WoW Math II - +hit% versus +crit%

Well, in honour of Tuesday's extended maintenance on my server, here's more Rogue Theorycraft!

+hit vs +crit is a shady area because their true values vary in relation to one another.

The #1 priority of any rogue should be to get +5% hit - which can be achieved with 5 ranks of Precision (and if you don't have 5 in precision, you would be wise to scramble up the gear to reach +5). The first +5% hit is crucial to beat out the standard 5% miss rate attached to your special attacks. It's after these initial points that people tend to go off in their own schools of thought.

One might think an attack is handled as follows:

1) I swing at a mob
2) The game rolls an imaginary die to see if I hit
3) The game rolls an imaginary die to see if that hit crits

Under such a method, if I had 30% crit, 30% of my hits would be critical ones. That's not how it works, however. Why not? Simply because it takes two operations each and every swing. Add that to the many players on server, and it's half the load to go with the method Blizzard has in place - the combat table.

How does it work? Basically, whenever you engage a mob, a result table is generated containing all possible outcomes and a single roll is made against it. For simplicity sake, let's say it ranges from 1-100. A sample table might look like:

01-10 Miss
11-57 Hit
58-61 Dodge
62-67 Parry
68-73 Block
74-100 Critical

Each result has a priority, meaning they will override other values always keeping the table the same size. That means, if I added in +2% hit, the table will compensate by subtracting from miss when it adds to hit. If I add in +2% crit, it will redirect it from hit's pool of table points to the critical portion. Your target's defensive options (dodge, parry, block) will further reduce this pool, as they override hit as well - dipping into crit if the hit pool runs dry.

In summary, if I had a theoretical 100% crit rate, it would still be capped by the size of my hit pool:

01-10 Miss
11-14 Dodge
15-20 Parry
21-26 Block
27-100 Critical

On the above table, it would in actuality be 74%. Every hit I successfully land would be a crit, however. Suppose I dropped some of my uber-leet-haxxor crit gear for equivalent hit gear, dropping to 90% crit but adding in 10% more hit:

1-4 Dodge
5-10 Parry
11-16 Block
17-100 Critical

Every hit is still landing as a crit, but now I'm suddenly boosted to a real crit rate of 84%.

A very extreme example, but hopefully one that illustrates the point. Crit is limited by hit. In other words, as long as your hit is high enough, critical rates are equivalent to hit for standard attacks. Why equivalent? A melee critical hit is doubled, that is, worth two standard hits. The loss of one hit is made up for by another one that crits.

Here's some more food for thought: The dual wield miss penalty (19%) doesn't apply to instant special attacks - they only have the base 5% miss. That means that after the first 5% of hit, +hit only benefits your white damage (normal swings), while +crit will benefit both. On the flip side, you will hit the artificial critical cap limited by the portion of the combat table associated with hits much sooner with white damage than you will on instant attacks.

What does all of this mean? Essentially, that +crit% is greater than +hit% until you hit that cap.

In most encounters, the cap is reasonably high that you could never reach it with all the +crit% you could stuff into your available equipment slots.

For higher level mobs, there is the wrench thrown into the works known as glancing blows. A glancing blow is a standard melee hit at a reduced damage percentage. It occupies a fixed portion of the table and is only a factor for PvE targets have when their defense is higher than your weapon skill or when their level rating is higher than your own. Glancing blows have a higher precedence than crit and will thus eat through your hit table before critical gets a serving. While the severity of glancing blows can be reduced (to the point where they are equal to an unglancing standard hit with +skill items), they cannot be canceled out. In the case of a level 60 character fighting a 63 (the level rating of end game bosses), the level disparity is so high that a fixed 40% of the combat table is filled with glancing blows. Standard miss rate kicks it up 5% to 45%. Dual wield miss penalty another 19% to 64%. Add in parry, dodge and block where applicable and it doesn't leave much room for crit (around 30%). To find more room, it's a matter of negating more of that miss. To negate that miss, you need +hit%

Glancing blows are only present on the standard attacks table - an instant attack will never glance, and will benefit from +crit%, while gaining nothing from +hit% after +5.

White damage is the large portion of combat specs (my average is around 60% of total damage attributed to standard melee attacks), so it's generally safe to pump +hit% until 5 points and then balance hit% and crit%.

 

I hate hunters,

I hate hunters, unfortunately. My least favorite WoW class.

 

Many reasons

1) There seem to be more hunters on any server than blades of grass. It's like every noob and their dog has one.

2) Ever since Blizzard made changes to raid bosses to prevent the out-of-combat resurrection cheese, vanish is no longer a way for a rogue to save repair money by exiting the fight when a wipe call is made or the boss is accidently pulled (also prevents being able to swap armor for fights with multiple stages). Despite this, feign death is unchanged, making hunters the only class that can exit a boss fight safely when things go bad.

3) Too many hunters that use the cheap PvP trick of Feign Death + Ice Block + Aimed Shot on top of you so it's unavoidable.

4) My favourite class is rogue. The rogue's archnemesis is the Hunter. I'm a melee specialist, they are ranged. I can see their traps, they can flare my stealth. I can get in their deadzone, they can kite me until the cows come home. They can send their pet at me, I can send my...oh wait.

5) In raids, the Hunter can relax and just shoot from a safe distance, avoiding cleaves, whirlwinds, AoEs and all the other crap melee combatants have to deal with.

 

I stand corrected.

Writing from a complete PvE raiding perspective, I think I generalized the #1 priority too much. For a combat rogue to go down the tree and not pick it up is insane, but I concede to it being wasteful to pick up for PvP. That said, it's still funny to see seal fate rogues complain over and over again on the wow forums about missing their cold blooded eviscerate because they're missing those 5 points.

I play in a raiding guild, and in that environment it is not burst damage that wins the day, but sustained damage. From a raiding rogue's perspective, yes, some of the lower Subtlety talents look like great additions, but there is way too much filler that doesn't help out along the way.

Master of Deception, Improved Ambush, or any other stealth enhancing talent is not a worthy investment as once that opener has landed you won't be stealthing for the remainder of the fight. And very few fights endgame, barring PvP, are less than 10 seconds. If they are, you're wasting more time stealthing into position than just running in and swinging from the get go.

While Serrated Blades and Deadliness are both talents I would love to have, they're too far buried to reach when specialized for longer fights.

My current build is here.