The topic of spell haste and healers has been touched upon in various other threads such as the haste mechanic primer and various healing guides. However I have yet to see the topic of haste and healers discussed in detail without derails into other areas.

Whenever this topic comes up in guild conversation it would appear that non-healers and dps casters in particular are inclined to view healing haste as a highly desirable stat. I on the other hand along with many healers of my acquaintance feel that it is marginal at best.

Therefore the question has to be raised... what is the value of spell haste for a healer?

before we start lets recap some basic facts and assumptions for spell haste.

• Spell haste has no effect on instant cast spells.
• Spell haste does not effect the operation of heal over time spells.
• Spell haste does not change the global cool down so is almost valueless for a 1.5 second cast spell.
• Spell haste rating is 15.76 rating for 1% spell haste at level 70.
• Spell haste rating is expensive in item value.
• Spell haste rating is usually applied to items at the expense of mana regen.

From this we can deduce that for a spell with a base cast time of 2.5 seconds you need 158 haste rating to reduce it to a 2.25 second cast and 366 rating to reduce it to a 2 second cast.

This is a large amount of haste rating required to get noticeable results. Given that most items with haste give somewhere in the vicinity of 30 haste rating we need between 5-10 items with haste to gain a noticeable advantage from this stat. Gaining this much haste will inevitably cut into your regen by a noticeable amount.

What are the advantages of spell haste?

• More chance of landing a heal before the target dies
• Ability to heal more targets in a limited amount of time
• More HPS in a chain casting situation

In my experience none of these advantages will significantly assist my healing in any of the encounters I have healed. (all of SSC and TK up to half way though Kael) The number of times the tank dies less than .3 seconds before my heal would have landed are not that common. When raid healing I cope fine using existing cast times and spell variety. If I need more HPS I simply use a higher rank of spell.

Do the advantages conferred by haste become more compelling for healers in more advanced content such as Hyjal and BT where healing spell haste is to be found?

In addition looking at the initial assumptions and facts it seems that certain classes will gain far more as healers from haste than others. Because spell haste benefits those classes with slow casting heals far more than classes with fast heals/Hots the class that would seem to benefit the most would probably be Shaman who almost exclusively cast slow spells. At the other end of the spectrum we would expect Tree Druids to be very dismissive of haste and virtually none of their spells benefit from it.

So in terms of desirability of spell haste I would expect it to go along the lines of Shaman>>Paladin~Priests~Non-tree druid>>>Tree druid. Does this in fact match with the observations of those in content where healing spell haste is plentiful?

As a druid, I dismissed all items that have haste-rating on them. I don't know exactly what Blizzard was thinking, putting leather healing items with haste-rating on them. I once checked up how many haste I could get and I think it was around 15%, but I'm not sure anymore. So therefore I just check it again, and on the four leather healing items (shoulders, bracers, gloves, belt) the difference would be (considering epic gems, using red/orange/purple gems for each slot):

You gain: 30 sta, 6 int and 140 haste (8.88%)
You lose: 96 spi, 28 mp5 and 68 +heal

As you can see, to gain not even 9% faster casts, you need to give up a LOT of mana regen and healing. Granted, you get a nice stamina bonus as well, but having to choose between these stats I think the decision is rather easy. You could probably end up getting more haste rating if you gear rings/neck/cloak for it as well, but I don't think it would balance things out. I also can't think of an encounter in the entire game where haste rating would be "needed" and mana-regen would be less of a problem (for druids at least).

I'll reprise what I said in the 2.3 patch notes thread regarding spell haste.

Now since I don't have any haste items at the moment I'm of course no expert, but I can tell you how I think.

Haste feels like one stat that you either need a ton of or it isn't worth it. To get greater heal from 2.5 to 2.0 sec you need 20% haste and to get to 1.5s (optimal) you need 40% haste. You'd have to give up on mana regen entirely to get those numbers.

You'd be an insane healer, until your mana ran out. Healing is not DPS, you still need to cast the same amount of spells to heal your tank. Faster spells lets you have faster reaction times, which I guess would be the point of spell haste for healers, but priests can also spam fast 1.5s casts which are mana inefficient if they need to.

I'm not against haste really, it is just that it is too costly in item levels and most often replaces mana regeneration. Since it increases healing done over time it is really more analogous to +heal in a way but less versatile since it doesn't affect HoTs or instant spells.

Haste is good for (certain) DPS casters and valued from that. Maybe if we got double the haste like we get double the heal vs dam/heal it might be more useful.

Comparing the healing mace from ZA with the mace from Vashj (about the same itemlevel) you trade 28 stamina and 11mp5 for 30 haste rating (1.9%), or 0.05s shaved off your greater heal. Am I the only one not wanting that trade?

Pre 2.2 I didn't really have any mana problems in BT with the possible exception of the buffed bloodboil fights. With the new 2 pc t6 getting 10% mana reduction to chain heal it would make 10% equal out to previous 0 haste build in mana / sec with dramatically increased healing throughput. Personally mp5 is not a problem I chain chug mana pots with an alchemist stone if needed but frequently I didn't even have to do that. Now with 2.3 improvements I ran around ZA all last night with only +healing trinkets on and never ran out of mana. If you aren't running out of mana haste is great for a resto shaman. I do think you need to have reached the point where your gear can support this though. If you collect alot of haste then run OOM it completely defeats the point.

I'm of the opinion that it's a complete waste of stat points for tree druids unless they allow it to modify the GCD.

The main reason Paladins wanted spell haste was because with Light's Grace and the 4-piece T5 bonus, your 2.5 second heals were already down to 1.75 seconds. Additionally, any spell haste you had was applied to the original 2.5s cast time, so even a small percentage was a decent amount of time reduced off of the 1.75s. So, we only needed 0.25s of haste, or 10% of 2.5s. This means about 158 haste rating, or ~5 items.

There's 120 rating that's very easy to get for an Illidan killing guild: [Dawnsteel Bracers], [Shroud of the Highborne], and 2x[Blessed Band of Karabor]. The two other haste items available in Hyjal/BT are [Girdle of Lordaeron's Fallen] and [Dawnsteel Shoulders], but these are so much worse than their comparable, non-haste items that they're just not worth using ([Girdle of Hope] and [Lightbringer Pauldrons], for those curious).

The main healing strategy while using this haste set was to use a lower ranked Holy Light spell (rank 4 or rank 5) that would give roughly the HPS of Flash of Light and keep Light's Grace up. That way, you could throw a big heal (without any extra delay at the beginning) in about ~1.5-1.6 seconds. This led to huge HPS and was great for many encounters in Hyjal/BT where lots of raid damage is being taken (Naj'entus and Teron are good examples).



Now, with 2.3, all of this has changed. Blessing of Light no longer gives the same amount of benefit to all ranks of Holy Light, so downranking HL is no longer viable. Additionally, the T5 bonus has been changed to give you -0.5s on Holy Light for only 10 seconds every minute. With these two changes, the downranking HL haste build is no longer a healing alternative for Paladins, and mostly we have been relegated to Flash of Light spambots.

Is haste still useful for Paladins? Sure. If you stack enough of it like all other classes, you could see some good HPS benefit on your Holy Light spells. But as the OP noted, you now give up way too much in other stats in order to get to that good HPS benefit. As a Paladin, you are far better off stacking +healing to increase your HPS than haste, and it also has the additional benefit of increasing your efficiency (whereas haste would only lower efficiency).


TLDR: Haste used to be good for Paladins before 2.3, but it is no longer worth going for over +healing to increase HPS.

I have contemplated using some spell haste items as a DPS caster. The benefit just isnt there. Sure imma increase my DPS output but im also gonna burn through my mana and create more threat.

I see the same problem with using it for my resto set. Imma be able to heal alot more in a limited time, but once again my mana is gonna go poof and my healing threat is gonna be higher.

Like you said above, needing 5-10 items to make a drastic noticable difference isnt worth losing the item value to it over healing, int, stam, spirit or mana regen.

Pretty much 100% correct. I would additionally add that as a paladin at least haste is now a completely worthless stat largely. I am a strong believer that if you want additional HPS a better method rather than stacking haste and thus gimping your + heal very slightly but really gimping your regen, simply uprank heals and space them out slightly longer if need be. For me some fights this means upranking from HL9 to HL11. Keeping the regen, while having the increased HPS. And since FoL gains no benefit from haste, 99% of the time it is a largely wasted stat for most paladin healers.

Sorry if the above doesn't make complete sense its early for me and I'm still half asleep.

I would think that Resto Shaman would see a decent benefit from wearing some haste gear. Especially on certain fights (Illidan?). There are regen periods, then periods of all out healing. Seems like a perfect situation for some haste gear. Since haste would effect all Shaman heals (except Earth Shield) they would seem to be a good candidate for some haste pieces.

Druids on the other hand...

I agree that using haste is not as useful as most people think, except for a few exceptions.
Let's see..

Druid:
Useless - I just dont see a fight where druids will chain cast HT. Lifebloom is your signature tool and is what makes tree druids so strong. Keep that hp buffer on the tank!

Paladin:
Situational - Faster HL but pretty much useless with fol. But lets face it, its your HL's that are important. There are two type of fights where haste will be very good for you:

1. Heal and run type of fights - the faster your heals land the better.
2. Where mana is not an issue at all

Priest:
Useless - A priest's strength is the number of tools he has available to his arsenal and that means a lot of instant cast spells. Assuming that we can safely say that a priest should focus on other stats.

Shaman:
Very good - Chain heal fully takes advantage of spell haste in several ways. First it's a very efficient HPM which helps against the argument that you sacrifice mp5 for haste.
Also, the faster you top of a raid, the less chance there is for someone to die from a certain ability or badluck. Also higher HPS means more time for all the other healers in the raid which translates into a more stable encounter. There's also the fact that all of the shaman heals are slow casting and haste rating has a positive effect on them.
Let's also not forget the 50mp5 totem buff this patch, along with water shield adding extra mp5.


In conclusion, if I were a shaman, I would grab it all.
If I were a paladin, I would grab some.
If I were any other healing class, I would not even consider it.

I really don't think they have any choice but to eventually make haste reduce the GCD. There are just too many spells that don't benefit from haste otherwise, and I can't imagine they want that.