Hit Rating for a Rogue in WoW

When dealing with most other classes in WoW, hit rating seems to be a pretty simple topic. For most other character classes hit rating deals with two main numbers known as the soft cap and the hard cap. The soft cap is the number of hit rating your character requires before special moves are guaranteed to never miss your target. The hard cap ensures your character’s auto attack also never miss your target in addition to special moves. This means the only real hit rating you need to think about is the hard hit cap. Unfortunately for rogues life isn’t quite this simple, as the hard hit cap is somewhat completely unobtainable. Rogues get the added benefit of being able to dual wield one handed weaponry of any kind. We can pick up a sword, dagger, axe, fist weapon or mace and handle it with skill (unless you use mutilate which requires two daggers), which means Blizzard decided to give us a penalty in return to balance things out. The penalty for dual wielding is an abnormally large hard hit cap of 27% which translates into 882.9 hit rating (approximately 32.7 hit rating per 1% of hit skill). That means while other classes can easily reach their hit cap quite easily, rogues can never hope to achieve theirs.

Therefore, rogues must focus on their soft hit cap and poison hit cap as quickly as possible before any main stat (but after expertise) when it comes to gemming and enchanting gear.

These are the current rogue hit caps approximately:

Soft hit cap (All special attacks never miss) – 8% hit skill, 261 hit rating.
Poison hit cap (All poisons never miss) – 15%~ hit skill, 490.5 hit rating.
Hard hit cap (All auto-attacks never miss) – 27% hit skill, 882.9 hit rating.

At first glance, it seems almost impossible for any rogue to even obtain the poison hit cap but there are various ways you can ensure you reach this level aside from gems and enchants. For example, very early on in the combat talent tree is an ability called “Precision” which awards 5% hit skill to the character which is immensely valuable to any rogue. In addition to his you may also reduce your required hit skill by 1% if you have a draenai in your party as they provide the passive aura “Heroic Presence” (+1% hit).

Assuming you have a draenei in your party you will therefore need the following hit:

Soft hit cap – 8% hit skill (Minus 1% heroic presence) = 7% hit skill, 228.9 hit rating.
Poison hit cap – 15%~ hit skill (Minus 1% heroic presence) = 14%~ hit skill, 457.8 hit rating.
Hard hit cap – 27% hit skill (Minus 1% heroic presence) = 26% hit skill, 850.2 hit rating.

If you have 5/5 points in the talent “Precision” in the combat tree but no draenei in your party you will need the following hit:

Soft hit cap – 8% hit skill (Minus 5% Precision) = 3% hit skill, 98.1 hit rating.
Poison hit cap – 15%~ hit skill (Minus 5% Precision) = 10%~ hit skill, 327 hit rating.
Hard hit cap – 27% hit skill (Minus 5% Precision) = 22% hit skill, 719.4 hit rating.

Finally, we will assume you have both 5/5 Precision and Heroic Presence in all of your raids:

Soft hit cap – 2% hit skill, 65.4 hit rating.
Poison hit cap – 9% hit skill, 294.3 hit rating.
Hard hit cap – 21% hit skill, 686.7 hit rating.

We can now immediately see why Precision is such as vital talent for all rogues to obtain. Without Precision our hit caps are immensely high but with 5/5 points in the Precision talent they become much more obtainable.

Assuming you have 5/5 points in Precision, when you first hit level 80 you should ensure you are gemmed and enchanted to at least be soft hit capped. As you will start off doing only heroic instances to gear up properly you should assume that you will not have a draenei in your party. This means you will need to aim for approximately 99 hit rating.

Once you begin raiding and obtain higher ilevel gear you should aim to achieve at least 300 hit rating to ensure you are fully soft capped and poison capped at all times. Once you reach 300 hit rating you can stop gemming and enchanting for hit and instead gem and enchant for agility. You should never gem for attack power and only gem for critical strike chance when you need to fill a yellow gem. Beyond 300 hit rating you should eventually find your gear naturally increases your hit rating to somewhere between 300 and 400 hit rating and you should not worry about your hit rating beyond this.

For more in depth information on the Rogue, Zygor Guides has all you need to know.