Haste and the need for speed
by Chris Jahosky 
Aug 24th 2007 at 12:07AM
There's been a lot of talk lately about the recent change to haste rating on the PTR. Melee classes are upset because the effects of melee haste rating has been nerfed by about a third, while caster classes are enjoying a buff to their spell haste rating.
Many players are arguing that the haste nerf for melee classes is unnecessary -- and while I tend to agree, it's hard to argue when rogues like Furi (who completed his legendary sword set earlier this month), or a Fury Warrior like Svag are cracking 3000 DPS in some fights all on their own. These players are specced and geared to take full advantage of haste rating
I'm in a modest guild that's raiding Kara, and our total DPS output is usually around 2200-2500. When one player can crank out more damage than a 10 man raid (even if they're geared out and buffed), something seems to be wrong. Maybe this haste change is for the best -- but it's pretty devastating to any melee class that depends on white damage for DPS.
Many players are arguing that the haste nerf for melee classes is unnecessary -- and while I tend to agree, it's hard to argue when rogues like Furi (who completed his legendary sword set earlier this month), or a Fury Warrior like Svag are cracking 3000 DPS in some fights all on their own. These players are specced and geared to take full advantage of haste rating
I'm in a modest guild that's raiding Kara, and our total DPS output is usually around 2200-2500. When one player can crank out more damage than a 10 man raid (even if they're geared out and buffed), something seems to be wrong. Maybe this haste change is for the best -- but it's pretty devastating to any melee class that depends on white damage for DPS.
Filed under: Rogue, Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Buffs
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
quaunaut Aug 24th 2007 12:30AM
Problem is, thats the only reason that guilds even take melee classes now, is for their damage. They cost more to the raid than a ranged DPS class, as they take more damage by far and are a much larger liability. Taking away what allows us to compete is nothing more than sealing the deal on melee classes, and condemning us to charity positions.
Jason Aug 24th 2007 12:50AM
With all the changes to cleaves, fights are far more melee friendly.
As to a single character pushing 2000+ DPS(I haven't seen footage of Svag clearing 3k, or anything from Furi), Keep in mind that you're in Karazhan. Unless someone is sporting Arena gear, they're in T5 and parts of T6. Their average ilvl is going to be 20-30 over your best DPSer, assuming you haven't picked up anyong further progressed than your guild.
HybridNinja Aug 24th 2007 1:16AM
How was it fair to casters that they needed more haste to get the same effect that melee get? I don't know what you peoples are talking about but there is FAR more melee friendly fights than caster friendly ones. For example on Void Reaver, melee can stay IN the fight and DPs while casters and healers have to run out to avoid bolts. As a mage a lot of the time with a 3 second fireball cast I dont have as much time to DPS as a rogue or warrior would.
Personally as a Mage +haste is useless until BT as Quag's eye makes my 3 second fireball like 2.8 which is nothing compared to the melee stat.
fhornmikey Aug 24th 2007 1:49AM
People react to these kind of large numbers without really considering all the theorycrafting and min/maxing that goes into them. Keep in mind that these players are cracking this kind of DPS while being placed in very specific raid groups to enable them to reach this amount of DPS.
Furi and Svag aren't hitting that DPS on their own, they're in a group with an enhancement shaman, a beastmastery hunter, a feral druid, and in the case of Furi a battleshouting warrior. This kind of fine tuning of groups is required for some of the more difficult encounters in BT/Hyjal.
My guild (Promethean on Malfurion US) currently has a slam spec warrior that frequently breaks 2k sustained dps, but once again this is because of the min/maxing we do to enable him to reach this level of damage output.
As for spell haste, it needed to get buffed, they nerfed it too hard when they decided they didn't want every caster in the game to be using Scarab/Quagmirran's due to the extremely broken nature of the buffs (at one point they were over 30% haste). Melee classes have little raid utility aside from their DPS, so it makes sense that they would be reaching peaks that might seem absurd to a player not used to this level of play.
As for melee friendly fights, it works both ways. There are some fights which require you to completely stack your raid to be incredibly melee intensive (i.e. Mother Shahraz) and some fights which practically punish you for taking melee.
schroey Aug 24th 2007 2:00AM
@3 Melee stay in at the cost of getting pounded every 12 seconds. They take far more healing than a smart ranged dps squad in Void Reaver. Not a good point.
warmblanket Aug 24th 2007 2:05AM
Sigh
1) Spell haste for casters is still useless.
2) Melee haste isn't OP. Certain items that procced melee haste were, and still are after the nerf.
3)You want to 'fix' items like DST, give it an internal cooldown. Don't make all BT items with haste useless. It's sad that a belt in SSC would be better than a belt in BT.
AndyF Aug 24th 2007 2:16AM
You can't just compare your Kara group's DPS to these guys. For a start, the Warrior got his DPS on Shade of Akama. This is a great fight where the Warrior doesn't have to worry about aggro, and the boss he's fighting takes more damage than usual.
As for Furi, he has double legendary swords as well as amazing stats all-round, and the damage he puts out is fitting for a full end-game Rogue.
And as also commented, with the 25-man raids, you get a LOT more opportunity to make buff groups. When I last raided I was in a group with Enh shaman, two rogues and a ret pally, and my personal DPS was 500 higher than it was on a Kara boss :)
rick gregory Aug 24th 2007 3:03AM
The problem with nerfs like this is that people make very real choices about what they roll on and how they spend DKP all based around game mechanics - and then the stuff they've worked to put toegther s changed. /sigh
Yes, everyone knows that this stuff CAN happen... but really... if you're doing it, do it sooner vs later
Tridus Aug 24th 2007 7:44AM
What people ignore in all this is that Haste is a flat out better stat for melee then for casters. Lets take a look:
Warlocks: Haste does exactly nothing to DoTs and Drain Life. You get faster Shadow Bolts.
Mages: Most spells get faster, but you run out of mana faster as a result. Mage DPS these days is constrained more my mana then anything else, and running out of mana because you're now burning it faster then evo/mage armor/potion chugging can deal with doesn't really help you a whole lot in a long fight.
Shadow Priests: Useless (the two spells that actually do speed up are already at the same speed as the Global Cooldown).
Now lets look at melee:
Rogues: If you're combat, a major chunk of your damage is white DPS. Haste increases that, without the pesky side effect of running out of mana. In fact, haste increases it a lot.
Warriors: Not only do they get more white damage like Rogues do, but Warriors also generate more rage due to haste, which results in more yellow damage as well.
So, yeah. Haste already does more for melee, why should it also cost them less of the item budget?
Ryan Aug 24th 2007 7:59AM
@9 In the last patch when they nerfed spell haste, they also made it work for channeled spells. So it's not exactly useless for spriests & locks, just not very valuable as it only effects drain life/mana/soul and mind flay.
Ambrose Aug 24th 2007 12:08PM
Chris Jahosky wrote:
"When one player can crank out more damage than a 10 man raid (even if they're geared out and buffed), something seems to be wrong."
What exactly is wrong with that? Rogues do not bring any utility to a raid, no buffs, no food/water, no healthstones, just DPS. It's our _job_ to push the damage meters, and any rogue worth his salt will push his character to achieve that, since it is all we're good for.
Like #4 said, rogues like Furi are achieving this dps on very specific fights where aggro/armor are not an issue, added to that min-maxing. Rogues have the _potential_ to reach that if the raid wants to min-max, on their own its a fairly level playing field. And at any rate, Furi has two Legendary swords, you would think he could outdamage everyone else, no reason to complain about that really.
The reason this is such a hot topic, is that the haste nerf comes in tandem with a number of others. The mechanic for Sword Specialisation was adjusted (ie nerfed), Windfury totem was nerfed, there is currently an ongoing and unfixed bug on the PTR regarding energy ticking for only 9 energy, and to top it all off, casters get a buff in the shape of haste rating.
In other words, melee dps is being reigned in by quite a large amount. Combined with the large number of melee-unfriendly encounters...well, melee classes now have a much harder time being useful to their raid group.
DeZo Aug 24th 2007 8:48AM
Been thinking about it and came to conclusion that we have to put an end to those constant nerfs we get.
I believe it's time we stand for our right to be the dps leaders and not be constant nerfed to the level of chest farming peons.
http://lfgkz.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/get-your-hands-of-our-dps/
NO MORE NERF
z
Khaotic Aug 24th 2007 9:01AM
As #11 is saying, we are getting nerfs thru more then just haste at the moment.
If Blizzard wants to balance the melee vs casters DPS they can atleast do it one step at a time.
Nerfing haste, wich for me as a sword rogue with about 60-65% of my DPS is from white attacks, will hurt alot, and on top of that cant get WF proccs of my yellow attacks anymore AND giving haste for casters a buff at the same time will just ruin it all.
And as people fail to realize that DPS is the _only_ reason someone would bring a rogue for a raid, there is no other reason.
Why should we then not be best at the only thing we can do?
Instead of nerfing one small step at a time to balance the DPS between casters they just throw every idea in at the same time and before they restore some parts of melee DPS, or buffing the class mechanics, we will be struggling against casters and probably will be missing alot of raidtime in the following month, if you have a raidleader with some brains.
Balstor Aug 24th 2007 12:10PM
there is some mis thoughts above me.
1) haste only speeds up shadow bolts:
Look at this Void Reaver kill:
http://www.lossendil.com/wws/?report=tsa3syonxka2e&s=10159-10436
Ironis their #1 DPS ONLY used shadow bolt
2) Rogues and Warriors(DPS) have to have large amounts of white damage. It is 50%+ of our DPS.
3) Almost every EPEEN video you will see the people stroking are stacking everything in their favor. If you want a true measure of DPS get a tank a couple of healers and head to an arena. Spend 5 minutes attacking the tank from behind and then you will have a baseline for DPS. The only fights I can think of good for baseline in raids is Void Reaver(DPS) and Lurker(DPS). For ranged DPS maybe first half of Al'ar.
4) I would also say on non tricked fights the upper limit on one person's DPS verses a solo target is about 1400
5) Rogues, DPS Warriors, DPS Druids all have similar issues getting raid spots.
ben1778 Aug 24th 2007 9:59AM
[Pvp related] Once the dps casters get their hands on season 3 gear there will be many more people who will hit their resilience cap [495] from gear item budgets (instead of gems/enchants/trinkets etc). I think that the big stat after hitting resilience cap will be spell haste rating (other than stam obviously). Even more so after this buff.
I don't think that melee haste rating needed a nerf.
Sylythn Aug 24th 2007 10:14AM
"Warlocks: Haste does exactly nothing to DoTs and Drain Life. You get faster Shadow Bolts."
I'd have to do research to re-confirm this...but my understanding of its effect on both channeled and DoT spells was that you would end up with more ticks per second. If your Drain Life or Corruption nets you 10 ticks before it expires, with spell haste you might net out with 12 ticks before it's done. I may have gotten it wrong - but last time we had a discussion about this on the lock forums, that's what the consensus was.
Todd Aug 24th 2007 10:22AM
@5
More haste for casters means more, faster healing for the melee.
fhornmikey Aug 24th 2007 10:43AM
@9
LOL If you are a mage and are honestly being limited by your mana pool in terms of your dps then either you blow, or your raid leadership blows.
We put a shadow priest in a mage group in every single raid and I have yet to see them run out of mana. They are CONSTANTLY vying with the rogues and our fury warrior for top DPS.
Zebedeo Aug 24th 2007 11:13AM
@9 Haste is not useless for shadow priest. Mind flay is a 3 sec channeled spell that is effected by haste. Pumping out 3 mind flays in the time it normally takes to channel 2 is over +1800 damage in my gear.
I have also heard a lot about this global cool down making haste useless for many spells. I have noted that the global cool down does not go into effect until the spell has been fully cast. This means if it takes 1.5 secs to cast VT and then 1.5 secs for the global cool down it is 3 secs before I can cast the next spell.
If I can cast VT in .5 secs and then there is a 1.5 sec global cooldown I can cast the next spell in 2 secs instead of 3. What am I missing here?
bdo Aug 24th 2007 11:17AM
How they should have fixed it is how they fixed arena points - a logarithmic scale so once you get up to a certain haste speed, the gains start leveling out.