Yes, exactly. You only take less damage in plate gear so it's completely different than a priest doing the same thing.

What we've seen from block/crushings of wotlk it seems to me that block will focus more on purely mitigating damage. In the sense that if you got hit for 15k without armor, 7 with armor and then blocking will reduce it futher so it would hit 2-6k (or 0-5k what ever) with blocks.
Yeah, it's pure speculation, everything here is. No point discussing what block does.
Doesn't change the fact how well holy-prot scaling would work.

The rogue talents have me worried, as they don't seem to be doing anything to fix the issues present in each tree. Subtelty gets yet more dagger/Ambush/Backstab talents, this time at 45 points deep. Assassination gets more combo point generation talents for a spec that already uses them in an arguably "wasteful" fashion. Blah.

There's some neat concepts in there, but the direction of each tree seems as misguided as ever.

edit: Not to mention Combat getting 3 defensive PvP talents out of 5 new talents.

Looking at the talents trees of all classes, it seems that not all talent trees continued to give what the tree was primarily used for. Rogue combat didn't get much in the way of raiding buffs while deep fire seems like an AoE tree. Shaman restoration focused mostly on tank healing and PvP aspects while shamans mainly just use chain heal current in raids. Druids got quite significant direct healing support etc.

My first impression of subtlety tree was that Blizzard is trying to make dagger rogues work in raids in the hunter group instead of in the melee group (though that may just be what I want to see). It seems you could build a pretty decent yellow-damage-based build off the cheap backstab and honor among thieves.

It's the lack of fucking consistency that is driving me wild. There are some decent talents there, to be sure, but then you see shit like Sinister Calling and Hemorrhage; and you realize you're in a schizophrenic talent tree.

When I cast a Heal over Time spell on a person, I am not casting it because I immediately want to heal the person, I want the healing component to last over a duration.

For example, my Renew does 1k ticks ever 3 seconds for 15 seconds (18 seconds with T5 bonus). When I am casting a Renew on someone, I don't want it to heal for 5k over 12 seconds, because if I did I could of burnt a Flash Heal far earlier and healed someone for 4k in 1.5 seconds.

Time compressing HoTs seem counter-intuitive. I am using it as a method to mitigate damage over longer periods. Which is why I am saying if haste made the duration longer, it'd be more beneficial. Instead of reducing it by 3 seconds, it should increase it by 3 seconds and keep the same 1k/3 seconds healing ratio.

Now! This would also have another beneficial "more closer to time compressing" effect. As it stands, I can roughly keep up 10 Renews at any given time (1.5 gcd, 15 second duration ~ 10 Renews). If the duration was increased (and lets ignore my gcd being decreased for point of example) as say to +3 seconds like mentioned, I'd be able to keep up 12 Renews in the same time period.

Haste currently increases throughput at the cost of efficiency(for casters at least). What you are suggesting is having haste leave throughput while increasing efficiency. There is no reason for haste to work like that. Haste simply does not affect HoTs optimally, and I see no reason why it should be given a separate ruleset for HoTs(or DoTs) simply so that it is good for them as well. Every stat will not improve every spell in an equal manner; should crit now cause DoTs and HoTs to randomly jump to a nearby target at the end of their duration? Spell damage and healing affect different spells differently, so do crit, haste, AP, and everything else. What possible reason is there to change haste to affect HoTs in a way completely counter to the way haste currently works, other than because it would be stronger that way?

But... haste is a valuable stat for shadow priests. And it's valuable for resto druids. It's not that great for affliction warlocks but it's not particularly bad either.

Have it decrease the interval between ticks by half the amount it decreases other spell casting times, but do not have it decrease the duration at all. Would that make everyone happy?

Haste is one of the better stats for both Resto Druids and Shadow Priests right now. Not too sure about Affliction locks, but I don't think it would be bad for them as more haste would mean more shadowbolt time.

EDIT: Way late. >.>

Maybe my understanding is flawed? As I understand it, haste only directly impacts mindflay, which is the SP's lowest priority spell. So its main benefit is decreasing the GCD. Of course that doesn't mean to imply that shadow priests gain no benefit at all from the stat, just that it's less valuable for them than other classes and specs, similarly to melee haste for enhancement shamans due to the WF cooldown. Anyway that's all tangential, you get the idea.

It impacts the GCD and Flays, meaning with enough haste you can fit an extra Flay in between DoT reapplications which is pretty damn massive. Its odd because it gives benefit in bursts (there's a graph of it somewhere floating around) that coencide with amounts of haste that let in extra tics of flay, but it is a fairly good stat for them. From what I remember its actually quite close to Spell Damage in terms of value, if not equal.

Under current game mechancis, haste always gives strictly less than 1% damage per 1% haste for a class using DoTs. It does increase both the DPS of the 'filler' spell and the time spent casting the filler because it compresses the DoT-refresh time, but if this damage increase from the filler is more than 1% of the total damage, that necessarily means that the filler was higher DPCT than the DoTs in the first place and that you shouldn't have been using the DoTs anyways.

Haste is very likely the best stat, aside from +dmg, for both affliction warlocks and shadow priests. This is not because it's particuarly good, it's just better than everything else, because nothing else provides much of a benefit at all.


As far as the gear debate: We don't actually know at this point whether blizzard's main goal is easier itemization, thinner loot tables, or making it easier for healers to kill things. My suspicion is, they've recognized they can do all three goals for three of the four healing classes. It would be ideal that paladins don't get left behind. This has spun off to a very broad tangent, so I'll just say this: if you don't want holy/prot pallies having stupid-high DPS/TPS, then make the changes Ret talents instead of base, like empowered SoR and having most of the spell damage scaling come from CS (without lowering its melee component). It can be done, you just have to tinker with everything instead of one or two abilities.

If you scale Ret off spell gear you also have to either have us use spell damage 1 handers and shields, which is a significant playstyle change, or itemize spell damage 2-handers, a weapon for a single spec. Neither is particularly attractive to me, but I might just be attached to the mechanics of Ret as it stands and somewhat biased. All this speculation is making me maddeningly eager for the patch that brings in Paladin talents and spells.

2-handed spell damage maces would actually be usable by both Balance Druids and Elemental Shamans. That still puts those very much in the realm of less desirable than the one-handed counterparts though, since that's still only a minority of specs.

Well, if they combine +healing and +dmg, you can have 2H healing maces that would do double duty as spelldmg weapons. Three of four healing classes can use 2H maces now, just like staves and daggers.

I don't understand the appeal of combined spell power. Sure it would cause less loot to be sharded and easier leveling itemization and so on, but caster gear is already subject to the greatest competition. If you threw in healer loot with damage caster gear than hardly anyone would ever get an upgrade unless they weighted loot tables in favor of spell gear. That's assuming they continue to use the same drop mechanics and loot table schemes they have now.

I understand that. I was pointing out why speeding up the ticks would be bad.

What makes the 15 or the 18 seconds any more important than 14, 12 or even 9 seconds?

In the situation you described, casting a Renew is still going to be a hell of a lot more efficient than a Flash Heal, even if spell haste reduces the duration to less than 15, and even if you cast the Renew such that it runs out before the target gets his last tick of light AOE damage.

Changing spell priorities as your relevant stats change is nothing new to any caster, healers being no exception, although my primary issue is that you seem to believe that Renew lasting 15 seconds is somehow important, when periods of AOE damage ticks can vary wildly in duration and are just as arbitrary.

Assume a party of Warrior tank, Priest healer and Rogue, Mage, Warlock as DPS. Assume the Warrior and the Rogue outgear the instance and do not need anything from this next boss.

Assume that in TBC, the boss drops a plate tanking chest, leather physical DPS boots, cloth healing pants, cloth spell damage pants, mail physical DPS gloves and a one-handed sword.

In this case, the Priest wants the healing pants, while the Mage and the Warlock want the spell damage pants. Both items have a 16.67% chance of dropping. The chance of all three players getting what they want in three consecutive runs is 0.46%.

Assume that in WOTLK, those healing pants would no longer exist, and the priest would want the cloth spell damage pants instead.

Since the loot table is smaller, the pants would now have a 20% chance of dropping, and getting three pants in three runs would now have a 0.80% chance.

End result: people get the loot they want, faster.

We could even give Blizz an ounce of credit and assume that instead on simply removing one set of pants and equalizing the loot table they remove one cloth item but double the drop percentage for the other item, thus keeping the cloth drops at the exact same ratio compaired to other armor types but merging them into a single pool.

Blizz really does seems to want to streamline loot, it seems like a pretty elementary mistake for them to simply merge all the cloth items together then lower the overall percentage of them, given that cloth wearers are over represented in the classes.

Haste already increases the throughput of HoTs and DoTs as much as it does direct damage spells, although at the cost of requiring extra targets. If you could previously DoT 10 enemies in unit of time X, and you gain 10% haste, you can now DoT 11 enemies in the same time.

The problem with eg an affliction warlock and haste on DoTs is really that if you've got enough enemies where casting a DoT on them all would benefit from haste, you've got enough enemies that spamming seed of corruption is a better option.

So is this really a case of haste doesn't work on DoTs, or a case that AoE spells are too powerful in comparison?

I think a possible source of major fallout given loot homogenization is public perception with regards to the RNG:

1. It's quite unlikely that people will recognize the fact that loot has been streamlined, and instead will only see "More players are rolling on the items I want". If we look towards the future and compare it to the present, the streamlining is obvious, but the layperson is only going to see their bracers or pants or whatnot getting rolled on by more people than they used to, because they can't compare to the healing drops that no longer exist.

2. Even if Blizzard DID increase cloth drop chances to maintain proportionality (good catch, I missed that when forming my example), the general public's lack of knowledge regarding statistics and probability is again going to color their opinions. When people still believe that whoever is raid leader when spawning into Kara influences loot, I don't think they're going to appreciate a drop rate increase of 16% to 20%, or even 16% to 33%.

Haste is only a good stat for Shadowpriests currently because we scale poorly with +dmg (and even worse with +crit).

The oft-quoted 1:1 ratio between +dmg and +haste rating which is somewhat similar to that of Warlocks and Mages is because Haste scales poorly for us, but it scales as poorly as +dmg (at a certain gear point).

Here's how you make Haste work with DoTs/HoTs:
Have them increase the size of the ticks, but also increase the mana cost. Possible concerns are of course in PvP with dispels, but otherwise you've achieved your goal of increasing throughput at the cost of efficiency and without losing the Over Time part of the spells.

Hey presto, Haste becomes valuable on DoTs (and HoTs). However this would also mean that unless the scaling by +dmg increases for Shadowpriests, haste rating will become far more valuable than+dmg to a Shadow Priest. (Increases in the amount of hit rating needed to achieve 1% etc though will probably account for this I guess)