Haste

[Schwarz]

Tonight I should be getting new pants for my 5 shaman. Pants

I have been arguing with a guy at work if I should be going haste or spelldamage. Up until yesterday I was convinced that I should be going straight spell damage. With these new pants my spell damage will be 1020ish. The arguement that really made me starting thinking twice about haste was the following. As you increase your haste you see an exponential growth. For every other stat out there you see linear growth.

I am really tempted to go back and regem over my +12 spell damage gems in favor of +haste/+crit or +hast/+spell damage or for maximum effectiveness just +haste gems.

So here is the question would you lose +60 spell damage for +50 haste?

[Frosty]

I've never done much research on haste in WoW.

I can see the potential for a problem but it may already be addressed.
If you cast spells faster, your DPS will go up, but your mana will drain faster. Unless haste also affects mana regen?

[Fizzler]

You will not use any more mana though just use it faster but than the MOB should be dieing faster.

Reminds me of something a friend of mine said during a horror movie. "Don't run you will just die tired"

[Schwarz]

I think this is a nonissue. If your dps goes up then the boss dies faster so you shouldn't have mana problems. I would think this would come up more often in a raid situation than 5 mans/kara.

[Aradar]

Yeah, haste makes the fight go the same way, just faster, which can be huge on some fights where bosses do certain mechanics based on time in the fight. However, more spell damage will also make the fight go faster and I'm not sure at what point the two stats are equal.

Assuming all stats stay the same and you just add haste, nothing really changes except the speed of the fight. On the other hand, additional spell damage will decrease the length of the fight as well but with the added bonuse of more damage/mana.

According to WoWHead's weight scale which I believe is directly from Elitist Jerks, elemental shaman should weigh thier stats as follows:

Damage = 100
Crit = 78
Haste = 62
Mana Regen = 30
Int = 25
Hit = 5

Which if my math serves me well means they equate 1.61 haste to 1 damage and therefore your answer is no, you shouldn't give up 60 damage for 50 haste, it would have to be around 97 haste to even be equal.

Edit: And grats on the pants.

[Ken]

The biggest damage-related problem with haste is that it does not influence instant-cast damage spells, while spell damage does.

[Drizzit]

does not influence instant-cast damage spells,

I believe it decreases the global cooldown and cooldown of spells.

[Multibocks]

yes it does, although global is limited to 1sec minimum iirc.

[Karthas]

to get to a 1 sec GCD, you need 785 haste rating. haste increases DPS, but DPM will stay the same, so you will go oom earlier.

The value of haste also gets higher depending on your other stats too, it is not just a linear function.

[Drizzit]

According to WoWHead's weight scale which I believe is directly from Elitist Jerks, elemental shaman should weigh thier stats as follows:

Damage = 100
Crit = 78
Haste = 62
Mana Regen = 30
Int = 25
Hit = 5

Which if my math serves me well means they equate 1.61 haste to 1 damage and therefore your answer is no, you shouldn't give up 60 damage for 50 haste, it would have to be around 97 haste to even be equal.

So is Aradar right then. Only get haste when you get 1.61 per 1 damage? Well if your hit rating isn't that good haste might be a better option.. if you think about it with no haste you can get 20 LB in 1 min and 30 LB with haste. On average you miss on every tenth one, so +spell hits 18 times and +haste hits 27 times. The extra 7 times could be a little more then the spell damage.

But on the other side when you crit, you will get a bitter damage done by the +spell. Dam blizzard making us chose.