Moving beyond Tier 4...hit ratingFollow

A question for those among you who are into the T5 content:

What do you do about hit rating with the T5 (and comparable) gear?

Overall, my gear level is basically T4; I'm hit capped at 95+ with 3/3 Surefooted. Now, I'm starting to replace some items with T5-equivalent gear. Unfortunately, one thing I'm seeing is a lack of +Hit Rating on the gear. So, I'm getting marginal increases in AP and other stats, but I'm losing +Hit. I'm forced to adjust gems to compensate.

Maybe I'm putting too much emphasis on being hit capped. It is nice to never miss. But, I'm just not seeing how I can stay at the cap without sacrificing AP/AGI/Crit gems, which doesn't necessarily seem like a good idea.

It's seems to be a hit for more, but miss occassionally versus a hit for a little less, but never miss sort of conundrum.

If anyone with the experience has any insights on this problem, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Well, If you're getting into T5 gear, you should be ignoring AP gems. Agi scales with raid buffs like Blessing of Kings and Gift of the Wild, while AP scale with... nothing.

Between Agi/Crit gems and Hit rating gems, hit will boost your overall DPS a lot faster than the other two options. 16 hit = 1% chance to hit = 1% overall DPS increase. I haven't seen any of the mobs in T5 zones like SSC and The Eye, but I'd hazard to guess that all the mobs are level 72-73, which you need 6.5% and 9% hit for respectively.

Here's a simplified list of attribute conversions from WoWWiki.com:

1 Agility = 1 Attack Power
14 Ranged Attack Power = 1 DPS
40 Agility = +1% Critical Hit
22 Critical Strike Rating = +1% Critical Hit
16 Hit Rating = 1% chance to hit

So if you were to gem 2 +8 hit rating gems, you'd get 1% damage increase. If you're getting into T5, I'm guessing your DPS is at least 320, so that'd be a 3.2DPS increase. If you gemmed 2 +8 Agi gems, you'd get a tiny bit more than 1DPS and a fairly negligible amount of crit.

I suppose that if you really want to gem Agi/Crit gems, you could eat Spicy Hot Talbuk which gives 20 hit rating and 20 spirit. The recipe comes from the Cooking Daily, and it's easy to farm the Talbuk Venison for it.

But personally, I'd prefer to be hit capped and eat Warp Burgers or Mudfish for the AGI boost.

Edited, Jan 7th 2008 5:53pm by ProjectMidnight

Head: S3 Arena Helm
Cloak: Drape of the Dark Reavers - Aran
Waist: Girdle of the Prowler - Illhoof; Girdle of Ferocity - Murmur

The S3 Helm does compare favorably to T5.

And the others are solid gear, well worth wearing if you're looking for Hit Rating. Unless you've got every piece of gear at your disposal, or are SV spec, maintaining the Hit Cap requires compromise.

And bringing up the CE helm augment is a non sequitur, as that can be applied to any helm.

I feel the same way. I will always maintain the hit cap, or as close to it as I can get without making ridiculous gear choices. The OP is looking to upgrade his T4 and equivalent gear twith a few T5 pieces he's won, and is wondering how to maintain his hit cap while he's replacing gear with +Hit with gear without +Hit which is otherwise an upgrade. The items I listed can help.

Edited, Jan 8th 2008 6:08am by Kompera