Project Lore

Haste can sometimes be a hard stat to measure. Not being the mathematics whiz that some of my fellow WoW players are, I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between a spell that takes 2 seconds cast and another that takes only 1.9. Sure, I can generally assume that the latter will lead to more damage somewhere down the road, but does that make it worth gearing for as opposed to other stats that might have a more immediate or obvious effect? Like sand through an hourglass, so are the raids of lives... Well, Ghostcrawler and the rest of the Systems team has a plan to make Haste a more marketable stat than it ever has before: allowing it to effect "Heal over Time" and "Damage over Time" spells. According to a recent post on the official forums, this implementation would decrease the time between ticks on an individual cast, allowing the effects to be felt more frequently. For instance, let's say you know there's going to be some consistent damage coming in and a player is at very low health. You cast a HoT in hopes of keeping him alive, but the damage kills him in-between ticks. In this case, Haste might have saved him by ticking sooner than the damage did. Of course, this may present another problem, as GC points out:

"This means more damage or healing per time but also having to refresh those spells more often. Since there is a trade-off, we're not sure the change is a no-brainer, especially in the healing case."

So what's their solution? Instead of forcing the changes on players, toss Haste-increasing effects onto Glyphs, so they can choose whether or not it makes sense for them to make use of it:

"For 3.3 we are talking about introducing three new glyphs for Shadow Word: Pain, Corruption and Rejuvenation that would allow these spells to tick faster with the more haste you have. There are glyphs of Corruption and Rejuv already, and we're not sure how we're going to resolve those yet. For Shadow Word: Pain, we are likely to rename the current glyph to Glyph of Mind Flay, remove the old Glyph of Mind Flay, and increase Mind Flay by 10 yards in the base spell."

It should be noted that these changes are NOT guaranteed! This is just a concept that the team has been tossing around for a little while, and apparently they've stumbled across some new technology that actually allows them to do it. If they come to pass, though, they'll most likely be available for testing in an upcoming build of Patch 3.3 on the PTR. We'll be sure to keep you guys posted, but in the meantime, do you think that allowing Haste to affect HoTs and DoTs would help or hurt your performance in-game? Perhaps it should only be applied to damage-boosting glyphs so that the stakes are lower for healers?

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