"Mists of Pandaria" , Hunters Will Need Expertise - General Hunter Discussion - Hunter Forums

Ghostcrawler has a post up about stat changes in Mists of Pandaria, with some changes that impact hunter — the biggest of which is that hunters ranged attacks will be able to be dodged, and so hunters will want expertise on their gear in MoP.

The post included a lot of minor stat changes, many of them changes that just make a lot of design sense (like spell hit and melee hit will be the same thing — just hit), but only a handful of the changes affect hunters. Here are the relevant hunter stat changes:

•     Hit chance: the hit cap against a boss in MoP will be 7.5% (instead of the current 8%). The hit cap against a same-level creature will be 3% (instead of the current 5%).
•     Bosses will have a 7.5% dodge chance, a 7.5% parry chance (front only) and a 7.5% block chance (front only).
•     Ranged attacks can be dodged. Hunters will benefit from expertise and will want to stack it. Ghostcrawler points out how this means that it will be easier for hunters and enhancement shamans to share gear. This means that we’re going to hate enhancement shaman a lot more now.
•     Expertise is changing to work like hit — with a rating that translates to a percentage. Most hunters are probably not familiar with how expertise works now, but it’s a fairly cumbersome and non-intuitive system and this change will make it much more clear for hunters who will now have to pay attention (more on that later).
•     All crits will crit for double damage as a baseline, with some exceptions where crits can get larger. Currently spell crits only do 1.5x damage baseline, and physical do twice. The vast majority of hunter abilities use the double damage crit, but we have a lingering couple (serpent sting, black arrow, etc) that do 1.5 and those should now do double.
•     Resilience has a bunch of changes — it’s going to be renamed something like “PvP Defense” and all players will start with 30% pvp defense. This defense will only be on pvp gear, and probably only work against players. Similarly pvp gear will have a new PvP Power stat that increases your damage and healing received, again, only against other players. The design philosophy here seems to really be to separate pvp and pve gear — you don’t want to pvp in your pve gear, and vice versa. On the other hand Ghostcrawler says that the goal is to make it actually easier to pvp in your pve gear and vice versa. There’s a lot of info on the change and if you’re interested in pvp you should check out the post.

The Big Change: Expertise
Without question the most significant thing that hunters saw from this post was the introduction of expertise for hunters. For those unfamiliar with the stat, here’s how it works:
Melee classes can have their attacks be dodged or parried — mobs (and bosses) can only parry attacks made from the front, which is why melee attacks from behind, but they can dodge all attacks. Expertise is a stat that reduces the chance to be dodged, and even parried. Currently hunters’ shots cannot be dodged or parried, so we don’t need to worry about expertise. Our pets can be dodged or parried, but they automatically gain expertise with our hit rating — if we’re hit capped, our pet is expertise capped (which is impressive — most melee only get enough expertise to not be dodged, but our pets can avoid being parried as well, which is great for tanking).
Come Mists of Pandaria our shots will be able to be dodged, but not parried. That means that against a boss 7.5% of our shots will fail to hit, even if we’re hit capped, because the boss dodged them. Thus we’re going to need enough expertise to bypass that 7.5% dodge chance. And then, just like hit rating, anything above that amount won’t actually help us. We won’t know exactly what that number will be until we get into the beta, but it will effectively be like having another hit-cap to go after.
In all likelihood our pets will no longer gain expertise along with our hit, and instead will gain expertise along with our expertise. Since we’re only going to get enough expertise to reach the dodge cap, that means that our pets will only have enough expertise to reach the dodge cap, and will still be parried. Again, mobs only parry attacks made from the front, and pets attack from behind if they aren’t tanking, so this change only affects soloing and pet tanking (effectively reducing tanking pet damage and threat by 7.5% — not the end of the world).

 

Quoted from Warcraft Hunter’s Union.