Statistic in Wrath

If you're currently raiding in BC, then odds are you're sitting at about 300 To Hit and maybe 300 Haste Rating. Currently, the former is available mostly on gear and the latter, mostly through trinkets/buffs. Why are people here? Well, Combat builds offer the best sustained DPS builds and they focus on auto-attack damage, which requires To Hit due to the 28% miss chance. Haste Rating just makes you swing faster, it's a good thing but only something to focus on after you've increased your To Hit to a reasonable amount.

For example, in Tier 7 gear, the items Blizzard figures are the baseline for top end gear, have Agility, Stamina, +Hit, +Critical Chance and +Attack Power. Haste has only recently been seen as a desirable stat as it wasn't readily available before 25 man raids.

In the Expansion, things have changes somewhat. The top end gear currently available, for both PvP and PvE has Agility, Stamina, +Critical Chance, +Attack Power and +Haste/Resilience. To Hit is gone on most items. In point of fact, there are next to no items with +Hit and +Haste on them. This has to get you thinking about what Rogues should look for.

First though, let's quickly go over the stats.

To Hit - With none, you have a 28% miss chance on melee strikes and 5% miss chance on special attacks. 80 or so rating is enough to reduce the miss chance on specials to 0% and you need 400 or so to reduce the rating on melee strikes. There is a hard cap where adding more To Hit has no effect, but up until that cap, the gain is pretty linear.

Haste - Every 16 or so rating gives you a 1% boost to speed. It's also a mutiplicative stat, where you multiply your haste % sources. Most times, it's simple enough, Slice and Dice and whatever Haste Rating bonus you have. The gains are better on slower weapons and use a logarithmic curve, where the effects never cap out but reach a point of reduced effect, or what we call a "soft cap". Each weapon speed has their own "soft cap":

• 3.0 - 80%
• 2.5 - 70%
• 2.0 - 57%
• 1.8 - 50%
  
• 1.5 - 45%

With that out of the way, let's compare BC with Beta. BC builds focused on Combat, specifically with Swords with a swing speed of 2.6-2.9, where you needed a lot of Haste Rating to reach the soft cap (700+) which most people never got to. Now, in LK the optimum build seems to be Daggers, with a serious focus on the faster the better, so 1.5 speed. You only need 45% haste, which is only 200 haste rating (considering Slice and Dice). That's a very small number, easily surpassed on the raid tier gear dropping in Naxx currently.

To Hit is now going to be the same as Haste was in BC, found on enchants, gems, food and buffs. I wonder what the devs think about this?