Post by dervasavred
If there was but only "Hit Rating" then both spell and melee hit caps would be the same no? Hmmmm, thought processes here seem to be lacking slightly.
Not necessarily. The only reason that spell hit requirements were higher to begin with was to compensate for the difference in mitigation mechanics for DPS between melee and casters. Whereas melee has to worry about Dodge, Parry, glancing blows and miss (and block in some old-school content, but this has since been removed), casters only had to worry about hit and resist, whether partial or full.
In order to bring casters back in line into stacking more hit gear instead of an obscene amount of +crit/+dmg, Blizzard raised the innate chance to miss/resist back in the day. This is still the case today.
And, for the record, 3.0 did combine all +hit/+haste/+crit itemization together, but the mechanics behind it are still distinct due to classes like DKs (melee and spell mixtures) and the simple issue above with casters having reduced DPS mitigation on raid targets without the separate mechanic. The hit affects both sides, but it does it in varying amounts based on class role (caster DPS vs. physical DPS, in this case).
To finalize this point, the WoWHead item filter yields only two pieces of gear that have "spell hit rating":
http://www.wowhead.com/?items&filter=cr=48;crs=1;crv=0 and they are both Brutal Gladiator's caster weapons, so I would feel that they are not even relevant to LK discussion.