Feral Druid - Hit and Expertise caps.

[Traces]

Hey guys, got a quick question, how important is hit and experise for me?

I'm currently playing Feral Tank MS and Feral DPS OS. Now that were pretty much full on 277 MS gear, i noticed that my DPS gear was pretty damn delicious getting. I plugged it into Rawr to see if everything was good and it flagged up that i should change some of my HIT gems to ARP since i was at 1262 passive ARP with some HIT gems placed around for make the cap. I was under the impression that i should maintain the HIT cap at all times.

Thanks alot for any advice.

[Chilifan]

If you follow simulations or Rawr you will be pushed toward the armor penetration cap since it is a dps increase. However, I feel that hit and expertise are more important to maintaining up times and that will make it easier for you to pay attention to your surroundings.

Scenario:
You have 4 combo points, 50 energy, 1 second left on rake, and 2 seconds left of rip. You rake at 0 secs remaining on rake and then rip at 0 seconds on rip (no wasted GCD).

Outcome 1 (hit and expertise caps):
Everything goes exactly as planned, high up times all around, and you can pay more attention to the "random boss mechanic" that may kill you.

Outcome 2 (ignoring hit and expertise caps):
You rake and them rip just like in scenario 1, but your rake was dodged or misses. You now have a 4 combo point rip on the target and no rake. Downtime for rake, and a loss of damage from rip.

Now some will say that you should notice that your rake was dodged or missed and re-raked. Well that is what simulators do, and unless you have cat like reflexes (pun intended), you will not be able to catch them all.

[littlepiggy]

Chilifan hit it, getting the ARP cap will be a dps increase and is the way most feral's seem to go.. but not being able to react when something misses could hurt you more. A miss here or there will not make enough of a difference to warrant hit cap > arp cap, but not paying attention and doing a 4pt rip or not getting the rake up several times per fight will.

If you feel like you can react to a miss and hit that button (whatever missed) again, it's ARP cap > crit cap > hit/exp cap > strength or haste.

[Elunedra]

aslo keep in mind the if you are not hit / exp capped the crit cap comes lower

[Deleted]

hit/expertise are only important for the purpose of increasing the crit cap

generally you want to go for arpen first, and after hardcapping arpen you should have so much agi/crit rating that you will need to cap hit/expertise to get the crit cap high enough

stuff like energy refund on missed attacks make hit/expertise go down in value compared to arpen/agi/haste/crit

[medloh]

I'm in the camp that prefers to max your DPS at the expense of a few misses. My take is that if you have a hard time noticing misses then you need to refine your UI. I've setup Power Aura's in strategic spots to make it pretty idiot proof to know exactly what bleeds and buffs are up, and what needs to be put up. With a little practice misses don't cost any brain cycles that could be used for situational awareness.

[Traces]

Thank you for the help. I got some new gloves and i'm ARP capped now and changed out my hand enchant to precision and hit food to cap me. Only need to work on some expertise a bit more.

[scorch109]

You're better off gemming the hit and using arp food instead of gemming the arp and using hit food, hit lets you meet a few extra socket bonuses.

[Richmond]

You're better off gemming the hit and using arp food instead of gemming the arp and using hit food, hit lets you meet a few extra socket bonuses.

This exactly at that stage. A few of the sockets in the leather gear are straight yellow and are worth gemming other than eating the hit food. For instance, the 2 sockets in the frost bitten fur boots are yellow. That could easily be 40 Hit and you'd get the socket bonus (6 agility i think).

[Hinalover]

If your sitting as 1262 ArP right now, make sure you have Executioner enchant toggled. It is able to supply 120 ArP on a 1 PPM basis. Afterwards, check RAWR and see what it comes up with. Another suggestion is tell RAWR to set limits on the amount of "Avoided Attacks" (the amount of hit and expertise not at cap [ie: 3% avoided attacks could mean 6.5% out of 8% hit and 5% out of 6.5% expertise]). Save each set and run them through SimulationCraft. Then go with the better choice. If the dps of two are too close (I'm talking about within 10 or so dps) I would suggest going with the one with the lower avoided attacks.

[Deleted]

If you want a simcraft version that supports black magic, you can use my custom compiled one: http://www.mediafire.com/file/zcrigm...9ob/simc-bm.7z (ill add it to my own thread's start post as well.