From Monday's look on Sarth and his 3 drakes, we are fairly close to kicking their asses, but the general concensus is that we need more DPS on them drakes - One way to get more DPS is capping your Hit (Spell Hit) and expertise ratings. If you are not capped out on said stats, you may want to do so - and if you don't know what said caps are, then here ya go.

Expertise Cap: 26 (214 rating) when attacking from behind (which is recommended on most fights), or 60 (492 rating) when attacking from the front. Note that you must have 214 or 492 in order to get the full point of expertise, as it goes in increments of 0.25%, not 0.01% like hit rating.

Hit Cap (Physical): 8% (263 rating) for 2-handed weapons and special (yellow attacks), 24% (710 rating) for Dual wield, 19% (592 rating) for rogues with the 5% hit talent in the combat tree. Hunters hit cap is also 8% (263 rating), the talent "Focused Aim" is bugged for their pets, and apparently reduces overall crit%. Don't bother going for the dual wield caps, and current gear cannot get that high without gimping other stats.

Hit Cap (Spell): 17% (420 rating) before any talents or misery/Imp FF, and the Draenei aura - this means you should strive for 13% (341 rating) before talents - the cap for DK's with Virulence is 10% (263 rating), 9% (237 rating) for Boomkins with Balance of power, 7% (184 rating) or 10% for mages, depending on build. Warlocks & Shadow Priests are also 10%, depending on build. Rogues' poisons are considered spell (nature) damage, and thus fall under spell hit, they need 12% (315 rating) with Precision.

Crit Cap: 4,600 rating before talents/int/agility. Good luck capping this out - it has been done, without the loatheb/Hodir buff. But, in all seriousness, if you have a on crit proc (Flurry, Vengeance, Expose Weakness), 35% buffed is good enough to keep a 90%+ uptime on these procs.

Excellent post Primal. In addition to the hard caps, there are many hidden "soft caps" that can benefit a dps'er, most noticeably with haste.

For example, with hunters, steady shot is a 2.0 second (unmodified by haste) cast. Rotation for survival hunter is ES->SS->SS->SS with serpent sting / hunters mark reapplied so often.

At 540 haste, Steady shot is a 1.5 second cast, simultaneous with the global cool down. Now the rotation becomes ES->SS->-SS->SS->SS (an extra steady shot every six seconds!) More pew pew, less QQ.

I encourage everyone to research their "soft caps" from various stats such as haste, armor pene, etc. We are damned close to a 25 person title.

Right, there are some haste & armor pen "soft-caps" - the cap for armor pen is 75%, in a raid (Sunder armor/ Acid breath is 20%, Faerie Fire/Wasp Sting is 5% come 3.1). In most cases, however, Haste is something that just comes with the gear, like AP/Crit/Spell power - it has no upperbound, 100% haste double speed, not instant spell casts or instant kills, from a weapon. Some builds don't scale with haste very well, Enhancement Shamans, Beast Mastery hunters, Death Knights, for instance, where as some caster builds benefit from haste extremely well, like Elemental Shamans, Doomkins, etc. note that Melee Haste and Armor Pen will be 25% stronger in 3.1.

It's worth noting that with 3% spell hit from talents and 3% from Misery, the effective spell hit cap is 11% (289 rating). This is what I advocate our casters gear for (with appropriate adjustments for their own amounts of hit from talents). The trinket off of Cyanigosa (Heroic Violet Hold) or the Dying Curse out of Naxx is usually sufficient to make up the difference if we're missing Misery (or Imp. Faerie Fire after the patch, when it won't have to be refreshed stupidly often).

Also note that for casters, haste will cap out in the sense that the GCD for spells can't go below 1 second. That's 50% haste, and while that's enormous, with Heroism, it only takes 505 haste rating to cap out your instants.

Yes, I agree with Muphrid. Also it might be useful for people to pick up loot that will keep them at hitcap even when we don't have misery or ff available. Although not required I have found it useful to have extra items with spellhit in them in my bags, just in case. For instance as Muphrid said, at the moment if misery or ff was available I would only need 11%, but if they weren't I would need 14% or 368 hit rating to be capped. It will be useful if people start considering this for their gear right now because even when the new 10-man drops you might not have a shadow priest or druid in the group with you to provide the buff and therefore will lose a ton of dps. Also keep in mind that you don't want to pick up gear for hit rating at the expense of other more important stats, most best in slot items are pretty much designed to get you to hitcap save maybe 1 or 2 gem slots.

In 3.2.2, Armor Penetration will be nerfed to 88% of it's current value. So for those who are soft capped at 440 - 520-ish, with Grim Toll or Mjolnir Runestone, will need to find the new soft cap with said items (I heard it's around 700-ish area), or start stacking other attributes.