Buffs

• Misery (3%, Shadow Priest, Non-stacking with Imp FF)
• Imp FF (3%, Moonkin, Non-stacking with Misery)
• Draenei (1%, Stacks with the Abovem - Party Only)

Warlock +hit Talents

• Suppression (6% to all schools)

Spell Hit Rating Quick Reference
10% - 263 Hit Rating
11% - 289 Hit Rating
13% - 342 Hit Rating
14% - 368 Hit Rating

Useful Food Buffs

• [Snapper Extreme]

In general, spec for hit, then gear for hit. Once you are at hit cap, gem for dmg.

As you accumulate gear with hit on it, take it out of your gems first, and then eventually out of your spec.

Hope that helps some new 80s get an idea of what to do with Spell Hit.

Might be worth pointing out that Imp FF and Misery don't stack, but both do stack with DA.

As soon as talents bring some of your spells to cap, value of Hit Rating compared to Spell Power goes down. Due to heavy rating to percentage conversion decay compared to level 70 values, Spell Power may be superior even until that cap (meaning gem for Spell Power, not for Hit Rating)

Interesting discussion. I am currently speced into both Supression and Cataclysm. I like the inherent hit balance provided by this spec. I have not done the math yet to proof its value, though.

Just to complete the buff overview, [Snapper Extreme] is a nice buff food that is useful to balance the hit rating - be it due to gear optimization or due to varying raid composition.

I can follow this line of thinking, but at least in the case of affliction and SBs still making up a large percentage of your damage. It remains to be seen where exactly the line is between 'Gearing to cap SB w/o talents' and 'Dont gear to cap it and stack dmg'. There may be a place in the middle that is more optimal but I just dont think that enough of us have had time to test yet.

Yeah I just found there were better DPS talents to spend those points in the Dest. tree while you are Aff. Thx for food reminder, updated first post.

Any thoughts on keeping 342/368 at all times for Soulshatter?

Hey Jym,

I'm shooting for keeping the 368 hit rating for two main reasons.

1) Soulshatter is capped as long as a shadow priest is alive. Good to know that in those 'oh shit' moments I don't have a 3% chance of getting screwed.
2) If the shadow priest dies, disconnects, goes afk to get her kids dinner, etc, I'll still be hit capped on Haunt. I -absolutely- hate it when Haunt or any of my dots miss; completely screws up my rotation.

Not sure about that, I still tend to agree on being hit capped for SS. I can still find myself running right up on the tanks on quite a few fights. Some you can hit SS early, some it has to be reactionary.

Something I have been trying to figure out in my mind is if it's really necessary to cap hit as Affliction anymore. The cost of hit percentage in terms of spell power basically doubled at 80 as compared to 70, while spell power coefficients were not halved, which seems to make hit a lot less attractive.

For a Destruction build, I think hit is still slightly better than spell power, but for an Affliction build it seems that 1 point of spell power is about twice as valuable as 1 point of hit (based on Leulier's preliminary spreadsheet), and you trade them at about 1:1 as well (when you use gems, at least). I believe this is due to the fact that Affliction basically relies on long CD spells (can't recast a DoT until its duration is out) that only go on CD when the spell actually hits, aside from Haunt of course. So really, when you miss a DoT, all that means is you recast the DoT and as a consequence spend less time Shadowbolting, which is the lowest damage-per-second-cast-time spell anyway.

Am I missing something, or is the only reason to go out of your way to cap hit to prevent the annoyance of a missed DoT, even if it means less average DPS? Of course, if you end up with it on your gear anyway, you might as well take it, but is there any reason at all to use hit gems?

Having Haunt miss is very very annoying. Since you cannot recast the spell for at least another 8 seconds, due to cooldown, you are left in a very unfortunate position. You get -20% damage from your dots for close to 10 seconds, plus this usually results in Corruption falling off. For this reason alone I like to keep at least my affliction spells hitcapped. This IMO is a much bigger issue than missing a soulshatter which you shouldn't really need in wrath.


Edit: spelling

Agreed with Juised. As affliction my DoTs are capped but my destruction spells only have 97% chance to hit.

Hi! Seems like currently a preemptive Soulshatter isn't really necessary, but that's -now- in Wrath. Blizz has reiterated that T8 and 9 will be more challenging.

Wow, correct me if I'm wrong..but missing spells is more than just "an annoyance". We are a DPS class--we are there to DPS. If you are knowingly configuring your gear/gems to cause a "less average DPS", then in my eyes, you (not you personally...warlocks in general) are not doing your job correctly.

updated first post

As you acquire hit, you should back points out of the hit talents. Just like we did pre-bc.


Why leave a 3% chance to do less DPS on 15-20% of your casts? In max/min-land I'm still not seeing why you wouldnt hit cap all your spells.

If the gear needed to cap hit on destruction (which deals, as you point out, only a portion of the total damage) gives less total DPS than gear itemized toward more SP/haste/spirit/crit, then that is "min-maxing" already. Backing out of the affliction +hit talent is harder since the talents that low down are pretty crumby.

Yeah I think that is the math that we still need to work out. Where is the break point. For now I'll just hit cap all my spells and see how it goes. Might be interesting to see if it works out, it never did pre-BC but would be nice to run though things to see if they do now.

Because those talent points or itemization points could be better spent elsewhere. It's not like you're just writing off 3% for nothing. I've seen people who had three points in Cataclysm and zero points in Malediction, that's just foolish, you're getting 3% hit on less than half of your spells to give up 3% damage to all of your spells. The itemization it takes to spell hit cap destruction could possibly be spent on spellpower or even crit or other stats that benefit more of your spells.

There's more to evaluating the value of hit than just "hit cap or bust." It's certainly the easiest meme to repeat to people who don't know how to gear, and you aren't going to be making a huge mistake by going for the hit cap. But there's a lot more to gearing for the hit cap than just the idea you would be gimped if you aren't fully hit capped all the time. While there are ancillary benefits to being hit capped, especially for affliction with haunt, in the end hit rating is just another dps stat. It just happens to be the cheapest stat per point.

Roughly, take the % of your damage coming from destruction, and that's how useful hit rating is after you cap affliction spells.

Example from the WWS thread:
5175 DPS
% from destruction = Shadow bolt (29%) + Immolate (6%) = 35% of damage done

Let's say we have 3/3 suppression but 0/3 cataclysm. Before capping affliction, let's say hit rating is worth 1 spell power. The above numbers say that after capping affliction, the final 3% to cap destruction hit rating is only worth 0.35 spell power. Given that hit rating is more expensive than spell power already in item budgets, I'd imagine you'd not want to find gear itemized away from hit after getting up there with such a low return.

EDIT: 1 minute too slow!

Sorry, I probably phrased that poorly. What I meant was, does capping hit actually mean LESS average DPS due to the fact that you may have gemmed or itemized points into hit rating that would have given a greater DPS increase by just going with spell power. Sure, missing a DoT does lower DPS, but does it lower it by enough to justify never missing? Capping hit just to cap hit seems silly to me, the reason to do it before was always because it gave the best point for point DPS increase, but this no longer seems to be true for Affliction.

And yes, Haunt missing is especially bad, which is the one thing, in my mind, that could cause hit to be more valuable then spell power. I just haven't seen any actual numbers on this, just that missing Haunt is "bad" and "annoying", and definitely causes a DPS loss compared to a non-missed Haunt, but the question is, does it cause enough of a DPS loss to justify being hit capped?

Edit:

This is basically what I was trying to get at, only I'm asking if it really is the cheapest DPS increase for Affliction, as it most definitely isn't according to Leulier's sheet, it's not even close.

Edit2: For example, messing around with gear in SimulationCraft, a 56/0/15 Warlock with the following attributes defined:

yields 4448 DPS, whereas

yields 4485 DPS. So you get a 37 DPS increase by swapping out 36 hit rating in exchange for gaining 42 spell power, which I believe is the conversion rate when swapping gems.

Disclaimer: I am just figuring out how to use SimulationCraft, so I'm probably not defining some attributes that I should, and may in fact be doing something entirely wrong, and as a result the DPS numbers are coming out lower than they should.

So for a destro spec you are suggesting that we have some a spec like this (12/3/56) before full hit capped and then something like this (9/3/59) afterwards?

I was mostly speaking from an Aff point of view. I really wont even look at going destro until the two specs are closer in damage output.

Although I would probably do what Tricky said earlier. Check and see what your damage sources are over the course of a boss fight. Then you need to decide whens best to go for hit or not.

Along with the [Snapper Extreme] it's also worth noting the existance of [Elixir of Accuracy].

I havn't done a item budget based comparison on whether they're better than their spellpower counterparts (I think there's several matches the former, and the latter one is [Spellpower Elixir]), but quite frankly, their mere existance means that reaching the hit cap - while it's always been a bit of a shortcut to having to explain the entire gear cycle - is a whole lot more fluid now. Yes, missing a haunt has some DPS ramifcations. But with 85 hit rating from temporary buffs alone, and then talents, Imp FF (ain't there a totem too...?) and Draenai's on top of that, I'd say rounding errors is liable to eat most of the benefits from shooting for the cap without any hit rating buffs/talents.

Of course, on the other hand, for affliction lock's at least, replacing those temporary buffs with spellpower buffs is probably easier than replacing a permanent gear bonus with spellpower is - simply because spellpower is likely to be present on the items with +hit anyway. That means that due to item budget penalties for single-stat stacking, you're going to replacing most of the straight up hit with crit/haste and not spellpower - and while they're not quite as crappy as they once were, spellpower still seems like a better bargain. In which case the customization options afforded by the temporary buffs are just too good an opportunity to pass up, and you're back to wanting the hit in your gear anyway.