Any word on whether Icy Veins and Bloodlust/Heroism will be converted to +haste instead of fixed percentages?

That might dilute their benefit somewhat for haste-stacking players, but at least there would be no danger of bumping up against the GCD....

I don't know where you heared this rumour and I wouldn't bother with anything that is hearsay or speculation as it's a waste of time. Making both of them into flat haste rating is about as idiotic a change as I can think of and doesn't do anything except ruin the ballance of the next expansion when rating will benefit less and less.

Making either spell fixed rating is about as smart as making Slice and Dice, Flurry, Spirit Tap and all other percentile increments fixed. It's pointless and if I were you I wouldn't bother with it.

MMO hosted some malarkey shortly before 2.4 notes came out about them not stacking, but (1) this is totaly differnent and (2) it is neither official nor confirmed.

Heh. Didn't mean to get you all riled up.

I haven't read anything anywhere about this actually occurring.......

I noticed the change to MSD from 50% cast time reduction to a haste rating affect and it made me wonder what would happen if they also changed the other percentage cast time reduction mechanics. (IV/BL)

Scaling really isn't an issue given that it is easy enough to create multiple ranks of a spell with increasing Haste Rating affect.

But............ I didn't realize it was forbidden to ask "what-if" questions. I'll restrict my queries to current game mechanics in the future.

That's just one of the differences between gear and players.

Player abilities are designed to provide a roughly equal benefit from the level you get them to whatever level you end up at; effectively a lot of player abilities are designed to last forever, the ones that aren't are abilities with static healing/damage values, which is why such abilities come with multiple ranks from a trainer.

Gear however, is designed so that you can't keep on using it forever. Hence why gear uses ratings.

A player ability using ratings would be inherently flawed, since it'd be far too powerful at a level below which it was designed for, while getting weaker and weaker when you get over the level it's designed for. You could work around this by making player abilities then get more rating as you get higher level, but if you do that you're basically at the point they are now.

Edit:

What could happen is that percentage based haste buffs get changed to stack additively with the haste provided by haste rating, but that's a different thing entirely than converting haste buffs to ratings. That is, however, speculation, and something I don't see happening.

At a minimum, if you want to attempt at speculation, you should at least keep up with the current patch notes. You mentioned a problem with bumping into the GCD? Spell haste is lowering the GCD to 1 sec min which encourages all the stacking you can get. Also, this question would not need a thread of its own. There are some current mage threads where this would be more appropriate.

Um, this isn't a very useful thread.

"What if they did <X>?"
"It would be a very silly idea"
"Oh."

And these aren't very useful posts, but hey...

If he has legitimate reason to think that a change would take place in a given patch, then asking the question does no harm. That said, it would probably be better as a post in the existing 2.4 thread rather than as its own thread.