Expertise, Hit, and YOU! Part One: Kitty Druids
Someone stumbled across this site with the following search term: “druid tank minimum hit expertise.” I’m certain I didn’t have what they were looking for and I hope they found it. As I was pondering that implied questions, it seemed to me that should be a very simple thing to answer, but as I think further about it, I find it is not a straightforward answer at all. For both tanking and dps druids they provide benefits, but how much benefit?
Before I get into a discussion about those specifically, if you aren’t familiar with the attack table and how one-roll and two-roll systems work, WoW-Wiki has a good page on that. For a more in-depth look, check out the ElitistJerks Theorycrafting Think Tank page on Melee Combat Mechanics.
To properly determine the benefits, let’s first define them. Items that provide Hit Rating increase your chance to hit your target by reducing the miss chance on the attack table. At level 70 it requires 15.77 Hit Rating to reduce miss chance by 1%. Against a level 73 target (which raid bosses are) a normal attack, unmodified, by someone wielding only one weapon has a 9% chance to miss. 9 * 15.77 = 141.93 or 142 Hit Rating to eliminate the chance of your attacks to miss. (WoW-Wiki: Hit)
Expertise reduces the chance of your target to dodge or parry your attacks. It takes 3.9 Expertise Rating to increase your Expertise by 1 point, and each point reduces dodge/parry by .25% (or 4 Expertise per one percent). According to the EJ post, boss mobs have been parsed to have a 6% chance to dodge and a 12% chance to parry. To remove dodge from the attack table would require 24 Expertise (94 Expertise Rating) and removing Parries would require 48 Expertise (188 Expertise Rating). (WoW-Wiki: Expertise)
That’s what Hit and Expertise do, and how much benefit they provide is different for DPS and for tanking.
Cat Form
For Cat form DPS I’ll assume you’d be Shredding and Ripping in a standard DPS rotation. Shred has to be done from behind the target and when attacked from behind a boss cannot parry or block (though nothing can reduce blocks anyway) so we only have to concern ourselves with Misses and Dodges. With no Hit and no Expertise you would miss 9% of the attacks, 6% would be dodged, 25% would be glancing blows (which also we cannot reduce), the remainder would be regular hits and crits.
Here is where the math starts to get fuzzy: Hit, Expertise, and Crit are all scaling effects. Depending on your stats they will all have different inherent values. As a general rule, removing one percent of misses (via Hit Rating) increases the Hit portion of the attack table by 1%, as does removing 1% of dodges (via Expertise Rating). Increasing your crit chance by 1% replaces 1% of your Hit.
Basically, Hit takes 1% that does no damage and lets it do normal damage. Expertise replaces 1% of no damage and makes it do normal damage. Crit replaces 1% of normal damage and makes it do double damage (before talents and meta gems, some of which increase the effect of critical hits and thus the value of Crit Rating). Without taking anything else into consideration, normal attacks on a normal attack table increase damage by 1% no matter which you choose.
Some special attacks, however, are resolved on different combat tables. For instance Rip cannot crit because it is a damage over time effect. Crit does not improve that ability at all, though Hit and Expertise do.
Attacks like Mangle and Shred seem to be on the two-roll system, so an attack has to hit before it can crit (normal attacks do not follow that rule). That increases the value of Hit and Expertise with the marginal increase in crit due to the special attack hitting in the first place.
Based on that, Hit and Expertise provide more benefit than Crit: they affect all attacks and on specials are increased by the marginal increase in crit chance the hit provides.
The talent Primal Fury, however, increases the benefit of Crit. Each time (if you have both points) a combo-point-generating-attack crits, you get not one combo point, but two. Given the time Energy takes to regen, it is not possible to have your four combo-point rip on a twelve-second cycle without having some of your special attacks crit. Even if you were to only Mangle, the 40 energy that costs would take four seconds to regen: the twelve seconds in between rips would only generate three combo points (assuming no misses, dodges, parries, blocks). A four CP Rip would be on a 16 second cycle using only Mangles. Using the higher DPS Shred you end up on an 18 second cycle! That is a 33% reduction in Rip damage (instead of total damage over 12 seconds it is over 18 seconds).
If we had a 33% crit rate, instead of four attacks to generate four combo points, we only need three attacks to do the same. Only using Mangle, generating four combo points would require 12 seconds, just in time to refresh Rip. Shred is improved to a 14 second cycle. At crit rates approaching 50%, mangle would generate those 4 CP in 8 seconds, far faster than Rip could be reapplied.
1% Crit, therefore, increases normal damage by 1%, special damage other than Rip by 1%, and rip damage (through faster CP generation) by up to 33%. 1% Hit or 1% expertise increases normal damage by 1%, special damage by 1% and a bit. In an effort to make this even more complicated, missed specials refund 80% of their cost and missed finishing moves do not. That weighs against the value of Hit/Expertise for specials because the energy cost of a miss is not 100% and Energy is a more scarce resource than global cooldowns (1 second in cat form).
None of that even takes relative values of AP into consideration!
Some people really like Hit and Expertise for keeping dps constant and not missing finishing moves, which is a valid argument. To the best of my knowledge, the dps benefits of any of them weighs out to very similar amounts in real world scenarios (hehe). Which you choose is going to have to be balanced against with the real items you would be equipping and the stat allocation. All of them are good to have.
My advice, is to not worry about Hit and Expertise. With the changes in 2.3 (I think it was 2.3) to Heart of the Wild made pure rogue leather much more attractive since it now operates off the derived stat of AP rather than strength. Most of the rogue gear is going to have some Hit or some Expertise on it, which is nice to have (rogues benefit so hugely from Hit that almost all of their gear should have it). I would never gem or enchant for it, however. And I would never chase pure crit. What comes on gear is nice, but I would focus on Agility. Point for point, the benefits of Agi providing both AP and Crit make it superior to every other stat for Cat DPS.
Additional resources:
ElitistJerks Feral Druid Megathread Check the first few posts for information.
Why is +hit good for DPS? A somewhat dated discussion, but the underlying math has not significantly changed.
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