Hunter Crit Cap

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union

I get questions about the hunter crit cap every now and then since WotLK, and the topic of the crit cap pops up on hunter forums as well. It’s a persistent bugger that doesn’t seem to ever go away and is positively filled with gross misinformation, so I’m putting this simple hunter crit cap guide together. Here we go:

The hunter crit cap is 104.8% crit.

That’s right, our crit cap is actually over 100%. The reason is that raid bosses are a higher level then us and thus are harder to crit. So if you have a 104.8% crit chance, you’ll actually crit 100% of the time. If you have a 103.8% crit chance, you’ll actually crit a rad boss 99% of the time.

It is theoretically possible for a hunter to crit with every single shot!

Now, we have several talents and glyphs that increase the crit chance of just one or some of our shots, and this won’t be reflected on our tooltip. In that case we would have a soft cap for just those shots.

For example, as a SV hunter with 3 ranks of Sniper Training, your Kill Shot softcap is 79.8% crit (because of Sniper Training and Master Tactician procs). That means if you go crazy and stack crit, after 79.8% your kill shot won’t benefit from any more crit. Your explosive shot softcap is 90.8%.

For MM, you can get to a Aimed Shot softcap of 82.8% with the TSA glyph.

(Note those numbers are without raid buffs: crit increasing raid buffs will lower the softcaps proportionally – max raid buffs give you about the equivalent of anotther 14% crit).

However, these numbers are all so high that no hunter should ever reach them unless your doing something suboptimal like stacking crit. But the point is that you can indeed have your shots crit 100% of the time. There is no external force capping our ability to crit.

96% crit chance demonstrates how high our crit can get. There is no artificial limit lowering our chance to crit. We (in theory) can crit with every, single, shot.

But…. I heard it was 42%, or 65%, or 75%?

Indeed there is a lot of misinformation out there about hunter crit cap that says we have a crit cap at some crazy low crit level. There are three reasons you hear that:

Reason 1: Sheeple
The first is simply that someone hears about the crit cap and it nags at them, gnawing away the reasoning centers of the brain. Surely they wouldn’t have heard there was a 35% crit cap without a reason, right? And then this person repeats the story, infecting others. Sure there’s no evidence of an artificial hunter crit cap and no logic behind it, but they won’t give up the idea without evidence that there is not a hunter crit cap. Go figure.

Reason 2: Poor Science
Secondly, some people don’t realize that the crit chance shown on their character sheet is their crit chance against a mob of the same level as them (lvl 80). Your chance to crit a higher level mob (like, say a level 83 boss) will be lower. So they see in their raid results that their crit was lower than their character sheet and BAM, the memory of the crit cap gnawing at their brain comes into play as confirmed.

Reason 3: Comparison to those Melee Guys
Finally the most legitimate reason is that melee classes (especially dual-wielding ones) do have a much lower crit cap. When you’re attacking in melee the mob has a chance to block, a chance to dodge, a chance to parry, and a chance at a glancing blow. So if you have a 90% crit chance, you won’t crit 90% of the time ’cause the mob still has it’s dodge/parry/block chances against you. We shoot, so we don’t worry about that. It’s good to be a hunter.