Friday, December 26, 2008

Is Your Aim TOO Good?

I've written a couple posts lately about hit rating and what the caps are. I should've been more clear, perhaps, that these are raiding hit caps. If what you're doing is running heroics or running normal five-mans, these hit rating caps are WAY TOO HIGH! You're wasting valuable itemization points by overcapping hit rating. For my hunter, I've swapped out the two one-handed swords (from Wyrmrest) and their 66 hit rating for a polearm with no hit rating. The extra hit rating from the swords is only relevant once I'm doing raids. Since I'm not yet raiding, I can afford to swap those for a polearm giving me a little more in the way of stats and crit rating. That's caused my DPS to go up some on the heroics. And I know I still have the gear which I can swap into to raid.

I've never maintained multiple PVE gear sets on my hunter, and only did so half-heartedly for other classes. I kept a (substandard) set of DPS gear for my warrior tank. I kept a few pieces of "dps gear" on my holy priest, but that became not as critical once +healing started adding to +spelldamage. And now, with the conversion of all of that to spellpower, it's even less crucial. I did have the beginnings of PVP sets for both the hunter and holy priest (resilience FTW) but neither was even close to complete.

So, until I actually get some gear and make some decisions about what I'm keeping and what I'm not keeping, my entire backpack is filled with gear I may use - but probably won't. And with hunter bagspace at a premium, it's not a practice I'm sure I can support for much longer.

The message really is to know what sort of hit rating you need to cover the content you're doing. For some classes (shadow priest, boomkin) you should be able to do heroics without any hit rating. But by gum, make sure you're not totally over hit-capped. You'll just be gimping your own DPS.

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