hit cap...

[Scyepogg]

Damn me, doing so hard and spending money on gems and enchants to get to 9% and now learning that hit cap has been reduced to 8%. Don't make that mistake

[The Deserted Grail]

Any idea if the same percent goes for melee, ranged and spells?

[Scyepogg]

As far as I know, yes for all types of attacks.

[Scyepogg]

Despite of the above-mentioned lowering of hit cap, I still feel more and more uncomfortable as I progress in gearing up, as the better the gear, the less hit rating it gives you, focusing more on crit, haste, AP and whatnot but not hit.
Despite hearing many times it is useless, I've made up my mind to invest one talent point into Focused Aim. That will effectively let me refrain from eating +hit food as well as free up a gem slot from hit rating.
Respeccing for changing one talent point does sound a bit... weird. Am I getting hardcore or what?

edit: And now I know where to get that point. In raids I do so many crits that with 2/2 Go for the Throat my pet actually stays on full focus constantly despite spamming all of its abilities. I think 25 focus per crit instead of 50 focus per crit would be more than enough.

[Scyepogg]

And I now learned that spell hit cap used to be 17%, unlike 9% that melee/ranged used to be. So I doubt it was lowered to 8% from 17%. I can't find any evidence as to how much was spell hit cap lowered or was it lowered at all.

[The Deserted Grail]

From Elitisticjerks:

Mage Gearing and Hit Cap at Level 80
Your first prority is getting spell damage. Your second second priority is also spell damage.
Even in crit heavy Fire and Frostfire specs, spell damage will be your best stat to stack via gems for a long while.

You also want to cap spell hit, but not at the cost of using inferior gear just because it has more hit.
When you get decked out in wisely chosen Naxxramas gear, you should easily reach the hit cap. Gem for it if you're close.

You want to reach 17% spell hit. You can gain 1% from a Draenei in your group, 3% from a raid debuff, 3% from talents.
Frostfire Bolt seems to gain 6% hit from Elemental Precision, a bug that's going to get fixed sooner or later.
The rest has to be obtained by gear, you need 26.232 hit rating for 1% spell hit at level 80.

That means if you have no spell buffs or talents, you need 446 hit rating for 17% spell hit chance.
Your Water Elemental and Mirror Image pets also get the spell hit from your gear, but not from your talents.


Crit and Haste then are your secondary DPS stats. They are vastly worse than spell power until you get around 4k spell power or more.
1 haste rating: Is worth about 0.7-0.8 spell power in full Naxxramas gear for most specs.
1 crit rating: Is worth 0.8 spell power for Frostfire, 0.7 for Fire, 0.6 for Arcane/Fire, 0.5 for Frost.

Intellect is on par with crit for Arcane/Fire and is has 1/3 of the strength of crit for the other specs. Spirit is mostly useless.

Mana is also very important, make sure you never run out of it.
If you use everything at your disposal and still run out of mana, check your spec and buffs.
If that still doesn't help then drop some haste, get some intellect, use Mage Armour. But don't stack spirit ever.

The percentage conversion for all ratings and stats at level 80 can be found in Combat Ratings at level 80

As for meta gems, the only acceptable choice is one of the +3% crit damage meta gems due to how it actually works.
It is worth about 150-200 DPS, which makes any headpieces without a meta socket a very bad choice.

The nice thing with spells is that they cannot be blocked, parried or dodged. When playing a melee class I find it annoying how even with a high hit rating a lot of my attacks still get nullified by one or more of those >_>

[Scyepogg]

When playing a hunter, I find it pleasant that none of my attacks can be blocked, parried or dodged and I only need 262 hit rating (8%) to be 100% sure I will hit.

As for spirit and mages, I am not too experienced there, but arcane mages have a spirit-enhancing talent and a talent that allows mana regen to continue in combat, so that still could be of some use in specific builds.

Still, is shaman cap same 17%? The most weird thing is enhancement shamans who have 3 hit caps, 8% for yellow melee attacks (stormstrike/lava lash), 17% (oresumably) for spells and 25% for white melee.

[The Deserted Grail]

Hunters have it the easiest with hit rating, naturally.

I've been reading this thread on Elitisticjerks for an hour. It seems that the spirit regening talent in Arcane tree is 100% useless for the moment and the class is suffering from mana issues (slight if not major), especially in longer fights and raid/instance runs with few pauses. Blizzard is promising to make "spirit more interesting for mages", but it'll be left to be seen if they mean more than changing that one talent from giving a 30% mana regen in combat to 50% mana regen.