Hit Rating For Spells And Mages Explained
There really isn’t an easy way to completely understand hit rating. There are so many variables involved when it comes to talents, abilities, resistances, and the fact that Blizz has a tendency to change their mind from time to time (such as making all hit rating just plain hit rating instead of both mele and spell hit rating, whew!)
But since you are probably looking for spell hit rating we’ll just leave it at that and separate out the different classes so that you can find what you need without having to root through some huge table (if you can even find one that makes sense).
So here we go with Mage Hit rating and caps. To keep thing simple we’ll just go straight for the kill shot and not go into some tedious explanation of combat ratings and all that other what-not. So here goes.
In order to maximize your DPS you need to get hit capped before you worry about anything else. For every 26.232 hit rating you will gain 1% DPS. There is simply no other stat that matters more until you hit the cap. Once you ARE hit capped, more is worthless and then spell power (up to about 4k spell power for mages) haste and crit become more valuable. Be sure to see our post on Making Gear Decisions For Your Toon.
So now that you know you must be hit capped to maximize your DPS, we need to talk about what the heck the hit cap is. You’ll hear two terms when people talk about the hit cap. One is the hard cap, the other is a so-called soft cap. The hard cap means that you have reached a point where more hit is worthless, the soft cap is a term used for abilities past which point have diminishing returns. There is no such thing as a soft cap for hit rating. You are either at the hard cap, or you are not capped and need to get there.
The absolute hard cap for hit is 446 Hit Rating = 17% in the tooltip
The hard cap represents the amount of hit necessary to ensure that you never miss. That means the hard cap is a 100% chance to hit any and every mob in the game. It may not seem like a big deal to have a 1% chance to miss, but if you miss on a big, fat Arcane Blast for 15K it will seriously erode your DPS in a big, fat hurry. Now let’s talk how to hit the hard cap without having to get to 446 hit rating from gear and gems.
We’ll start at the top and work our way down. For every one of these things you have available, your hard hit cap for spell hit drops to the next number down. Just find yourself in the list and you’ll know how much hit you need to have to be hit capped and never miss. Keep in mind that anything that adds +% chance to hit does not necessarily show up in the tooltip (like +17%), so the hit rating is a much better way of looking at things.
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Dranei or Dranei in Party – Hit Cap = 420
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Mage with Precision OR Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 368
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Dranei or Dranei in Party Mage with Precision OR Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 342
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Arcane Mage with Precision AND Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 289
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Dranei or Dranei in Party Arcane Mage with Precision AND Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 263
There are a few levels past this if you do a lot of 25 man raids, or have just the right combination in your ten mans. If you always run with a druid that uses improved faerie fire or a shadow priest using misery you can get by with just 210 hit rating. And if you happen to be a Dranei or have both a Dranei AND SP/ImpFf in your raid you can do as little as 184 and be capped.
Keep in mind that heroic Presence is party only, so folks may be fighting to get the Dranei in their group, meaning you might not always be able to count on this buff – plus it’s a 30 yard range so on fights with a lot of movement you may be out of range for it from time to time. Your best bet is to stick with the absolute cap of 289 unless you ARE a Dranei (in which case you will always be in your party and can’t get out of range without some wicked bipolar debuff) in which case you can always be safe with a hit rating of 263.
The bottom line is this. If you are an arcane mage your basic hit cap is 289. If you are a Dranei or always party with a Dranei your basic hit cap is 263. Everything else is just gravy. Now, the more gravy you get, the more hit rating you can drop in favor of other stats. But the reality is that it’s much harder to balance staying just barely above the cap than it is to find a bunch of gear without hit on it. It can be tough to get hit capped when you first hit 80, but later on you’ll be looking for nearly every chance you can find to dump hit for spell power or haste or just about anything else.
One more factor to consider, however is that many bosses will have a certain amount of resistance to one or multiple schools of magic. In the end the balancing act can be almost impossible to hit precisely between just enough hit to overcome both the regular combat hit rating and any resistances a boss might have. It’s not a bad idea to just go for 289 as a mage and anything above that is going to overcome a certain amount of resistances that might be present. But it would probably not be a great idea to carry around a hit rating of 350 at the expense of spell power or something else. You can get anal retentive about it if you wish and figure it out for every boss, but only if you have a lot of time to kill.
So there is hit rating for mages made simple. If you are arcane, your goal is 289 add in Dranei and it’s 263. Once you get hit capped it’s far better to try to stay as close to 289 or 263 as you can (and still be over) and then use the Simcraft Engine to figure out what else you should be stacking and how much. The less hit you can get away with and still be over the cap, the more of those other DPS stats you can stack which will really bring your DPS up to Domination levels.
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