Balancing Hit Rating in PVP.

[reuva]

I am so stuck with balancing my hit rating through reforging. It's just not humanly possible. I've got all of the critical strike off pieces and the alacrity bracers. As it stands, all of my mastery reforges have had to go into hit rating. I want them to go to critical strike rating. After a while, I had the honor to spare to purchase the accuracy bracers, knowing that I would be able to get a refund, thinking I'd have to not reforge into as much hit rating from mastery; I was wrong.

I've been looking at this spell penetration thing.... I've got 220 spell penetration. Looking around, I see a lot of other hunters at 220 spell penetration. Do you absolutely need 220 spell penetration? I've seen the reason behind 220 being "for maximum damage". I've even heard that you don't need spell penetration at all but it's usually recommended?

I've not been playing hunter for too long so I'm highly susceptible to hearing something about hunters in PVP and thinking it to be true.

What do you guys suggest? How can I balance my hit rating to get the most out of my mastery reforges to benefit from more critical rating?

[Moosedrool]

Get accuracy bracers. You should only need to reforge a piece or two for hit if you're fully geared. Without seeing your armory it's kind of hard to make any real suggestions.

As far as spell penetration, in my opinion, yes it is absolutely needed. Nothing worse than having one of your highest damaging abilities being partially resisted.

[Fetacheese]

195 spell pen is better.

[Deleted]

195 spell pen is better.

Why is that?

[Illana]

Why is that?

random comment with no explanation to back it up usually someone who is clueless or trolling.

In fact you ideally should have 240 spell penetration because some teams run with a mage and shaman which means glyphed healing stream totem plus mage armor totalling 240 resistance.

220 is easy to obtain because all it requires is that you fill your 3 blue sockets with spell penetration gems and have the 70 spell pen enchant on cloak, 20 resistance won't make or break games (usually) but a difference of 45 resistance can have your traps being resisted (as they are in nature school) and chimera/arcane shot being partially resisted.

You could get 245 spell pen quite easily by putting a spell pen/resi gem in one yellow socket if you're very paranoid about resists however.

On topic:

I use accuracy bracers and wrists (not completely ruthless) and I sit at around 5.05% hit.

[Alynnea]

The easiest way to see just how important spell pen is, is to go to your character pane next time you're in a BG, and hover over your resistances. As a blood elf with a baseline 85 arcane resistance, i take 12.64% less damage from arcane, now consider that in BGs people often have 2-3 times as much resistance, and you begin to realise just how much damage you are losing out on.