Hit vs StrengthFollow

Hit is ranked lower then other stats primarily because a missed hit for feral druids effects us much less then any other class. Only 30-40% of our damage comes from white attacks, which is the lowest of the melee classes. So a extra 1% hit is only +0.4% increase in dps from white damage, as opposed to 0.7% for many duel weilders. Second, the penalty of missing on a special attack is lower for ferals because we use energy. A missed attack only consumes a fraction of the energy cost of the attack, where mana or rage users lose 100% of the cost of the attack. Finally we don't suffer from the loss of a global cooldown from a miss, with using energy and having a 1s global cooldown, we have more GCDs then we can ever use.

That is not to say you shouldn't forget about getting hit. Missed white attacks don't proc OOC and enough missed specials will consume energy that could have been used to land another attack. I try to socket hit/xxx gems in order to boost my hit up, but being short of the hit cap doesn't mean I'm a gimped dps.

As for the graph, the reason it doesn't make sense to you is because your assuming that the line goes through the origin (0 crit, 0 AP). That is not true in this case. the equation for the line in the graph is approximately y=100x+9000 which means that at 0 crit, AP is 9000. Another way of looking at it is to say even if you had 0% crit, you would need to have at least 9000ap before you started thinking about stacking agi instead of str. The primary reason for this is that a big chunk of our damage comes from bleeds which does not scale from crit at all, however all of our attacks scale on ap which makes it much more valueble.

Edited, Jan 27th 2009 8:42am by SirJac

The only time I would consider gemming for Hit (other than as required to activate my Metagem) is if my hit was VERY low and it started to affect my rotation. At one stage, I had only about 20 +hit rating and found keeping all my debuffs up was quite difficult. Sometimes it woult take 3 hits to get rake or mangle back up which naturally decreases the uptime on them significantly.

My gear has more +hit on it now, but I also have got more used to out "rotation" so it may not be as much of an issue for me as it was then anyway.

Two things:

One thing that kinda bothers me is how they regularized itemization to be the same for Rogue and Druids. Because of that, it's rather hard to get Strength on your leather. I guess the only way is to gem for it.

From the top of my head I can't remember anything that would prove me wrong here, but since they made the change to Heart of the Wild a while ago, there's no benefit to gain from Strength over AP, right? (Obviously considering AP is twice the amount of Strength)

Aah, right, makes sense. Guess I was thinking too much about benefits gained from our own buffs/talents.

I also thought about it since I posted, and I guess with Predatory Strikes and Survival of the Fittest, it'd be best to have pure AP on weapons (good thing that's already the case) and then rough Strength on armor. (Had forgotten about the change to PS when I first posted)

Guess I'll try to look for it when I start gemming my gear.

str is by no means a bad stat, and in fact its, strictly speaking, a "better" stat and an equivalent amount of AP given the options. however, straight AP isnt bad either, even with the potential gains on kings. using high-end rogue leather is generally preferable to trying to hold on to more "feral" oriented pieces of gear that utilize str over straight AP.

as for hit, getting to the hit cap isnt a bad idea (8% before talents or buffs for level-capped raid boss) but not something thats completely necessary. i find the 5% for pvp is a good starting point; the last 3% will generally fill itself in via various means. haste is really the most important "secondary" stat for a druid after crit. the way they reworked OoC having more haste = having more procs, and from a kitty dps standpoint, that means a significant boost to dps aside from the obvious increase in white damage.