Hit Happens

Next time, I wish Neshura would give me an easier topic to theorycraft on. She wanted to know about hit rating.

First things first. I'm merely pulling together information that's freely available on the internet. As my good friend Tom Lehrer would say, "Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - Only be sure always to call it please 'research'." With that esoteric reference aside, I'll dive right in.

Things you need to know:

1. There is some (limited) math in this post. Viewer discretion is advised.
   
2. This works for MELEE and RANGED classes only. Please do not attempt to apply the (limited) theorycrafting to your shadow priest.
3. When World of Warcraft determines a hit (commonly referred to as 'rolling'), several things are determined simultaneously. A single roll accounts for many results. Most notably the roll determines miss, block, dodge, parry, critical etc. The rest of the results that aren't "special" in some way are the times when you hit. So, raising hit actually contributes more to lowering your miss.
   
4. Raid or dungeon mobs have a defense equal to their level times 5. That is, level 73 raid bosses have 73*5 = 365 defense.

There are two formulas that determine miss percentage, based on the difference between your weapon skill and the targets defense.

If the difference between your weapon skill and targets defense is 10 or under:

• 5% + (Defense Skill - Weapon Skill)*0.1%

If the difference between your weapon skill and targets defense if over 10:

• 7% + (Defense Skill - Weapon Skill - 10)*0.4%

Thus, if you're a level 70 character, with 350 weapon skill and you're fighting a level 73 boss, we use the second formula (since 365-350 > 10. Miss percentage = 7% + (365-350-10)*0.4%=7%+5*0.4%=7+2%=9%.

If, however, you're a dwarf hunter, using a gun your weapon skill is 355 (hooray for racial weapon bonuses). This drops us into the FIRST formula. Miss percentage = 5% + (365-355)*0.1% = 5%+ 1% = 6%. This also applies to a troll hunter using a bow.

So, how do we make up that last remaining percentages to statistically make a miss impossible? Well, there are two ways. Slightly more than 3.9 Weapon Skill Rating (not the same as Weapon Skill Level) gives about 1 point of Weapon Skill Level. So stacking 20 weapon skill level will actually make up 5 points of weapon skill level. The second way to make up the difference is with +hit rating. Each 15.8 hit rating you can acquire lowers your miss by 1%. A dwarf (with gun) or troll (with bow) thus needs +hit rating of 95. Other hunters need +hit rating of 142.

I've not found a ton of guns or bows that a level 70 would use that have weapon skill rating on them. So, I've resorted to +hit. Currently I'm at 75 hit rating (which is not the 95 that I need being a dwarf) but I miss pretty infrequently. I'd say less than 1% of the time.

The last thing I need to mention for hunters, if you're deep enough into Survival Tree (but who is really?) Surefooted will increase your hit percentage (that is lower your miss percentage) by 1% for each of the three points you can take. This drops non-dwarves and non-trolls to needing only 95 +hit. And for us lucky suckers with racial weapon bonuses, we need a mere 48 +hit.