spell hit at 80

[ganimus]

just thought i would show mages raw spell hit caps here, spelled out as simply as possible.
For reference 1% spell hit is gained from 26.23 spell hit rating

446 required before talents and buffs
368 required if we take 3/3 Elemental Precision(Fire/Frost), or Arcane Focus(Arcane)
289 Required if Frostfire Bolt continues to get 6% from Elemental Precision, +EP/AF

There are spell hit buffs from other party members, but i wont include them here.  Also recognize that the EP bug will only affect your frostfire bolt, so if you go that spec, your other spells will notice increased miss rate. Notably scorch, which will be more of a pain in applying your debuff.

[Sunrath (Devon)]

I'll see if i can get the image linked when i get home, but in the last couple instance run's i've done, i've noticed my ele still missing quite a lot when im not. Blizz said they were giving hit from the masters to thier pets, but it looks like the ele might still be a little behind.

I'll dig through some screens when i get home...

[ganimus]

hmmm. since i switched to frostfire spec, i havent gone back to look at my deep frost spec stats.  I will try to look into that, since I cant play the stupid game anyway. =)

[Mord]

Sounds like arcane is getting buff 6% spell hit.....

[ganimus]

i just looked at vranx's post about patch notes.  Looks like multiple arcane improvements again.   Too bad we never got the 2pc tier bonus gear. =)

[Sunrath (Devon)]

i don't understand the nerf to the speed reduction on Blizzard.

It doesn't make blizz do more damage. It's never used in PvP for that reason. 99% of people who PvP don't even bother spec'ing into it.

So why nerf the speed reduction? Are people too jelous of our AE Kiting abilities?

[Vranx (Scott)]

From the Mage post at Elitist Jerks:

Mage Gearing and Hit Cap at Level 80
Your first prority is getting spell damage. Your second second priority is also spell damage.
Even in crit heavy Fire and Frostfire specs, spell damage will be your best stat to stack via gems for a long while.

You also want to cap spell hit, but not at the cost of using inferior gear just because it has more hit.
When you get decked out in wisely chosen Naxxramas gear, you should easily reach the hit cap. Gem for it if you're close.

You want to reach 17% spell hit. You can gain 1% from a Draenei in your group, 3% from a raid debuff, 3% from talents.
Frostfire Bolt seems to gain 6% hit from Elemental Precision, a bug that's going to get fixed sooner or later.
The rest has to be obtained by gear, you need 26.232 hit rating for 1% spell hit at level 80.

That means if you have no spell buffs or talents, you need 446 hit rating for 17% spell hit chance.
Your Water Elemental and Mirror Image pets also get the spell hit from your gear, but not from your talents.

Crit and Haste then are your secondary DPS stats. They are vastly worse than spell power until you get around 4k spell power or more.
1 haste rating: Is worth about 0.7-0.8 spell power in full Naxxramas gear for most specs.
1 crit rating: Is worth 0.8 spell power for Frostfire, 0.7 for Fire, 0.6 for Arcane/Fire, 0.5 for Frost.

Intellect is on par with crit for Arcane/Fire and is has 1/3 of the strength of crit for the other specs. Spirit is mostly useless.

Mana is also very important, make sure you never run out of it.
If you use everything at your disposal and still run out of mana, check your spec and buffs.
If that still doesn't help then drop some haste, get some intellect, use Mage Armour. But don't stack spirit ever.

The percentage conversion for all ratings and stats at level 80 can be found in Combat Ratings at level 80

As for meta gems, the only acceptable choice is one of the +3% crit damage meta gems due to how it actually works.
It is worth about 150-200 DPS, which makes most headpieces without a meta socket a bad choice.

[ganimus]

Ok, here is a synopsis of what myself and azunai have discovered, comparing our dps with drastically different hit ratings.
If you fill your equipment slots with crit and sp, instead of hit, you CAN counterbalance your dps loss from misses, with greater performance when you hit.  I had nearly 200 more spell hit, and 200 less combined sp and crit, and our dps was very close throughout the raid.

However, the fact that you can improve your dmg per frostfire bolt enough to compensate for misses, and even out dps is not the only factor to consider. (albeit the most important)
1) scorch is VITAL in maintianing maximum dps.  Maintaining your scorch debuff requires 1 cast for roughly every 5 frostfire bolts. However, if your scorch misses, you then are forced to recast 2 more times to reapply the debuff. This is 3 casts for scorch application instead of one
2) Living bomb is also a debuff that should be kept up at all times.  In the last raid i ran, I recieved more dps from living bomb than from my Hot Streak pyroblast procs.  While a miss on this recast will only cost one additional cast, it still removes dps time.
3) here is an important, but more abstract bonus to spell hit.  Hot Streak will end up giving you about  15% of your dps. Every time you cast a critical hit, you need to follow that spell with another critical hit.  If you miss your spell entirely on the second cast, you not only lose your dps for that spell, but also the possibility to proc Hot Streak for another 2 casts.

Consider, and let me know what you think. I have considered the hit v sp arguement before, and now again just recently, and will continue to run at or near the hit cap for the forseeable future.

[Vranx (Scott)]

When BC came out the article at Elitist Jerks said hit cap was the most important stat you needed, fill out hit cap and then get more damage. I was surprised when WotLK came out they had an article saying try to get hit but not at the expense of damage. I disagree and will try to get hit capped this week. Im still a bit confused about it though.

I understand its 446 to be hit capped without talents.
I understand its 368 if I have either the frost tree or arcane tree hit talent.
But what is the 289 cap for?

[Zerginator]

I understand its 446 to be hit capped without talents.
I understand its 368 if I have either the frost tree or arcane tree hit talent.
But what is the 289 cap for?

289 is just exploiting a bug with frostfire bolt as it gets double the +hit from the EP talent, so it will eventually be fixed and that line should disappear from documentation.

[ganimus]

It may eventually be fixed, but they have had a similar problem with frostbolt until wotlk, because it could be partially resisted. They never seemed to fix that one in bc. Either way, if you spec 289, the other spells you cast would be missing significantly, since only ffb will get the 6% to hit bonus.

[falis]

     Yeah that new elitist jerks post about mages kinda sucks on the whole hit issue.  "Don't use inferior gear just to hit the hit cap" yeah thats real helpful.  To the best of my knowledge blizzard hasn't "nerfed" hit since BC.  Assuming they haven't it should be your best dps scaling stat until you hit the hit cap.  Not sure why they're changing their tune.

[DOIN-AoK]

At first I was scared to death when I found out i needed 368 to be hit capped.  Remember with BC I was able to be hit capped at 54.  Then I started looking at what was out there as far as mail gear for ele shamans.  Everything I see seems to be geared towards haste and crit.  At the same time those are what is put at the back of the hit>sp>crit>haste.  there really is very little mail +hit gear that is not stacked with AP.  I am currently wearing 2 pieces of cloth to get my hit cap in addition to eating hit buff food..  I looked at my naxx numbers from Sunday's run and did seem to be right on as far as hit except for the few times I did not food buff after wipes.
So after looking at the ele shaman gear I stated to wonder if blizz was thinking that we would be able to make up for lost DPS from not being hit capped with bounus damage from crit and increased cast speed from haste.  I am still learning to play with all my new spells and figuring out the prime rotation so it will be a few more runs before I can be consistant enough to try a run both ways and then compare numbers.

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