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The Light and How to Swing It: Gearing up your Retribution Paladin for Hit
I know I was supposed to write a guide to gearing up for Haste, but some of you pointed out that Hit is way more important, particularly with the change to melee Haste in late Burning Crusade. You guys are absolutely right, as melee Haste no longer gives the same oomph in Wrath as it did back then. In fact, if we're looking at maximizing our DPS, it's important to actually land our hits. All that Strength isn't going to do jack if we miss our target.So first things first. We make out Hit cap, which frees up our gems and enchants for the all-important Strength. At Level 80, every 32.8 Hit Rating gives us 1% Hit, which means that we'll need a total of about 262.4 to reach the cap or 8%. Raid bosses are considered to be Level 83, three levels above max level -- hence the skull, so we'll need 8%, or 3% above the 5% base chance to miss targets of the same level. Fortunately, there's a whole lot of +Hit DPS plate in Northrend that we won't struggle to hit that cap at all. Here's a quick guide to gearing up our Retribution Paladins for +Hit.
Blood Pact: Warlocks taking a hit
Have you seen any Warlocks lately? For some reason, the only remnant of Warlocks that I see are the odd Demonic Circles scattered here and there in Dalaran. Otherwise, pretty much everybody's re-rolled the flavor-of-the-month Death Knight or a Retribution Paladin. Where's the love? As much as Warlocks are reputedly overpowered in PvP, exactly how a Warlock deals with Death Grip, Strangulate, and a string of crits from the Death Knight and his friends isn't exactly the kind of stuff that make PvP legends.In fact, the way we're designed to deal damage in a slow, painful stream, Warlocks downright blow in PvP -- particularly Arenas -- right now. The king of Arenas today is burst damage, and instagibbing an opponent with a zerg is the order of the day. With very few players stacking the necessary Resilience, Arenas are dominated by players who have gear from heroic Naxxramas. Out of all the cloth classes, Warlocks are the only one without a natural 'out' of a zerg save for the preparation-heavy Demonic Circle (which doesn't break a stun, by the way, and has a meager 40 yard range). Mages still have Ice Block, Blink, and the target-removing Mirror Image. Priests, more than ever, have higher survivability across the board, specially with Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit, and Dispersion across three trees and a plethora of instant heals. This makes Warlocks Target #1 when it comes to a zerg train in Arenas. And it takes about 4 seconds for us to blow up.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Overstacking
When coming into a new spec and role, one of the things you find yourself doing at first is making constant small adjustments. Part of this is simply the nature of the beast. You've been a PvP arms warrior for most of TBC, for example, but now you're a raiding Arms DPS warrior and you need different things from your spec, which in addition is pretty significantly changed from what it was at level 70. Or you were a tank for the original endgame, but stepped away for a while and then came back in time to level to 70 just before the expansion, and are now looking at what you need to do to get ready to tank 10 man raids for your small guild, and are realizing that the leveling prot spec you were using isn't quite up to it.Or you could be fury again after tanking for over a year and you realize that your spec has points in all the wrong places and you have too much hit and not enough crit or AP on your gear. Not that I'd know what that was like. Okay, so I do. In fairness to me, it's not like I intended to be sitting at 550 hit rating and once I stopped and looked at the upgrades I've recently acquired, I realized that I'd gone overboard on hit to the detriment of crit and AP. It's true that the white hit cap for fury is somewhere around 950 hit rating but I'm easily over the 361 or so you need for specials while dual wielding. Assuming that the miss chance for special attacks is 9%, and not 8%, as I've been hearing lately - if it's 8% now, which seems fairly well tested and proved by this point, then you can shift how much hit I need with TG down the table. Once they drop the 5% penalty on specials, you can drop it even further. So while making that soft hit cap on special attacks is very important, you can do it with roughly half the hit rating I've accidentally collected. What I need now is crit and AP. Not related to any of this, but check out this post from the EJ forums and boggle at the significance of passive haste somehow adding hit.
Encrypted Text: I roll on caster loot
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we'll be talking about hit rating and the seeming lack thereof in Northrend gear.After a few all-nighters in a row and a lot of showing up to work very tired, I finally reached level 80 this weekend. After a few victory laps in Dalaran to celebrate my victory over experience points and blue bubbles and Hemet Nesingwary (not for long, I'm sure); the looming realization of level-cap responsibilities started to enter my mind. Reputations, heroics, arena points, and honor – I had a lot of work to do. So, I took my own advice and decided to start some heroics, but not before spec'ing into my PvP mutilate build. I thought about trying out the truly insane DPS of Honor Amongst Thieves builds, but decided to postpone that until I've got some more gear to give it a real trial. Read on to see what I discovered on the way to my first Emblem of Heroism.
The Queue: Bloody rare
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.We had no maintenance today, what a pleasant surprise! Rolling Restart Tuesdays are always a nice breath of fresh air. Or wait, was that what regular maintenance Tuesdays are for? Hmm. I can't keep this 'fresh air' concept straight at all so let's just start on the Q&A. Etcee asked...Can you explain exactly how rare spawns in Northrend work? I've heard multiple theories - from "Every 20 or so hours for spawn," to "Only one rare mob is alive at a time, and the next one doesn't spawn until that one dies," etc.
Spiritual Guidance: Hitting the cap
Welcome to Spiritual Guidance, usually brought to you by Matt Low of World of Matticus. This week, resident Shadow Priest Alex Ziebart steps in to make your day a little darker. We're getting to the point in Wrath where more than just the hardcorest of the hardcore are raiding. Not everyone is there (and not everyone is interested), but the time will come. On the way there, you're going to have to visit an old friend: The hit cap.In Wrath of the Lich King, the hit cap has moved from the original 16% to 17% hit. Why? Prior to this expansion, there was a baseline 1% chance to miss with spells that you could not remove. No matter how much hit rating you had, you were stuck with a 1% chance to miss. In Wrath, that's gone. It can be overcome.
Lichborne: A Death Knight statistics primer
Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly Death Knight column by professor Daniel Whitcomb, who totally has a PhD in Death-Knightology from Ebon Hold University. It's the truth, I swear. I've seen a lot of people asking these questions as we've been getting into the expansion: Now that I am trying to gear by Death Knights, what stats should I get? What's good for a Death Knight? Which armor should I take. We've started getting in that somewhat in the last few columns, with advice on reputation gear and starting zone gear, but I figured today we should delve a little bit more into the why of Death Knight stats. Today's column will double as a little bit of primer on how Death Knights get their power, and what stats you should be looking for on armor in general to make your Death Knight the best it can be. It's not completely in depth, but it should get you well on the road to understanding just how Death Knights get all that awesome power and sexiness. We'll have 3 sections today. The Good are stats that are excellent choices for DPS, Tanks, or both. The So-So are stats which still do us some good, but are pretty situational or conditional in their usefulness. The Outcasts are those stats that you should avoid -- Well, I'd say avoid like the plague, but we're Death Knights. We like the plague around here. So I'll just say you should avoid them.
Encrypted Text: Raiding as a Rogue, Part II
Every Wednesday, Elizabeth Wachowski or Chris Jahosky write Encrypted Text, a look into the shadowy world of rogues.Last time, when I discussed raiding on your rogue, I talked about the differences between the 3 talent trees as they relate to raiding, and the Hit cap. A couple of people made comments that basically say there is no magic number for Hit rating that you need to be at, and this is true. I'm not advocating stacking hit at the expense of all your other stats. There should be a balance, and you don't want to gimp yourself in other areas just to stack Hit rating.Today, one of the things I'm talking about is the Expertise cap, which should be viewed in a similar light -- the information is there so that you can make good decisions regarding your gear. Don't just run out and start stacking Hit and Expertise and leave your other stats to twist in the wind.
