for our shadow spells yes, not for dispel/mass dispel/starshards.

Right, so you need 2/5 Shadow Focus to get your shadow spells hit capped and then 38 hit rating to get your non-shadow spells (i.e. dispel and mass dispel) hit capped, right?

Okay so we all agree on the hit cap for non-shadow spells

Now how about +hit nullifying talents that effect our spell's chance to hit like our shadow +hit making our fear more effective vs people with fear resist talents?

This is how I understand the hit issue.

Take, for example, Unbreakable Will. 5/5 Unbreakable Will gives +15% resistance to Stun, Fear and Silence. So instead of having a 96% base chance to land (i.e. spell hit) a Fear or Silence against a 70 Priest, you have an 81% chance. Therefore, if you only have 3/5 Shadow Focus (i.e. +6% spell hit) and 0 +hit from items, your chance to land a Fear or Silence against a 70 Priest is only 87%. Therefore, having more hit from talents/items is not a waste against Priests.

You won't get your hit chance up to 99% for everything (since talents and gems have a lot of cc mitigation), but more will always help. EVERY shadowpriest knows how crucial it is for a Fear or Silence to land so it's worth adding some extra hit if you don't gimp your health/dmg/res/etc.

Based on a bit of loose testing I'm going to have to insist that spell hit does not counteract resist talents in pvp. Whilest in my pve gear I was over hit capped (18%) and fighting a feral druid with 3/3 Primal Tenacity, I had him resist 3 consecutive fears. This of course could be bad luck, but then, the numbers make it feel highly unlikely. The innate 3% resist required for pvp hit cap plus the additional 15% hit for his 15% added chance to resist should have given him around 1%, maybe 2% chance to resist? If something is wrong with my logic feel free to correct me, other wise I'm going to be forced to believe that things such as Primal Tenacity and Unbreakable Will cannot be countered with spell hit.

Correct me if I am wrong but I am pretty sure there is a mechanical difference bewteen Flat Out resists, ala +Hit Rating and talent based % Resistances. I am almost entriely sure these are not mitgatable.

For example, your +Hit will not help you versus CloS.

Trying to work out how much hit you need to cast through cloak of shadows is as effective as masturbating in the long run.

Just think about it like this. Cloak of shadows means that 9/10 of your spells will not land. This means that for the 3 GCDs you can get off, there is a very high chance that none of them will land at all. for that reason, you need to be casting only either rank 1 Pain, to try and land them in combat and/or have a dot on them so they can't vanish for very long, or a Prom/Shield/IF, depending on your current situation. Even if it did work, you would need 12.6x90, or 1134 hit rating to negate clos. So getting that little extra 8 spell hit when you could get another 9 damage is not going to help you against the rogue whose beating your face in.

Gil, you read absolutely nothing of what I said

Wasn't directed at you

Just kind of an overall "omg quit worrying about this thing because even if you could the numbers required are stupid high" post. Albeit a bit late, it still made me feel better.

Talents such as Unbreakable Will's calculations are taken into affect AFTER +hit. They cannot be mitigated by it.

not locked out .

I was asking me same type of questions with talents such as Balance of Power (moonkin).

The tooltip says : "Increases your chance to hit with all spells and reduces the chance you'll be hit by spells by 4%." I thought it could be different from Primal Tenacity (which was mentioned before), because it's clearly a matter of "spell hit" there.

Maybe someone here has a clear answer to that

Isn't resistance overcome by spell penetration, not spell hit?

I know no one bothers with that stat anymore, but...

To my knowledge, penetration is anti-resilience. I'm not sure about resistance.

Penetration is anti resistances only. It usefulness is therefore somewhat questionable although a little is quite good.