I’ve seen a variety of posts about working out how to hit cap and still maximize DPS, and a couple templates of what a ‘Best in Slot’ gearout would look like, but no real instruction on how to evaluate this yourself. I’ve been fighting back and forth, and finally decided to put some numbers to it. Rather than report my results, I thought it would be better to post the methodology.

To start, I decided that ultimately what I needed to know was how much theoretical damage I would be losing for every point of hit I picked up on an item, and use that information to decide which items give the best return. The first thing you need is item rankings assuming that hit is valued at zero. In Leulier, this is easily accomplished by sorting the ‘Items’ tab with the second button on top, which ignores hit. This will assume a hit value of zero and rank your items accordingly. On this page I usually look at the ‘DPS Diff’ column to compare loot against what I’m wearing. For this, we want to look at the absolute difference between two items, so we’ll use the ‘Value’ column instead.

We’ll look at our MH weapon, because that is obviously a bad place to drop an item for hit rating. The value listed for me for Turning Tide is 757.14. Soulblade, the best hit item (find by looking down the hit column on the sheet until you see something with hit) has a value of 645.67. That’s a difference of 111.47. If we divide that number by the amount of hit we gain, in this case 30, you get a number that shows the amount of value we gain for each point of hit we pick up, 3.715. We’d lose almost 4 damage for each hit gained, which is a pretty bad deal. The basic formula to apply to any slot is:

(non-hit item value – hit item value) / hit

So I got 3.715 for my MH, which is a good top end. At the other end, Dying Curse clocks in at .14. From a simple logic check, this makes sense as Dying Curse is one of the best trinkets in the game. Those two items make up our inside and outside bounds, and everything else falls in the middle. Obviously the lower the number the better return the item is. I plugged in the best in slot item and the best hit item in each slot into a spreadsheet made to calculate these values, and got the following ranking for best hit items…

Dying Curse: .14
Wyrmrest Necklace of Power: .24
Leggings of the Wanton Spellcaster: .52
Surplus Limb: .57
Gown of the Spell Weaver: .63

The hit on those items alone will put you at 317, or just over 12% from gear, and represent the best places to sacrifice more attractive pieces of gear for items with hit.

As always, your mileage will vary. Using values from your spec and raid buffs in Leulier will give you better results. Also, it isn’t always possible to pick up the exact pieces you want, and this will allow you to evaluate other items you may have access to. Hopefully this can help some people who are fighting around the hit cap.