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

[Deleted]

you get all the information you need in the game.

you know the tick interval of your dot.
you know its duration.
you know your haste rating. you know how much % haste it gives you. so you know how much haste rating equals 1% haste.
you know that there is a 5% haste raid buff that stacks multiplicatively with your haste from haste rating.
you know that an extra tick is generated when the new duration with the extra ticks is equal to the original (unhasted) duration of the DoT spell.

you know everything to calculate your breakpoints yourself. if you dont like to do so, you are free to read up on EJ.

haste increasing DoT-speed and ading extra ticks at some points is the most interesting mechanic of all the stats (except mastery for a few classes) and it's one of the last things in the game that require some thinking. i would be very sad if they killed this one as well.

[shadowkras]

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.

TC was "okay" for pre-raids and some gimmick encounters (double damage), but it wouldnt suck if they actually gave us the hit to use it.
When you consider 2 points for +15% walkspeed or 7 points for an extra mana regen, there isnt much choice to be honest.

[kerghan]

Honestly... I'd rather just see haste make the same number of ticks go faster. Then you re-up your HoT/DoT as needed. Problem solved. Still does more damage/healing overall, but removes all this excel-sheet-hero garbage about where the ticks are. Corruption does 1k damage in 10 sec? well with haste now it does 1k in 9.8sec. Boom. PS, make ticks smaller and faster. The point of damage over TIME is that it's supposed to be a "constant" source of damage, not a pulsatile fire/shadow/frost/nature burst-bolt.

Think of it like Drain Life, but backwards. Haste makes it go faster, but it still heals the same.

Or would that make pvp whine and bitch because now dots could nuke?

[Napoles]

Im sure most WoW players will deny it, but all the changes and math associated with Hot fixes/patches are some of the things that make this game so damn great. And of course the more up to date you are on changes the better the player you would be.

[shadowkras]

It seems that some people dont get how haste and dots/hots work right now. As they are all suggesting to hasten the ticks.

Newsflash, it already does.
But once you have enough haste to gain an extra tick inside the full (no-haste) duration, you get another tick and the duration is reset back to full.
So you will see dots going from 12s to 10s, but then back to 12s once there is another tick from high haste. But instead of, say, 4 ticks, it will have 5 ticks instead.

[Deleted]

Honestly... I'd rather just see haste make the same number of ticks go faster. Then you re-up your HoT/DoT as needed. Problem solved. Still does more damage/healing overall, but removes all this excel-sheet-hero garbage about where the ticks are. Corruption does 1k damage in 10 sec? well with haste now it does 1k in 9.8sec.

Basically this is EXACTLY what haste does... It increases your dots tick rate. In addition, when your ticks are fast enough for an additional tick to fit into the base duration of the dot, it adds a tick.

So each single haste rating point increases dots dps. The only benefit of haste soft caps is that you don't have to refresh the dot as often as if you were just below the cap.

I'm not saying it's a ridiculous increase in most cases (otherwise we won't even bother considering the caps) but it's not the main issue.
In some cases the caps are irrelevant, like corruption in affliction spec because it's automatically refreshed.

The only exception is for conflagrate because its damage is calculated directly from immolate total damage.

[Tradu]

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.

I believe thats how the first implementation of haste affecting HoTs and DoTs worked(the glyphs added in 3.3), and it was changed in Cata, because they didn't want a "hardcap" on haste, which WOULD exist if haste only reduced the time the DoT takes to do its damage, because there would be a point where more haste wouldn't increase your DPS at all, because you just can't fit more stuff into your cycle.

This was then changed into the current system, whereby another tick gets added when you get "room" for it in the base duration, like Shadowkras said.

[bellefso]

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

+1 for Beavis reference

[Deleted]

OP is right, of course.

A possible fix would be to make the tick rate of HoTs/DoTs invariant (e.g. 10 ticks per second), make the tick amount depend smoothly on Haste (and other factors) and make them refreshable by adding the duration up to a cap (150% of original duration, for example).

Note that in some sense Haste is a weird stat, because the justification for it affecting HoTs/DoTs is that it "makes things faster", but then it should increase mana regeneration as well.

[Heilige]

min/maxing should ALWAYS be math-based

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

and its booooooooooooooring

This... Min/Max'ing and theorycrafting is a completely different aspect to the game that helps seperate those who want to go all out from those who coast along.

[Deleted]

^ Don't label whole groups of people "all out" or not based on your specific isolated opinion. For me, all out - and in need of high intelligence to play optimally - is to liberate the game from soft caps and let it float freely into utility abilities.

And that's what they aim to do in MoP. Utility over hard math.

edit: To say it another way, at the moment the majority of hard core raiders are following a very small minority of people with a hobby or profession in Mathematics to get cookie cutter theorycrafting. That's not very intelligent or all out. If anything, we see every day phenomena at the best places for it - e.g. Elitist Jerks - where whole classes are blindly following wrong theorycrafting done by a handful of people. e.g. Palas stacking the wrong stat recently or Mages not taking into account munching. This is not the fault of the hobbyists that produce the theorycrafting, those people are having their fun and do go 'all out'. But the followers, who are the overwhelming majority, do not do anything (too) intelligent.

[Jellyphant]

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

The math is simple enough that anyone with a middle school level education could follow along with relative ease. And I'm not saying that in an exaggerated manner, soft caps are actually very easy to calculate. In addition, those of us who like math and theory craft do this work on our own, and some of those people post it to forums like EJ, so that people who don't enjoy math can easily find the information. Really, you never have to do one bit of math to find out the soft cap for your class, and the information can be found in seconds.

I really don't see your complaint, it seems incredibly stupid to me.

Note that in some sense Haste is a weird stat, because the justification for it affecting HoTs/DoTs is that it "makes things faster", but then it should increase mana regeneration as well.

I'm sorry, what?

Your argument is like saying because stamina makes me able to run longer, it should make my arms longer too.

[PHsname]

Taking math-heavy theorycrafting out of the game will seriously take away one of the few things left I find fun in this game.

I like going through numbers, combat logs and parses of them, analyzing talents and certain stats and how they affect my play. This kind of min/max'ing is honestly half the fun of this game for me. The other half is the raiding itself.

These kinds of things are also very easy ways to distinguish better players who are committed and thorough from ones we'd rather avoid. Taking this kind of thing away will make recruitment more difficult than it already is.

I like complexity, and I mean come on...nearly all the work is done for you on places like EJ anyway. How can you complain?

In direct response to the OP, I do think the current way Haste interacts with HoTs and DoTs isn't the most interesting thing it could be, but still...it's not bad and is a lot better than Haste not affecting HoTs and DoTs at all like before.

[Deleted]

The math is simple enough that anyone with a middle school level education could follow along with relative ease.

Absolutely not. This is like saying if you understand the equation for strength of materials you can build a skyscraper. Tools like Rawr make you become able to to use the soft caps in a few minutes and build your whole set of gear around it. If one had no external help to reach a soft cap and a hit cap and do it optimally, they would need perhaps hours.

Also, there are severe errors that happen by players that think it's "simple". e.g. some of the best players in the world think that if they hit cap they do not get a benefit if they need hit gear. This is fundamentally wrong since if they reforged something to hit then a new hit item may increase their DPS since reforging it back to another stat will or may increase their DPS.

It is not simple at all. And this is proven by the errors of people, even very brilliant people with expertise in Mathematics that are corrected every day on the best websites about it (Elitist Jerks) and the best software for it (Rawr or Spreadsheets).

[announced]

haste would be nice if it also lowered the cooldowns of certain skills like say 3 min cooldowns lowered to 2 mins instead of just making the GCD faster. this is similar to mind flay /shadowfiend and elemental feedback but hey.. we gotta think of something.

[papajohn4]

hm..this is dfficult..from one hand the way it is now indeed is not fun at all...for example get 1900 haste and you have 4 ticks, then get 1950 and you gain 1 tick...it seems a lot weird. for someone that raids 10-man and also do heroic dungeons it is difficult to build his character because anything less or more from a certain number is waste and you always have to rely on others to bring a certain buff for you. and it happens sometimes in 10 - mans to miss a buff or two.

For dungeons, maybe they are easy and you don't need to be 100% efficient but that is also not fun either..having my dps drop on a 5-man dungeon because I miss a haste buff it is not fun even if I can easy complete dungeon. People want to efficient and as much optimized as they can and the way haste is working on dots/hots is getting furstrated sometimes.

It seems that the people that don't really care about how it works are the hardcore 25-man raiders cause they only raiding, as they probably snob the rest of content or don't have time for it and in 25-man they have all the buffs so they can perfectly build their stats around soft/hard caps

from the other hand it is difficult to apply another way for this..as others said it will make haste to flat increase your damage and become a clone of mastery..the best idea I heard till now is to make haste reduce the total time of the dot and not add ticks..rotation will be more dynamic because you will have to refresh dots more often but this is not a problem I think..it seems though that it will increase burst dmg/healing but hey this is what haste should be, make you quicker :P the reason they are not doing it this way I think is that it will take them extra time to balance it on pvp or change the whole spell mechanics (dot can be applied only in x targets and such)

[Deleted]

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.

But how should it say that? "If you keep in mind 5% haste, and you talented for 3% haste, and you use this and that, then you need 2006 haste for this to do 1 more tick of that."

[Tradu]

hm..this is dfficult..from one hand the way it is now indeed is not fun at all...for example get 1900 haste and you have 4 ticks, then get 1950 and you gain 1 tick...it seems a lot weird. for someone that raids 10-man and also do heroic dungeons it is difficult to build his character because anything less or more from a certain number is waste and you always have to rely on others to bring a certain buff for you. and it happens sometimes in 10 - mans to miss a buff or two.

For dungeons, maybe they are easy and you don't need to be 100% efficient but that is also not fun either..having my dps drop on a 5-man dungeon because I miss a haste buff it is not fun even if I can easy complete dungeon. People want to efficient and as much optimized as they can and the way haste is working on dots/hots is getting furstrated sometimes.

It seems that the people that don't really care about how it works are the hardcore 25-man raiders cause they only raiding, as they probably snob the rest of content or don't have time for it and in 25-man they have all the buffs so they can perfectly build their stats around soft/hard caps

from the other hand it is difficult to apply another way for this..as others said it will make haste to flat increase your damage and become a clone of mastery..the best idea I heard till now is to make haste reduce the total time of the dot and not add ticks..rotation will be more dynamic because you will have to refresh dots more often but this is not a problem I think..it seems though that it will increase burst dmg/healing but hey this is what haste should be, make you quicker :P the reason they are not doing it this way I think is that it will take them extra time to balance it on pvp or change the whole spell mechanics (dot can be applied only in x targets and such)

I don't raid "hardcore 25man", I do 10mans and 5mans, occasionally a 25man(getting more common recently). I don't mind stats having softcaps/breakpoints, actually I think it adds more depth, by having something to optimize on my characters.

[Mascotte]

Haste as a stat should just be removed entirely.
Without Haste around the value of Mastery can increase (Some classes/specs barely use it since it sucks for em) and become much more valuable.
Haste on the other hand isnt 'fun' and you need extreme amounts to even really notice you have it.
Scratch haste entirely, increase Mastery since the concept of doing what you should be doing better is more fun then being able to spam a button an extra time so you can do 11 in the time you'd normally do 10.

[Deleted]

Hmm, how is Mastery more fun than Haste?

For most specs, Mastery simply multiplies the damage/healing/block of a part of your rotation, which is something you won't even notice without comparing logs.

On the other hand, Haste has the most readily noticeable effect among all stats.