Hi all,
First off, I'm an orc mage. I was reforging post patch 5.04. down to 15% hit, and noticed that I was only needing 14% from gear to cap! I took off all of my gear and all of my buffs and low and behold, I had a 1% hit chance by default. This seemed really odd to me.
I looked for something to explain this, and saw that I have the racial Axe specialization, which gives 1% expertise to fist weapons, 1h, and 2h axes. I know that expertise now also counts as spell hit for classes. Could it be that we get this 1% even if we don't have an axe/fist weapon equipped?