Bear in mind that with haste affecting DoTs, we will be casting more often as a given. This will be more mana intensive than encounters are at this point in time. Combine this with a chance to miss, and you're casting even more. It seems that it would not be in our best interest to be under the hit cap, even with the lower hit PP value. While we have very good options for mana regeneration, it will be interesting to see how this pans out.

I'm also stuck in the "missed spells do not do damage" way of thinking, but this may end up being a matter of personal preference.

I think that, practically speaking, being below the hit cap using current itemization would be quite difficult. In practice, what this might mean is that in some set ups, if you are slightly below the hit cap, you do not necessarily have to gem for it.

One thing about +hit, is it has been a static number since we hit level 80. In Naxx, you could only reach certain levels of haste/crit/spell power and even +hit, making 289 hit a somewhat harder number to reach as there was less of it on the gear and you had to sacrifice more to get it.

With each new tier, all stats have gone up but the needed amount of hit has stayed the same and become more easily attainable making it worth less. If you have to sacrifice 6 items to +hit in your Naxx gear to make hit cap, but can to it w/ 4 in ToC, that leaves a lot of room for the other stats.

I remember having to gem hit in many pieces in T7 just to reach hit cap. I haven't had to gem for hit since Ulduar came out.

Very good point, with that in mind you'd think that hit would be worth at least double. This would make hit seemingly more important than any stat for all classes even though it almost always already is. I could see it mattering less on classes that don't require specific abilities to be used before others.

You'd almost assume just have simcraft not even calculate hit anymore since if your PvEing without being capped, then your not doing it right. (Not that i really think Sim programs should really be changed in that regard.)

SimulationCraft does indeed add the value of sim->reaction_time as a mini-cooldown on a spell that misses to prevent it being chosen again instantly.

It's by no means perfect as a class that was intending to just cast the same spell again anyway, miss or hit would be penalised but it's handy for those spells where you expect it to hit and thus have to react and notice it's failed. The default value for sim->reaction_time is I believe 0.5 seconds. I do still intend at some point revamping the entire spell selection, casting and latency modeling to more accurately reflecting someone deciding which spell to cast next ahead of time, casting it when possible and modeling the delays appropriately, but this is still a while away.

Just saw this posted in the DD forums (which I'm now banned from for unrelated reasons): SampleOutputPTR - simulationcraft - Project Hosting on Google Code

Annnnd suddenly we're #2 right behind survival hunters. What the hell changed between our last simcraft and this one? Is Simcraft accounting for SW:P haste on refresh logic now (as implied in this post)? Does that REALLY account for 1000 dps? Or is the simcraft just using 3.3-optimized gear instead of our 3.2 BiS?

EDIT: Nevermind, I can't read.

One complaint I saw on the forums was that (at the very least) the Aff spec isn't up-to-date and uses poor talents. How optimized is Simcraft for non-Shadow specs right now, and how do you think that affects our relative dps?

"Become more easily obtainable making it worht less".
Hit doesn't become worthless. The worth of hit is only counted 'before' the hit cap: before cap it's usefull after hitcap it's useless. I'd even go as far to say that hit becomes more usefull with higher gear levels because it acts as a multiplier rather then a static increase in dps.

I do agree though that while struggling for the cap in Naxx gear, you struggle to no be overcapped in higher level gear.

Has anyone managed to get any information from developers or blues about mindflay locking haste in? As 3.3 gets closer, the thought of this 'feature' staying in doesn't really appeal to me that much.

Bold is pvp talk, although it is PvE related.

The potential PvP ramifications may force Blizzard to finally fix this. I could see quite a few priests going Fan Of The Month crazy as shadow rolling engineering and getting click able haste trinkets etc. etc. Doing 6k (rough guess) SWP's in 3 seconds and with consistent refreshes could be a problem.

Haste is almost already worth going full out on as shadow due to the decreased GCD's and abilities like Manaburn, mass dispell, and any other non-instant spells benefiting. Now with the reduction of 1 GCD per fight already with Vampiric Embrace becoming a buff, along with the major haste buff, problems may arise in a "nerf retribution to the ground" manner.

However in the past it has sounded as though they didn't want to investigate a fix for this as it would be complicated and don't have the tech for it yet. So if they are forced to fix it, we may see either a huge delay in the patch or they may revert the change all together.

Personally im all for them delaying the patch and fixing it. Been waiting for them a while to fix this problem.

Keep in mind that going haste on shadow in pvp without spi on your gear means that you're going to go very oom very fast especially since you can't just use sfiend and dispersion as manareg abilities, and doubly so as your team's dispeller. It might make sense to pick up the spi tier set and get haste on your offpieces because spi and crit are very close as dps stats (spi being roughly 75% of crit's value) in 3.3 (assuming glyph of shadow) and mana consumption is going to be very high in arena in 3.3.

What I'm more worried about is going to be that shadowplay (aff + shadow) is going to have a very strong place in 3.3 with the buffs both specs are getting (VE as a self-buff is very useful for target switching, one of our major weaknesses) and the fact that we can roll hasted dots on both targets with dispel protection, and that the QQ will get us nerfed. Not to mention that Lust is going to bump us up proportionately in 3's and 5's too.

I honestly think we're just going to have to wait for a dev comment on this... it's only been a year, right?

Also it might be worth mentioning that blizzard could deal with the haste problem in a different manner - by itemising differently - mainly the tier pieces of priests. The new tier could have minimal/smaller ammounts of haste relative to other stats.

Yep, it's gone. Embrace of the Spider had even procced.

So not only did they remove the ability to lock in high haste to SW:P, they just removed haste from affecting it entirely?

I really hope they work haste into scaling SW:P in some way though. The best way I can see is having your haste rating affect your spellpower only as applied towards SWP; that way pain and suffering will update it correctly. It would be really disappointing to see that 14% or so of our dps never benefit from haste.

To be fair, it'll be closer to 8-10% of our dps without haste kicking in, but yeah, that's a goddamn shame. This also means that SP will beat haste to gem again.

Given that there are probably technical limitations in fixing mindflay haste refresh, this is probably the best change they could do. It might work out to be a serious nerf to SW: P damage, but that's probably a better alternative than balancing our DPS around a bugged mechanic.

It isn't a technical limitation. If it was a technical limitation, then we would be able to "lock in" spell power as well. This is all due to poor design. The developers have a shallow grasp on the concept of abstraction. /sigh let's just hope they get their shit together and find a way to make it work.

One can only hope that we see a buff in some other area (MB coefficient comes to mind as a MF buff with our 4pc might be going a little too far) to balance out the damage that we're going to be losing here. The worst part is that it doesn't simplify our rotation one bit, and hurts our multidotting especially.

As an aside, I believe this will make Glyph of Dispersion almost universally better as our 3rd glyph now.

I don't think this is as simple as the programmers fucking up a simple constructor. I am quite sure that Blizzard has excellent programmers, if this was that simple, they'd fix it, if they haven't, it is because it might be quite complicated.

I wouldn't hold out for that, I don't think they ever considered that the +100% haste we could get on SW: P was balanced. Assuming we run with 20-30% haste on gear, this might work out to be a 20% nerf on 10% of our dps, or a 2% nerf (in Blizzard's eyes).

I am willing to bet it is. Back when they first put together the first UML for the spell casting system the designers did not have the foresight to think far enough down the line. This is what i mean by their lack of a grasp on abstraction. Due to this folly, as they implemented more and more changes, their original model was not abstract enough to incorporate these new changes, which would lead to some nasty bandaids, hard-coded conditionals, and the like. They should have spent a little more time on the actual design.

I would much rather them push Cataclysm back and just do a complete rewrite of the source. Knowing what they know now, I am sure they would be able to create something more susceptible to the dynamic nature of the game.

This reminds me of the time when the Reflective Shield talent used to actually work the way to made it to in the first place ( damage reflected regardless of who the shield was on ). In Wrath of the Lich King somehow it was broken to where the effect of the talent being applied when the shield was on others was non existant.

After a while of complaints about how the talent currently functions in relation to how it used to, blizzard simply stated they "didn't have the tech" and just added "this talent only works on yourself" to the tooltip of Reflective Shield.

How do you have not have the tech to allow an ability to function a certain way when it worked just as intended in the past?

Blizzard is a mystery wrapped in an enigma!