Hit and expertise for RetFollow

Until it is fixed its the general consensus that the old talented hit increasing talent from prot is active on all paladins now. Whether it is a bug or not is unclear. There is a ton of stuff on this at elitist jerks if you want some verification. Your melee hit cap should be 6 percent or so until this is changed. You will still miss an occasional judgement with this low of a hit rating but it allows you to stack more crit and expertise.

And perhaps hold on to some armor penetration stuff as well. While currently its a gimped stat there have been some posts from ghostcrawler talking about how they would like to buff it. And even though its not as useful for ret as fury if they buff it enough it may become more valuable.

It was. 8% is melee hit cap, but it doesn't cover your judgements, so that is probably where those misses are coming from. You will want to be expertise capped also, it's a great dps boost.

This issue has been bothering me and the other ret paly in our guild forever now. We are in a guild that is clearing 25 man Naxx in one night now. From what I understand there used to be a ghost cap at 5% for special abilities and 8% for autoswing. Now the new patch fixed that and everything is 8% as long as you have a dranei in the raid. Though the highest geared person in our relm is a ret paly that has only 170ish hit rating and 19 expertise and still puts out L337 dps. You can see my armory in the sig to find my hit rating and expertise which i believe is 7.9% hit and 16 expertise. Depending on the fight I can put out somewhere between 3.5K dps to 5.5k dps which makes me think that hit and expertise is very important while the #1 ret paly makes me think that expertise is more important and hit is whatever as long as you put out as much damage as possible when you actually do hit.

If by jewelry you mean rings then yes. The best two rings for ret palys imo is the Circle of Death that drops of sapph 10 and Ruthlessness that drops off of three bosses in 25 Naxx. Those are the only two strength dps rings in the game currently and both have expertise.

So from responses here and what i've tracked down elsewhere:

never ever gem for hit/expertise. 16 str >> 16 hit/14 expertise

Gear up for hit and expertise as they come with a large preference for these over haste and arm pen until they are capped (8% for hit, 6.5% for expertise). Crit is about as good.

Gear hit and expertise about equally; no need to cap one or the other first since +1% is +1%.

For me personally, i'ma shed non str gems for str gems, and some hit for expertise if i can.

let me put it into some perspective. using some very basic math.

with divine strenth (+15%), Kings buff (+10%), and sheath of light(30% AP > SP). Ret pallies use about 155% the value of 1 str.

Now, taking into account that consicrate on single target accounts from 10-15% of your DPS in a boss fight, and doesnt use hit.
im going to say that we use about 85-90% the value of 1 Hit.

Now to go even farther, for most melee DPS 1% hit and 1% expertise will net roughly the same increase in dps, however for ret,
our Judgments account for ~25% our DPS in a boss fight, AND does NOT use Expertise. so 15% DPS from Consicrate + 25% DPS from Judments . . .

we utilize only 60% of expertise's value.

to summerize,

we get an extra free 55% more from STR
we waste 15% of every point of Hit.
we waste 40% of every piont of expertise.

Hit is only an "OK" stat now,
Expertise is straight trash.

Str is better, point for point, then any other stat available to use by aleast 2 times. and in many cases, 3 times more effective then any other DPS stat.

let me simplify this even farther

Tier 1 stats
-Str

Tier 2 stats
-Hit
-Crit rating

Tier 3 stats
-agi

Trash
-expertise
-armor pen
-haste
-Hell, everything else.

Edited, Jan 28th 2009 12:20pm by RuenBahamut

They did put a wasted stat on Tier gear, and people do QQ all day.

I am Right, if you dont believe me there are plenty of site completely dedicated to showing your what your going to get out of every stat to reinforce what ive already said.

Edit: the numbers i used above are not invented in any way, i took my own charactor stats and figured the %'s myself.

Edited, Jan 28th 2009 12:33pm by RuenBahamut

ok, to help you figure out, ill try to some facts, some ive said but from other angles.

one, i dont have ghoat hit because i never actually talented into precision . . .ever. back whan i was a noob, i didnt see the use for it and by the time i figured it out, i was already hit capped anyway.

second the experise, the reason why it is such a wasted stat is because our most damage ability we have, cant be parried blocked or dodged. so damaging is said attack that it accounts for 25% of our total DPS on single target. and to go farther, any good ret will be keeping up consicrate as often as possible, another power that cant be parried blocked or dodged.

so if 40% of your single target damage cant be blocked parried or dodged, why would you value a stat that would reduce an already 0% chance.

so again, 40% of your dps does not care what your expertise is, that means 40% of the stat is wasted. and that 40% can be very much higher really if your fighting undead, as exorcism and holy wrath also cant be blocked parried or dodged. higher still if your fighting trash and consicrate is hitting multiple targets. but i didnt go into that as im trying to keep the numbers as real as possible.

if for some reason you still question, then maybe someone else can explain it better then i can.

Edited, Jan 28th 2009 12:57pm by RuenBahamut

Thanks for the input TRBD. I think you're underrating expertise, though. Check the math used at elitist jerks; they place expertise above crit, below hit. Its certainly not a trash stat. Looking at my naxx stats, most of my attacks are missing 5% of the time, nearly all dodge. thats nothing to sneeze at, and certainly ex capping would be much better than stacking haste or arm pen.

I absolutely see that STR is better than anything else, and hit and crit come next. But I think expertise has to be rated at least equal to agi, if not better.

I do get you analysis of why hit is better than expertise though, i didn't think about how it was affecting judgements (ie, that judgments are a big part of damage and already can't be dodged or parried). So it is better to hit cap before ex cap, but i still think ER is something to go for after you're hit capped.

what Ehcks and Ruen have posted are spot on.

the argument for the importance of Expertise is moot. you WILL NOT gem or enchant for it. expertise should not be sought after, it will just happen on your gear as you upgrade. it will usually take only 1 piece of gear with an expertise stat to become soft capped.

if you are concerned with squeezing every point of damage out of your gear, run a spreadsheet with the pieces in question...but be sure to included the actual scenerio.

/facepalm

So young, so naieve

yeah, blizz stated that they intentionally put "trash" stats on all of the tier 7 gear (not just rets). This was supposedly for 2 reasons. first, it's supposed to make gearing up take thought and show the difference between a good player (takes gear w/ less of the trash stats) and a, um, casual player (takes an epic cause it's epic and tier piece cause it's tier....). Secondly, this allows them to make higher lvl tier sets better by giving them better stats, not just more of the same stats. Is this just a clever excuse for poorly designed gear? probably. are those 2 things true about current gear? absolutely for the first and hopefully for the second (haven't seen tier 8 gear yet of course to know if it's really better stats lol).

On the Str-hit-crit-exp issue, ruen is pretty close to the mark on this. Strength is rediculously so much better than any other stat that that is the ONE stat that you should be gear for. yes there may be a peice of gear as you're gearing up that has soo much AP and hit and crit and expertise that maybe it's better... for instance 150 AP is obviously gonna be better than 50 str... hence the reason if you check my armory, you'll see i do have some peices of gear that have AP/agi/crit instead of straight Str/crit. is it what i'd prefer? no. is the polearm i have from Maexxna better than the axe i had from H-HoL? yes.. although that's for a different reason... i'm fully in love w/ the speed of the wraith spear. even though we don't use SoC anymore, my divine storms and crusader stikes are still considerably bigger w/ a slower weapon. but that's off topic.

while i think ruen, may be, um, overstating the uselessness of exp by adding it as a trash stat, i think he's very close to putting the same value on stats that i would. Strength is amazing (AP slightly behind it because it doesn't benefit from kings/divine Str). Hit up to 8% will be a noticeable improvement, but not near as much as str. expertise will be an improvement up to 6.5%, but not as much as hit. crit is an improvement to dps, and prolly better than exp imo (eh, i love those big numbers...). 1 str is roughly equal to about 2.25 AP. 1 str is roughtly (i really need to get to doing my maths again for more accurate number)equal to about 3 hit or crit w/ hit being just barely preferred till hit cap because a missed white hit = no seal damage which. hit vs crit would be equal as far as the dice roll goes on any hit except for the impact a missed hit has on the seal damage. exp is going to be somewhat lower than hit/crit due to how much of our dps comes from judements these days and the fact that judgements only hit, crit or miss on the attack table. but it's still worth having on your gear. as was said ealier though for the glove/wrist enchants the AP enchants are going to be worth about 4-5 times as much dps as the expertise ones for a ret pally.

so, str is the deciding factor in gear. if str is equal between peices, then if you're not hit capped hit is slightly better than anything else, but not by much, crit is close, and expertise is only going to be the better choice if it's considerably more than the hit or crit on the other peice. all other stats are trash and shouldn't be taken into account unless they are absolutely rediculously more of them. this includes haste, ArP, SP, agi (i've seen some peices w/ rediculous agi+crit and in that case the agi might be worth it), stam, int, etc. to whoever mentioned that blizz was planning on buffing ArP, i don't see it ever being buffed enough to be good for ret. if it was good for a class that has so many holy attacks that don't benefit from it, it would be too OP a stat for classes that don't have spell damage, such as warriors and rogues.

just a note, very little of what i say here is based on hard math. hard math may modify my numbers a little bit one way or the other, but i have been too busy working and when i'm not working enjoying the game to be worried about numbers. also to note, my ret gear sucks. I've had horrible luck w/ main set rolls in raids. so far in about 2 months of wotlk raiding on camila i have 2 main set drops out of 10 man naxx... the rest came from farming heroics. this is compared to my healing set being mostly raid dropped gear and my other pally (holy) who's been raiding for about 3 weeks now having almost half his gear from raids... so you can judge my words based on my gear if you'd like. it will just reinforce how much i hate the deathknights that's taking my stuff lol.

and yes, i'm waiting for a good SoB/tM libram.... pretty freaking retarded that blizz stated they were leaving SoB/tM damage less nerfed than the rest of our seals/judgements because they wanted that to be the seal we use for pve... and then they only give a SoC libram for ret pallies from PVE sources... at least we have a CS libram available from heroic noth (although i haven't seen it drop yet of course).

sorry this post is so lengthy. anyone who knows me, knows to expect that though ;)