Spell Hit Discussion - Page 2

• Nicarras · 12/01/08, 3:13 PM

Originally Posted by oresteez

I know it's probably obvious, but it would be nice to see somewhere in the first post that 26 hit = 1%

Also, assuming a 56/0/15 build where you are taking the 6 talents in both schools for +3% hit...what's the best "next step" once you reach the hit cap?

Do you respec and put 2 points into something else? (and keep 2/3 hit-related talents..)
Do you regem as necessary and convert +hit gems into +dmg (or haste, crit, spirit, whatever your flavor..)
I guess a 3rd option is to change out an entire piece of armor, provided it doesn't drop you below the hit cap, and you gain a nice bonus to dmg/stats...

updated first post

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

Originally Posted by rutiene

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

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.

Trickykid · 12/01/08, 3:18 PM

Originally Posted by Nicarras

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.

• Nicarras · 12/01/08, 3:23 PM

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.

Devourment · 12/01/08, 3:24 PM

Originally Posted by Trickykid

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.

Suppression is definitely worth it. Cataclysm is not, however, since 56 points are needed in the aff tree to fully max out affliction spec dps. That leaves only 15 points for destro, which would logically be 5/5 ISB, 5/5 bane, and 5/5 ruin. It could be argued that while in early L80 gear as affliction spec, points could be moved from ISB to Cataclysm but regardless it is a dps sidegrade, because the dps from the hit gained by the talent is negated by taking points out of the other dps talents.

Sydane · 12/01/08, 3:30 PM

Originally Posted by Nicarras

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.

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.

Trickykid · 12/01/08, 3:31 PM

Originally Posted by Nicarras

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.

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!

Ravelvan · 12/01/08, 3:33 PM

Originally Posted by oresteez

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.

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:

Originally Posted by Sydane

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.

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:

talents=http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=Ifxrb0MAoVA0IstZE00V
gear_intellect=850
gear_spirit=500
gear_spell_power=2200
gear_hit_rating=289
gear_crit_rating=320

yields 4448 DPS, whereas

talents=http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=Ifxrb0MAoVA0IstZE00V
gear_intellect=850
gear_spirit=500
gear_spell_power=2242
gear_hit_rating=253
gear_crit_rating=320

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.

Leprechaun-Misha · 12/01/08, 3:49 PM

Originally Posted by Nicarras

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

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?

• Nicarras · 12/01/08, 3:54 PM

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.

Calixtus · 12/01/08, 4:26 PM

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.

oldlockwam · 12/01/08, 5:17 PM

The 1% Draeni racial is called "Heroic Presence" and applies to party only, not raid.

Originally Posted by Calixtus

(ain't there a totem too...?)

There is no spell hit totem anymore -- Totem of Wrath used to do 3% each to spellhit & spell crit, but that has been changed to +280 spell power and +3% crit.

Splot · 12/01/08, 6:01 PM

I think its still worth while to mention the non boss hit caps (for those who swap in gear & food buffs on a boss fight) to reach the cap.

Mob level Hit
80 105 4%
81 132 5%
82 158 6%
83 +446

These are before raid buffs and talents but you cannot rely on shadow priest or moonkin debuffs going up on the target for trash.

PSGarak · 12/01/08, 8:25 PM

So, how bad is not capping Haunt? Napkin math follows:

Let's say you're at 99% hit, and you have 100 casts of haunt where one of them misses. We'll assume near-perfect play, which means that each hit haunt lasts 12 seconds and the missed one costs about 10 (you spam it on cooldown, it has a cast time). So, your haunt uptime is reduced by about 1/120. During that time your DoTs tick at 1/6 less (100% = 5/6 * 120%), making this haunt miss a 1/720 damage reduction to your DoTs from the haunt miss. If DoTs are around 1/2-2/3 of your damage I'd say a good rule of thumb is around 1/1000 to 1/1200 DPS decrease from the Haunt debuff per point hit below the cap. There's also a replacement effect of swapping a shadowbolt for a haunt, but that's like 1/500 of a shadowbolt per cast, and Haunt does damage itself, and shadowbolt is a filler, so I'm going to say this doesn't affect the rule-of-thumb results I got.

So while it does elevate the value of hit by like 10% or something, missing a haunt is not the difference between boatloads of DPS and slapping the boss with a wet noodle. While it's annoying when a haunt misses and having it drop on WWS is a mild embarassment, the benefits of being hit-capped are decidedly meh. Min-maxers will not hit-cap religiously, and any hit-capping that happens is purely incidental.

Akj · 12/01/08, 8:53 PM

You are not taking into account the fact that both corruption & shadow embrace can drop off because of a missed haunt.

PSGarak · 12/01/08, 9:21 PM

Unlikely, shadowbolt still refreshes both. Even at 4% miss on destro spells, the odds of every shadowbolt missing in the same 18-second window as a haunt resist is unlikely. And if it does happen all you've lost is 1.5s of filler on corruption. Shadow Embrace is half the effect of Haunt, so it's going to alter the final analysis no more than 50%.