If I recall correctly the CD lowering effect for Ret was a random "what could happen" quote from a Blizzard employee when they first unveiled the mastery system at last Blizzcon but yea we haven't heard anything about it since.

The issue still remains that it's going to be very difficult to keep a ret pally from being GCD locked. Since we're not resource limited there's nothing to stop us from using any of our buttons, whether they're single target or AoE. In fact, we're losing possible DPS if we don't hit something during a free GCD. I'm interested to see how they end up addressing that.

Regarding SoV: I always thought that as a class/spec wielding a 2-hander, applying 5 stacks of something that only works on auto-attacks was a bit excessive. Perhaps making the full effect available at 3 stacks would be a nice change.

Now onto a point I want to make about potential use of haste. We have 3 DoTs. Especially if haste is going take more then now to get to a certain percentage, then I have a feeling haste is going to continue being very useless to us, especially early on in the expansion. Think about how trying to get expertise capped at the beginning of WotLK was debateably a frivolous effort with points better spent in Strength.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not in beta), our DoTs are working as follows:
RV: 8 sec, 1 tick every 2, 4 total.
Consec: 15 sec, 1 tick every 1, 15 total.
SoV: 15 sec, 1 tick every 3, 5 total.

So what percentage of haste would it require to add an extra tick to each? Assuming haste applies to DoTs as it was described, with the duration not changing but the amount of ticks during the duration increasing, this is how it would look:

RV: 1/4 = 25% haste
Consec: = 1/15 = 6.67% haste
SoV: 1/5 = 20% haste

So basically, to make haste more effective for us, they would need to make RV and SoV tick every second, so we don't have to meet a high "haste cap" for each of our abilities. I do realize I am discounting the other effects of haste and just focusing on the DoT component, and obviously nothing is finalized, but there is a lot of potential change, and consideration to be taken if there is no change.

Especially adding further abilities. We're GCD locked with what we have. Drop Cons+DS from single-target, add HS. Even if only one of the possibly 2 new abilities is single-target we're worse than before (HS's CD is 6, Cons and DS are both 10).

Don't get me wrong, I think there's an improvement. There will be enough attacks that we need to consider which to use and when, instead of blindly hammering them speedily in the right order. But it's 100% GCD locked. Hitting Divine Plea will be a short-term DPS loss (to avoid the long-term OOM severe DPS loss) since there should be absolutely no window to hit it.

The most common sense solutions are play with mana (bad idea, both GCD and mana-bound like BC is not good) or to actually increase the CD of many abilities. If everything has an 8 or 10 second CD it's suddenly closer to the DK rune design, although still with problems. DK is limited to 3 per 10sec before haste, lengthening CD would just give us the window to press the less damaging buttons in the free GCD. This would have to be paired with linked CDs, such as drop a Cons and single-target-ability-X also goes on cooldown.

There is no obvious magic bullet for Ret's GCD issue. I hope Blizzard has a less than obvious magic bullet to reveal.

DoTs
Math on Cons and RV look correct. SoV not quite, since it would continue without resetting. 1% haste would increase damage by 1% if you can keep SoV up. In a 5 min fight (300 seconds) you would get 1 extra tick. Each melee attack extends the duration, but doesn't reset the tick times (or autoattack clipping would be hell).

That is under ideal conditions you find in a spreadsheet/patchwerk type model. In reality though this game has had many encounters require switching targets/disengaging every now and then (I.E. Putricide, Sindragosa, Lich King). So basically you may or may not get an extra tick out of it, unless you have plenty of haste. RV is very similar in reality because you may or may not keep it up for a long period of time, depending on your crit chance and possibly not getting a single crit for 15 seconds (it happens). And of course there is the switching targets factor. With overall crit chance being lower in Cata, this is going to be more of an issue.

Let's just say that I wouldn't want to rely on extra haste ticks as being a reliable increase to my DPS, at least with how these spells are now.

Current RV will never benefit from small amounts of haste, your original math was correct. If you get a fresh crit it restarts the debuff with the "new" damage value (anyone unsure how this functions, search the Wrath Ret thread) and a duration of 8 seconds. You would need 25% haste to get that extra tick, as you originally stated.

Regarding SoV I was merely pointing out you need significantly less than you stated to see an impact as it is a constant rolling effect. 1% haste, in theory, increases SoV damage by 1%. Movement and target swapping can lose a 1% haste bonus from autoattack.

That doesn't mean that Haste is a bad stat. However, considering how good Mastery appears and the fact that DoTs will be able to Crit, both of those ratings will have high values. Unless/until Blizzard unveils a Haste benefit for Ret, it's likely to take ArmPen's position as least desirable stat. It's not bad, it does increase DPS, but everything else is markedly better.

Blizzard mentioned they'd like Haste to also increase our mana regeneration. If that's the case they might make Divine Plea benefit from haste too or something to that effect. We can be pretty sure they'll try to balance things such that we won't be ignoring haste like we are armor penetration right now even if it's indirect like meaning more mana for later/continuous stream of it.

Haste affecting mana regen is only useful if we're designed to be mana constrained rather than cooldown constrained. At this point I'm not ruling anything out. There's too many things about our class (ret and holy, not so much prot) that don't line up with blizzard's design goals. They're also iterating on our design fairly rapidly (as indicated by the DS change and the recent holy comment).

If they do decide to go with mana management, then I'd fully expect an attack power to mana conversion (probably 1-2 mana per AP). If we're meant to be holy warriors (which is once interpretation of GC's comment of we're warriors which give up mobility and bleeds for heals and holy damage) then, in my opinion, this feels like the right change. Should we feel more like a melee caster than a melee? Maybe that's the answer to the mobility question as well. We should want to be in melee range but if we're not, we could still do our job (at a reduced effectiveness). Something like we have a mix of ranged and melee holy damage abilities. The ranged stuff would be instant cast when in melee (or reasonably close to melee) but has a cast time outside this range. The mechanics are in the game to do this (Art of War but instead of a buff check, its a range check).

The reason I say this is that holy is meant to be able to solo effectively enough that you could farm/level with a holy spec. Holy really needs some spamable damage ability if it's going to solo, preferably ranged as holy really feels like a caster. Giving something like this to all paladins kills about three birds with one stone (prot ranged threat, holy solo, ret mobility).

Actually, removing the cooldown off exorcism (and buffing the damage quite a bit - about a 4k nuke in holy gear and 6k in ret gear at the current content level and bump the mana up to about 18% of base) would do this. Art of war is our maelstrom weapon equivalent. More haste would mean more exorcism procs. Crit and haste would play off eachother (more crit makes more haste valuable and vice versa). Holy dps would be about 4k (with good haste, exorcism has about a 1.0-1.15 second cast) giving holy good soloability while Art of War becomes something we have to watch for and want to use. The more I think about it, the more I think that this is likely.

Whatever design they choose to make for us, we will be viable. We will see improvements from all stats which affect melee damage that make it worth the itemisation. That doesn't mean that we won't prefer one over the other but we won't see things like crit being twice as good as haste. We will be fun to play... well, I hope we'll be fun to play.

An interesting question is what is likely to remain in our talent trees, given blizzard's design goals? Here's my opinion:

• Art of War
• Righteous Vengeance
• Divine Storm
• Vindication
• Vengeance? (Not completely certain)
• Swift Retribution (will probably have some other bonus attached as well so it's worth taking if we're duplicating raid buffs)
• Replenishment (I'd say the self mana part of Judgements of the Wise will be a passive given at lvl 10)
• Sanctified Wrath
• Eye for an Eye (Maybe, it's an interesting talent but isn't exactly useful, maybe if it's changed into a reflection?)

Everything else is either passive damage, a cleave (Seal of Command), pvp talent (we'll probably keep just one with a modified Pursuit of Justice being the likely candidate), a boring talent (eg. Imp Judgement) or buff to a buff. That's about 20 points using the current design and none of these are 5 point talents (so it's likely to stay at 20ish points). Sheath of Light (or similar) will be a specialisation passive (we probably lose the hot part).

We still need half a tree. Some of which will be things affecting our active specialisation ability, an end of tree ability and some synergy talents but the rest will be entirely new ret design.

From the MMOC datamining it seems Holy Shock will not be baseline, but will instead be the Holy specialization ability.

Right now they have the following listed for the ret benefits:
-Divine Storm (which GC said was going to be replaced)
-Two Handed Weapon Spec
-Sheath of Light
-Divine Purpose

More info is incoming.

Divine purpose appears to be a mana regen ability and not the current divine purpose Divine Purpose - Spells - Sigrie. I'm guessing placeholder numbers

DS being a talent again probably didn't make it into this build. I'd expect that we'll see that change in the next build (which means that we won't see one of our new abilities).

Edit: Provided divine purpose is correct, I'd say that this means that haste probably won't increase our mana regen. Why add a second knob to fiddle with our mana?