Some people on the forums have been asking about hit rating (how much do you need? What is my classes/specs hit cap, etc). For spellcasters the easiest way to find your hit cap is
here (if you scroll down there's a table that will help you).
Why is hit cap important? First of all, hit rating is meant to increase your hit chance on mobs (mostly on the level 83 raid boss). When you have a chance to miss a target, then your DPS is decreased by that chance over an infinite amount of time. For instance, if you have a 97% chance to hit, then the DPS you are doing on recount is only 97% of what you are really able to do, but thats over an infinite period of time (because all random number generation averages out after an infinite amount of time). Usually spellcasters have a rotation they stick to, which include low damage attacks and when a certain ability procs, the few high damage attacks ( Arcane mages – Missile Barrage, Arcane Barrage, Fire mages – hot streak procs, Moonkin – Eclipse) and when one of these abilities miss then the DPS drop is much bigger. Even more, usually you need some kind of a combination of the low level attacks (you need a wrath crit for eclipse, you need two consecutive fireball crits for hot streak). And when one misses the high damage attack is less likely to even appear.
One more reason why you need to have a 100% hit chance are spell criticals. If you have a 3% to miss then you can just subtract that from your crit rating. Because of how the server handles hits and misses. Lets say you have to roll ,like you roll for loot from 1 to 100, (its all in one roll the hit, miss, critical, probably to save bandwidth and latency ). When you have a 100% chance to hit and a 30% crit rating, for example. You need to roll 71 or higher to score a crit. But when you have a 3% chance to miss then you need to roll higher than 3 to even hit the target so and the critical area is from 74 to 103. Obviously you cant roll over a 100, so that crit chance is effectively lost. Which means abilities that proc with spell criticals have a lower chance to appear again. So i would say being under the hit cap for 3% is a much bigger loss to DPS than 3%.
I can’t be sure how it is for melee though. For example as a feral DPS the hit cap is not important, because when ferals miss it’s only a loss of a global cooldown because ferals dont have any attack abilities that arent instant and dont have a cooldown. I’d think that melee that have cooldowns on abilities are more dependent on being hit capped than for example rogues and ferals.
Tank hit is a weird thing, because you need to be melee hit capped to get larger amounts of threat (8%), but your taunts can still miss because they are considered spells (17% miss rating with 0 hit). Paladin’s have a glyph that gives 8% hit chance to their taunts. And warriors should have mocking blow/commanding shout(I’m not sure about warriors, feel free to correct me) when their taunts miss. So the 8% melee cap should be OK for tanks, since spell hit scales better than melee hit with hit rating.
There are also abilities which increase your chance to hit ( for us, draenei heroic presence, improved fairy fire from a boomkin). So your hit cap isn’t that rigid but being capped really helps. It’s also useful to keep all the gear you have with hit rating on it. You never know when you get a great upgrade which doesn’t have any hit rating on it.
Feel free to ask questions and point out any mistakes i may have made, and I hope it will answer the questions you may have about hit rating. Also if anyone wants to add any information to the melee hit rating part, feel free to do so.
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