Hit Rating – A quick rundown

This expansion I’ve had a few guildies asking me about what the new hit cap is for casters. And there are a lot of people out there who may still not know. So this article will break it down for you and explain what it is. If you’re not really interested in the finer details and just want to know the number, scroll down and look for the red text!

In Burning Crusade, you had a hit rating stat for melee, and a spell hit rating for casters. In Wrath, these 2 stats have been homogenized into the one stat, simply called ‘Hit Rating’. However, casters still in effect convert this stat into spell hit rating, because casters still require a different amount of it than melee classes do.

Hit Rating (an integer) is converted into hit chance (a percentage). At level 80, 26.23 points of hit rating is equal to 1% of hit chance for casters. For melee, 32.77 points of hit rating is equal to 1% hit chance. The mechanics of caster hit and melee hit is quite different, and my knowledge only covers the former. However, there is a nice explanation of melee hit for you on WoWWiki if you are interested. The rest of this article will be focused on casters.

Yup you guessed it, read the rest after the split.

The chance that your spells will hit or miss a target is dependant only on the level difference of the player and the target. Hit chance also differs between a player target and npc target. What is dependant on your particular level is the amount of hit rating required to achieve an increase of 1% hit chance. At level 70 it was 12.6 if my memory serves me well. At level 80 it is 26.23, more than double.

Your base chance to hit an npc of equal level is 96%. For 1 level higher: 95%. For 2 levels higher (end heroic bosses for example): 94%. For 3 levels higher (raid bosses) it plummets to – wait for it – 83%.

One significant change that came with patch 3.0 was the removal of the 99% hit cap. Prior to this patch, chance to hit was capped at 99%, meaning there was always that 1% chance you could miss with a spell, no matter how much spell hit rating you stacked. Also, oddly, if you missed with a spell, it would show as a resist rather than an actual miss. This I think was just an unintended error and was also fixed in patch 3.0. You may still get resists however, resistance and hit chance are 2 different mechanics, the former being a lot more complex.

So now it is possible to reach a point where you cannot miss with your spells. All Wrath raid bosses will be level 83, 3 levels higher than you, meaning you’ll need to acquire 17% of hit chance from somewhere. As mentioned earlier, at level 80, you need 26.23 points of hit rating to achieve an increase of 1% hit chance. So if we need 17%,

17 x 26.23 = 445.91

Now hit rating will only come as an integer (a whole number, not a decimal) so you’ll need a grand total of 446 hit rating to be capped. It is better to be overcapped than undercapped because of the old addage – a 1% increase of hit = 1% increase of dps…roughly speaking. It’s not quite as simple as that but it’s a good moral to live by.

Acquiring hit chance is mainly done via hit rating which is aquired mainly via gear. There are however potions and flasks and even food available to increase your hit rating. There are no doubt enchants which will do it too although I’ve yet to look them up.

Most importantly however, is that all classes have talents which will increase their chance to hit with spells. For all classes, you can get an increase of 3%, except for Boomkins who can get 4%. This may well prove invaluable in the early stages. If you do take these talents for the 3% increase, that will leave you needing only 14% more to be capped.

14 x 26.23 = 367.22 = 368

So there you have it, it’s not a particularly difficult figure to obtain, certainly not as difficult as I initially thought anyway. There are good pieces of loot dotted around, from badge vendors, crafting professions and even the odd quest reward. Remember if you hover over your hit rating value in your character window, it will tell your percentage so you can see how you are getting on. The target is 14% (368) with talents or 17% (446) without.

Good luck!