I have a general question about the prioritization of hit rating that I have been seeing lately. I know that it is much better in 4.0.1 than it was in WotLK, both because of rage normalization and because the HS bug is no longer a factor.

However, I have seen many people just assume that we should hard-cap hit rating before focusing on any other stats (except for strength). This is what I don't understand. I've managed to swap out gear so that I'm sitting on about +25% chance to hit, without reforging yet. Is it mathematically proven somewhere that reforging that last 2% hit chance from other stats like haste or crit will be a dps improvement?

I just don't buy the "if you can't hit you can't do anything" argument, because it's a rare boss fight that boils down to a single attack. When you have a 98% chance to hit, that means that only 2% of your autoattacks are going to miss, over the course of the fight. Over the course of that same fight, having a 2% greater chance to crit will mean that 2% of your white swings will be doing double damage instead of the normal damage they would otherwise have been doing. It also means your flurry uptime will be higher, especially early on when crit% isn't all that high for warriors.

If the argument is that it is absolutely essential to have reliable rage generation at all times, I guess I can buy that. However, it seems like there should be a point where your rage generation is, on the whole, smooth enough that the haste benefit of getting more rage per swing, and the crit benefit of having higher flurry uptime (with its 25% faster autoattack bringing in 25% more rage) start to become more attractive than stacking additional chance to hit.

Am I crazy? Or is it possible that hit rating doesn't need to be the highest-priority secondary stat all the way to the hard-cap?

Reply