Gearing Up -- DPS vs. Healing

So, I just lately am becoming aware of the differences in difficulty of gearing up for DPS and for Healing.

When I was gearing up my priest, my priorities were SP > Spirit > Int. Although a secondary goal was to keep Spirit and Int relatively equal, that didn't dictate my gear choices. In the end, if a drop improved one or more of these without drastically reducing one or more, I would roll on it. I would say, gearing up for a healer is fairly easy, as there are no absolutes to aim for.

The opposite is true for DPS. There is one absolute: Hit Rating. Even though SP, Crit and Haste are all good, they mean nothing if you can't actually hit the mobs with your spells. Hit means nothing to a healer. It's everything to a DPS class. As I mentioned in my diary post for today, I've been choosing not to roll on some items because they don't have +hit on them. And last week when I put on my three Naxx drops, I immediately noticed that my +hit had lowered. It was painful to have to replace SP, Crit and Haste gems with +hit gems.

My mage has been 80 for a while now, so it might seem odd that I'm only figuring this out now. The truth is that I paid little attention to +hit while I was leveling her. I had enough +hit for regular quest and grinding mobs, with the occasional missed spell. And, when I hit 80 and started doing Heroics, a couple of my guildies helped me with crafted gear to reach the 288 hit cap for Arcane. In fact, for a while there, I was 20-30 points of over the hit cap. As I've found new gear, my hit rating has slowly gone down, but never below the cap. So, it wasn't until last week when I got the Naxx items that I was suddenly faced with having to replace gems with +hit ones.

For DPS, each new item drop forces an evaluation. How does this piece of equipment affect my hit rating? If the answer is, "not at all", then there's no problem. But, if it affects it, either positively or negatively, it starts off a process of rethinking gems and other equipment in your bank or inventory. Should I swap out that +SP gem for a +hit one? Or should I just swap out my boots for those that have higher +hit that are sitting in my bank, even though they have slighter lower stats?

To contrast, the only reason I ever re-gem on my Priest is to try out new combinations. There is no one stat that has to be one specific number. So it's all just experimentation to find the right combo for me.

My conclusion? It really is more complicated, at least for me, to gear up a dps toon.