In Mists of Pandaria, hunter stat reforging priorities have not changed a whole lot from Cataclysm, aside from the addition of expertise. Agility is still king, and is still far enough ahead of the secondary stats to be your most important stat for gemming. The secondary stats (haste, crit, mastery) are much lower and the difference between them is comparatively small.
Here are the Mists hunter stat priorities:
- Agility
- Ranged DPS
- Hit & Expertise to cap (hit and expertise should be identical)
- Crit
- Haste
- Mastery
While the actual stat weights change slightly from spec to spec, the overall stat priorities are the same for BM, MM, and SV — except for ranged DPS which is the top stat for MM.
Crit is the best secondary stat after hit/expertise, and mastery is the worst. Again, the difference between them, especially between haste and mastery, is relatively small. If you respec to crit, and then respec to mastery you would likely be hard-pressed to see the difference on the dummies (due to RNG); however, the difference is there and reforging in favor of crit will give you the highest possible raid dps.
It’s worth noting at this point that the kind of micro-optimization from reforging secondary stats is one of those things that you want to do for raiding, but probably isn’t worth it before then. For heroics you may want to reforge to get to the hit and expertise caps, but that’s about all you really need to worry about at that point.
Question – with current gear for heroics, it’s impossible to hit both hit and expertise caps. With raiding beginning, should I focus on reforging one more than the other. For example, get hit capped and then work on expertise cap later? Or, should i reforge gear to have hit/expertise as close as possible, even though its still under the 7.5% cap?
By the way, thanks for all the grea info and hard work.
I’m not sure how you manage not to have enough hit/exp from HC gear. I’m nearly fully HC geared and have plenty. Do make sure to get some pieces with hit/exp; as Frostheim has written in this post they are your first priority, they will make the biggest impact on your DPS. I find myself thinking ‘but that crit+mast/haste is so much better’. It might seem nice to have lots of crit (or any other secondary), but your caps are more important.
To answer your question: as far as I know, Hit and Expertise are completely the same, there’s no favour whatsoever. I’m not a very deep theorycrafter though, so don’t pin me down on this.
If you can’t hit the caps with reforging, it doesn’t really matter how the balance works: being dodged is identical for all practical dps purposes as missing.
Thanks for the input. I’m not fully HC geared out, but you make a great point; focusing on gear with more for hit/expertise. Damn you expertise!!!!
Keep in mind that as a hunter, you need only to hit the dodge cap, not the (significantly higher) parry cap for expertise. It’s a little misleading that the in-game expertise tooltip shows parry at all.
if you’re only doing heroics, then simply go for the level 92 caps first. you’ll need the 93 cap only once you start doing challenge modes and raids.
Because having 7.5% expertise is only necessary in raids and boss fights i dont cap it on my gear.
My geared exp is only 5.3% and i use an Elixir of Weaponry (750 exp for an hour) when raiding. Its a cheap elixir to buy at AH, and to produce if u are an alchemist. It adds just over 2% exp.
Not gearing expertise to cap gives me more dps when i dont need exp like when doing dailies. If all u do is raid i guess u are better off gearing exp, but if you are like me and do a fair bit of PVE outside raids as well, like dailies, you will prefer to use the elixir as needed to cap in raids.
Im ilvl 488 currently with epic in every slot. I too have trouble capping exp on gear even if i wanted to. I had to use a lot of my reforges to cap hit.
Ugh, this expertise is killing me. I might as well dump all my haste, it’s not doing me any good since it’s not enough to adjust my Cobra Shot cast time significantly : (.
Thanks for amending this, Frostheim, the clarification really helps! :)
I believe that there should be some mention as to the affect of talent choices on stat priorities. Again, I’m no theorycrafter, but from my own personal experience, with less than half heroic gear and no T13 2-set, Thrill of the Hunt (ToTH) results in FAR less cobra shots being necessary (as BM and SV, and I would imagine the same case for MM). Given that, as to my knowledge, the primary benefit to haste being it’s affect on cast times, it is devalued the less you need to cobra shot. In fact, ToTH feels very similar to using the T13 2-piece, and I would expect mastery to overtake haste in priority just as in DS.
Great articles, Frost. Keep them coming.
Hey Frost.
I generally follow this pattern of skill, but now currently the Ask Mr. Robot optimizes to achieve Haste. I prefer to keep Agi> Crit> Mastery; would even need to convert everything into Haste?
That’s odd — I wonder if maybe Mr. Robot hasn’t updated their priorities from Cataclysm. Simcraft and FD both seem to agree with the gear levels I’ve been checking.
wouldn’t Mastery be more important for the BM hunter to increase pet damage?
As it turns out, no. At least not right now. Keep in mind that crit also increases pet damage by increasing pet crit, as well as hunter crit.
“Relative values:
Despite what simulation tools say, haste is not a very attractive stat over what we cannot avoid from gear. “Faux reforging” over several valus of secondary stats between haste, crit and mastery show that;
mastery and crit have a very high synergy
haste and crit have an okay synergy, though not as good as the one between
mastery and crit
haste and mastery diminish eachother – in all cases it would be better to go either full haste or full mastery, with full mastery being significantly better within the observed min/max
In addition I also found that
mastery and crit are very close together in value
mastery will be better then crit at more intervals than vice versa
a balance of mastery and crit shows better results than going purely for one or the other
while haste may show slightly better results at specific increases, it also does so at specific decreases, and shows loss just before and just after these points – this can only be due to dead time or shot shifting.
haste will, apart from the specific shot shifting points, be a loss over mastery or crit at all other tested points
This leads to a valuation of:
Agi>hit==exp (to cap)>>mastery>~crit>>haste
This is according to Nooska over at Elitist jerks. And this is specifically for BM hunters.
I keep hearing how it’s impossible to keep the expertise and hit caps at 7.5. I don’t understand why?? I haven’t hit 90 yet with my hunter, however: from 85 to 86 to 87 to 88 I have been able to reforge to the hit/expertise cap of 7.5 .So what changes at 90 that keeps peeps from doing so???? Thanx
Thanx, this thread was a great help :D
can someone please help me ?what is the stats that i need more for a bm hunter .i have tryed mastey crit .and it just done seem like i have it right yet .here is my email if someone can help werthmike85@yahoo.com …. thanks
@slayercome, you have it right.
Agi > Hit > Exp > Mastery > crit > Haste for BM hunters in 5.1 and 5.2.
The priority of haste, crit and mastery seems to be in debate.. how big of a differance are we talking in raid? 100s, 1000s, 10, 000s dps?