Soft Caps are not fun and very math based. Haste should increase DOTs in another way.

[Deleted]

In line with their desires to make the game less about math and more about utility, haste is quite monolithic lately. It will give whole new Ticks to powerful damage over time abilities making them extremely important not to miss undercapping.

To make the stat purely utility, a path towards the right direction would be to affect them in another way, e.g. to increase the DOT damage flatly.


edit: typo s/DOTs/Ticks

[Irisel]

I tend to agree that HoT/DoT math is lame and soft caps kind of make for meh gearing, but I can't see any other way around it.

[Alvito]

There are dozens of places that tell you the number or % of haste you need to hit differnet hot/dot caps for spells. With all of those resources so easily avialible the math is completely taken care of for you. At that point it becomes no different then knowing you need 1742 hit to be caster hit capped. The way that haste effects hots and dots is much better then what we had before. I am sure it can still be improved upon but the current system is far from broken.

[Yalingo]

One or two people per spec do the math, post it on EJ for the rest of the community so they can follow along... Its not that hard to play wow...

[Deleted]

Of course there are places to tell you what to do. But the point is to avoid having to go through that math - even if someone else does it for you - in line with their desires at Blizzcon.

Hence one may think of stats as utilities:

e.g.:

- Crit: Fun
- Mastery: flat increase
- Haste: Quicker

(Those are examples, certain classes have it different, e.g. crit is a reliability factor in fire mage or their quality may change depending on the point of view.)

[Stealessence]

I'm angry at numbers there's like to many of them.

[Deleted]

I'm angry at numbers there's like to many of them.

It sounds reasonable but to my experience in this game in years I have not seen anyone other than hobbyists in Mathematics to really care about calculating soft caps.

The overwhelming majority of players have either no knowledge [of the existence of the mechanics] or spreadsheets/other software that tells them what to do.

[and that includes very good raiders]

[Yalingo]

Of course there are places to tell you what to do. But the point is to avoid having to go through that math - even if someone else does it for you - in line with their desires at Blizzcon.

Hence one may think of stats as utilities:

e.g.:

- Crit: Fun
- Mastery: flat increase
- Haste: Quicker

(Those are examples, certain classes have it different, e.g. crit is a reliability factor in fire mage or their quality may change depending on the point of view.)

But see thats the thing, haste even makes dot quicker. It's not so much a flat % increase such as mastery or Spell power.

Haste makes your dots tick quicker and at certain breakpoints it creates an entire new tick. Which is one more source of damage, one extra chance to proc trinkets/talents/legendary.

It is a hell of a lot more interesting than a flat % increase of damage as you suggest and no where near as "mathy" as something like ArP was.

[Deleted]

^ The problem is that haste will not just increase [damage of] DOTs in a uniform way. There will be a soft cap that if you miss by very little it's a disaster: you lost a lot of haste that does not improve DOTs.

This is very math based and clearly against their wishes to make the game less about hard math and more about utility.

[Deleted]

well haste is supposed to make you do things more quickly, thus increasing the number of procs on a dot/hot.
there is no easy way to change this.
one possible solution to partially fix it, would be to change every dot and hot to tick every second, thus "smoothing out" those haste caps, making them less powerful

[Deleted]

^ It does not make DOTs really be quicker in terms of [the procedure of] killing the target, e.g. many dots are applied instantly hence, it's as quick as it gets already. [At the end of the day the change is largely a flat increase.]

What one could say is that the internal distribution of ticks of a DOT may make interesting [utility] changes though that does not affect Patchwerk [it's mainly for low HP targets or burn phases and it's quite obscure anyway].

[Zinnin]

The way haste scales with DoTs is fine for DPS because unless you have a mechanic like conflag it is very linear and the 'softcaps' are barely any dps gain at all.

However for HoT's its a bit different because you get a definite amount more healing by getting another tick.

[Dracodraco]

If you want to change the way haste works with dots, the only way I see it "working" would be if you were to make dots just simply tick faster - instead of adding more ticks, you would get a 15 second dot to 12 seconds at XXXX haste rating, etc... This would change up your spell cycles as the more haste, the more you'd have to refresh the dot, while your spells also casts faster so you can fit in the same amount of casts in between, etc... Basicly, the more haste, the faster you will have to go through your cycle/priority/rotation.

[Ceria]

There are dozens of places that tell you the number or % of haste you need to hit differnet hot/dot caps for spells. With all of those resources so easily avialible the math is completely taken care of for you. At that point it becomes no different then knowing you need 1742 hit to be caster hit capped. The way that haste effects hots and dots is much better then what we had before. I am sure it can still be improved upon but the current system is far from broken.

The UI specifically tells you where the Hit caps are, aswell as Expertise caps.

Where does it say the Haste caps?

[reverendball]

min/maxing should ALWAYS be math-based

otherwise u remove all variety and just reduce all stats to +dmg

and its booooooooooooooring

[Deleted]

You could keep the current hot/dot scaling and get rid of the 'softcaps' by making each hot/dot a fixed length. For example, rejuvenation would have a 12 second duration always regardless of haste. Then the ticks happen normally, but the last tick strength is scaled to the remaining time of the hot. That way each point of haste increases the total healing/damage done by one cast in a linear way rather than jumping by one tick when it hits a cap.

[Mammoth]

The solution would be to build it into the UI, so the player can see it.

I would probably add to the tooltip of each DoT ability, where it reads "Haste 1995: 5 ticks" in a list giving you all the soft-caps for that ability. It then still remains up to the player to work out what needs to be soft-capped.

You cannot remove soft caps easily, otherwise you're saying the duration of all debuffs should decrease with the haste value of the player casting it.

[shadowkras]

The UI specifically tells you where the Hit caps are, aswell as Expertise caps.

Where does it say the Haste caps?

Each spell has a different duration and tick period, the window would have to tell you the caps for every single spell you got. Good luck
Some classes only have 1 dot/hot, others have 5-6, all on different timers.

Id rather stay with 3rd party tools (addons).

I would probably add to the tooltip of each DoT ability, where it reads "Haste 1995: 5 ticks" in a list giving you all the soft-caps for that ability. It then still remains up to the player to work out what needs to be soft-capped.

Yeah, addons can do that.
There is any already doing that though?

[Deleted]

My experience is that softcaps forces people to play their class/role in the same way. For instance, shamans have a softcap haste and high mastery/crit will get very very slow lightning bolt thus making crit the mana regen stat over TC, i thought Blizz wanted to involve the healers in the fight with mechanics like TC. If there were several abilites that had different softcaps for haste then maybe the stat wouldnt just be bad above the softcap, this however is not the case for shamans. I dont know maybe it cant be solved.

[Rowsdower]

OP: As I understand it, your complaint is that your character isn't optimized with whatever secondary stats you happen to have on him. Be that the case, I have an exciting concept for a new MMO. I call it "Rock, Paper, Scissors." It will have 3 classes (2 more planned for future expansions)...

Anyways, the point- soft caps don't inhibit your ability to perform your role; they make it marginally difficult to excel at it. The current design paradigm aims to reward skilled players without knee-capping bad ones, not to permit everyone to derp their way through Heroic raids.