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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In this week's episode, I had the chance to play my warlock alt, Xenophontos. I've been doing quite a lot of experimenting on him, and I've been switching between specs to check out each one. I enjoyed affliction at low levels due to the nearly nonexistent downtime, so I checked it out the other day (maybe you'll see that in a future episode). My DPS as affliction is highly dependent on keeping as many DoTs on enemies as much as possible. Something that really helped my DoT upkeep was a neat little addon called Chronometer. Chronometer puts up a timer bar for each debuff you cast on your enemies. It is highly configurable, and can show debuffs on mobs other than the current target, or just those on the current target. The bar is a small bar, similar to a cast bar, in that it fills up or empties over the duration of each spell. The icon of the debuff can be shown, along with the name of the target, the name of the spell, and seconds left until the spell fades. This allows me to (theoretically) reapply DoTs immediately after they complete for maximum uptime and minimum wasted mana. As affliction, it can be tricky to juggle all those DoTs, so this makes it much easier to, at a glance, see what I should be ready to cast next. Other than just DoTs, It's great for watching curses on multiple mobs as well as crowd control spells, like fear and banish. If I time things right, I can get a new banish on just moments after it runs out, keeping whatever crazy demon or elemental I have assigned to me from smacking a healer. I've also heard it's useful for keeping an eye on other spells, like HoTs, but I don't have any of those on my shaman, so I don't worry about it much. Now, apparently Chronometer is outdated, so let me know if you guys have something that might be current!

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