A Little Bit on Spell Hit...

Spell hit is a very important thing for a PvE Mage. It is the single best way to increase your dps and mana efficiency. Take this with a grain of salt however. I say it this way because no matter how much spell damage, haste, or crit you stack, if you’re not capped on hit, you’re going to miss. And when you see resist across your screen, you might as well count that as a big, huge, fat, stinking zero.

So how is spell hit calculated? Quite simply in fact. Let’s try a couple scenarios real quick, shall we?

Scenario A:

You’re 70, and you’re grinding the blood elves on top of Black Temple, trying to get some more Scryer Rep. So you and your mob are both 70, and you have a base of 96% to hit that mob. How much plus to hit do you need to be capped against this mob? You need 3% more hit, or 37.8 spell hit rating. For those of you who just did the math, yes, that’s only 99% to hit. Well, that’s the way it is. Blizzard has implemented a cap on hit, so you always have, at the very least, 1% chance to miss. It does not matter how much plus hit you stack, you will never have greater than 99%.

Scenario B:

You’re 70, and enjoying your first Kara raid with your guild. They’ve stressed that as a Frost Mage, you need to get at least 164 spell hit rating before you can start getting epic loots with them. For most trash in Kara, you won’t need to be hit capped. You might need a little as some of the trash is a level higher than you, but it’s only 4% (or 50.4) more. However, you clear you first bit of trash, and you come to your first Kara boss, Attumen the Huntsmen. Now, if you check the link there, you’ll notice that he is level ??. This means he is a raid boss, and for all intensive purposes, he is mathematically 3 levels higher than the highest level person in the raid, and in this case, level 73.

This means that you will have to have enough spell hit to not miss a mob 3 levels higher than you. That is a total of 16% spell hit (or 202 spell hit rating), which must be attained through gear and talents.

However, I did specify Frost Mage didn’t I? Yes I did. As a frost mage, there is a talent that reduces how much plus to hit you need to acquire to reach your cap. Elemental Precision is one of the first talents as a Frost Mage, and it’s not uncommon for PvE Fire Mages (or PvP Mages, as you only need 3% to not miss a player the same level as you) to have the talent too. It reduces the mana cost and chance your target has to resist your fire and frost spells by 3%. So by having this talent, you’ve already taken care of 3% spell hit, or 37.8 spell hit rating.

So how is spell hit calculated? For a level 70 Mage, 12.6 spell hit rating is 1%. So, as stated above, to cap your hit rating against a level 73 mob (Raid Boss), with no talents pertaining to spell hit, you need 16%, or 202 hit rating.

So now that you are a little more educated on spell hit, wether you'r looking into PvP or PvE, you have a reason to get at least 3% spell hit.