I just want to pop in and confirm that swapping a weapon in combat as a caster (at least as a mage) will give you a 1.5s cooldown, regardless of your haste.

So, when swapping weapons for something that has less than 1.5s - 2.0s cast time, you might actually lose from weapon swaps.



/run hooksecurefunc("CooldownFrame_SetTimer", function(_, start, duration, enable) if start > 0 and enable > 0 then DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(duration) end end)

Copy/paste this into your chat, and then it should spam numbers everytime you cast something. It spams the cooldowns of everything in your hotbars, so it's messy and just for testing.

Casting scorch, it spammed 1.09 all over (GCD with haste clickies), using my "/cast scorch /equip wand_1 /equip wand_2" macro it spammed 1.5 all over.

Indeed, the reason that Feral AP, bonus spell damage, and bonus healing exist on weapons is that their users get absolutely nothing out of a weapon besides the stats. Hunters already have a weapon that they actually use, and the role of ranged and melee weapons are merely reversed for them. It seems foolish to suggest that Blizzard make Ranged weapons that sacrifice DPS in order to provide more stats. The paradigm right now works perfectly fine.

The existence of all that Feral AP instead of damage-reduction-oriented stats on Feral staves is exactly due to the fact that warriors get DPS increases on their tanking weapons. Paladins will generally go with a mace or sword with spell damage if they're worried about threat. But there is no reason why Blizzard couldn't decide to make 40 DPS tanking weapons that get stamina for their DPS sacrifice, especially if they want to make it more feasible to switch from a DPS role to a tank role mid-combat. Unfortunately, unlike healing weapons, there is not one weapon type that all tanks would be using unless you let druids dual wield or give them tank-relevant off-hands.

I'm guessing that Blizzard has had this discussion internally for quite awhile, and basically arrived at what we're seeing because spell haste is the only DPS/Heal stat besides +dmg/+heal that scales indefinitely while maintaining its quality. Hit rating, expertise, and penetration (spell and armor) all cap, and crit rating very quickly becomes weak - especially in pvp where people have tons of resilience. Spell haste provides a continued increase in throughput, diminishing only in the same way +dmg does (ie, it more haste makes more +heal better, and vice versa) and for many functions is more valuable than +heal since it allows for smoother healing with less reaction time. Given that many spells have no benefit from +dmg/+heal, especially PvP staples like Mana Burn and Dispels, the item makes a lot of sense; given all the analogous combat ratings available, I don't see anything else slipping onto weapons in exchange for DPS.

That's not to say that a new stat they come up with for WotLK won't have very similar properties, but it's hard to theorize about those right now.