you're forgetting that the 5 second rule doesn't start until the spell finishes casting. as such the actual cast time of the spell shouldn't have an appreciable effect on the amount of time you spend regenerating mana.

I think the idea is that if we could do greater heals/healing waves/healing touches in 1.5 second, we could probably heal reactively. With longer heals, we have to cast proactively and often let a heal go through rather than cancelling because if you cancel and the tank is hit immediately, it's 3 seconds until your next heal lands (or you don't cancel because the tank is at 60%, and a milisecond before you heal heats, someone else's heal hits and yours becomes wasted etc etc).

If we were in a position where we could afford to wait for the tank health to drop before casting heals, we would definitely get more regen time, although the amount of mana regen you could get on gear to substitute for that much haste rating would probably be more. And I wouldn't think it would let you "replace a healer", since on 90% of fights it's total healer mana and regen that's an issue, not healer throughput. Only a handful fights that I can think of which relied on healer throughput more than healer efficiency.

It's ultimately irrelevant, if Blizzard chooses to make haste available to healers then future encounters will be based around the assumption that your healers have haste and thus greatly increased throughput... it's not so overpowered that it can't be balanced around, however fears that it becomes necessary may be well-founded, but meh. I think haste would be great, because even if you just downranked to the point where you had equal HPS as a non-hasted healer, you'd be landing those casts more frequently and spike damage would become less dangerous (and perhaps allowing Blizzard to create yet more ridiculous spike damage :P).

Does anyone know how much spell haste rating you need for a 1% speed-up on ptr now? "The amount of spell haste rating needed per percentage of haste has been increased substantially."

The figure I keep hearing is 25 rating per 1% haste.

If they were smart, however, they'd make spell haste reduce the damage/healing and spellcost of all spells on the player by the % of haste. At 100% haste (twice as fast) you'd be casting spells that heal/damage half as much.

In other words, I could skip my spell haste gear and land gheals in 2.5 seconds for 6k health.
Or I can wear my spell haste gear and land gheals in 1.25 seconds for 3k heals.

Same net healing, same mana cost, same efficiency but with the added effect of getting the cast off longer. The only difference is that you're using more GCDs but not all of the healers need to be in spell haste.

Don't have a paladin for spammed flash of lights? Gear out one of your priests in 150% spellhaste for 1 second 2k gheals.

This is pretty much the worst Idea I've heard. You spend major itemisation points on a stat that does not increase your HPS, it does not increase your longevity and it makes your flash heal/LSW/flash of light worse HPS. All it does is increase the granulation of the heals which is what faster heals are for anyway. You can have 2 healers cast 3 second heals 1.5 seconds out of phase and you still have possible healing every 1.5 seconds and they will be bigger heals and the healers can last for longer.

Not to mention the stat would be totally and utterly useless for DPS classes.

As a affliction warlock my primary problem with spell haste is it is rated according to how effective it is for mages, so for the dot heavy classes its basically a laughable stat. Unless they change it to be like bloodlust and decrease GCD, such a sweet dream >_<

Making spell haste work like that would also be bad for healers in a way, as it would result in more time spent in the 5 second rule. Currently you can regen a lot if you cancel greater heals when they are not needed, but that would be harder to do, and less worth doing, if your heals were all smaller and faster.

Calling shenanigans. If DPS is threat-limited, why give us damage upgrades at all?

We are indeed threat constrained situationally but it certainly is not a fixed ceiling on most fights. In fact, with BoS up, at range, using invis intelligently and casting fire and/or arcane, a tank can reasonably hold a target off me indefinitely even at multiples of my present output.

I certainly would agree that threat constrains us on many, many fights and in many situations. I'd point out specifically that it is a pain to rely on BoS so much when we so often do not have access to it and how 'burst' damage often needs to be left on the table due to the problems in reliable 'burst' tanking threat. Still though, it terms of sustained raid-level dps there is a lot of wiggle room left. At this point only shadow priests using full dps + VE cycles in an AE damage environment are really hitting caps, although they are shooting past them in a hurry of course.

Where are you getting these numbers? From what I've seen on mmochampion, you give up mp5s for +spell haste on healing gear.

So that you can force more total DPS out of the raid(e.g. adds, complications that prevent DPS from being in the entire time).

Even as a high-threat Enhance or Elemental spec I have no problem cutting loose on raid mobs all the time, provided I don't do something stupid like attack the mob immediately on the pull.

"True" DPS classes all have have aggro wipes anyway. Its only the hybrids that end up capped if at all.

Blizzard may have issues with design and communication, but they never have had a problem making cut scenes. This was well done.

http://www.worldofraids.com/news/bla...kama-curse.jpg

OMG...now that is Hunter Mail. It took them quite long enough to make good stuff.

Enough of that, check out that offhand! 42 Damage, 24 Spellhit and decent stats on top? Nice to finally see an offhand that actually feels like a big upgrade.

And that ring makes me happy in the pants.