Perhaps it's an attempt to make belt slots 'unique' (passive haste) instead of adding in a new type of enchant.

Isn't rage normalized for weapon speed? I mean whatever weapon speed you have so flurry doesn't give any extra rage? At least that's the impression I got from reading stuff back when 2.0 was coming out.

It does scale better than crit rating because haste effects are multiplicative rather than additive.

Example: You have 20% crit. You get a new item with 10% crit on it. You now have 30% crit.

Now consider if you had a 2.0 speed weapon and 20% haste. Your attack speed would then be: 1.6667. You get a new item with 10% haste. Your attack speed is now 1.515, or 32% haste.

Is this tested or are you just assuming?

dagger from vashj is worse from what?

I don't believe this is correct. Haste rating scales multiplicatively with non-rating based haste effects, but not with other sources of haste rating.

Ah, you may be right there. I was thinking of Flurry, Bloodlust, Blade Flurry, and the like. Still, multiplication with haste effects after summation of haste rating is very good.

The general rule of thumb I've seen is that if it says "Haste Rating" you can consider it an additive haste value. That is to say, any buff that you have that is active and gives +haste rating, is added with any others before being applied. If you have an ability up with a %haste modifier (such as Blade Flurry or Slice and Dice) then the sum total haste from those buffs stacks multiplicatively with the %haste ability.

Some discussion here regarding the way it works.

I'm fairly positive that the change to sum all of the haste ratings together before calculation of the total %haste was to curb some of the extreme cases where a player could stack upwards of a dozen haste effects. You realistically won't see a drastic change in dps with a few effects up, but haste is still regarded as the best raiding stat/buff for Rogues. While I havn't looked over the Warrior flurry mechanics recently, I imagine the additional rage generation for them would put it up near the top on their list as well.

I'm a bit shocked to see the stat on a Paladin belt as we havn't seen any Paladin-specific gear with +haste on it since the Scrolls of Blinding Light (the belt giving nearly double the constant haste rating compared to the trinket).

I doubt Blizzard had any sort of forsight of haste stacking when they did this, and it was more of a byproduct of the whole rating system. Instead of multiple haste "buffs" from any items with haste before, you now just have a single haste rating stat that is everything combined. I am sure they could easily fix the multiplicative stacking of haste from talents/skills if they wanted to, but it rarely makes a huge difference. Though I do enjoy my 2.7 speed axe going to 1.28 speed with trinket + heroism + flurry, and I have yet to try out haste potions.

FWIW, I think it can help Blizzard a good bit to show people that there's actually some good loot to look forward to. Some of it is meh, yes, but there are a few amazing items in there (although they all look like Vashj++ drops).

And if they'd done a test server for SSC/TK, people would have seen some of this stuff anyway, just like we'll see BT loot on this test server before we see it on live.

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/6267/chokerfg9.jpg

Just dropped on one of the Aqueous Lords.

Edit: My apologies for the imageshack, not my link =p I'm sure teza will rehost it later on when the loot list gets updated.

Wow. The itemization team is really getting creative, and making good stuff finally too.

Done Sovelis:

Also, I would speculatively say that reduced armor on your target is REALLY high in what dps it adds, especially as a fulltime passive. Now as to what specific amount of crit or hit it's equivalent too, I have no idea, but I can tell you I would wear that necklace without a 2nd thought over anything else I've seen.

It wouldn't surprise me if those 'fun' itemization effects will be mostly limited to trash drops, it'd be at least semi-consistent with other trash loot design officering stats usually not seen on boss drops. Though in the current instances it's (mostly) limited to specific school +damage.

Both of them will effectively scale downwards too when the level cap is raised again, since one is a rating, and for the other you'd need more of it for it to be worth it at higher levels compared to what you'd need now.

Well no item lasts forever (or no item SHOULD last forever). And looking ahead to the next level cap increase (which I have never ever even heard of aside from wild speculation) is a bit premature at this juncture ;-)

"Armor penetration" to coin a term, would appear to be a stat without deminishing returns, apart from Aran-like low armor mobs. At least, that is if my understanding of armor mitigation is correct -- it being a % physical damage reduction.

I sure hope not. It would be great to really get a wider selection of stats to put on gear than just token items.

I just wanted to say that I got this item (Kaushikk in the screenshot) and it's really nice having the ignore armor on equip. I'm using it instead of the Choker of Animalistic Fury or whatever it is that comes in one of the Tier 5 boxes.

When you have like a half hour of nothing better to do, would you be a dear and run a test of that neck vs nothing, and one versus another neck? :-D

Don't forget that each point of armor has a far greater effect the lower the armor total is. Testing that neck solo vs testing in a raid with a mob that has Sunder/FF/CoR is a big change in how much dps it will add.

I understand this is strictly not true. In fact, a reduction from 99% physical mitigation to 98% mitigation would double your damage on said target.

So your increase in damage is proportionally greater, the more armour the target has.

If this trinket said "reduces your targets armour mitigation by 1%", this analogy would be true. But this trinket reduces armours target by a fixed amount, which has very strictly diminishing returns as armour increases: For example, going from 98 to 99% reduction yields the same damage increase as going from 50% mitigation to 0%. However, the former requires you to remove half a million points of armour, wheras the latter is on the order of 10,000 points of armour.
When dealing with fixed reductions in armour value, the less your target has to begin with, the more dps you gain.