Originally Posted by Moogul

Haste vs. Crit, Mathematically (as I understand it)

Firstly, let's ignore all specials talents, eg. impale, flurry, deep wounds etc.

1% haste means you get 1 extra 'swing' per 100 swings. A swing can miss, be dodged, or crit as normal. It's damage is therefore (avg. swing damage) * (1 + crit - miss - dodge)
1% crit means you get 1 extra 'crit' per 100 swings. A crit turns a 100% damage hit into a 200% damage one. It's damage is therefore (avg. swing damage)

DW miss chance is 27%, I think? With 9% hit, this means 18% miss, and a normal 5.6% dodge, reduced to 3.6% (for now, let's assume 0 expertise as it's not *currently* a common stat on warrior dps gear). We'll use Hiddens example of 45% crit for now, though this is *vastly* higher than what I run with (we don't put our feral druid in the melee group, he goes with the hunters and we get the ret paladin, plus some of those stats seem a bit optimistic).

So, the damage of the extra hit from haste is therefore: (swing) * (1 + 0.45 - 0.216) = 1.234

This is for white damage only though, and haste does not affect yellow damage (bar a small amount of interaction with heroic strike), whereas crit does. Looking at my damage parses, yellow damage (excl. heroic strike) is normally around 50%, maybe slightly less, meaning that crit's effect is pretty much doubled.

This means we're comparing a crit:haste dps bonus ratio of 2:1.234

This is per 1% though, and haste *is* cheaper in terms of itembudget - 15.7 per 1% compared to 22.1 (correct me if I'm wrong) for crit.

Dividing to get per rating point, we get 0.0786 for haste and 0.0905 for crit, so Crit still comes out ahead per item budget point.

This is before we include flurry, impale, RED etc. which *all* increase the value of crit compared to haste, and this is already at very high levels of crit. At lower levels of crit, haste will decrease in effectiveness against crit.

In short, haste will pretty much *never* be better than crit, rating point for rating point. Of course, this doesn't stop particular items (eg. DST, Dragonstrike) with haste from being very good, and it's still a useful dps stat (more than some might consider). I'm looking forward to getting my JC neck in 2.4