Back when i played my hunter, I had two goals: Get hit capped and get as much agility as bloodelfinly possible. As a feral druid, I simply had to have enough stamina and then stack agility (for the level I was raiding, at least). But as a moonkin, I find that my headaches frequently return when I’m planning ahead on gear wishes.
For the blissfully ignorant, let’s just cover the caps: 263 hit rating, 400 haste rating, and then pump up your crit. Spellpower is not really something we can gear for – we try to get as much spellpower from our gems, but other than that, it pretty much comes along as we get gear upgrades.
Hit is obviously a great concern. While I wouldn’t lie sleepless at night about being 10 hit rating below the cap, I do generally want to stay above the cap – actually, because of my “luck” with gear, I was recently as high as 130 hit rating above the cap. I want to keep my haste around 400, but my general rule of thumb is to allow it to swing down to 350 and up to 450 – although if I reach that high, I can easely switch my haste ring for another ring with crit. But once these caps are met, the issues start surfacing.
After 400 haste, it stops being beneficial to wrath. It can still benefit starfire, but crit becomes better. However, at tier 9 gear, our crit is so high that it stops being a major benefit to starfire, especially since most of us are running with 2-piece tier 8. I am a few crit away from having 100% crit during lunar eclipse, but once I reach that point, I will only have heroic upgrades left in TOTGC and Icecrown Citadel will probably be just around the corner. But even without the added bonus from the tier 8 bonus, with 85% chance to crit during lunar eclipse will reduce the worth of crit. And we are going to get more crit in Icecrown, surely.
So what does this mean? My concern is that it will make us look at crit just as we do haste. It will basicly come down to crit not benefitting starfire and haste not benefitting wrath. There you have it: Two of our most important stats, will only be benefitting one spell each.
Other casters will still gain the full benefit from their stats as they are used to – they have instants, sure, but their main nukes remain unchanged, and the increase will be constant for them, but we are at a point where haste and crit lose some of their worth.
What can we do? Assuming Blizzard doesn’t turn around and make a class defining change, theres not much we can do other than bite it. I suppose a plus side can be that the added crit will benefit our T10 bonuses – especially the 4-piece bonus – and the extra haste will make sure we cast more spells which crits more. But it still doesn’t remove the feeling that we have to compromise the benefit we get from gear – all because of two talents.
Tags: crit, eclipse, haste, hit, nature's grace, starfire, tier 10, tier 8, tier 9, wrath
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