Unless Felpuppies dual-wield, the hit cap is only 9%, not 28%. Possibly 8%, according to sometimes-contradictory evidence. Keep in mind also melee have a different rating:% ratio for hit than casters do, and we don't know if pets inherit the rating or the percent, and at what ratio.

I actually tested and found the opposite of this. Only our raid parties with Draenei in the were showing the buff. In addition, the tooltip for the buff specifies "the party." url=http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=28878Heroic Presence - Spell - World of Warcraft[/url]

Can anyone corroborate one or the other of these situations?

I believe I've heard/read/seen that somewhere as well. However, that also implies that spell penetration is a completely useless stat: Bosses have no real "resistance" to over come, and no one is going to wear resist gear in PvP. Sound about right?

It's a completely useless stat in PvE, that much is true. It's not useless in PvP - first of all, it's not unheard of for people to wear resist gear in arenas. But more importantly, people are likely to have buffs like MotW, which gives 54 resist to every school.

I can confirm this situation - I switched myself from a party that had a Draenei to a party that didn't, and I lost the buff.

What does DA stand for?

I am trying to workout the best spec to pull as much dps as possible. Right now Im running a 53-0-18 variation with 3/3 cataclysm. I am at 11.50% hit, so right now the 3% is a must for me due to having a boomkin/sp in each raid, and my own passive hit. When I gain another percent or two of hit, would dropping a point or two from cataclysm into molten core be the best decision for optimal dps? Right now I'm doing very high numbers on every encounter as 3/3 cataclysm affliction biild and would like some insight on whether or not once I gain another percent of hit so I am at 12%, if I should still keep 3 points in cataclysm or drop one out and place it into Molten Core? I ask this not do to the hit from Cataclysm but the mana cost for my shadowbolts which come out to a good percentage of my raid damage, and the extra mana I feel is a good dps increase. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Dark yes you want to do that. I would drop 1 out of each Susp and Cata and move on from there as you get closer to 14% Hit. Then you can spec like me. And as you are currently running 3/5 in ISB and 2/3 in MC is better then 5/5 ISB and 0/3 MC.

Well, I see your new spec Mel and I want to make it clear that I sometimes am the only affliction lock in raid and we do not run with a discipline priest. Therefore, I find myself wanting to use for felhunter for the spirit buff over an imp. I do not think I will be able to spec the way you are atm, but will definately start working points out of cataclysm and into molten core, along with suppression into something else.

Ahh, well that being that id prob spec this after getting to 14%
Warlock Talents - World of Warcraft Talent Calculator - WoW Tools
that last point in whatever you want

Something I don't think a lot of people realize is the that the mana reduction is an important part of the DPS value of those talents, too. Even if you aren't going to take cataclysm, you should take at least two points in suppression, because the mana reduction is pretty huge.

My own little mathcraft has been that roughly, 3/3 cataclysm is worth more than the other talents you can take to fill your way to ruin. I go 3/3 in both, and until scaling takes off a bit more than it is currently with ISB (which it may never) I don't think it's particularly arguable.

On the subject of itemization value of hit vs. hit from talents, I was wondering if anyone had determined which is better? I'm currently hit capped at 446 +hit (no buffs). I could swap out hit gear/gems and try to replace them with spell power items, or I could spec to avoid using the +hit talents. From a min/max point of view I was wondering if any math had been done on this subject.

Thus far, my DPS is low with whichever spec I've tried. I tried a couple of specs last night (56/0/15, 0/41/30), and I'm pretty consistently getting 2400-2700 DPS on the boss training dummy (again, no raid buffs, which I understand is a requirement for the felguard to be viable). As a note, I should point out that I've been playing around with gear/specs so my armory page might be in a weird state (for instance I think when I went to bed I had 446 hit and the 3% hit talent in destro).

it's not so much the math but the uniquenes of what you can get through talent points that is making you free up those points as you can (f.i. Fel Concentration.. about impossible to compute into numbers)

other things to consider would be
- the items you got to replace the +hit with
- your spec (3 or 6 points freed up?)
- the talents you would use those freed up points for
- hit on items effect pets while talent points don't

assuming that it's nearly impossible to replace those 78 hit with pure spellpower (which would be 92sp / ~107dps.. haste would be more realistic ~48 dps) it's pretty much safe to say that those 3-6 Talent points elsewhere are worth more in any case for Aff, Demo or Hybrid. Deep Destro has no alternative for 2/3 points.

Heya fellow ´locks. Long time reader first time poster. I have a little question about +hit rating, kind of related with Leuliers awesome DPS spreadsheet I haven't been able to find an answer for.

After introducing my gear and supposing the most common group buffs in my raid setup (10 man at the moment, working towards 25 man Nax), the DPS Spreadsheet gave me the following damage values for each statistic:

+1 Damage ----------------------------> 1 Damage (^^)
+1 Hit Rating ---------------------------> 1.27 Damage
+1 Critical Strike Rating ---------------> 0.52 Damage
+1 Haste Rating ------------------------> 0.88 Damage

Well, the reasons this kind of confuses me are that up till know I've always been told by any Warlock worth his salt that I should max hit rating first. My questions are:

At what value should I max it? I was thinking 302 (+/- 11.5%) so my destruction spells are capped with a Draenei and a Shadow Priest/Balance Druid, and if neither of the latter are present, the +40 Hit food. (I heard that affliction spells suppose a negligible part of FG/Ember's DPS and thus hit capping them is not really worth it, confirmation on this would be awesome).

Should I just ignore capping hit rating and use the DPS Sheet to calculate what stat will give me an overall Damage increase in the long run? Aka, enchanting Superior Spell power on my one hander gives me an overall DPS increase greater than the +25hit and crit enchant, even with my hit rating being faaaaaar away from being capped (8.58%, 11.58% with talents for Destro). Also, regemming Rigid Autumns Glow, even though one on one they beat the Runed Scarlet Ruby Damage wise, if I take slot bonuses into account, they sometimes are inferior in providing an overall damage increase, what should I do in those cases?

Also, the demonology thread posts different damage values than mine for each stat, why?

This is mostly applied to gems an enchants, since gear is a different matter, and up to now I've decided to replace a piece with the damage values from the demonology sticky, should I use mine instead?


Thank you A LOT for the answers guys, I'm still a bit of a newcomer to this whole theory crafting world, and believe me I haven't found the answers to these questions anywhere, mostly because they're a bit "particular" I think. Again, thanks A LOT for your help, I'll finally stop loosing sleep over the stat that's been the hardest for me to decide on 8).

P.s Funny thing really. I used to be hit capped, untill I won T 7.5 gloves and Illustration of the Dragon Soul. Ba bie Gloves of Dark Gestures and Mark of the War Prisoner. Winning some of the best items in the game has it's drawbacks too apparently :P.

“I heard that affliction spells suppose a negligible part of FG/Ember's DPS and thus hit capping them is not really worth it, confirmation on this would be awesome). “

As destro or demo/destro hybrid affliction spells account for about 20 – 30% of your dps. Going out of your way to hit cap these spells is not worth it.

“Should I just ignore capping hit rating and use the DPS Sheet to calculate what stat will give me an overall Damage increase in the long run?”

Yes, hit is the best value per point of itemization, but its not magical. Go with the option that yields the best dps overall.

“Also, the demonology thread posts different damage values than mine for each stat, why?”

Because the builds are different and crit and haste scale on different spells and builds differently.

“Winning some of the best items in the game has it's drawbacks too apparently :P”

I’ll say it again since many seem not to understand. There is nothing magical about hit. It’s an efficient stat. That’s the only reason that, in general, one should focus on hit first. The upgrades you took were well worth it in this case, even if your hit dropped. There really is no drawback here.

Soon i will become lv80 and i have allready chose my new spec for PVE 0/41/15

And i was wondering what is Hit cap rating for this spec, i dont realy have found what it would be

The mana reduction costs of the hit talents aren't worth anything. 6% off a 655 mana cost spell is ~40 mana. If you aren't a fresh 80 or avoiding spirit at all costs your LT should be over 4k. Meaning you need to cast the spell 100 times to save yourself a GCD.

---

The difference between +hit in TBC and WOTLK is spell power does not suffer from ratings decay. Meaning 1 spell power gets you the same DPCT at 5, 40, and 80. Hit rating by contrast gets you less bang for your buck the higher your level gets. So we now have a situation where spell power can be better than +hit on the spreadsheet.

As for misses not all misses are equal. Missing a haunt will cause your haunt debuff to fall, and could cause your corruption and SE to fall as well. Typically though misses are an inconvenience but as they can throw off spell rotations being hit capped has DPS value that doesn't show on a spreadsheet.

You should still go for hit capped, but you shouldn't be tossing off too much spell power to do it.

That's not even close to being true. Even with the full 6% mana reduction on Affliction spells you're going to save less than half a Life Tap's worth of mana on a five minute fight.

1 spell power adds the same dpct at all levels, but as a percentage of your damage it goes down. Hit/crit/haste will increase your damage by a percentage, so the rating system is needed to force those stats to decay. Since that wasn't clear here it is as made up numbers.

If at some level you do 100dps, and add enough spell damage to do 101 dps, you have gained 1%. If you add enough of some rating stat to gain 1%, its the same boost.

Now you level up a bunch, and do 1000dps. If you were to you add the same amount of spell damage, you would now do 1001 dps, a .1% increase. Now adding 1% from something on ratings is a 10dps boost. Assuming the rating to percentage conversions were setup correctly, the value of spell power relative to other stats shouldn't change too much as we level.

I'm at 14% normally and I swap in a Mark of the War Prisoner in Raids without Owl's or Spriests. If you can't farm the trinket then I recommend holding on to extra gear pieces and stacking gems accordingly for 14% hit and 17% hit configurations.

That is the conclusion I came to after analizing our WWS for a bit of time. I am hit capped in afflliction tree, but 1.8% behind on destruction spells, succub with 2/2 DP makes wanders. The misses are very very rare, not on every boss, sometimes only on 1-2 bosses. Even though it is annoying to see some percentage of miss in WWS, but I don't think it overweights the damage loss If I actually regem for those 1.8%.

I am currently wondering the following. With some gem changes I can accomplish the following 2 options:

- 288 hitrating, 1 points under the 289 in the startpost, but I would gain 9 spellpower
- 296 hitrating, 7 points over the 289 in the startpost, but I would not gain the 9 spellpower

It is the simple choice of replacing a +16 hit with a +9sp/8hit gem. Would it be a huge dps-loss to get to 288 hitrating? Is it better to play it a bit more safe and stick to 296, or is the extra 9 spellpower worth it?

I am 0/41/30 specced, so will not go without cataclysm (not much else to spend points on). And we always raid with at least a boomkin or shadowpriest.