Althor

Yes, it probably is an artifact of it being formerly channeled but it also still dispels any technical reasons why DoTs can't tick faster from +haste.

 

Prinsesa

One of the first TBC patches, in addition to nerfing Lock and SPriest DOT efficients rather heavily, also revamped DOT hit mechanics.

Previously, DOTs could only get a resist on the initial application, thus causing the whole spell to fail. After this patch (was it 2.1?), DOTs also got a chance to resist on individual ticks in addition to the initial application.

Since Blizzard seems to have this control over individual DOT ticks, it seems feasible to assume they could make DOT ticks crit, if they so chose.

I also agree that they could make haste affect DOT ticks, as per the current behavior of Starshards (channeling artifact or otherwise).

---

Regarding hit rating and healing:

A big problem with trying to make healing benefit from hit rating is the hit cap.

If hit rating does nothing for healing, then hit rating is useless for a Holy Priest/Resto Druid/Resto Shaman

If hit rating does something for healing, but continues to give benefits past the 16% resist rate for damaging spells, then there's always some wastage.

In fact, even if healing's benefits from hit rating would cut-off at the same rate as damage spells, it'd still suffer from Soulshatter Syndrome: None of the spell hit talents affect it, so you're always either 3% undercapped for healing or 3% overcapped for damage (given most classes talents), or exactly capped for both, but not leveraging your hit talents.

Finally, somehow cutting off the healing benefit at 16% would either require a sudden hard-cap, which feels shoehorned, or some sort of scaling/DR system towards 16%, whose math could get quite complicated.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

PSGarak

Having DoTs crit also raises the possibility of inconsistency for on-crit procs. It's not that they would proc way the hell more for a DoT class, since that could probably be balanced around (especially by internal cooldowns). It's more the issue that on-hit procs are always done by spell application rather than DoT tick. I think re-wiring the on-crit procs to register DoT tick crits would actually be a bothersome and bug-ridden task in itself, and the result would be inconsistent proc mechanics.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Wuff

I'm sorry, but you are wrong. Dots always had the chance to be partial resisted. Before the patch you mentioned (could be around 2.1) they simply had a lesser chance to do so.
DOT ticks simply can't be resisted completly till now.

 

Starfire

Heh, I am all for allowing hit to proc special effects for healers.

Like, making hit proc clearcasting more. That might be a bit overpowered example, but it seems somewhat intuitive to me. You get gear to increase +hit, which is the chance something will land. So why not allow it to increase the chance of clearcasting "working".

I am sure all other healing class have some kind of example. (+hit could also work for inspiration/illumination, in addition to crit, too).

 

Starfire

Magister's Terrace item is an interesting concept. I see no reason why crit couldn't do something similar for Affliction Locks and Shadow Priests.

Albeit, Blizzard seems to be fixing the issue with SPs. Now that crit procs Spirit Tap.

 

Pheus

Rewording Hit/spell hit rating to something that benefits healing wouldn't really be that hard, all they need to do is decide how it will help healers and then tell their lore guys/writers to make an appropriate description.

It could be something like :
"Increases your ability to pinpoint the source of a wound, increasing your healing done by x%" or
"Decreases the amount of energy wasted due to difficulty locating the most damaged areas, decreasing the mana cost of your healing spells by x%"

 

Snow

Bleh, I'm not sure that spell hit really needs to be useful to healers. It's easy enough to itemize around the stat consolidations now - leave hit off cloth gear entirely, then you make a ring with a boatload of hit on it. DPS casters or even melee of all stripes would want the ring, while healers might opt for a spirit maxed ring. Talents like elemental oath seem to support the idea that they aren't necessarily expecting people to reach the hit cap, or at least are putting that point in a much farther in progression than in TBC.

Regarding the rampant paladin speculation, everyone seems to be assuming that they are grouping plate gear as follows:
Tank Plate(Prot war/Prot Pal)
DPS Plate(Ret pallies, DKs, Fury/MS Wars) <-- Is this where holy pallies go?

I would put my money on:
Tank/DPS plate(All wars, All DKs, ret pallies)
Tank/SP plate(Prot/Holy Pallies)

What would need to be done for this to happen? Well, all plate gear has to come with a mixture of defensive/offensive stats(think PVP gear except with defense instead of resilence). Hell, they've been itching to make that happen since BWL (hello [Drake Talon Pauldrons]). As long as they don't slip up and create something a little too "pure" for one role or the other, they can safely balance damage output and input on hybridized gear by fiddling with the numbers at 80. They also need to make sure that prot warriors have a reason to want AP/str/crit, and some of the new talents seem to reflect this; at this point more fiddling probably has to be done, but it IS the alpha. My first prediction with this theory is that we will see a much magnified STR->Block Value ratio in a coming patch.

They'll need to retool paladins a bit to differentiate prot and holy and still get them working on the same gear. My guess would be a large buff to holy shield to coincide with the shield block/crushing changes, large coefficients on paladin heals and seals to work with hybridized gear, a talent to refund mana on offensive spell crits(see the new elemental focus) to bring up overall sustained dps, and probably some real heavy mitigation talents in deep prot and mana regen talents in deep holy.

The sum of doing things this way seems to be everything blizzard seems to be trying to accomplish:
*2 sets of gear for an armor type
*1 set of gear for warriors, DKs, and for paladins who switch between holy and prot.
*Sizable increase in tank dps
*Non prot warriors and paladins will all have defensive stats making off-tanking more possible.
*Less overall mechanics changes than spellpower ret paladins or AP based healadins.

 

crimsonsentinel

The new spell haste pvp weapons indicate that this is a very likely possibility. Class specific stats can all be itemized for in weapons to allow armor to be more multi-purpose.

 

Bogeyman

If that were to happen then nobody would use plate for dps. Wasting item budget on defensive stats would just mean any plate user that was collecting dps gear would just go straight for leather (even more than we do already).

The easier division of gear is just tank plate/dps plate but the problem which has been hashed over for the past few weeks now is how to shoehorn holy pallies into one or the other. Perhaps, taking the new shaman weapon imbues as an example there could be a paladin seal deep in holy that is longer lasting and adds spelldamage or healing. In conjunction with a baseline AP>spelldamage conversion for all paladins that would also provide whatever spelldamage prot or ret might need without putting it on the armour.

Another good point that has been made is about sockets. When I first heard about socketing i was excited, envisioning a blank canvas where we could allocate stats in a more personal fashion. In the end it seems to have just become another enchanting type profession with everyone socketing in pretty much the same way. I'd rather see generic items with base stats and a lot of sockets, making this the way they can have gear that appeals across the board.

e.g

Generic Caster Robe

30 Int
30 Sta
30 Spelldamage
Socket
Socket
Socket
Socket
Socket

Now because of the lack of stats that one group may want over another it is appealing to all classes and with customisation can be stacked with spelldamage, hit, crit, regen, or even more Int or Sta if you wanted. Perhaps adding some colour coded socket bonuses, 4 red gems +spelldamage, 4 yellow gems +crit etc. Obviously this can be extended into the other armour types just as easily, reducing the need for spec-specific loot in favour of more customisable items.

 

Smurrf

Interesting, but unless they limited that to one or two areas of gear (such as robe/pants, or whatever), it would make having JC even more of a money maker than it is now. Not only that, but it'll cause problems with allocating epic gems obtained from raids even more so than it did prior to gems being on badge vendors. Say your typical raider has 10 gems slots (just on average - I know it's gear dependant and is subject to BiS requirements.) Even if you just have two to three of these items, it could feasibly double the amount of gem slots the entire raid is having to socket. Of course, if Blizz immediately had that tier's vendor cough up epic gems for badges immediately, that would go a long way to curing the problems that pre-attunement removal BT/MH raids had with gems.

 

Snow

I honestly somehow didn't think about that. But you could bypass that by making defensive stats "free," similar to how armor is "free." It's not really that big of a stretch, as viewed broadly, armor and defense are more or less the same: they increase longevity vs. physical damage. Either that or they could add more talents like the death knight AC->AP.

 

Mordekhuul

Imagine a retribution paladin wearing raid armor with free defensive stats on them in PVP.

 

tedv

Related to both comments, Mind Flay is also a DoT. It deals a tick of damage once every second for as long as it's channeled, and you channel it for 3 seconds. The easiest way to tell if something is periodic damage (a DoT) or direct damage (a normal spell) is to check whether or not it can crit. Dots don't crit. Mind Flay doesn't crit so it's a dot and can trigger Tymbal's Focusing crystal and all that. Arcane Missile is five bolts, not a dot.

All this to say that they have had hasted DoTs for a long time. Moreover, no one has complained about how haste reduces the 50% slow effect on Mind Flay from 3 seconds to 2.6 seconds with a lot of haste. Because honestly no one cares. The reason you cast all DoTs is the same: damage. Their rider affects are nice, but if they run out and you still need them, then you just recast them. Given the examples you listed:

Shadow Embrace: Requires at least one affliction DoT up. If this isn't the case, the warlock is doing something wrong.

Misery, Vampiric Touch: These should never fall off anyway. Hasted DoTs just mean you get to refresh your dots more often for extra damage, and you always refresh right after their last tick.

Blood Frenzy: Created by Deep Wounds, which is a proc from an effect, so I see no reason why this should be hasted. Rend should benefit from haste, but if you are relying on rend to keep up blood frenzy, you have already lost.

These are all non-issues. Even with a boatload of haste, you're only going to hit 20% and that just lets you refresh DoTs sooner. Making haste affect DoTs never has a real downside.

 

thevidon

Direct damage spells can be stopped through interrupts and LOS. Once a DOT has been applied (and they will always get applied), there is no way to take away that casters advantage they would gain through haste.

Warlocks (in a pvp setting) have no problems right now with dealing damage or CC. They do have some issues with being melee trained in the larger brackets. I would like for Blizzard to fix their issues with melee, but not overpower them through making DOTs more painful.

 

Anaram

There are a few dots which are primarily used for their secondary effects, but the real problem is hots. I think haste works well enough as-is, the real problem comes with combining crit and dots.

 

Anaram

I'm not sure even S4 PvP gear reaches the point where haste would result in higher dot dps than +damage. To shave off 20% a dots duration you would need 25% haste, approx 400 haste rating. The equivalent spell power is over 450 according to some quick calcs.

I think you generally need to be raid buffed with pretty decent gear to break the limit where haste is better than plain spell power, a situation quite unlikely to surface in PvP. The gains from haste over spell power surely aren't that huge in PvP.

 

tedv

I don't think speeding up HoTs is ever going to be an issue either. When you are using them to top off targets that probably won't take a bunch of damage any time soon, a faster ticking is surely a benefit. And when you are using the HoTs to heal someone during a forced period of non-healing (like a silence on Gruul or Asgalor), the duration of silence is always shorter than the HoT duration, even hasted. If a 12 second Rejuvenation ticks in 10 seconds because you have an enormous 20% haste (over 300 haste rating), that's still twice as long as a 5 second silence, so the HoT just applies more healing during the downtime. That's STILL a benefit. Even on Maexxna, hasted HoTs will last longer than the duration of the stun.

The only situation where it might be a liability is if the haste makes Lifebloom tick so fast that it can't be refreshed in 5 seconds. In that case though, they still get the bloom heal affect towards the end (which is a meaningful heal in that case), and you can still build up a new three stack pretty quickly.

Last, if for some reason a druid has so much haste that they feel like their HoTs are too fast, they can just shift their gear more towards +healing by changing their gemming. That can also solve the issue of Abolish Poison falling off too fast for Maexxna as well, although I think this is also a non-issue.

Sorry, but I only see positives for making HoTs affected by haste as well.

 

Ketari

You could also simply allow crits on dot/hot's, but have smaller increases (say 25%) for those crits. So crit does scale *somewhat* with crit...

I think it's clear from Blizzard's mechanics that they can proc things from either/and spell hit or spell tick and control which affects which can proc an ability, so I'm not really seeing that as an issue.

 

orcsgotbooty

Going back to prebc and random massive wastes of itemization so the gear sucks for both specs would be a gigantic mistake. The tanks would only take the gear if their tier gear hadn't dropped, and retadins/dps warriors would laugh and be forced to take leather gear that in many cases we are already forced into now. Noone would want this gear at all.

 

Nezralix

Although it could be a little difficult to really segregate the content of the posts, it might be good to separate this thread into a "WotLK mechanics discussion" thread and a "new WotLK information" thread, with the information thread dealing more in hard data and not so much in the discussion of it. This one seems like it's getting really bogged down in speculation (not that the speculation is necessarily bad).

 

flyingtoastr

"Hard Data" will always breed speculation and discussion. Look at the current topic; we know that gear is being consolidated but there are still a few outliers (DoT classes, hit rating, holy pallys) that people are musing about. If you want just pure information there is a great website here you can read.

Some people's minds are like cement: all mixed up and permanently set.

 

Cube

First off, druid healing rotations(and, honestly we're the only class where this is currently applicable) would be tremendously broken with making haste effect HoT's. Haste currently lowers the spell GCD, which allows us to get our spells out quicker. As of now, with a <1.4 second GCD(and perfect latency), it's technically possible to get 5 rolling lifeblooms at once. Hasting the HoT would remove this possibility, and would lock druids into a 4-tank maximum rotation. We wouldn't be able to consistently heal more than 4 targets at a time. With haste, it's possible to get 5 other players healed at the same time.

In addition, healing isn't based on getting the most HPS possible. It is the ability of the healer to tailor their output to match the total damage incoming that's more important than pure throughput. With a 3-tank rotation(LBx3 on all three, Rejuv on 2 tanks) during Hyjal trash, I think that 30-40% of the lifebloom ticks are wasted, and 40-50% of the rejuv ticks are also wasted. Faster ticks won't do anything to stop this, and would only force me to spend more mana for the same result.

As for lifebloom ticking off: This is a HUGE issue. In PvE, Lifebloom is most efficient(and useful) when a 3-stack is kept up. Here's an example: my 3-stack lifebloom ticks for around 950. The bloom portion crits for 2.4k, and hits for 1.6. That means that in 2-3 seconds, the 3-stack does MORE healing than the bloom will ever do, and is much cheaper to keep up. Keeping up 1 lifebloom stack costs 180 mana every 6 seconds after the initial stack is established. Reapplying it costs 540. In addition, it takes 4.5 seconds to get the full stack up. With your hasted example(120% haste), it takes 3.75 seconds to get the stack backup, and STILL doesn't do as much healing as the hasted stack. Plus, there's no guarantee that the final bloom will do anything, because the tank might be topped off when it goes off.

 

GSH

Haste is different than the other stats in that it has a positive effect (higher DPS) and a negative effect (higher mana consumption*). All the other stats are purely positive, and the only issue is the opportunity cost for not getting a different stat.

I think that this "double-edged sword" nature of haste makes it interesting, and perhaps extending that trade-off to DoTs and HoTs is not that bad of an idea. It might make for more interesting choices in gearing up.

*Admittedly this would have more of an effect if mana consumption was actually a strategic concern in the game.

 

Tunch

There is no negative effect of haste. More mana consumption is a flawed perspective. You're doing the same damage you were doing before, but faster. If you run out of mana (where you used to not run out of mana), you've already done at least the same amount of damage you would have previously done, and you did it quicker. This is pure positive.