Vis Maior

Thanks for fielding some of mine and Xangetsu's questions yesterday, as we are getting acclimated to playing Mutilate in raids.

I had another question, and I'm pretty sure I'm splitting hairs, but since you are putting 1 point from CQC into SnD, wouldn't it make sense to take 1 point from Precision to then put back into CQC? I assume that 1% crit is > than 1% hit, particularly when you consider that we have talents that proc off of crits.

My spreadsheet agrees with this theory, but only by like 1 dps...

I know that you can't crit if you don't hit, but since we already hit way more than we crit, the idea seems pretty good on paper.

"can't crit if you don't hit" only applies to a 2-roll system, such as the system used for all spells (non auto attack). Your auto attack hit table is a SINGLE roll system. The only situation where "you can't crit if you don't hit" sort of applies is if you are crit capped.. that is, your Miss + Dodge + Parry + Crit + Glance >= 100%. In that case, Crit is being pushed off the table and adding Hit rating will decrease your Miss chance, thus giving you crit.. but thats really not a factor.
(TLDR: You don't need to hit to crit, for auto attacks)

What makes hit roughly equivalent to crit is poison damage. Before the spell cap (17%), every bit of hit you get scales quadratically. First you must land the attack, then you must land the poison. With poison being such a large portion of our damage, its generally advisable to reach the spell hit cap. That said, dropping 100 AP for 5 crit rating is a dumb move (if such a gear choice needed to be made).

As for talents.. a spreadsheet will tell you 5/5 Precision and 3/5 CQC comes out as the best dps, in general, for most peoples gear. We've been moving a single point to Imp SnD because in practicality, most fights are not Patchwerk and the addition few seconds can often save your SnD timer when moving around. I'm not sure about Rensy, but I know the last time I spec'd I needed all 5 points in Precision to get spell cap, which made it worth more than CQC. Either way, 1% crit or 1% hit (above spell cap) is so damn close, its one of the smaller factors contributing to your dps.

Just like Latito I also need that point in precision to hit the spell cap-- my hit is disgustingly low. It's important to remember that the situation here in WOTLK is practically the inverse of TBC. We only need enough hit to cap spells (make sure you are actually looking at spell hit cap and not melee), which is 210 if you assume all buffs/debuffs. In other words 8%, 9% without the draenei in your group.

Depending on your hit you could do what you are saying, but at the moment I'm no longer putting that point into SND, making the 5 points in precision necessary to get to tier 3 aka CQC, so doing so is not even an option.

The point in SND was nice when we were unfamiliar with the spec, giving us a little free leg room to make up for mistakes, but now I don't really feel it is neccesary. It could be nicer for pooling, however... but at the moment I'm experimenting more without having it and it seems to be going okay.

Just try what you want. If you like the SND point, sure, put that extra point from precision into CQC because past the spell hit cap crit is roughly a more valued stat.... but ultimately this sort of thing is going to be the slightest/i] of DPS increases.