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Spell Haste to Affect Global Cooldown
Published on February 1, 2008 by Phaelia 
Blue, Mailbag, Spells and Talents 
17 Comments
There is some exciting news about Patch 2.4 from Community Manager Drysc today:
Although not terribly relevant to your discussion I thought I’d jump in and let you know about some Spell Haste changes in the upcoming patch.
In 2.4, Spell Haste will reduce the global cool down on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. It won’t apply to melee and ranged abilities though however.
Ironically, this news comes just days after an e-mail from Sydera of Vek’nilash (US) in which she inquires:
I have been wondering about something for a while and have no other resto druids to ask. Why do you think there is so much spell haste on the Zul’Aman and T6 content items? What are we going to be doing in Hyjal and Black Temple that makes spell haste necessary? Is this bad design, or is there something to be learned here?
My healing style relies almost exclusively on instants. My guild is 1/4 TK and 3/6 SSC right now, and I tend to use regrowth about once per boss fight and healing touch pretty much never. If I use HT, it’s with nature’s swiftness every time. My general rotation is rolling lifeblooms and rejuvenation on tanks. Is something going to change this for the T6 stuff?
In responding to her question, I generated a list of spell haste items that would be appropriate to a cloth or leather-wearing healer by filtering the armor on WoWHead. Those previously scoffable eight items are now looking a lot more attractive. Because in the now immortal words of reader Zackoria:
HAHA! LIFEBLOOM! LIFEBLOOM LIFEBLOOM!!! Castable healing? BAH! ONLY THE ACCURSED GLOBAL COOLDOWN CAN RESTRAIN US FROM WORLD HEALING DOMINATION AHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!
(Endgame-equipped) Druids just got (up to) 33% closer to World Healing Domination.
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@Kiryn: Have you considered the fact that Rejuvenation + Swiftmend is a 1.5 second cast while Regrowth is only 2? I know that you aren’t having trouble with mana, but a Regrowth will hit harder and provide more potential benefits (crit = Nature’s Grace and possibly Living...
Curses! You beat me to it Phae! One of my guildys just informed me of this post on our forums and i sprinted here to tell you.
Blizzard has finally made me want to get past vashj/kael and into BT! (We might be there before 2.4, now i have a goal! ^_^) This will increase our max amount of Lifeblooms from 4 to 6, rejoice!
And now…it has begun…
*Runs off to prepare*
Edit: This just in!
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=2405447683&sid=1
Dungeons and Raids
* All 25- player raid bosses that drop set tokens will now drop and additional token!
*Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped.
I’m puting Heroic Slave Pens and Shattered halls on notice! For you Spirit stackers you might want to put Heroic Botanica on farm as well.
Our time has come, finally!
Can’t wait for your new charts, Phae. Haste vs. mp5?
Spell haste, eh? I wonder if it’s also going to affect haste pots, bloodlust, meta gems procs, etcetera.
At first glance this looked to me like great news for the Hunter community. I know my better half has a lot of trouble managing his shot rotation after I pop bloodlust, for example. But… “It won’t apply to melee and ranged abilities though however.” :S
I’ll be curious to see how this actually shakes out. Just like how haste is almost worthless to a moonkin until one can fit an extra starfire into the cast cycle, how much haste will be necessary for us to get an extra cast in? And if we do get an extra cast in, how much does that matter? I don’t feel particularly limited by the gcd, 4 stacks is plenty for Hyjal trash and single-tank boss fights I don’t feel restrained.
I dunno, color me agnostic unless there’s something I’m seriously missing.
This is a weird change. The GCD is a huge factor in the combat system and I’d have to imagine there will be unforseen results.
I don’t think you will see an improvement in effective healing as Flash of Light, Lesser Healing Wave, and in some circumstances Chain Heal will all be affected by this change. More heals being thrown around means more of your hots will end up lost or as overheal.
This change does make the Memento of Tyrande a more attractive trinket for a druid so good for you if you have a chance to pick one up.
I am just going to repeat my same babble here that I’ve posted elsewhere:
If spell haste reduces the GCD, the biggest benefit we will see is being able to squeeze in more GCDs before needing to start the cycle of refreshing the first lifebloom again.
However, this does mean that spellhaste will only be useful in stairstep amounts, and diminish greatly in value until you hit the next level.
If you can do a 4 GCD cycle now, you’ll need to reduce your GCD from 1.5 to 1.3 in order to do 5 GCDs. Which is 13.34% haste, aka 210 spell haste rating.
Who knows what Sunwell will bring, but with the healing haste gear we have now, you will need every piece available to move from 4 GCD to 5.
This stuff, plus the mace from Zul’jin:
http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=4;ty=1:2:-3:-6:-2:-4:-5:8:0;cr=119:102;crs=1:1;crv=0:0
This brings you to a max possible of 340 spell haste rating, which is ~21% haste. Not enough to jump from a 5 GCD cycle to a 6 GCD cycle, but sufficient to get trees of all but the worst latency connections up to a 5 GCD cycle if they *really* want to.
The next question you have to ask is how often is a 5th cycle necessary. Because while being able to do so is good, is it worth the tradeoff in regen and +heal, especially considering a 5 GCD tree will be burning more mana than we do at 4 GCD.
A druid could heal a bloodboil group, but it would require 100% of their attention, and if priests are available to do so, priests will still be a better fit.
It would help on fights like RoS, where there are a lot of people taking consistent damage. Another rejuv or LB thrown out is good.
My conclusion is that unless we start seeing a huge amount of spell haste stats on sunwell gear and beyond (and that spell haste comes on stuff that is already our best in slot gear) the most likely use of spell haste for trees is people who need a moderate amount to get the help needed to make a 4 GCD cycle possible, or trees who keep a specialized spell haste set on the side with the right amount to put them into a 5 GCD cycle for specific fights.
Uh, I think your RSS is broken - I can’t use it anymore, and I get an XML parse error when I try to subscribe.
Sorry for being off-topic!
Thanks Esarhaddon. I’m not sure when it went bad or which of the several changes I’ve made tonight have broken it, but I’m working hard to try to fix it.
Edit: After some very stressful troubleshooting, I think I narrowed it down to a plugin I installed earlier today to allow me to display links from my blogroll randomly. >.< I’ll be watching it tonight, just in case.
Nice. Dont forget there is some jewelry. A neck from ZA and 2 rings with haste. Also the 1h from ZA as well. When I added it all up HT was under 2.5 seconds cast. If this means a full .5 secs off the GCD……daddy like!
And we will see more hasting gem in future patch
*glee*
^_^
The Eagle driven back around the tents
will be chased from there by other birds:
When the noise of cymbals, trumpets and bells
will restore the senses of the senseless lady.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=4311203093&sid=1
Fear this, for changes are at hand…. :O
Oh god I’m so scared :/
The first table is the length of global cooldown needed to fit the y (5,6) number of spell within the x-value time given to keep lifebloom up (it’s 7 seconds, but Obviously, you won’t have perfect latency, ect). The second table is the same, except it lists spell haste needed instead.
GCD Needed:
Rotation Speed
Spells |7 6.9 6.8 6.7 6.6 6.5
|————————————————
5 |1.4 1.38 1.36 1.34 1.32 1.3
6 |1.17 1.15 1.13 1.12 1.1 1.08
Haste Needed:
Rotation Speed
Spells |7 6.9 6.8 6.7 6.6 6.5
|———————————————-
5 |113 137 162 188 215 242
6 |449 478 508 539 571 604
Hmm, those tables look so much nicer with tabs
Just wanted to agree with Kaera. Most of the spell-haste gear in BT comes at the expense of other stats like spirit and mp5. I already am constantly casting LB to keep up 4 stacks (or equivalent number of casts w/ rejuv and raid LBs) so mana regen is an issue for me (I somehow get the favored MT group which means - no spriest and no totems /sadpanda). If I stacked enough spell haste to reach 5 GCD, I’d lose a great deal of regen and yet be using more mana to keep up 5 stacks (or the equivalent number of raid casts). Doesn’t look so good to me.
That said, I do have haste gear stashed away “just in case”… Curse of the Packrat hits you for 80456.
@Kaymoo:
I will worry about Druid nerfs when I actually see them in blue.
I am cautious about how hard people have been yelling about Druids because I’ve been a Druid since launch and I have seen how badly the community reacts to Druids and the nerfs and setbacks we’ve had because of it. (Or simply the fixes we’ve never gotten for the fear of making us OP)
I’m still not going to worry until I see it. I’m prepared to be pissed off, though.
UH OH, we need an armor buff to tree now…!
Or an aoe threat reduction spell. ouchies, untanked adds are going to chew us up bad.