Paladin Hit & Expertise Stats

[Darthmullet]

RF scales holy threat much more than physical threat, so if you look at TPS scaling instead of DPS scaling, your holy damage abilities (like ShoR and consc) are a much larger portion of your threat than your dps.

White damage is ~30% of my DPS, just about tying with SHoR. It's less than 15% of my threat.

str increase AP, AP scales damage on nearly all of your tank abilities.. so
str will increase your threat a lot. Hit? Expertise? you gotta be kidding me.
i dont have a lot of hit and i can not remember the last time a spell of mine did not hit. The survivability expertise gives is extremely minimal compared to well, any other survivability stat, and if someone thinks expertise helps pally threat.. i just dont see that as a posibility lol.

[jere]

str increase AP, AP scales damage on nearly all of your tank abilities.. so
str will increase your threat a lot. Hit? Expertise? you gotta be kidding me.
i dont have a lot of hit and i can not remember the last time a spell of mine did not hit. The survivability expertise gives is extremely minimal compared to well, any other survivability stat, and if someone thinks expertise helps pally threat.. i just dont see that as a posibility lol.

Hit scales on all of your abilities as well, either as spell hit and melee hit, this includes but is not limited to:

Judgement (melee)
Holy Shield (spell)
HotR (melee)
ShoR (melee)
Consecration (spell) -- yes, it does miss, but the combatlog doesn't report it.
HoW (melee)
AS (melee)

Until you are hit capped, hit is a very good stat for threat. I would say STR and BV are better, but hit is a solid 3rd. Expertise is 4th until you start to get close to the block value cap for ShoR (probably won't happen in progression tanking gear), where it becomes 3rd. Hit will actually surpass both STR and BV once you are capped for the BV portion of ShoR. You should take a look at some of Theck's plots. They are pretty informative.

Also remember that hit scales almost exponentially with level difference. An example of this would be that level 82 mobs only require around 6% spell hit to cap, while level 83 mobs (boss mobs included) require 17% spell hit. Melee hit is a bit more relaxed, but still jumps between level 82 and level 83 mobs. You will most likely not miss often on trash but can on boss mobs more than your think due to low hit.

That said, I wouldn't stack hit/expertise, but discounting them can be as big of a mistake. Each stat has its place.

[Darthmullet]

I am not saying they aren't good for DPS, but we are talking tank here.
You aren't going to gem or enchant for threat, sometimes for hit so your taunts land, but not because of its threat abilities - not that it doesn't help damage / threat, but that tanks are not going to gem for that. Hypothetically if they did, strength would be better because it would also increase their survivability stats.

As a tank we aren't going to stack anything but stam and avoidance, our purpose isn't to deal a lot of damage, that's just icing on the cake. All we need to do is keep aggro and stay alive, and we don't need to stack str, hit, or expertise to do that. All the hit you need is on your gear, unless your in blues or something.

[jere]

I am talking tank here too. Tank DPS makes a difference when you start getting into hard modes. You don't gear for threat for those typically, but you should be aware of what contributions they provide. As a note, hit provides survivability too. Vindication applications, JotJ applications, libram procs all are affected by how much hit/expertise you have.

The main point here is to say that STR is a good threat statand hit is not isn't really considering the big picture. STR is better, but hit is still good, and both hit and expertise come on tank gear often. You don't stack them, but be aware of them.

I think Honors posted the correct order of preference for threat stats based on your gear setup. However, survivability should still one of the most important things to keep in mind (and for that AGI is better than STR honestly). Just don't forget tank DPS, as that has become more important in WotLK.

[Groeden]

Theck, your guide states:
"More of the same, here we see expertise losing value after the dodge soft-cap. Really nothing surprising here that wasn't on the previous plots. The one really important note is that while Expertise is good, we only need enough to hit the dodge soft cap before it takes a nose dive, which with the SoV glyph and Combat expertise isn't much (10 expertise, or 82 expertise rating). This, in addition to it's weak threat performance, makes it a weak stat to "stack" since we arrive at the cap quickly."

Please forgive the ignorant, I am still learning to wrap my brain around some of the finer points of stat mechanics, but what do you mean by stacking only enough expertise to meet the dodge soft-cap? What is the Dodge softcap? How does Expertise improve dodge? I thought it just increased Miss.

On a side note, thank you to everyone who replied to this post. My thanks to Tankspot for this resource.

[Tazlex]

They do not mean your dodge when referring to the expertise. Expertise is to lower the chance an enemy mob (more importantly Raid Bosses) of either dodging, blocking, or parrying your attacks. This will help with DPS and threat generation I believe.

Basically more expertise you stack the more often you hit and not have your attacks avoided. Since you are always facing the boss, usually when tanking. So the soft cap for dodge (which I dont' know off the top of my head) is just enough I believe so you aren't dodged at all. I think Parry is like 12% expertise, not sure.

[jere]

EJ tests showed it at like 6.5% for dodge (26 expertise skill) and 14% for parry (56 expertise skil).

Also, expertise doesn't affect the enemy's chance to block your attacks, just their chance to dodge or parry them.

[axsch]

last time i have heard about expertise and hit is that 28 expertise is cap and being at nearly 8% was the hit cap for pallys.I personally am very close to this and i never miss any of my moves.What u have to pay attention to is if a mob/boss can avoid ur moves ur not going to gain any aggro on them.So saying oh hit cap and expertise cap isn't important then, every dps class is going to beat u in terms of aggro very quickly(even though pallys are aggroo sponges),It also could save someone a repair bill just so u know seeing as ur taunts will never miss.

[theckhd]

Please forgive the ignorant, I am still learning to wrap my brain around some of the finer points of stat mechanics, but what do you mean by stacking only enough expertise to meet the dodge soft-cap? What is the Dodge softcap? How does Expertise improve dodge? I thought it just increased Miss.

I've posted a detailed tutorial about how hit and expertise interact with miss, dodge, and parry over here at maintankadin:
View topic - Basic Training 101: The Attack Table - Maintankadin

But the short version is what jere has posted here already. The boss has a 6.5% chance to dodge your attacks, and 14% chance to parry your attacks. Expertise reduces these values, making you connect more often, thus generating more threat.

However, once you've already stacked enough expertise to reduce the 6.5% dodge chance to 0 (26 expertise skill, or what we call "reaching the dodge soft-cap"), expertise only becomes half as effective as it was before that point (because all that's left for it to reduce is parries, and the rate at which it does so stays the same). Basically before the soft-cap, you get twice the bang for your buck from expertise.

If you reach the "hard-cap" at 56 expertise, you remove the boss's ability to parry your attacks. At this point, more expertise is useless, because extra expertise past this point does nothing.

There's also an 8% chance your melee attacks will miss the boss. Hit reduces this value.