Quote Originally Posted by 'Bluepants',index.php?page=Thread&postID=66513#pos t66513
When it comes to crit/haste i tend to choose haste, as pure reliable damage is better than random massive hits..
Imagine a scenario where you are fighting a character in the arena with 12,000 HP in the arena.

Your team of (let's be crazy here) 4 Elemental Shamans is capable of doing one of the two amounts of damage:

a.) 4000 damage per second, with a minimum of 3000 damage per second if nothing crits or a maximum of 5000 damage per second if a couple of spells in a volley crit. They have a spell-cast that is on a 2second timer, so this really means the average volley impacts the target for 6000-10000 points depending on the number of crits.

b.) 4000 damage per second, guaranteed, consistent. They're totally pimped out with haste gear so that the 2 second cast time is reduced to a very quick 1 second. Each volley is hitting for 4000 damage every second.

If no one ever heals the target, it will die in either b.) exactly 3 seconds or a.) somewhere around 4 seconds (2x2sec volleys). If no one ever healed the target, haste would reign supreme.

But targets get healed, and if you're fighting a 2-healer team, they might be able to sustain about 4000 healing per second. In this case, the haste team with a damage profile in b.) can never win. The first team, however, can actually pull it off. They can get a lucky string of crits and work away at the reservoir of 12,000 health that the target has.

Team a.) can take advantage of their 4xEM+NS+CL combo to finish off a player if one of those 10,000 point volleys hits. Team b.) will never make a dent large enough to have their 4xEM+NS+CL combo kill anyone. (Their combo may be "gimped" too because if they traded spell damage for haste).

You used the word "reliable" when I think you meant "consistent". I actually agree with reliable in the sense of finishing someone off (4xEM+NS+CL is VERY reliable because of the guaranteed crit aspect of the combo).

For arenas in WoW right now, a very powerful combination is being able to do DPS with a reasonably unpredictable and large variation paired with something that does sizable, reliable, burst damage to finish someone off. Spell haste steals itemization budget from attributes (crit/+dmg) that contribute to that combination.