The Hit Cap Trap
Note: Even though we are “quoting” this email-question, we did a lot of modification and hacked it up for readability and conciseness. Any attempt to show where and how we changed things made the question almost unreadable, so we’re going to pretend this is a direct quote, even though it isn’t. In the interest of full-disclosure, we thought you should know.
/ready
“Dear BRK, my main stats self buffed with talents/equip only, no consumables are 1904 RAP, a bit over 26% crit, 9k health and around 7k mana, and 110 hit rate. When it comes to 25 man raids, I’m always grouped with a feral druid and my stats become 2.3K RAP, 33% crit, over 8.2K mana and 10.2K health.
“Should I invest in more RAP, stack more crit, neglect a bit of both and raise my mana pool/Mp5, neglect all the above and get hit capped, or should I not give a flip about any of that and /rage /slapself /quit and go live in a cave? EchoVibes & Pilocas”
Yes; yes; a little but don’t hurt yourself; hold that thought; and no, caves are notoriously wet and it’s flu season.
When you go from a greenie to a blueie to your first purple, your stats are going to improve without too much thought or effort. Equip it and move on. But when one is looking at swapping an “Agi/Sta/Int” piece of epic gear for a “Sta/Crit/Hit/RAP with a red socket” epic item, things get more complicated.
Balance. We preach it for BM hunters. Crippling your Stamina for Agility isn’t smart. Neglecting Hit in Kara and beyond is a mistake, but going over the Hit Cap is a colossal waste. Loads of Crit but no Intellect is gonna hurt you in the long fights. Massive DPS with no Stamina makes you a glass cannon and hurts your raid’s healing.
Balance. Get and learn to use RatingBuster or a similar gear-stats analysis addon. Don’t give yourself a big weakness in any area while attempting to meet some stat-threshold.
Now let’s talk about the Hold Your Thought and capping one’s Hit Rating.
Our ranged Hit Cap remains 142 for level 73 bosses. However, having too low a Hit Rating will hurt your DPS, and that’s no lie. But do we recommend massively sacrificing Agility and Stamina and all the rest to get to that Hit Rating maxed? Nope; we just told you Balance is the key to MQoSRDPS.
Our Hit Rating through Gruul’s and SSC and Doomwalker has been 99. Yes that seems low and yes it affects our DPS; we miss approximately 1% of all our AutoShots against these bosses. We accept this because if we wanted to boost our Hit Rating, our other stats would be affected such that our DPS would decrease more than the amount our misses are costing us.
Read that again. By increasing our Hit Rating, our DPS would go down because we’d loose too many other stats while trying achieve the Hit Cap. This interplay of stats is what we call The Hit Cap Trap.
If we got caught up in the Hit Cap Trap and re-equipped our 3-pieces of Ebon Netherscale gear to get the +25 Hit Rating the set provides, we’d have to take off our new BoJ bracers and belt, two pieces of extremely powerful gear. Our Hit Rating would go way, way up, but our mana pool and health and crit and armor would all take a big tumble.
Do not let anybody say to you, “If you’re not Hit Capped, you’re not doing as much DPS as you can.” While technically a true statement, the methods used to implement it can cripple your DPS. It is very true that your Hit Rating is important and should not be ignored, but it is not the single most critical stat about which a hunter needs to be concerned.
The key to avoiding the Hit Cap Trap is Balance. So sayeth BRK, so let it be done.
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15 Responses to “The Hit Cap Trap”
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I also love how that 1% translates out in a 3 or 4 hour raid setting. I think my 1% missing (on a really bad night its 2%!) is like 5 shots.
Now if only Hydross would drop that sexy sexy mail chestpiece….
Yeah this is true. I’m not much of a theorycaster guy, but look at it this way. Say you are doing 500 dps, a decent number in early kara. Say when its all said and done, you are doing a shot every two seconds. So that’s 1000 damage per shot. Now say you are not quite hit capped and say you miss 1% of shots. On a boss fight that lasts say 3 minutes, that’s 500*60*3 = 90,000 damage on 60*3/2 = 90 shots. But say you miss a shot on this boss (remember hit cap is mostly for bosses). Your damage is actually 90,000 – 1,000, or 89,000 over 180 seconds. Your dps is actually 494.4 because of that miss. That’s 6 dps lost. If you swap out stuff, your dps may go way down while gaining that extra 1% hit. To me, 6dps is negligable, and its only on bosses.
But wait, maybe you are actually doing more shots that one every two seconds. Maybe its more like 1 a second with proper shot rotation. Okay, fine. So you end up doing 180,000 damage in 3 minutes using 180 shots. And you miss 1%, or 2 shots. Your dps now falls to 990, or a loss of 10 dps. Yeah that’s not much, an equivalent of swapping a gem out. But its up to you.
Amen. Balance is the way to go. Being 100 hit in Gruul and Kara is acceptable, but sacrificing other stats just to get hit up is not good. That 1 miss on the trash clearing to Lurker is not going to be a big deal and those 4 misses on Lurker is again no big deal. But if you’re hitting 100% of the time and your shots are doing less damage because you’ve spec’d for hit, your dps will take a big nose dive.
I’d been at 148 hit with self buffed ap at about 1850 for a while with 27.5% crit and have been VERY happy with that… and those stats were achieved through gemming and enchanting my gear intelligently.
I won the ring off Hydross last night, so I could get rid of my Kara quest ring finally. Lost 6 hit in the deal, but it dropped me to 142 and upped my ap by almost 30 and gave me another half point in crit.
I keep a lot of older gear around just so I can keep stats in balance if a new piece throws things out of whack.
And we learned the true value of hit last night when our Frost Resist tank missed a shield slam on the transition! One critical miss by the tank… 25 dead people. (But to be fair, this is the first miss I’ve seen of his in almost 5 months!)
Wait…the BoJ rewards replace the Netherscale armor?
If that’s the case, perhaps I won’t go through the ugly grind for the primals and just sell the leather and primals I do have. Buy a few enchants on the Felstalker and move on.
I’ve read, and i believe, that Blizz itemisation costs for Hit are generally less than that for other stats like Ag, Crit and Ap. Therefore in pre/early kara gear, it is actually quite easy to get 120-135 hit (Think Felstalker set) and enter kara with a respectably high DPS on Boss’s. Better than if you had focused on improving your Ag, Crit and Ap with gear of the same level.
I did this, and i found it took a long time before i could put together a set of gear that actually improved my DPS over my pre-kara set. I had to wait until i had 2 or 3 items, then upgrade.
The downside to high hit, is that you throw away some DPS when working on trash in heroics (lv 70) So i generally swap out hit for Ag, AP, Crit or even Stamina.
I fully agree with the message of the post, that blindly racing towards the hit cap is sub-optimal, but “Balance” is a rather subjective and vague concept.
I think a rough DPS stats value guideline for BM hunters would be very beneficial. In my opinion for raiding BM hunters stats values are:
1 agilitiy is slighlty better than 1 crit rating or 1 hit rating or 2 attack power, which are all about the same value.
With “new” stats like haste and armour penetration it gets trickier, but going by ilevel values 1 agil is about same as 1 haste or 8-7 armour penetration.
The reason that agility is more valuable than other is because of Blessing of Kings, which adds 10% to your total.
Other important non-DPS stats that should not be neglected are stam and int. Their value are a bit more difficult to estimate, but we can use our collective experience to give some idea of what others should expect.
I think in previous posts BRK mentioned HP pool guideline of about 9k un-buffed and I’d agree. That’s a good target for a PvE hunter. Not sure about int/mana pool though.
@ For the Pie. IMPO, I would not skip the Ebon DS set, but that depends on your gear. For me when getting into Kara, it was a significant and relative quick and easy upgrade for my gear pre Kara. In Kara there are not a lot of pieces that I like better for a hunter. (I bought the primals as I have a ton of gold from doing dailies and my alt is a miner, free primal fire FTW). I spent my marks on the Gauntlets of Sniping, first as those were the biggest upgrade for me.
I’ve actually been using 122 as the hit cap anyway, since I can always eat some spicy talbuk for bosses. Particularly in Kara and heroics where the trash is only L71-L72 anyway. 142 is over the cap on those and, to paraphrase BRK, a colossal waste. So I run at about 110-115ish, and eat soem talbuk for bosses. As a result I hardly ever miss and I can gem for agility/crit/AP/Stam.
I do tend to neglect stamina though in PVE for most fights. I’m actually ok with being somewhat of a glass cannon. If I’m getting hit, I’m usually doing something wrong anyway.
There are a few fights that are exceptions to that, and I need more stamina, so I always carry different sets of gear with me. I’m a firm believer not only in balance, but also in having and using the right tools for the right job.
what’s the pre-kara – i.e. heroic 5-man hit cap? i’ve read that’s around 96-99. is this true? i’m sitting at 97 at the moment and that seems to be fine.
anyways, i might never get into kara as i’m sort of a 5 man PUGing badge farmer now-a-days. i guess i’m wondering where i should be sitting hit-wise as i upgrade from my T3 blues into heroic badge vender items.
and oh – how about the NEW 5-man coming with the sunwell? i’ve read that the bosses will be dropping purples so will the hit requirements jump too?
thx in adv
peas
I can’t see how the BoJ is better than the ebon. Yeah you get the hit with the Ebon but you also get way more mp5 and crit. So imho the Ebon is much better. Having the T4 set2 bonus is better than having the BoJ gloves, and having the leather BoJ legs is better than the mail BoJ legs.
Future note:Hit cap becomes more important the closer you get to end game ….. what was 100% never miss on Vashj is 1% miss on Kael and gets worse in BT. Using WWS as my source on my hunters has proved this over and over. 106 Hit will produce 8% to as high as 11% miss in Hyjal. If you have to do a quick MD(and you will do a number of these) and miss, could make a mess. Who wants to have to do all the trash waves again cause your MD didn’t build enough agro for the MT to bust Kaz’rogal past the NPC’s.
But I do agree with BRK, i have not sacrificed balance for Hit when +hit food is available for bosses.
Hey BRK, this might be a slightly different interpretation of his question but I thought it would be worth mentioning all the same.
I frequently find myself looking at items and wondering if they were an upgrade for me (especially the new items with reduce armor)
Cheecky’s Hunter DPS Spreadsheet from Elitist Jerks, is an invaluable resource to me, let me tell you if you thought WWS was a wealth of information just wait till you get your hands on this thing
This simple excel file, will, hands down tell you if that item is an upgrade (accounts for, well everything as you’ll see)
I would be very impressed if you took at look at this yourself, BRK. Maybe even suggest it to your readers, assuming it gets the BRK stamp of aproval
I agree with 2ndworst. Balance may be one thing when just looking at raw DPS output, but missing a in critical task is, well, critical!
With my latest gear upgrades I had to socket +hit to remain capped. I am comfortable with that, and I know I will be able to (read: have to) put another gem in there once I get my hands on other hit gear.
But my personal epxerience is that capped on Vashj remains capped in Mount Hyjal and BT. There’s no diminishing returns in +hit, and a boss is a boss is a still boss, i.e. mathematically level 73.
So my advice:
Get capped, but don’t overcap. If this is a downturn of your DPS, you either eat it, or be ready to swap gear in favour of hit rating and eat the appropriate consumables if your task implies “you better don’t miss”.
I’ve been raiding for three years now. Cleared all instances as all specs in the Hunter tree. Having max hit rating is WAY over rated and NOT needed. Like you said here, balance is key. Right now im sitting in full T6 with almost every possible upgrade for a hunter in BC. I roll with 120 hit rating, and its plenty. I haven’t missed a shot yet since I lowered from 143 to 120. And yes this includes bosses like Illidan and Archimonde. Now when the Sunwell comes out, I will probably change Signet of Primal Wrath back to Intent, but it probably wont be needed there either. Good luck.
i agree.
i recently went with my guild into black temple on my hunter alt that has about 90 hit and only 2 epics.
on bloodboil i still ended doing 1100dps (blew all cds as soon as tank established aggro) before i died because i only had 7.5k hp buffed.
the biggest factor in hunter dps is the steady shot macro. i’ve out-dpsed hunter with 3times my gear in heroics because of it.