Hit and Expertise WOTLK

[Rootkitworm]

Q: What is new Hit cap? Expertise? I know before it was like Hit: 142, Expertise: 23 softcap, 44 cap. Couldn't find a thread with this info, so if you could link me to one too that's fine, thanks

Q: Is Expertise still a serious mitigation stat, since no more crushing blows with 3 level higher mobs? As in I cant get crushed, parry-gibbed then crushed again in 1 second. If the boss parries is it still a big deal?

Q: I have some high Hit levels, and finding a lot of tank gear with +Hit on em that have more stats other than Expertise from some previously acquired 75ish level gear. Do I go with a lower iLevel pieces if it has 27 Expertise but lower armor/stam/str and no Hit?

EG: Choose +50 Hit Rating to be at 170 or +27 Expertise Rating?

[Kazeyonoma]

1) same %'s just new ratings so 9% hit, 6.5% expertise for dodge, and 14.25% expertise for parry. There's a thread that has the ratings somewhere around here, i don't recall them myself.

2) Still very serious mitigation state, parries are still in game and will cause spike damage, part of the reason why DW DK tanking right now is nearly non-existant because expertise levels aren't high enough yet to remove parry gibbing. Bosses don't crush sure, but they still hit hard, parry-hasting 2 or 3 big shots will still kill the tank.

3) I'd still say armor/stam/str are better for your survival than expertise at least until you reach certain comfortable minimums.

[Farothin]

I actually read an interesting article at EJ that thinks the melee hit cap may have gone down 1%. There didn't seem to be any conclusions reached as of yet, and the whole thing could just be a bug of some sort, but an interesting read.

Is melee hit cap really 9%? - Elitist Jerks

[Solanthious]

I was going to post this on the above thread but I've got to get my PW reset on the EJ forums, but it will serve it's purpose here.

I started looking around and the more I thought about it I wanted to see some hard numbers on hit / expertise etc. So I went down to Org on the Heroic Training Dummy, and here's the numbers that I got.

This testing was done 3 times, each test was 1000 melee swings.

The first test was conducted with 0% hit & 1.5% Expertise from Vitality.


The 2nd test was conducted with 5.25% Expertise and 0% hit.


The 3rd test was conducted with 5.25% Expertise and 4.24% hit.


After looking over this data it seems to me a few things are wrong. With 0 hit and 1.5% expertise I had a 7% miss rate, with 5.25% and 0% hit I had a 9.2% miss rate and with 5.25% Expertise and 4.24% hit I had a 3.6% miss rate. I'd like to see other data from other players, but I'm inclined to believe that the miss rate is now 8%, based on my 3rd test.

What I don't understand though is expertise doesn't seem to be helping the miss rate.

Maybe someone who is better at number crunching can make better use of these.

[Giantone]

expertise was never suppose to change your how often you hit the target but if they dodge or parry. What i am more concerned about from your data is that with 5% expertise the amount of times you where parried didn't go down that much. Does expertise first reduce dodge then parry? That is kind of a concern because it means you have a lot more expertise to not get parried and that is what gives you the damage spikes. Has anyone else seen that from there test?

[Solanthious]

Therefore, due to weapon expertise, tanking warriors get the full effect of both parry and dodge reduction, gaining a 0.5% chance to hit the boss, which will stack with any hit rating they already have. Hit rating reduces your chance to miss, and therefore a capped hit rating will not be impaired by expertise rating which reduces your chance to be dodged or parried. Expertise applies to all abilities a warrior uses that can be dodged or parried (devastate, shield slam, white attacks, etc).

That comes from the prot warrior guide from the EJ forums. Obviously however, this is not the case unless we're missing something, or the combat table is bugged, or the combat log is bugged. IDK it could be a million different things.

[Muffin Man]

1000 strikes is a pretty small sample size to draw conclusions from. You're going to have a pretty big standard deviation. So I'm not sure your data is cause for concern.

Also the EJ thread is guilty of using misleading terminology. Expertise does increase your chance to hit by removing your changes to be dodged/be parried.

That's confusing because expertise does increase your % to hit, but it's separate from your hit rating. Hit rating and expertise rating increase your hit % in different ways. So expertise does nothing to change your miss rate.

[GravityDK]

Q: Is Expertise still a serious mitigation stat, since no more crushing blows with 3 level higher mobs? As in I cant get crushed, parry-gibbed then crushed again in 1 second. If the boss parries is it still a big deal?

I am managing a thread about DW DK tanking on deathknight.info, to consolidate knowledge on the topic and net together the spammy threads we had about it.

In the process, we came across some interesting analysis on EJ from a chap called Berthold who wrote a simulator here which you'd all find interesting, it models dual-wield -vs- two handed and the 'wipe probability' from parrygibs. Look at its charts. Note it doesn't model warrior shield block.

What it made me wonder though, only having tanked as a pally and now DK, is how do Warriors handle all the parrygibs? I had thought Wars went for fast weapons, but if it's say 1.5 speed then that opens you to a lot of parrygib risk. Are there special unparryable attacks by a warrior to reduce it? Or simply does this explain why expertise was such a highly rated tanking/threat stat for wars?

If a DK has a 3.5 speed weapon, he'll be open to parries far less than a War, particularly because DK Rune Strike will often replace that melee hit altogether (and RS is unparryable). That's a helpful mechanic that would be part of the overall maintank balancing between the four classes.