I just had a few thoughts on what separates Hit and Expertise from other, more "interesting" stats, and whether the original design philosophy still holds true for these "mandatory" caps.
We all know that back when hit, and later on expertise (or weapon skills in its original form), were introduced they functioned much like any other stat. It was passive on gear and as you collected more pieces you inevitably ended up with an amount which was suitable for the content you were undergoing.
Then Blizzard changed up how stats worked. On top of the original enchants we had in place, they brought in gems so you could further tailor your gear to provide the stats you wanted. This was intended to make it easier for players to get their desired stats from gear, and was also to help people move away from all having exactly the same items as they did in vanilla with 8 and 9 piece tier sets.
Then came reforging for further augmentation, and finally we have item upgrading which enhances stats on the gear we choose to improve.
All of this brings us to today, where we constantly gear around two things:
1. Our desired "interesting" stats like haste/crit/mastery
2. Our "necessary" caps for hit and expertise
Now Blizzard has already come out and admitted that hit and expertise don't feel fun to balance around in their current iteration (I don't have the blue post for this but if someone can point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it) - so that raises a few questions for me:
Firstly, do we even need these in the game? I mean we dont want 86s with 100% hit against level 90 or boss level mobs, but surely just giving max level characters the correct hit/expertise automatically isn't too gamebreaking? Is it?
Secondly, if they do need to be a stat which is constantly in play, do we need them to function as a secondary stat that we balance around? Couldn't they be something which is just automatically improved as per your level of gear (ie. full 463 blues means you are hit capped against heroic bosses, full 476 epics means you are capped against LFR level bosses, full 486 means you are capped against 5.0 bosses and so on)?
I mean, take these ideas with a grain of salt since I'm just spitballing here, but surely we can come up with a more efficient system than these mandatory caps which you are constantly balancing your gear around (and usually going over by 0.1-0.3% in order to "make sure" you are capped).
I just wanted to have a bit of a brainstorm and see how people felt.
TL;DR do we really need hit/expertise? Is there a better way than how they are currently in the game?