Something I don't understand

[Jessicka]

Nothing changed in terms of hit cap being important. Spells can still miss, missing your big spells still sucks, and sims still tell you that it's better to sit at 16.9% hit than it is to sit at 17.1% hit. Sims are nice and all, but they run 50k iterations of 6 minute fights, all of which are single target. They don't really apply to actual raiding, and you have to look at how it all works out during actual gameplay while taking sims into consideration. Over the course of 50k 6 min fights, missing the occasional HoG, Shadowbolt, Immolate, etc. isn't that big of a dps difference, I'll give you that. In an actual raid, all that needs to happen is for you to get an unlucky roll of the dice, and your DPS is in the shitter, the add got away, the boss didn't die or whatever else can happen. Get the hit cap, end of story.

If on average I'll put out more damage at 16.5% Hit than at 17% Hit, I'll go with the lower rating; it obviously benefits me more on average than the downsides of those occasional misses, otherwise it would come out on average lower.

[gakpad]

First of all, the difference going between 70ish mastery and 70ish hit rating isn't going to be noticeable. Second, on average, dropping below hit cap is a dps loss. Average means over the course of MANY attempts, where you are GOING to see spells miss. There's no quantifiable claim to be made on behalf of dropping below hit cap because the difference is on average below our level of perception, so sims are the only thing we have to go off of, and if they point to the contrary, I'll go with them over your anecdotal opinion, sorry.

Not to mention that being below hit cap reduces the value of all your other stats by preventing you from utilizing them 100% of the time (i.e. mastery isn't going to help you when you don't hit with the spell in the first place), so the value of hit below the cap is twofold. When HoG couldn't miss, sure, dropping slightly below the cap may have ended up slightly higher, but things are different now and people need to update their opinions to match.

edit for more math in support of the "on average" factor:

With your current gear (17.02% hit), you're simming at ~48,560 dps.

Taking 60 hit and adding 60 mastery, your simmed dps moves down quite a bit to ~48,390 dps. That sure as hell doesn't look like an "average gain" to me.

[Kildragon]

If on average I'll put out more damage at 16.5% Hit than at 17% Hit, I'll go with the lower rating; it obviously benefits me more on average than the downsides of those occasional misses, otherwise it would come out on average lower.

As gakpad explained below, it's actually a net loss to be below the hit cap. However you're still missing my point, in that even if you got a tiny DPS increase out of running with less hit, you need to run a hell of a lot of sims to actually make it to that DPS increase. That's the point of sims, they average something out that would take you literally the rest of your life to test manually. Since we can't run 50k iterations of a boss in an actual encounter, you would see a lot of swings in your dps over the course of the encounter. The only reason it levels out in sims, is because after 50k iterations, 5-6k DPS swings in an attempt due to shitty misses won't make much of a difference. That was the point I was trying to make. Sims aren't real life, and in all of the encounters you actually do, it will be more beneficial to simply be hit capped.