Category: Groups, Numbers
MWRW: The Hit Table
Today’s entry is the first in what will (hopefully) be a series called “Mechanics With a Rubber Wrench”. The theme is to break down, into simple concepts and ideas, the not-so-horribly-simple and occasionally viciously-complex mechanics of World of Warcraft.
In this way, you can learn to be a better [player|raider|PVPer|Artisan Chef] without having to do the math. This is helpful if you’re not mathematically inclined, if the whole idea of ‘defense rating’ is confusing, or if you’re just lazy.
Today’s topic: The Hit Table.
If you, or someone you know, has abnormally low DPS in fights, don’t despair! You may not be an utter noob! It’s not necessarily that your weapon sucks, that your skill rotations are terrible or that your pet spent half the instance trying to do unspeakable things with the tank’s leg!
It could just come down to Hit Rating!
Here, ladies and gentlemen, we have an example of The Hit Table. Now here’s how attacks work in game, as far as anyone’s been able to piece together from research and Blizzardian tidbits.
When you swing your weapon or fire your bow, a /roll 10000 takes place on the server. Your attack is placed somewhere on this table based on what you rolled. Let’s assume 0 is at the top of the table and 10000 is at the bottom (though it doesn’t really matter- we just need an arbitrary method of placing a roll on the table).
Clearly, you want your htis to land on Critical Strike or Hit, and definitely do NOT want them landing on Block, Glancing Blow, Parry, Dodge or, heaven forfend, Miss. But how to ensure that this happens?
Well, imagine that there’s an endless supply of Hit ‘below’ the chart, constantly welling upwards- that is to say, any empty space on the chart will be immediately filled, because all the fields move up to fill the empty space, and the Hit segment expands as needed to make sure there’s no gaps left.
I won’t go into the math here, but the various sizes of the segments of the chart are based on many things:
- Your Level
- The mob’s level
- Your weapon skill
- Whether you are fighting from range
- Whether you are in front of or behind the mob
- Whether you are single or dual-wielding
- Your gear’s statistics (expertise, critical hit rating, agility, and hit rating)
- Whether or not the Balance-talented spell “Improved Faerie Fire” is present on the mob
- Whether you’ve eaten Spicy Hot Talbuk recently
- Probably more that I’ve missed…
Assumptions I’m going to be making include:
You are level 70; The mob is a raid boss (level 73, which the game shows as a skull); You are NOT dual-wielding; you have your weapon skill at 350; you are either fighting at range (guns, bows, crossbows or thrown) or are standing in the mob’s rear arc.
With those assumptions made, I can tell you, definitively, the following things:
1: Without some boost to your abilities, you are going to miss 9% of your attacks. Sucks to be you.
2: You will not ever get parried or dodged; those two things require a frontal-arc melee attack.
Okay, so missing 9% of your attacks… well, that’s bad! But wait a minute- let’s assume for a second that my chance to land a critical hit can be boosted insanely high- to 100%- then you’ll never miss and always crit, right?
Wrong. Critical Strike is second from the bottom and can’t expand upwards until other things “get out of the way”. (It can, however, expand downwards, meaning that you no longer land normal hits but instead all criticals. This is referred to as ‘pushing off the table’, as in ‘My crit rating is so high I’ve pushed normal hits off the table.’)
So… how to get these other things out of the way?
Eliminating Dodge and Parry:
Stand away from the mob and fight at range; or; attack from behind. Attacks from behind cannot be dodged nor parried. Similarly, ranged attacks cannot be dodged or parried. Those two chances will be reduced to 0; those entries can be entirely taken out of the table (not pushed off, but actually removed completely). The second way of doing this is with Expertise Rating, which I am not going to go into in-depth today; Let it suffice to say that with sufficient Expertise Rating, you can attack from in front and still allow zero chance to be parried or dodged.
Eliminating Glancing Blows:
Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t do this, and though I hate to agree with conventional wisdom I’ve yet to see a scrap of proof that says there’s a way to reduce the chance of these things happening. Sorry.
Eliminating Blocks:
See above, ‘Glancing Blows’.
Eliminating Missed Attacks:
Here we come to the meat of the subject. It is not only possible but actually simple to reduce the chance that you will miss to zero.
Attain a hit rating of at least 142 points.
Hit ‘rating’ and hit ‘chance’ are not, of course, the same thing. And again, there’s lots of complex math but, take it from me, the 9% miss chance vs. a level-Skull mob is removed with 142 hit rating. This is referred to as ‘the hit cap’ for hunters and melee classes that single-wield (anyone using the classic ’sword-and-board’ combo, anyone using a two-handed weapon and, of course, feral druids). At this level of hit rating, you will never actually miss.
There are of course ways to lower that number- various classes have talents that increase chance to hit (generally by 3%, reducing their hit cap by 47); a draenei Paladin, Warrior or Hunter’s racial aura reduces the hit cap of their party by 15.77 by their mere presence (1% chance to hit) and, of course, a druid tagging the mob with a three-point Improved Faerie Fire allows another 3% (47-point) reduction for anyone attacking that mob physically.
But How?
As noted above- be Draenei of the appropriate class, talent for it, beg a Balance druid to come along. There’s also hit rating on gear; ranged users (almost always hunters) can pick up ranged-only hit rating via the [Biznick’s] (but good luck finding an engineer who has the schematic, these days). Finally there are gems, a [glyph], the Surefooted enchant and even [food] that can be used to top yourself out. (Hunters can also get an improving leg or head armor kit via Zul’Gurub, but that place is rarely run these days).
Now you know how the hit table (theoretically, anyway) works! This should allow you (and your raidmates, feel free to point them here) to up their DPS much faster than simply stacking crit chance or attack power. It also makes for more predictable damage, which makes your tanks very, very happy.
Go forth and conquer! (and, seriously, if your raidmates keep complaining about their miss numbers, send them here…)
April 23rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm
I haven’t fully dissected your posting here, but it seems that you have block and dodge backwards, at least in terms of mobs.
You are somewhat correct in that you, as a player, cannot dodge or parry attacks on your rear arc. Mobs, however, are special in that they have a magical sixth sense, and CAN still dodge attacks made from behind. This is why Expertise is every bit as good, rating for rating, as hit for melee DPS.
As for block: I may be mistaken, but I’m 99% sure mobs can’t block rear attacks.
April 24th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Nice post
April 24th, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Ok. . . I guess you wont take it from me, since my first comment appears to have been deleted. Perhaps you’ll accept it coming from WoWWiki. . .
“A player attacking a mob from behind can remove only parry and block from the table since direction doesn’t affect dodge. Also note that there is a 0.5 yard penalty in which direction doesn’t count.
A mob attacking a player from behind will remove parry, block, and dodge from its attack table.”
From http://www.wowwiki.com/Attack_table
April 25th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Standing in the rear arc, you will not ever be parried or blocked. You WILL be dodged. This is why melee DPS needs some expertise.
April 26th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Sura, Wellington; thank you for the responses. My apologies it took so long for your comments to show up; there was a bit of a hitch with moderation (”Oh, there are comments in the queue- oops…”).
Interesting that mobs can dodge from any direction- that, I did not know (Clearly, I haven’t done enough melee work!).
The WoWWiki entry on Hit seems to be be missing some of the information on the Attack Table entry; my fault for incomplete research. My thanks to you both for pointing this out, I’ll amend the post when I have a moment.