Criticals

I've been thinking about the attack table a little bit, and in particular about the crit cap. I have never really considered the crit cap before, but it turns out that I am getting rather near it. To demonstrate how problems can arise, suppose you are a dual wielding fury warrior, with no hit or expertise, attacking from the rear. With white attacks your attack table would be:

Miss - 27%
Dodge - 6.5%
Glancing blow - 24%
Crit/hit - 42.5%

Therefore if you have crit chance of 25% the white attack table is

Miss - 27%
Dodge - 6.5%
Glancing - 24%
Crit - 25%
Hit - 17.5%

It can be seen that any crit above 42.5% will be wasted as regards white attacks - extra crit will not increase white attack damage as it will be "off the table". Special attacks do not glance, and have a miss rate of (I believe) 9% rather than 27%, so have higher crit caps. This is why +hit and +expertise gear is so important - not only is it a linear damage increase, but it also increases rage generation and increases the crit cap.

I am expertise capped, have +11.5% hit, and crit of about 40%. My white attack table is as follows:

Miss - 15.5%
Glancing - 24%
Crit - 40%
Hit - 20.5%

When you consider rampage adds 5%, and raid buffs account for around another 5%, the crit cap is only 10.5% away. This is something I will need to monitor as my gear improves - I currently have gear score of only 5,375, so there is likely to be considerable improvement in my crit rating as I gear up. This cap is only for white attacks however - most of my damage comes from yellow attacks where the table is

Miss - 0%
Dodge - 0%
Glancing - 0%
Crit - 40%
Hit - 60%

No such worries here then!

The point I need to take away from this is that as my gear improves the desirability of crit is going to fall away sharply when it ceases to benefit my white attacks any more. I may need to regem when I get near the tipping point, as I currently have some yellow +crit gems that I could swap out.