Heigan, Hunters, Hit Capping

Kvasira's post made me wonder about hit-capping again. I mean, I know it's important, and I'm told I should stack it above everything else, but ... how much am I really missing by missing? I wanted to do the math myself.

Looking at the web stats, I can calculate the following --

Even with a draenei in the raid, I missed 1.6% of my auto shots. 0.1% was mitigated, but let's just ignore that, because it's too small of a percentage to work with. This means, since I landed 317 shots, 5 of them missed. Average damage was 859 on non crits, and 1682 on crits (14%). This means I missed on average 3694 non-crit damage plus 1177 crit dmg.

For my steady shots, I missed 0.5%, with 0% mitigated. This means out of 201 shots, 1 (JUST ONE) of them missed. Average damage was 1167 on non crits, and 2571 on crits (18%). This gives a probable damage for this shot of 1173.

So we have...

• Auto Shot: 308,597 done, and 4871 that I could have gotten if I were hit-capped.
• Steady Shot: 284,060 done, and 1173 that I could have gotten if I were hit-capped.

Now, what my Cheeky's (now Shandara's) spreadsheet tells me by modeling my gear and buffs from the exact raid setup I had then, is that Poached Northern Sculpin will buff my pet DPS by 5 and my hunter DPS by 12, as opposed to using no food at all. My pet was useless in the Heigan fight, so let's ignore the 5.

My time in the fight dps'ing was 706 seconds. My DPS was 928. Adding 12 dps to that and multiplying by my time in the fight gets me 8,472 that I could have gotten by eating AP food. Getting to the hit cap gives me 6,044, or 8.5 dps that I could have added.

• Eating cheap BC Hit cap food: 8.5 dps increase, or
• Eating mammoth 60AP food: 9 dps increase, or
• Eating expensive 80AP food: 12 dps increase

So missing only 1 steady shot and 5 auto shots in a 14 minute fight is roughly equivalent to 60AP lost!

Once again, the clear conclusion is... get ye to your hit cap, hunters. A little bit of hit is worth a lot of DPS.

(The postscript is, hug your local draenei.)