Too much hit??Follow

Let me start this off by confessing that I'm not so swuft at that thar number crunchin'. On to my question:

I have been trying to gear up via Heroics on my DK. I've tried to only geat gear that is specifically for my spec (dps) and when I gem or enchant it's for str or ap (mainly str when possible). Without doing any stacking at all, I have somehow ended up at almost 11% hit. I was told that 8% is cap. This being the case, without ditching my gear is there a way to lower your hit rating? The gear I have is a 3/5 T9 as well as some nifty pants that I got from my very first 25 man raid ever (holy CRAP it was mind boggling), mostly gear from ToC/PoS/HoL for the rest. I don't want to post my armory link because people will point, laugh and make me cry. (plus I cant from work)

As a kinda follow up, what exactly is the effect of having too much hit?


Bryllphon of Anvilmar, He Who Has Hit

Bryllphon's Armory

I wouldn't worry about how far over the hit cap you are at this time. You're sitting at 330, while the "recommended" amount is 263. The reason I say that is it is very difficult to exactly hit that number. Now, you are in a very transitional gear phase right now so you will be switching out a number of pieces for upgrades which may or may not have hit on them.

The best advice I could give would be to evaluate after every upgrade to see what you need to do. If, for example, you pick up your t9 helm and manage to get Pladed Greaves of Providence, you'd be trading 107 hit rating for some dps upgrades.

As it sits right now, you are using a mix of tank and dps gear. I'd recommend swapping out the tanking items for dps as soon as you are able. You should see a decent dps increase.

My recommendations: (if you don't like it, ignore me)

1.) Get the crafted boots. Spend your frost badges on saronite and get the ICC crafted boots. Since you're a miner, the rest of the mats should be free or near free. Plus with the fact that you'll be getting saronite from badges, the boots should be completely free.

2.) Finish getting your tier 9 by getting the helm. Technically if you want to be the best in slot for tier 9 stuff, you want the ToC crafted chest piece (you can get the orbs with normal badges) and the rest of the tier 9. That means dropping the hit from your helm and legs.

3.) Get actual dps gear. You're half dps half tank, I'd be surprised if you could break 3k dps in your setup. Never take tanking gear to dps with just because it has strength on it and it is purple. I'd rather you use a dps blue than a tanking purple for dps.

4.) Quit gemming for stamina as a dps. Gem strength, strength and more strength. The ONLY time you gem anything else is to either A.) meet your meta (one +10 stats gem, 1 +10str/15stam gem) or B.) if the socket is yellow and has a strength socket bonus (where you put str/crit).

5.) Drop the icewalker to boots if you can. Attack power is way more dps, and you only need icewalker if you're short on hit, and you're way over it.

6.) Change your heart strike glyph for dancing rune weapon. Heart strike is a PvP glyph. If you try to pvp and pve in the same gear/spec/glyphs you will fail at both. Jack of all trades and terrible at all of them.

I cringed... literally cringed when I clicked your unholy spec and looked at your talent and glyph choices for unholy.

You have many more problems than simply too much hit. You haven't learned how to play your death knight yet.

Tank gear you have:

Cloak (dodge and expertise)
Bracers (defense and parry)
Ring1 (dodge)
Ring2 (dodge, parry, and expertise)

Tanking stats are dodge, parry, defense, shield block, armor value in green (i.e. improved armor), and items with pure stamina and nothing else. If an item has any of those, you want to avoid it for your dps set. If you want to get them for a possible tanking set, that's fine, but do not use them for dps.

It depends. The thing with defense rating is that it lowers the chance that you get a critical hit on you. In heroics and raids, getting crit can one-shot you - which is why a proper tank will be crit immune before going in there. Which basically means that you will need to achieve that level (which is 535 defense SKILL for heroics and 540 for raids [=about 690 defense RATING]) before specifically focusing on any other stat. As long as you are not immune to crits, as a rule of thumb, you can avoid all other tank stats in favour of defense rating - which means that you might want to go for a +def enchant to reach that point. Once you reach the point where you have so much passive defense rating on your gear that you are crit-immune, without enchants or buffs, you'll want to forego all +def enchants you might have to get stamina, dodge and parry rating, or what-have-you.

Keep in mind that ALL of the above information only goes if you want to TANK. Like Dilbrt pointed out, none of this works for a DPS Death Knight. In fact, DPS Death Knights want to forego defense, parry and dodge rating completely and focus on completely other stats instead (like, for example, armor penetration). If an item has defense, parry or dodge rating on it, again as a rule of thumb, you will NOT want to use it if you are DPSing. If you want to swap between tanking and DPSing, you will need two different sets of gear to do it effectively (and probably two different specs too).


The cap on armor penetration is technically 100%, though the problem is that armor cannot be reduced below a set amount (around 3200, I believe) AT ALL. Which means that once you reach, say, 70% armor penetration, there is little use in getting more of the stat seeing as the difference between 70% and 90% armor penetration is going to be minimal.

That said, you'll want to read over these two links;
http://www.wowwiki.com/Defense
http://www.wowwiki.com/Armor_penetration
They have more detailed information on how defense and armor penetration work.

*scribbles page after page of notes and curses the need for maintenance*

I started working for the emblems to get my 4/5 piece of the t9 gear last night and have started watching the AH for Str gems. I read up on those two threads and that does clarify some of the questions that I had as far as def cap and things like that. The only question I have left about def cap is that I keep hearing (seeing?) the terms "hard cap" and "soft cap", which is more important? I figure since I have 1/2 tank and 1/2 dps gear I'm 1/2 way towards having two sets, one for dps one for tanking.

To clarify about what tabstopper's saying; the defense 'soft cap' (which, if you want to do it right, should simply be called 'being uncrittable') is at 535 for heroics and 540 for raids. The defense 'hard cap' is the point where stacking additional defense gives you no more benefit AT ALL. I'm not entirely sure where this point is, but I wouldn't worry about it, afaik it's higher than 600 defense skill and never really reached anyway.

Yeah, but Rogues tend to hit their effective crit cap as it is, so they are more often hunting for hit.

Sounds like the two most likely results from a blind date...

I hit 400 hit rating, thinking I only had 20 or so to go for the dual-wield cap, but then I remembered I had Nerves of Cold Steel and only needed 164 hit rating to soft-cap.

I'm halfway to the hard-cap, though.