Healing Touch is not a raiding spec, it is a spec for people who want to play moonkin but still be able to heal very minorly.

Ok, we see two opinions in this thread:

1. (yours): Spell haste for healers is entirely useless
2. Spell haste for healers is useful, but it's way too expensive in terms of stat points

As for 1., anything that accelerates my GHeal is welcome. I have almost never lost a tank because I was OOM, However, I do sometimes lose a tank because our healer group is unable to heal quickly enough due to brain lags, real lags, environmental difficulties or just because the tank caught a crushing that he should have avoided. In any of these cases, I welcome a proc off my Scarab, and I for sure would welcome a constant +spell haste.

In your terms, spell haste certainly helps me achieve my goals. It's just too expensive so far.

BTW.: A little nitpicking: Mana regeneration for priests profits slightly from spell haste, as a quicker slow heal means you get out of 5s faster. So at least this - tiny - effect is a real use that spell haste has.

I don't think anyone is arguing that spell haste is entirely useless, but it's utility is right down there along with spellcrit for priests and spirit for paladins. Given that this is the case then 2) is trivially true: you could play with the cost of spellcrit/spirit such that it was possible to run around with 100% crit rates, or 5000 mana OO5SR ticks and suddenly turn them into incredibly powerful stats.

In regard to preventing tank gibbage - from my own experience at least, this most often occurs due to poor strategy or poor execution, and occasionally due to a bad roll of the dice. As such the way to fix the problem is not to throw more healing power at it, but to refine and/or practice the strategy (and try and eliminate/reduce the RNG factor as much as possible).

Mana regen and haste both allow healers to recover from poor play or bad luck, but as it stands regen does this a hell of a lot more effectively and flexibily than haste. With additional regen you can uprank, use a shorter-but-less-efficient heal, throw HoTs around indiscriminately, bubble (if you are a priest), or just flat out spam overheal. Haste just allows you to click GH7 faster - and if base GH7 spammage is overkill, then of what earthly good is the haste?

This is true for all classes, but I believe the conversion ratio is 15.7 rating to 1% haste, at 70 (see wowwiki).

As the GCD limits the time between spells to a minimum of 1.5s, and is unaffected by spell haste, any spell that would be reduced to a cast time < 1.5s does not benefit to the extent that spells with longer cast times do, as you have a small period where you are essentially twiddling your thumbs (the cast reduction is never sufficient to be able to move/do anything else useful while waiting for the GCD).

I disagree, I ran with well under 150 mp/5 through all t6 content, and while yes I had a bit of mana trouble on a couple fights it was manageable. You're trying to tell me that in 2.3 a priest starting t6 content doesn't have significantly more than 150 mp5? I admit I don't know the stats of priests in t4/partial t5 these days but I know I personally had a lot more spirit back in those days and PMC is still extremely viable as well. And while I don't particularly care about the heroic healing gear since the upgrades I could get are significantly higher ilvl they are definitely options for the raider doing t5 content who is low on the DKP totem pole and gearing himself through tailoring/badges.


I don't see how you can argue this. I don't think anyone could say haste does not help you react to , and heal more quickly ( and thus potentially prevent unlucky burst) burst dmg on a raid. In fact, I would say thats pretty much all haste does. I do not claim it does this efficiently either in terms of mana use or itemization value, but it does do this. My second claim is that the second object of a healer for you "not running oom" is a lot easier to obtain for some classes, and since thats the case they can afford to drop regen which is not helping them at all ( after all they have mana leftover) and pick up haste which will help them at least a little, and the player who says they could just as easily stack sta or crit or similar in that gap, is right in theory, but itemization wise thats only valid for a select few pieces (I cant think of any cloth that is competitive that has crit, but I'm sure mail and plate have better options), where as haste has an option for almost every slot ( most of them bad options but at least the stat is becoming fairly plentiful).

For example illidari council you have several sources of 5+ burst that you can predict and react to ( i.e. Deadly poision and the Divine DoT thing), but you also have several sources which both A) stack with the aforementioned abilities AND in conjunction with them potentially 2 shot most classes. I.e. flamestrike ( and if you're terrible blizzard I guess). And of course the strat tries to reduce the potentially for being double teamed, by interrupting the holy spells, and staying well spread out, but eventually players are going get hit with multiple abilities in a very short amount of time and its not really unreasonable to think that healer reacting to Deadly poison noticeably more quickly than he could without haste has a better chance of having healed that player before the flamestrike or whatever comes.

Spell haste may serve a role in PvE just as well as the speed boot enchant. In movement fights haste will allow you to move that much sooner. It doesn't serve this role however since you have to give up too much for too little.

My point of view is that I want to make the best out of what is accessible to me. Poor execution is the norm in most of the raid play I participate in. The server I play on is a "day 1" server, nevertheless Illidan is alive and kicking, and so is Archimonde, with a total of 3 raids in BT at all. Unless you are in a raiding guild that is able to pick only the best (while still socially acceptable) players, poor execution is and will be reality. Have to get rid of "horrible execution" first. Where I can cope with gear, I will, just to get some progress.

Haste does not only allow me to click GH7 faster, it also allows me to deliver a GH5 faster, which is sometimes more important, especially if you play in a raid with just 1 or 2 paladins like I do. Also, getting the GH spam out faster means having more inspiration procs on the tank.

My personal impression is that haste for priests (can't talk for the other healers) is in a situation similar to CoH shortly after introduction. It needed just a few tweaks to go from "mostly useless" to "very good".

So let's not be overly hasty in condemning haste.

And let's continue to watch out for situations where it would be useful, even though perhaps we won't be buying anytime soon.

I use a spell haste set (Ring, Bracers, Shoulders, Belt) for trash (sometimes) and RoS. Everywhere else it's useless

Wouldnt spell haste help your mana regen a little in some fights just due to it allowing you to be in the oo5sc time more?

Im not suggesting its worth it to sac mana regen for spell haste..but this fact..however minor it may be seems to be ignored.

It would, as I mentioned a few posts above. The effect is, however, pretty hard to model, as it depends so much on the actual combination and timing of spells being cast.

Probably the easiest way is to start from a typical WWS parse. Maybe I have time to do that next week.

Edit:
Here is quick estimate of what it would amount to:

Let's say we have a 10 minute fight with 25 GHeals cast. Let' assume we have enough spell haste to get GHeal down to 2s. As an upper limit of what we could gain, let's further assume every one of these GHeals gives us another 0,5s out of 5S.

Assuming a 200 MP5 difference between O5S and I5S for post 2.3 priests, that would give:

25*0,5 = 12,5s extra time out of 5s. 200*12,5/5= 500 mana regenerated. In additional MP5, that's roughly 4 MP5 for a 10 minute fight.

So, it's nothing to spit on, but won't be enough to change my mind about spell haste, especially since my estimate is a very optimistic one, I think.

I don't see anyone claiming +healing giving additional OOFSR time, so I don't see how haste is very different. Of course if you can burst heal then rest more HPS will let you rest longer, wether it's from haste or from +healing, but most fights more HPS doesn't result in (at least not noticeable) OOFSR time afaik.

Haste really does 2 things:
-HPS
-Faster "oh-shit" heal

As I've already said if you're ever downranking more HPS will allow more downranking so the HPS from haste actually helps your efficiency - wether it's worth getting for that purpose or not needs to be calculated on a per-class basis and the ranks you're actually downranking to/from.

As for faster "oh-shit" heal the chance it'll save the dying person is small, although not neglicible completely and can be statistically calculate if you actually decide what's killing people in your fight. Of course this only applies to reactive healing with max rank, anything else and you wouldn't really benefit from haste when it comes to saving someone who would die if the heal doesn't land 0.1s faster. Proactive healing pretty much negates that portion of haste, although we all know nobody heals proactively 100% of the time.

It sounds like having a spell haste set might be good for when you are learning new encounters. Like practice wheels on a bike, not ideal for race day, but they sure make practice more enjoyable.

It also makes Cyclone's cast faster, ie harder to interrupt/counterspell. I plan on picking up a spell haste leather healing set just for the curiosity of trying it in PVP- it's not like anyone else is going to bid on it.

The haste leather in T6 content makes me spitting angry as a tree.

Speeding up the ticks/duration of hots would make haste more appealing to trees, but if it messed with the duration of Lifebloom we would outright lose the ability do a 4 GCD cycle with any notable haste. 15% haste takes us just under 6 seconds on LB duration, and doing a 4 cast cycle at impossibly perfect levels requires 6 seconds. So even if they made it affect HoTs for Trees, we'd have to carefully balance how much of it we actually equip, or lower our options for cast cycles. High latency trees could be in danger of losing 3-cast cycles.

This is assuming that the game can calculate ticks at other than on-the-second times.

Percentage-wise, haste would have the most effect on HT versus any other heal cast by any class. This is a nice thought expect for the fact that any Resto Druid maximizing their healing ability and class strengths for raids is going to be using Healing Touch only in conjunction with NS.

I can't see the extremely marginal benefits on casting cyclone faster (15% haste saves you less than 1/4 second off cyclone) being worth it for PvP. You'll be far better suited with resilience gear, and you won't be able to be truly serious and competitive without resilience. Casting HT in arena is a bad bad idea. But I guess if you've got nothing better for arena...

This is really wrong. Haste does NOT result in more time OFSR (Outside Five-Second-Rule).

Remember that FSR only starts when completing a cast. Your theory would only hold if the time inside FSR = cast time + 5s.

Given your example of 25GH in 10 min and assuming your GH are distributed uniformly over the time period, this would result in one GH every 24s. This would result in 19s or 79.1% of the time OFSR per cast. This is independent of the cast time of the spell itself.

No matter whether you use GH or Flashheal or PoM, as long as you cast 25 spells in 10 min your time OFSR will stay the same.

As a consequence, spell haste will not help your hpm only your hps.

The only situation were spell haste would improve your hpm is when having an item like "Bangle of Endless Blessings" or "Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon" equiped, since more spells per minute also mean more procs per minute. However, I would consider the effect too small to be of any noticable value.



Edit (little of topic):

+Healing can however potentially improve your OFSR-Time, if it enables you to cast one big heal instead of two small heals. However, this is often not possible in practice since you often allready use your maximum spell rank and the health pool of the main tank is limited.

Conlcusion:
+ Healing -> +hpm, +hps
+ spell haste -> +hps

Partly I'm going to play devil's advocate here as I argue for a point I'm not entirely convinced of, but it seems that nobody really went through the numbers.

Consider the following example with chain heal.

For the purpose of simplicity I assume a healing specced Shaman with 2k added heal from gear & talents.

CH5 does then an average of (minHeal+maxHeal)/2 * addHeal/3.5*castTime * talentModifications = (833+950)/2 * 2000/3.5*2.5 * 1.3 = 3092 heal on average for 513 mana

Similiarly, CH4 does 2780 heal on average for 413 mana, which is 90% of the value of CH5.

So if one could reduce the casting time to increase healing throughput by 10%, one could use CH4 with the same HPS as one could use CH5 without the haste gear.

This requires 15.7*10% = 158 haste rating. The cost for 2.5s of casting is 413*1.1 = 454 mana, one thus gains 59 every 2.5s or 118mp5. Comparisons of similiar items gave me an rough approximation of a relative item budget cost of 1mp5 = 3 spell haste rating. (Based on the similiar shoulder slot epics available). One can easily see that 158/3 = 53 is much less than the 118mp5 virtually gained through spell haste.

Some assumptions and deductions one should be aware of when looking at this result
- By using CH5 with spell haste one has the option to achieve more hps than one could without.
- There are more individual casts, thus one is more likely to catch more targets with the jumping part of the chain heals, resulting in less overheal, and one is more likely to get that last heal through when your target is dying.
- This is assuming an unlikely chain-casting over a long time. If there's time to reg without casting one gains more mana with mp5 than with spell haste, but the same goes with spirit.
- Any spell takes some additional time to cast due to reaction time and latency. This time increases with more casts and thus with more spell haste.
- 2'000 heal is a rather lot, with less, as for instance 1400 heal (one should at least achieve if spell haste is a realistic option) one needs an additional 32 haste rating (or 2% haste) more for the same effect.
- Items for the 158/190 haste rating are available through Zul'Aman/Badge rewards/Crafting.
- This calculation is entirely theoretic, as I don't have the spell haste gear.

So I dare to conclude that Spell haste is actually a quite useful stat at least for a Chain Healing Shaman, which, while it does not increase hpm directly it can increase it indirectly with some smart downranking. One should be aware that 2% increase in something sounds as if it were very little, but so is 2% crit and hardly any dd would consider crit an useless or overpriced stat.

Ok, the post above made things much clearer for me, and I admit that you are right.Given your scenario one really gains time OFSR.

However, I'm not sure if this has any noticable influence in practice for healers.

The described effect only occurs if the next cast is started during the time gained by spell haste.

This can happen when healing the raid, since raid-wide damage occurs with a low frequency for most fights. In this case the faster you can heal up the raid the more time you get OFSR.

When healing a tank this does not hold, since the frequency with wich the tank takes damage usually is much higher. The only benefits you gain from haste when healing tanks are that you are more mobile, have more hps and can heal more reactively.

As I wrote the above post and thought a little more about Haste and pure Healing, it came to my mind, that the relation is similar to AP and Crit.

While Healing is a absolut increase of HPS, haste gives a relative increase. This is similar to spell crit, however this stat is rather useless for healers apart from paladins since it is not possible to predict whether the next healing spell is going to crit. Haste however applies to all casts and therefor can be relied on.

This means that after you reach a certain amount of +Healing, you gain more hps from haste than from pure +Healing.

As an example: Consider 10% spell haste ~ 157 spell haste rating.

@2000 +Healing: 157 shr = 200 +Healing
@3000 +Healing: 157 shr = 300 +Healing


As I'm unable to come up with the item value of spell hast, I cannot tell when the point is reached, where an item with haste beats an item with +Healing for the same budget.

However, +Healing will allways have the additional benefit of increasing not only HPS but also HPM.


As a Note: Remember that Blizzard may provide Items with certain stats with the next step in raid progress in mind. Maybe some encounters in Sunwell is going to favor healers with spell haste rating.

My argument for haste is on the grounds that +healing and +mp5 diminish greatly at a certain point, one that is certainly lower than the the T6 level. Shaman alone just gained 65+ (depending on the encounter) free regen from new patches. When you reach enough mp5 to sustain casting on these encounters, you only have +healing and haste left as significant stats (there is always the argument for "padding" the mp5 stat, in case of bad luck/play of course). +Healing can only be stacked so much, until your heals are needlessly large, as you still can't heal more than the incoming damage (although at least Shamans can make the case for stacking healing to large amounts, given the scaling of earth shield, chain heal and healing spring, which all start relatively small, but gain huge amounts from +healing).

That leaves +haste in a position to be a decent stat to stack. Your primary heal, Chain Heal, will always benefit from it, and on top of that, +haste is free reaction time for "oh shit" heals, as was stated earlier. Where the benefits of +haste are probably not as solid as the first chunks of mp5 and healing you pick up, I certainly feel that it's stronger than either stat once they've reached high levels.

From personal experience, I'd honestly say that a Shaman only "needs" 120-135mp5 (depending on whether or not you're a leatherworker for drums) and ~1800-2000 healing before those stats start going downhill, however it's hard to post any hard numbers when dealing with healing, as everyone seems to have their own style. I honestly can't comment on the later parts of BT, but I've killed everything through Azgalor in MH (as well as Archi attempts, in which mana wasn't a concern), and Gorefiend in BT, with 136 unbuffed mp5. All of this was before the massive regen buffs we got in 2.3 (as I quit raiding about a month ago). The only time I was ever starved for mana was post-ankh, and only if my drums/pots/tide were all on cooldown.

I like your analogy, but small correction on this one: spell crit is a very useful stat for holy priests, too. Partly for crit as such, but more so for the inspiration procs. When you are healing a tank, 25% more armor is one of the best buffs a non-druid tank can get (or even druids below the armor cap), and if you have at least 2 holy priests with a decent crit rating healing the tank, the uptime ist quite decent, too. As for details, all the math is already in the Holy Raiding thread, so I won't repeat it here.

My personal opinion (having been to every fight leading up to phase 3/4 of Illidan) is that while mp5 is a far superior stat to haste for a shaman, building a haste set is worthwhile if you can get the gear cheap. It's a statistic that is best used for fights which are healing intensive, but not mana intensive. Gurtogg Bloodboil and Illidari Council are prime examples of a mana intensive fight. At no point is the healing incredibly difficult during either of those fights, as it is always localized damage; yet, they can be a very long fight that requires mid-rank heals constantly. Mana doesn't plummet the way it does in some fights, but rather due to the length slowly whithers away if you're not paying attention. Reliquary of Souls and Teron Gorefiend, on the other hand, are healing intensive though. The raid, as a whole, takes exceedingly large amounts of damage, which can often come in large spikes (incinerate + shadow debuff for example).


Currently, Reliquary and Gorefiend are the perfect encounters for a spell haste set. Both fights are incredibly short and as such should not be an issue for any properly geared shaman at that point in the game. Mana tide alone should be enough to hold up through Gorefiend and during Reliquary I'm not sure there's even enough time to drop Tide. Due to the constant, mid-to-high rank heals that are necessary to keep the raid alive during those fights (especially as they go longer and longer), the extra chain heals can make a large difference. One-tenth of a second per chain heal does not seem like a huge buff, but when you hit your 26th chain heal as your partner hits their 25th, it is noticeable.

Do I prioritize Spell Haste highly? Not at all, but I do not neglect it either. As many have said, you need lots of it to make a difference. Building it as an alternate set (much like your high-mp5 or high-+healing sets) can come in handy on those two fights, and possibly one or two in Sunwell.

For haste to be of any use, not only the damage taken by the group needs to be big, but also the fight needs to be short and/or the damage needs to be very bursty (such as no damage for a long time than a lot of damage for a short time then no damage again). If a fight is both long and deals a lot of damage to your raid to the point where you'll want haste to increase HPS, the fight would be impossible as you would either go oom or not put up the required HPS. Since the game had been cleared those fights obviously don't exist, though.