How many problems would ditching Haste as a stat solve?

[Jingshui]

I just read the following blue exchange, and got more than a little frustrated:

Not meant to be a loaded question, but the number of people disgusted by downtime added to their specs surely rings alarm bells?

The related thing is that people have trouble distinguishing two stacked changes. PTR characters have less haste, thus slower. (Celestalon)
And then, when people test out any change that affects speed, mentally, feeling-wise, they compare it to what they're used to. (Celestalon)
So, 20% less haste, plus 10% slower rotation = feels 30% slower than they're used to = EXCRUCIATING. (Celestalon)

Interesting psychological phenomenon:Build 1: This feels great.OK, now I'll slow it down by... 10%.Build 2: OMG EXCRUCIATINGLY SLOW!!! (Celestalon)

this confuses me. If something feels great, why slow it down?

In order to prevent scaling and rotational problems down the line, when they have more haste. (Celestalon)
Making specs un-fun to play compared to live, just to solve future numerical issues feels completely wrong.
Resetting power levels with each expansion is definitely something that feels bad to a lot of people. Wish we... (Celestalon)
...had a way to provide the scaling fun gameplay, without having power resets. (Celestalon)

I propose the elimination of haste altogether. It effects the "feel" of a class too drastically, and then causes problems with meaningful scaling, etc.

The haste change between x-pacs is what killed my feral druid for me, and I'd loved her for years.

Rate of attacks is a major contributing factor for enjoying the WW spec for so many people. I think most folks would agree that the core of the spec is its high mobility and rapid attack pattern. I just don't understand gating a key part of the spec behind x-pac progression.

Their concern is the perception of increasing strength. As I said elsewhere, I get it, and it's a noble endeavor. But there's so many other ways to perceive gained strength:

• Seeing old mobs die fast
• Being able to solo old dungeons and raids that you couldn't before
• Seeing phatter crits light up your screen

There's got to be more. All of you should add the ways you know you've gotten mightier to this list. Someone more eloquent than I'm feeling at the moment (nasty day at work) should re-write the intent of this post clearly, and.... noninflammatorially (that's a word now - see why I'm not writing a post for the blues tonight...?). Bonus points if it's one of the awesome theorycrafters around here that both agree with the heart of what I'm saying AND have a line to the blues.

Attack speed is not the only way to feel mighty. And making it a stat variable is making us miserable - and I think trying to balance it over an x-pac is making the devs miserable too. Now is the time between x-pacs. Now is the time to drop Haste as a stat!

[tuesday the paladin]

Haste increasing resource regeneration should be changed some how. Starving for resources for half the xpac then drowning in them the second half isn't very fun. But caster haste scaling isn't too bad, atleast once dot/hot breakpoints gets changed. But by removing the resource regeneration aspect of haste I cannot see the value being desirable for any melee anymore, and I don't see any easy change to it to remedy that.

[Rockets]

I can completely guarantee that they won't be dropping haste for WoD at this stage in development. You're about six months too late for something like this.

[Babylonius]

Haste increasing resource regeneration should be changed some how. Starving for resources for half the xpac then drowning in them the second half isn't very fun. But caster haste scaling isn't too bad, atleast once dot/hot breakpoints gets changed. But by removing the resource regeneration aspect of haste I cannot see the value being desirable for any melee anymore, and I don't see any easy change to it to remedy that.

The resource regen of haste is certainly very odd with how it works throughout the expansion, but its similar to Spirit for healers/casters, at first they're struggling to find all they can of it, then they forsake it completely. To make haste more desirable now, or desirable at all w/o resource regen would require procs that work on auto attacks, so speeding up your AAs would result in more procs. Not sure if haste still reduces GCDs, if it doesn't then returning that would help quite a bit.

[Enpoli]

Removing Haste would take away the only stat that most (all?) energy classes have that change how their rotation feels as they gear up.

IMO, every dps spec needs something that changes their rotation as their gear improves. For crit specs they generally get a proc from certain abilities critting, for Haste specs they usually just get to cast more abilities from increased Energy regen or lowered GCD time, Mastery specs tend to already be GCD-capped and scale in other ways like letting you cast stronger spells more often than your filler spells (or they're just stuck using a broken trinket, Ferals).

The reason I'm pretty worried about how my WW will feel is that we are a Haste spec that is trying to be pigeon-holed into Multistrike. If they make Haste garbage for us, they need to give us something else to react to from the stats that scale well for us. If they take Haste out of the game and give us a set amount of Energy regen, what will be have left that makes our rotation change as we gear up? Same problem. Taking Haste out doesn't fix it, it would just be nicer since we all prefer the fast style that we're used to.

Taking Haste out (and tuning us to be GCD capped, at least for single target) and making Multistrike give us a RSK-cd-reset proc would probably be the way to go. It gives us a stat that we can stack to cast a stronger spell more often, but it still costs the same as our filler spell, so it won't affect GCD use. This is still the answer if they leave Haste in the game. They can just make it a *free* RSK cast if they still want Haste to be a crappy stat for us. Or maybe a 1-Chi RSK for a middle ground?

[Deleted]

Most simple fix would be to reduce the overall haste values on Items, like 1/3 haste 2/3 other sec. Stat instead of ~50/50 as it is currently.
That way they could keep the "starting point" for meeles in terms of ressource gain, Attack speed etc higher and therefore feel better with a somewhat smoother curve reaching the same point where they currently aim for at the end of the xpac.

IDK if missed out on something vital, I can't think of anything against it

[Tehterokkar]

Most simple fix would be to reduce the overall haste values on Items, like 1/3 haste 2/3 other sec. Stat instead of ~50/50 as it is currently.
That way they could keep the "starting point" for meeles in terms of ressource gain, Attack speed etc higher and therefore feel better with a somewhat smoother curve reaching the same point where they currently aim for at the end of the xpac.

IDK if missed out on something vital, I can't think of anything against it

Very rarely you see an item with 50/50 secondaries, most have the other stat higher.

OT: Stats that affect how the spec plays/flows can't be ever balanced.

Haste is not the only stat that suffers from this:
Crit: Fire Mages, Fury Warriors
Multi-strike: Survival Hunter(before they reverted LnL), Blood DK


Both Fire and Fury are total potato specs at the start of an expansion and are therefore compensated with extreme overtuning to the point where they have to be nerfed each tier because Scaling gets out of hand as they get more Crit.

Survival hunters(not relevant anymore really) needed Multi-strike(Surv got 10% passive multi-strike to compensate for the lack of it) to even get their LnL to proc, at higher levels of Multi-strike the rotation would turn into a single button spam fest(other than casting Cobra shot for Focus). Blood DKs on the other hand get RP from auto-attack MS's, which later on in the end tiers will again get out of control since they'd be spamming Death Coil and Death Strike only pretty much.

[Valsh]

In a perfect world haste and multistrike would be almost equally balanced(hard to do) and you could pick between slow, harder hitting play style or faster less damage playstyle.

Maybe if our class had some interaction with other secondary stats it wouldn't seem like such a big deal.

[Deleted]

Wildstar has no haste equivalent and it has the best combat of any MMORPG right now, so yeah I would say no haste would be an improvement given the recent "EVERYTHING SLOW TIL U GET HASTE EVEN IF U DONT WANT HASTE" stance

- - - Updated - - -

The same argument could be made for crit. There's no reason to eliminate either stat.

Haste has an immediate effect on the pace of a spec, crit is usually proc based and if you do proc them you are choosing the proc over another ability.

[Gaje]

What I have argued before is to keep haste as a stat, but make WW's/BrM's non-energy using classes. We already have Chi, and it is more than enough of a resource from a design PoV.

Skills that already have CDs (FoF, RsK) don't really need extra resources to manage them since they are already limited by CDs. All of our filler abilites w/out CDs cost Chi and the only way to build Chi is Jab. Since Jab is the limiting factor for Chi generation, putting a short-ish CD on it that stacks up to N-times (where N is some nubmer, maybe 3-4) would limit how many times we can Jab per min.

This would be very simple to balance, and haste would not be needed for rotation purposes (haste would still be a secondary and would need to provide some value like reduced CDs or increased tea generation). In practice, we would play just the same - Jab to build Chi, spend Chi for abilities. The difference would be that we could be tuned to be as fast or slow as desired and haste would never have a factor on the most important factor of how our class feels - the speed of our dps rotation.
Look at warriors, the get along just fine w/out worring about haste. At level 100 and after raiding Heroic for over 6 months, my class should not become signficantly less fun to play. I should start out less powerful and become more powerful with better gear, but I should have fun playing it the entire time, no matter how crappy my gear is at first.

On beta WW' rotation is like Rogue's, but Rogue's build up points for huge burst and WW's want to put out more steady dmg for TEB generation/usage. If they are trying to make us play more like Rogue's, why not just be a Rogue? Why have a monk class at all?

Ditching energy as a resource would make us play somewhere between a Rogue and Warrior, but different than either. Energy just makes the class more clunky w/out increasing depth of play.

[tachycardias]

Removing haste would pretty much leave only stats which serve solely to increase the yellow numbers.

Personally I'm not someone who feels that my WW should be spammy, but maybe there should be a talent or something that allows that choice. With some sort of trade-off of course. Like reduce jab cost to 30-35 or so but decrease BK damage by some percent.

[Juliansfist]

Haste and energy resource increases is not a problem. The better way to deal with it is to have a filler ability that is free to use/proc activated to fill in time but as haste (or whatever other stat adjusts game play) increases your priority will be on stronger abilities. I feel the current design of fury warrior nailed it very well with bloodsurged free and GCD reduced wildstrikes functioning effectively at lower crit levels and becoming mostly irrelevant at higher crit levels and is an effective way of highlighting ability priority other than CD order.

Unfortunately for windwalkers combo breaker is still tied to our energy production and combat rogues just don't have any free GCD filler. Brewmasters do not have this problem as tiger palm is spammable so you always feel like you are active.

The large 'slow down' feeling is a class design symptom rather than

[Marxman]

Ditching energy as a resource would make us play somewhere between a Rogue and Warrior

I think ditching Energy would make us play like a Ret Paladin, replacing Crusader Strike, Judgment, and Exorcism for Jab.

[Raugnaut]

After thinking about it, it would probably solve a ton of problems (along with ditching Spirit for healers). Blizz would be able to give all classes a set rotation, and outside of procs based on crit/multistrike/mastery. We would no longer run into problems of classes being "slow" at start, and capping around 20% haste. You would know that, for a 100% fact, you could fit x abilities into y period. You would no longer have to worry about x breakpoint where haste is worthless until you get that exact amount, ect. I think that ditching haste (and spirit for healers) would be a good change.

Why Spirit for healers? Take a look at how Spirit has played out for every single expansion so far. For starters, Spirit's been a "feel" sorta stat. You can't say that x amount of spirit will make you z more powerful, unlike Crit/MS/Mastery. For some healers, Spirit is essentially a junk stat. (During Cata, Spirit is junk stat for Resto druids. During WotLK, spirit is junk stat for holy paladins. During MoP, spirit is junk stat for MW monks.) For others, Spirit is a "stack till the max". Resto Shamans and Mana Tide totem. By removing Spirit as a stat, and giving Healers a set amount of regen so they know they can cast exactly x spells throughout a fight, the game itself would become so much easier to balance.

[Babylonius]

It would be easier to balance but much more boring. More skilled players can make use of less or more haste/spirit with more precise rotations or pressing more buttons. Having a set rotation would homogenize player and take a huge chunk out of how player skill affects it. By just having procs to deal with, no variable resources, would make the only thing skill can effect is ones ability to press the Proc without pressing another button before it.

[Deleted]

Is this "discussion" at the point where you propose to get rid of all resources because "eventually" your regeneration is high enough?