Moonkin hit cap - Ignore the Draenei post comment

This week on TOTGC I noticed that I was missing a lot of spells. Ignoring Faction Champions (as that fight is to erratic to pay attention to miss rate) I appeared to be missing approximately 1% of my casts. I felt this merited investigation as if my suspicions were proved true then it may indicate either a misunderstanding of the effect of [Heroic Presence], or an outright bug.

It felt like, despite being at 9.15% hit rating (as considered the hit cap with a Draenei), I was missing a proportion of my attacks that would correspond to [Heroic Presence] not stacking with either [Balance of Power] or [Improved Faerie Fire]. I asked for feedback from a couple of other druids, none of which confirmed a similar circumstance. At risk of looking foolish, I pressed on.

Tests with the heroic dummy

The test was simple. I shuffled around my gear so that I had precisely 9% hit rating. I recruited a poor Draenei to hold my hand. I had Innervate, Mana pots, and some water to hand. I started spamming Wrath.

After 1000(ish) casts I had missed not a single wrath cast. If I wished to do this scientifically then really I should have either repeated my experiment to reduce chance of error, and have done experiments with different levels of hit to confirm, i.e. 0% and 8% for example with a view to seeing a 9% and 1% miss rate respectively. Considering that I missed no Wrath casts though I felt it was sufficient to halt here as it showed that the conventional wisdom, that the hit cap for a Moonkin with a Draenei, is 9%.

How did I miss despite being "hit capped"?

Range, bad luck, and deaths, to put it simply, intefered with my efforts to do some damage. The range on [Heroic Presence] is 30 yards. The furthest you can be from a player in the Colluseum is nearer to 80 yards (estimated). It is easy to say "I will always be in range of the Draenei", but how certain of that can you be? In my example part of the reason for having misses was due to my Draenei needing to move i.e. due to having the [Paralytic Toxin] on the Northrend Beasts or [Legion Flame] on Jaraxxus. Needing to move to keep up with the Draenei would only result in your DPS being further reduced.

Deaths is a slightly tricker one. As a Moonkin you should not be healing. You are not specced to heal and are not in the raid to heal. If it is a choice of heal or die i.e. because a healer or 2 are down then fine, but that's the exception. If your Draenei dies, you will lose 1% hit rating. Your options here are limited to combat ressing, or hoping that the Draenei in question is Soulstoned or can Ressurrect.

Finally, bad luck. All Moonkin should be aware of the cruel mistress that is RNG. In the first fight that I noticed misses it was due to missing the first spell I cast, [Faerie Fire]. This in turn caused me to be 3% under hit cap until I noticed

Conclusion

The above has lead me to 2 conclusions. Firstly that from now onwards I will be advising Moonkin to be aim for 10% hit cap regardless of whether or not they have a Draenei available. It may not seem like much, but that 1% really does get noticable in the extremes that result in you losing [Heroic Presence], and for the sake of getting an additional 27 +hit I don't think it's worth losing DPS perhaps when you most need it. Logically the time you are most likely to lose [Heroic Presence] is at the times where a wipe is on the table, because if a lot of people are dieing then one of them may be your Draenei.

Secondly it would be advisable to have at least 2 players that can apply a 3% hit buff, be it Moonkin with [Improved Faerie Fire], or Shadow priests with [Misery]. If they both cast their hit spell at the start then it is almost certain (99.91%) that one of the two will stick. As the number of players with one of these spells increases, then that number approaches relative certainty. This is more applicable to 25 man raids, in a 10 man you will most likely have to make do with at most 1 hit buff caster.