+hitFollow

i was wondering how important +hit is for feral druids, both tank and dps. and when do we cap out +hit?

The cap is 142 Hit Rating (=9% to hit). Until you reach this cap, +Hit is one of the best stats we can have on our gear. Luckily we share gear with rogues who, because they dual wield, need 442 +hit to reach their cap, so there is plenty of leather out there with +hit on it.

This applies to cat DPS. For tanking, it can help reduce the risk of a taunt being resisted but I for one have pretty close to zero +hit on my tanking gear. Your other stats are so much more important for tanking.

In all fairness though, a miss in cat form isn't as wasteful as it is for any other class/spec. For any spell caster, a resist is a complete waste of mana and casting time so spell hit is a very high priority. For melee in general, missing takes a big chunk out of their white damage which is ~60% of their total dps. For warriors in particular it's even worse since they depend on white hits to build rage for abilities.

Cat form druids though it's not as bad when we miss. Our white damage makes up much less of our total dps and we don't have to deal with the extra miss rate from dual weilding. For our abilities, a miss is the loss of only 25% of the energy cost or about half a tick, with the exception of finishers that lose full cost on a miss.

It's still a good thing to get + hit for your dps set, but we get less out of it compared to other classes since we don't lose as much potential dps for missing. Thus while it's a great way to boost your total dps, I believe that you still get more bang for your item budget buck with agility. Luckily there isn't really any need to compromise since the hit cap for us is so much lower then it is for most other classes.

For tanking, it's entirely optional. For raids it's standard practice that the dps wait until the tank has X threat on the target for a buffer to avoid pulling aggro. Once you got that buffer, it's usually no problem to have a higher TPS then the rest of the raid as long as your dps doesn't have higher tier gear then the tank, since your operating with effectively unlimited rage. In 5 mans some + hit can be nice to have since the dps isn't always going to wait so you want to make sure that your first couple hit connect. Still, it's a matter of preferance since there are plenty of options available if your first mangle/lacerate miss.

I could see how you missed it among the three other responses, lol, but RareBeast addressed this with the first few words of his post just above.




Edited, Feb 5th 2008 6:18pm by JeeBar