I’ve got a hunter friend, a dwarf. I’m really keen to head into ZA with him to get that tuskbreaker! Guns are scarce.

If you’re talking about just 1%, then you will see a difference in the average boss fight.

If you’re constantly shooting a 1:1 rotation with a 3 second bow speed, you’ll let out somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-50 shots per minute. Assuming your boss fight lasts at least 2 minutes, you’ll let out at least 100 shots.

For every 100 shots, 1% hit should make you hit one extra time. Likewise, 1% crit should make you crit one extra time. Every little bit counts, and it will show up if you read the reports.

The way I like to explain it to people is that gaining 1% to hit is increasing your overall DPS by 1%. That’s almost definitely worth more than the equivalent amount of crit, Agi, or AP, and it just gets better as your gear improves.

However hitrating is for us still the cheapest per DPS. While we might not see much difference in getting those last few hit, we tend to forget that we won’t see any effect from those few extra critrating points either. Chances are we haven’t recieved a single extra crit due to them over a bossfight, but regging even a single hit where it would have been a miss is a massive difference in comparison. And we get that hit because hit is cheaper.

Of course if a piece of gear with no hit has a lot more crit than the same piece has with hit, then go for the crit. Luckily we don’t HAVE to go for hit as we don’t have any shots aside from Misdirected shots that really count anymore. But it is still the best stat.

Heroic bosses are only level 72 and not level 73, thus requiring a lower hit rating to avoid all misses. (This also means that these bosses cannot crush a tank and also require a tank to attain a lower defense rating to prevent crits). Only raid bosses will be treated as level 73 (raid bosses are treated as being 3 levels higher than your current level) meaning that amount of hit rating is completely useless until you look to karazhan and beyond.

Also, hit rating is significantly less important to hunters than to other classes that need to maintain a steady rotation of their abilities to ensure their optimal dps rotation. For example if a hunter misses an auto-shot or steady shot his next auto/steady will still hit for the same amount of damage and the order he casts in will not be affected. The same is not always true for druids/rogues etc… and a much higher emphasis is put on hit rating for those classes.

This only applies to spells. Physical dps (hunters included) can bring their miss chance down to 0%.

However, there are several class talents which will boost up their own chance to “resist” attacks (melee and/or ranged) as well as spells.

Mage talent Arctic Winds is one example from deep Frost tree, giving them up to 5% additional chance that melee and ranged attacks will miss—meaning a Hunter would need 10% Hit to cover the gap—there is always the blanket 1% chance to miss that cannot be covered.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should stack Hit to the point where you slack on STA/Resilience/AP for Hunter PVP.. but just keep in mind when that clutch Scattershot misses and you’re left with no outs.. it’s your Hit rating failing or their class talents negating your base 5%.