Hit Rating for Rogue PvP
I’ve been thinking about rogue hit caps since the time has come to start picking up the new season’s honor pieces. Increasing your white hit percentage is not important for rogue PvP because such a high percentage of your damage – especially your burst damage – comes from your special attacks and your poisions. However getting to that special hit cap is of vital importance because it affects all your utility movies – your openers, your finishers, everything. Missing a kidney shot could easily swing a game against you!
The special melee hit cap against players is 5%. You need 32.79 hit rating for 1% of melee hit. That means you’ll need 164 hit rating for the special cap, or 230 for special cap versus night elves. Those numbers would be 132 and 197 respectively if you have Heroic Presence from a draenei (the perks of running rogue/shaman!).
The spell hit cap against players is 4%, which is relevant because it affects your poisons. It’s not as important a cap to hit because although your poisons provide your snare and your mortal strike, you have a very high application chance and thus it’s very unlikely one failed proc will set you back. You need 26.232 hit rating for 1% of spell hit, so you should be able to cap poison hit (105) as a happy side-effect of capping specials.
Spell penetration: poison damage is good, but it’s not that good.
Here are your main options for hit, assuming a full PvP setup:
- Furious Gladiator’s Cloak of Victory – 42 hit rating. Also comes in a crit version.
- Furious Gladiator’s Pendant of Victory – 42 hit rating. Also comes in a crit version.
- Deadly Gladiator’s Band of Victory – 38 hit rating. This is the only deadly melee ring available.
- Icewalker Enchant – 12 hit rating. Obviously useless if you’re an engineer, which you should be!
- Enchant Gloves – Precision – 20 hit rating. Undercosted compared to the attack power enchant, and again, not an option if you are an engineer.
- Titanium Weapon Chain – 28 hit rating. This is a must-have for the disarm duration reduction alone.
- 12 sockets (2 yellow, 4 red, 5 blue, 1 prismatic), in which you could socket Glinting (or Pristine), Rigid, or Vivid. Note that one of those reds will be a yellow if you’re still using the engineering goggles.
- If you’re desperate, the burning crusade rogue arcanum included 16 hit rating, although the Wrath one does not.
Without gemming or enchanting (except the chain) you’re already at 150 with the aforementioned gear. If you’re using PvE weapons (which I anticipate will be significantly less popular this season given how readily available, cheap, and high quality the furious offerings are) you’ll probably score some extra hit rating from there, and you can comfortably gem for the rest based on how much you hate Artic Winds. I recommend 2 x [Pristine Monarch Topaz]!