Spell haste & itemization for Shaman's - worth it?

[Stealthy]

Hi all,

WotLK has seen the introduction of a lot of items with Haste Ratings on them. It seems to be an expensive stat in terms of item budgets, on par with Crit Rating.

Do you think it's a worthwhile investment to stack haste over crit for Ele shams? It seems you need to stack large amounts of Haste gear to see a noticable improvement. In PvE, particularly on longer fights, I can see where it would be beneficial. But for PvP, it seems you would be giving up significant burst capability if you stack haste. Unless you're using to tighten timing on certain spell rotaions parhaps? Like trying to get 2 Lava Bursts in for one (glyphed) Flame Shock, along with LB's or CL's.

Or am I missing the point?

Cheers,
Stealthy

[Niley]

if You have PhD, maybe You'll be able to figure out whats good and when for You, crit is bad for us, almost useless. Haste is only good in certain areas....Ele shamans had become a over-complicated.

[not5150]

You can always go to elitistjerks for the mind numbing excel sheet dps breakdowns of haste versus crit,hit, etc.

But yeah, haste seems to be on almost every new piece of gear I get.

[puppychow]

Its because it becomes impossible for Blizzard to upgrade gear if they just deal with crit/spell dmg/AP/etc, since gear gets either scaled way out of hand OR the new gear isn't that much better than old gear. With haste, they can add a ton to new gear and it doesn't change the game drastically, since haste requires large numbers to see big "jumps".

Frankly it sucks as a player, going from 100 haste to 200 haste isn't a huge improvement, but people will see a number on a piece of gear thats 50 bigger than what they have right now, and immediately want it.

For multiboxer shamans, I'd say gem/enchant for non-haste (spell power, crit, spi/mp5, etc) and you'll pick up enough haste gear along the way. It will lower the cast times and the GCDs so its not a terrible stat or anything, it just requires SO much for each point of improvement that its hard to get excited about.

[Schwarz]

elitest jerks had some nice pretty graphs on how much haste you want. The jerks over there say that there are gaps when haste does not help you.

http://elitistjerks.com/f79/t27016-elemental_wotlk_talents_discussion/p59/

This thread has been moved off their main page so it hasn't been updated for a while. The problem with elitest jerks threads is they get up to 60 some pages. It is hard to read through all that stuff. But they do have some good information.

[Ken]

It's understandable if Blizzard would prefer haste rating over crit rating, because haste rating is a lot more predictable in terms of balancing.
It's also a lot easier to tweak haste rating after it has been spec'ed, because the DPS change is directly noticable (and not just over a longer period of casting).

Just my 2 cents.

[Chaosomega]

Haste is really an amazing stat to dps IF you have like 900 of it... I know back in the 70 days (weird!) when i was tryin to gear up my girlfriends frost mage the biggest dps boost to her was to stack haste. Unfortunatley haste was so hard to come by in the 70 days, you really only found it in black temple or later.

It was incredible once she started getting the gear her dps easily went up about 100 or so.

But i couldnt agree more with one of the previous posters, that if blizz would just make the stats on crit, spell power, etc bigger and bigger, we would see ludicrous numbers that would tend to lean the game too far in one direction. I am excited for the haste stat, faster casts, more numbers, more fun.

[algol]

Crit is a little problematic, in that it becomes less effective to add more the more you have. It works like this:

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4750/critfalloffoj4.png

Plot of how beneficial the next % crit will be for a given % crit in terms of %dmg gained, for 200%, 175%, and 150% crit multipliers. I include the extra multipliers for no real reason other than it lets me put more pretty colored lines on the graph - that part just tells you what you should already know, that crit is more effective to add if you get a higher damage bonus from it.

Haste universally becomes MORE effective the more of it you have, while crit diminishes. There are periods where the rate it becomes more effective is slower, and there are periods where it is undesirable because it doesn't play nice with currently popular rotations. There are however more fun talents and such for working with crit, and it's easier to work with crit when it's in the earlier stages and hasn't run out yet. And who's going to get 100% crit anyway if they're not casting Lava Burst at the time?

So in brief:

Hit is cool until you have enough.
Crit is cool but eventually becomes less cool.
Haste is cool and becomes seriously OP if you get enough, but sometimes it's not worth what you have to give up to get it.

[Noids99]

I've always thought that haste was a much nicer stat for PvP than crit, after spell dmg obviously. haste can't be mitigated like crit can and in a mobile environment like PvP, shorter cast times are great. Unfortunately this is balanced by the fact that PvP also generally involves more instants though too, which haste has no effect on, but still, a great utility stat IMO.

[algol]

PvP also generally involves more instants though too, which haste has no effect on
Haste shortens the GCD.