Shadow and Hit (/Spirit)

[oni 2]

So, I have a question on Hit for Priests. (Which, is also affected by Spirit, of course)

To my understanding, Shadowpriests have been able to get away with fudging on their Hit a bit. In fact, ElitistJerks has said that, the greater your haste, the less you have to worry about being Hit capped.

My own Spriest's hit tends to be closer to 14% (instead of the 15% cap), allowing me to reforge into a bit more Crit after the Haste cap. I rarely miss anything, as far as I can tell. Except, when it is a fight mechanic, like with the second boss of MSV. (And, with that fight, I once put on a Spirit flask to see if it would let me overcome the Hit reduction in the first phase of that fight... it didn't make a difference)

Recently, someone in another forum told me that I need to bring my Hit back up to 15%. His justification for this was the 5% buff to Shadowform damage in 5.2. Which, as far as I can tell, doesn't have anything to do with Hit mechanics. But, perhaps someone here can illuminate me on whether I'm doing it wrong?

[Damien 1,514]

I'm no Shadow Priest specialist, but I think Affliction Warlocks are in a similar state. Let's assume that, theoretically, all your secondary stats (Critical Strike Rating, Haste Rating, and Mastery Rating) are better than Hit Rating.

Does it mean that you should reforge away from Hit? I think not. For Affliction Warlocks, where simulations have always clearly showed that Haste Rating and Mastery Rating are better than Hit Rating, most players still prefer reaching the 15% hit cap. The reason is simple. It takes a lot of skill to make up for missing applications of your DoTs, especially in the case of Affliction Warlocks because a lot of their damage revolves around properly using Haunt and if a cast of Haunt misses, you need to react properly to make up for it.

My guess is that not being hit capped makes playing a Shadow Priest harder, so it's not necessarily recommended, unless you're going for World Firsts.

All that was assuming Hit Rating is not good, but I've just run all the Shadow Priest profiles of Simulation Craft and I can assure you that Hit Rating is much more beneficial than any of the other secondary stats.

[Stasis 36]

My guess is that not being hit capped makes playing a Shadow Priest harder, so it's not necessarily recommended, unless you're going for World Firsts.

Yeah there's really no good reason not to be hit capped these days.

The more damage you do, the more valuable hit rating becomes. Since a miss is also a wasted GCD and the damage you could have done in a GCD increases with gear (and the 5% shadowform buff).

And if you miss 1% of your attacks, it essentially nullifies the benefit of 1% extra crit. So you've gained absolutely nothing, but made the fight a little more stressful due to having to double check that all of your dots are landing, or having to recast Mind Blast/DP/Mind Sear/etc. And don't even think about the disaster that missing a Mind Flay Insanity cast would cause to your DPS...

End of the day, it's easily capped and the negatives of not capping wildly outweigh any positives gained by a little extra crit.

Edited March 14, 2013 by Stasis

[oni 2]

Actually, reforging out of my crit now to stack haste higher and higher. With 5.2, haste has much more value, and stacking crit (after a haste breakpoint) isn't apparently as good.

But I still hardly miss anything at around 14%. A once-in-a-raid-night thing, as far as I can tell.

And like I said, the more haste you have, the less that Hit begins to matter as much, from what the eggheads say at several authoritative sites.

Edited March 21, 2013 by oni

[Vlad 411]

I'm a little late to this party it seems, but as Damien pointed out, Hit is actually quite good for Shadow. You basically do want to cap it. Sure, you can go a few tiny points below if your character is better optimized like that, but it's not worth giving up any meaningful amount of hit for other stats at this point.