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As we all know, William Shatner is a shaman, and we all, no doubt, are wondering, “how do I hurl bolts of lightning?”  Early in 3.1, one of the shaman complaints surrounding their drop in DPS was the cooldown of lava burst.  Many shadow priests have a similar complaint with their lack of an on demand direct damage ability.  They also have to wait for what can feel like eons between casts of their mind blast.  There is relief on the horizon as 3.3 looks to test the effect of haste on DoTs and HoTs.

The Symphony of Healers

A good raid healing team really is a thing of beauty.  Imagine Beethoven’s 5^th or the Brandenburg Concertos being played but instead of the glorious music, you are watching a screen of green heals bombarding your monitor.  There is a rhythm to healing and syncing up your rhythm with the other members of your healing team is one of the most important aspects of raid healing.  If you druid raid heal like Stomp, you know your role has always been tempo.  You are the underlying carrier of the healing symphony.  It becomes the job of the other healers to drop in their massive heals at a moments notice if you are low on a GCD, and conversely, for you to ease the pain of the tank healers with a HoT or two if you have the time and mana.

Haste is dangerous to HoTs because of the symphony.  It doesn’t just impact the druid; it impacts the entire healing team.  Healing teams who know and trust each other are managing their mana as well as the mana of their team.  Faster ticking HoTs would naturally speed up the tempo of a druid heals, and therefore, throw the timing of the other healers off.  Ghostcrawler may not have directly commented on the rhythm of a healing team, but he did bring up one of the costs of haste effecting HoTs, more casting equals more mana used.  The reapplication of HoTs also has the high cost of a GCD not even worthy of a nod from the crab.  Overall, he understands haste on HoTs may carry a high cost, and the glyph idea is a step in the right direction as the developers appear to be testing the idea right now.

The Chopin DPS

Unlike healers, DPS are only dependent on themselves.  They may use or bring buffs but when the fight starts, it is no longer their responsibility to monitor anyone else.  They are supposed inflict agony on their foe and nothing else.  Whereas a healing team relies on each other, DPS classes are skilled soloist performing their own Chopin.  Locks might be patiently executing their very own Prelude No. 4 while the mage hastily plays a well performed Prelude No. 16.  Both are effective, but each has of them have a style their own, and only the damage meter is likely to judge when the dust settles.

Haste impacting DoTs is very different from it affecting HoTs.  DPS don’t have to worry about monitoring a team of healers.  They are able to completely blast away at their heart’s content as long as they have the mana.  Warlocks and shadow priests even have their own talents everlasting affliction and pain and suffering, respectively, to help with the refreshing of DoTs to conserve mana.  There might be some concern about the ability to refresh, but as Dominic Hobbs pointed out in a recent post on WoW.com, it would take about 4000 haste rating to prevent a lock from being able to refresh corruption with haunt.

I do have to say, as someone whose original toon was an affliction lock, I was a little disappointed shadow priests would be getting the buff for all DoTs through talents they are already taking, but locks would have to use a glyph slot and it would only benefit corruption.  Since I read the spriest notes first, I thought eradication might be in for a serious rework.  Instead of “When you deal damage with Corruption, you have 6% chance to increase your spell casting speed by 20% for 10 sec” imagine an eradication with the a tooltip more like, “when you cast haunt, your haste reduces the time between periodic ticks of your damage over time spells for 10 seconds.”  Giving the 10 second window means you would need to refresh haunt as soon as the cast is available (8 seconds later) or you are likely to lose some valuable seconds of free dps.  It could bring back some of the complexity of affliction so many locks long for without completely making the rotation a 3.0.8 nightmare.  I, for one, do miss some of the complexity of the affliction rotation and would be happy with another DoT similar to the old siphon life to manage now since the rotation has been oversimplified.

Why does haste have to equal more spam?

At Blizzcon, the devs told us haste was being reworked.  It would increase the regeneration of energy, rage, mana, and the new hunter focus.  It will be designed to allow all classes to “press more buttons” because pressing buttons is fun.  The only weakness of haste for a class like the mage is that it allows you to press 1 more button.  Pushing yourself to see how many bolts of whatever you can fill in between your cooldown abilities is nice, but what if it lowered cooldowns too?

If the idea of haste is to make it a fun stat, why not make it a really fun stat?  Can you imagine an elemental shaman who shaved off a second from his lava burst?  A priest with a reduced mind blast?  A druid able swiftmend more frequently?  What about a tanking deathknight able to skim 5 seconds off the unbreakable armor cooldown?

Haste could be a stat for everyone, and gearing for it could change the game for the better.  It would need to suffer from severe diminishing returns at a certain level or some encounters might break under the weight of the sheer OP’d-ness of the stat, but haste working with long cooldown abilities would be a major step in the right direction, especially since we all have to share gear, and Blizzard failed to really give an in depth analysis at Blizzcon on the gear and stat restructuring headed our way.

Time for an Ambien

Rhab