Blood - (don't get) hit and expertise

[Drunkenvalley]

Recently, a guildie of mine said to me,
"You want hit and expertise on your gear."
...I am a Blood DK.

Note: This reminder only applies to Blood and (probably) other tanks.
Also: All numbers are rounded down even if it the number after was above 4. This is because I doubt WoW rounds up ever.

"But you'll miss your death strikes!"
This is a very common claim I hear about hit. Both on these very forums and in-game. There are a few things you need to consider when making this claim:
Reaching the hit cap (8%) requires 820 hit rating. With secondary stats normalized by iLvl (with minor variations and oddies) this means you are spending exactly 820 points that could have gone into mastery.

How much is 820 mastery rating? For a Blood Death Knight this means
820 mastery rating lost / 179.3 rating per point of mastery
= 4.57 mastery lost because you capped hit instead. That is a Bloodshield boost of +28.56% lost.

"But you'll have your death strikes dodged and parried!"
Expertise reduces your chance to be dodged or parried. Fair enough.

However, to get 4 expertise you need 121 expertise rating. This reduces your chance to be dodged or parried by... 1%.
Oh, by the way, a raid-boss has 6.5% dodge and 14% parry.

For the boss to no longer dodge you you will require 26 expertise. That means... 781 expertise rating.
But wait... what about the parry part? Oh, the raid-boss still has 7.5% chance to parry you.
So let's bump it up until he can no longer parry! This'll require 56 expertise... or 1682 expertise rating.

As pointed out earlier that expertise rating could have been mastery. At a 1:1 ratio.

What does this mean?
It means you wasted 781 mastery rating if you just went for dodge-neutralizing.
Or a whopping 1682 mastery rating if you went for full hard-cap of 56 expertise!

If you softcapped expertise at 26 you lost
781 mastery rating lost / 179.3 rating per point of mastery
= 4.35 mastery because you went for expertise softcap (26). That's +27.18% Bloodshield lost.

If you hardcapped expertise at 56 you lost
1682 mastery rating lost / 179.3 rating per point of mastery
= 9.38 mastery because you went for expertise softcap (56). That's +58.63% Bloodshield lost.

And if you went for hitcap and expertise hardcap... god help us all...
1682 + 820 mastery rating lost / 179.3 rating per point of mastery
= 13.95 mastery lost to your decision. That's +87.18% Bloodshield lost.

Because you probably missed that:
What you've lost is 87.18% Bloodshield

Quick Q&A
Q. What's wrong with people gearing as they like?
A. There's nothing wrong with that!

Q. Then why did you make this post?
A. Because those people gearing wrongly are telling others to do it.

[monkeyshine]

since about 75% of the people will read the TLDR this is so misleading :P

[Drunkenvalley]

since about 75% of the people will read the TLDR this is so misleading :P

I suppose. Might as well make both last line very, very massive.

[Naus]

Yup I'm up to 150% absorbs, with 0% hit and Expertise I cant get rid of. Hit and EXP while nice aren't that great.

[tru]

get it through ur head there slick hit/exp are threat building stats more than survivability

[Drunkenvalley]

get it through ur head there slick hit/exp are threat building stats more than survivability

However, getting more threat at this current tier is absolutely redundant.

[Deleted]

get it through ur head there slick hit/exp are threat building stats more than survivability

any tank that needs more then 0 hit and 0 expertise to hold threat is doing something EXTREMELY wrong
vengeance does all the job for you after the first 10 seconds of the fight, if a dps takes aggro in that time window he's bad, call him out for that, if the offtank overaggroes you in a boss that needs to be swapped tell him vengeance is a buff, he can just right click it away and keep damaging the boss without aggro issues
plus, expertise is TERRIBLE for blood death knights, Rune Strike is our best threat generato and it's totaly uneffected by expertise
the only good reason to go for Hit is if you're raiding 10 mens, and you need to be a reliable interrupter on Nefarian (and that's going away pretty soon)

nice post, i've been struggling to get this kind of arguement through the thick brains of many tanks on my server, but it seems no matter how good your arguments are, bad people just like to stay bad

[Carpalol]

I dont understand who this post is directed at

[moveth]

I dont understand who this post is directed at

All Blood DKs that try to argue that hit and Expertise have any value greater than 0 in Raid content.

[Zao]

I pretty much agree with that.
Lets face it: If you wipe because your DS did not connect three times in a row and you have nothing else to prevent your death, something else must've gone terribly wrong.

In terms of overall damage taken, Mastery/avoidance still has a higher value pint per point than hit/exp and threat is currently not an issue.

[zabraba]

And what this post fails to factor in is that a missed Death Strike completely negates your mastery. While I reforge off as much hit and exp as I can, I still have 3% and 18 expertise. No amount of Blood Shield % helps when you can't land a Death Strike when you need it most. No amount of napkin math factors in a wipe that would have been prevented by that Death Strike. What you also fail to factor in is that it is fairly difficult to get rid of ALL hit and expertise. As a result your numbers are very inflated and falsely support your point. You're preaching to a crowd of mindless morons or people who already have their own views about how they want to handle everything. Your post was pretty dumb to make in the first place. We know what mastery does. Thanks for the reiteration of the tooltip.

[Drunkenvalley]

@zabraba:

Lets face it: If you wipe because your DS did not connect three times in a row and you have nothing else to prevent your death, something else must've gone terribly wrong.

Obviously you'll have some hit and expertise. And so there will be so minor inflation as you say. However, if you're above ~300 rating hit (~3%) or expertise (~8) then I think you may want to do some very clever planning of your reforging.

If you're desperate to know how much mastery that would've been if Blizzard had itemized your shit properly and you were at 0 hit and 0 expertise: 3.35, or 20.9% Bloodshield.

[Magnumx]

And what this post fails to factor in is that a missed Death Strike completely negates your mastery. While I reforge off as much hit and exp as I can, I still have 3% and 18 expertise. No amount of Blood Shield % helps when you can't land a Death Strike when you need it most. No amount of napkin math factors in a wipe that would have been prevented by that Death Strike. What you also fail to factor in is that it is fairly difficult to get rid of ALL hit and expertise. As a result your numbers are very inflated and falsely support your point. You're preaching to a crowd of mindless morons or people who already have their own views about how they want to handle everything. Your post was pretty dumb to make in the first place. We know what mastery does. Thanks for the reiteration of the tooltip.

You sir are wrong, OP is correct however a little over exaggerated (parry cap)...

Mastery has a lot better overall mitigation, hit and exp however may be more steady and to say that you might prevent a wipe with DS missing but not realise the fact that you will prevent a lot more wipes with the extra blood shield and higher overall mitigation mastery provides.

[Skullmaster]

get it through ur head there slick hit/exp are threat building stats more than survivability

If you are a Blood Death Knight with threat problems then you need to start looking closer to home than to stats, it is easy to keep threat up as a Death Knight, I have never had problems tanking on mine other than the "usual" suspects as you may have guessed.

[Slonah]

What's wrong with letting people itemize themselves how they want? It may not be the way you would do it, or even the way 99% of the rest of the WoW community would do it, but they are paying for their account and they can play how they want. If you don't like it don't party with them or invite them to your raids or guild, but egotistical posts with rough math and lots of big underlined statements demeaning people who don't share your belief really are not needed.

[Morbycakes]

I think at this point everyone knows not to go for Threat stats and those that argue to do it are beyond help.

[Xlink]

What's wrong with letting people itemize themselves how they want? It may not be the way you would do it, or even the way 99% of the rest of the WoW community would do it, but they are paying for their account and they can play how they want. If you don't like it don't party with them or invite them to your raids or guild, but egotistical posts with rough math and lots of big underlined statements demeaning people who don't share your belief really are not needed.

And this is when my favorite quote of all time comes into play (quote not exact):

You might pay $14.99 a month to play how you like, and thats fine, but the rest of your raid's $359.76 a month tell you that you are wrong.

[Slonah]

And this is when my favorite quote of all time comes into play (quote not exact):

You might pay $14.99 a month to play how you like, and thats fine, but the rest of your raid's $359.76 a month tell you that you are wrong.

You must have missed the part where I said don't invite them to your raids if you disagree with how they play their character?

[Xlink]

You must have missed the part where I said don't invite them to your raids if you disagree with how they play their character?

No i got that part, its just that its usually the same people who cry about their class and ruin the game for the rest of us.

[Tarryk]

10man heroic 0%hit counter ftw !
with 4.1 and the counter/hit changes i'll totally agree