Thanks. So I can back off my Hit rating to about 5% (in the Armory) till I get my Mastery and Crit ratings up?

It won't be useless after the patch! (assuming there is AOE magic damage)

Can I point out that Landsoul seems to currently have his gear reforged favouring hit over haste?

As I recall in Landsoul's example comparing hit and haste to a glass of water, where haste would be the size of the glass (i.e. the potential benefit from haste) and hit would be how full the glass is, representing how much of that potential is actually tapped. I don't think the relationship between hit and haste is as clear-cut as some say it is. His comments regarding this may have been before the +40% auto attack damage buff but I can't pin that for sure.

That said, I do agree that although hit and haste are closer to each other for SMF, hit is at least pulling a little bit ahead for both specs.

Agreed. That's the reason behind it at least, although somewhat of a poor design for things to end up that way. Without a ton of hit to back it up, a gain in haste means so very little unless you are connecting on those faster hits. So for haste to be valuable at all, you need a proportionally high amount of hit to go along with it, which just isn't worth it when you factor in how much nicer crit treats us. That's why it sucks.

On the other hand, it appears that some sims are showing mastery as falling behind even haste for SMF at least. I wonder how well that holds up on the varying gear levels or if it pretty much has sunk down in the stat priority overall.

I did a few experiments between haste and hit and haste has always pulled through for me. If we're going with heavy hit builds should we be prioritizing heroic strike now? I'd like a little bit of discussion on whether our rotation priorities change with this, because hit just doesn't seem to be working for me.

The guide says landsoul prefers haste and yet he's reforging to hit. So...

What do you mean by "Stance Dancing" on the Arms spec? Switching to Battle Stance to Overpower twice or just casting Overpower to keep the Tier 4pc Bonus up?

Thanks in advice.

After testing the stance dancing, I personally opted to pass on it. Reasons are as follows:

1) Firstly, the numbers people post are a bit outlandish. 2k+ dps? The whole bonus is less then 5% - its 110% vs 105% so less then 5% increase, and not everything is perfectly multiplicative, so in fact its about 4%. Then add the fact that basically the overpowers (15% of our dmg) and 1/6 of whites/opportunity strikes , dont benefit from it (since you still cast them in Battle Stance. That reduces it by further 20% so its more like 3.2% bonus now. So even at this stage to get 2k+ dps you would have to do 60k+ dps otherwise - thats likely on like halfus, but there are other factors there so lets not count that fight. For a typical 20-30k dps fight the bonus is around 600-900 dps. AT THIS STAGE.

2) You do sometimes lose rage when stance dancing, even with Tmastery. It also takes time. Granted , overpowers having 1 sec gcd make it less of an issue, but think about it this way - if due to the stance dance, over the round of 12 sec you lose 3% of time - ~350ms , you are barely breaking even. And it easily can happen. Im not even getting at major mistakes etc.

All in all I find the stance dance bonus to be below 400-600 dps - which can be significant, but its not as high as some people make it. It also only applies to single target fights - on multitarget, tclapping to spread rend etc is a better dps increase. I also have higher latency (US servers, playing from Europe ) - which might apply to some other people, making it harder.

Finally I dont believe its here to stay. Blizzard took clear efforts to make arms warriors use battle stance, and even 4.2 notes show further steps in that direction (namely making recklessness etc usable in any stance). I dont see that mechanic as intended or desired, and I expected it to be purged.

When i add "#showtooltip Overpower" to the front of the macro, it makes overpower light up when taste for blood is active regardless of stance.

People reporting 2k+ boosts in dps from stance dancing are clearly mislead. In BIS gear and perfect rotation it would at max be 1.2k dps boost. Adding lag and human reaction time it would be more reasonably be an 800 dps boost. Its noticeable but not even half of what some people are reporting. My guess is that they aren't factoring in the free GCD every 15 seconds that they had gained this patch as well.

Again even 1.2k seem too high although way closer to the target. I think my assessment with perfect rotation but lag and reaction taken into account is around 600.

Now there is one more thing that isnt covered - to make this work, you need to overpower twice (with dance like 2.5 sec) at PRECISELY given time. There is no leeway of delaying it like you normally would, so you can make sure you hit every MS. So your rotation will miss mortal strikes, gain some slams, but overall i estimated the dps loss just from the rage loss from battle trance to 200-250. Then there is lower enrage uptime from lower number of MS.

Overall yes, i noticed a considerable dps increase in the patch. But stance dance is borderline even for me (again i do have higher then average lag which i blame for that, still i dont think with low ping it would suddenly become extremely potent).

One more thing to consider though is dropping overpowers completely, in scenarios where you have excess rage. Rend ticking/refreshing means you dont lose damage from that, and overpowers while potent due to their crit, dont hit that hard. Their main purpose is to conserve rage - which isnt always necessary. Seems fights like Sinestra for example, staying in zerker and completely ignoring overpowers could be worth it. Slam hits for 50% more from the base multiplier (comparing slam in zerker to overpower in battle) + the pretty hefty extra damage (which seems to mostly offset the white swing loss).

Expertise, aswell as hitrating now that pummel does not require hit, is purely a threat improving stat. If you do not need to produce more threat, you don't need more expertise. The reason many high end protection warriors don't gear for expertise or hit is they simply don't need more TPS.