Posts with tag spellcasting

MMO-Champion has just discovered 3 interesting new tailoring patterns in the Wrath Beta files. Rather than things you can sell, however, these are soulbound cloak embroideries, and at least at first glance, they seem very nice indeed.

• Lightweave Embroidery: Embroiders a subtle pattern of light into your cloak, giving you a chance to cause an additional 800 to 1000 Holy damage when you damage an enemy with a spell. You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound.

The CMs are doing a real drive-by on the forums this afternoon. The latest tidbit dropped by Drysc (in an only barely related thread) is that spell haste will reduce the global cooldown on spells, to a minimum of one second. It will not apply to melee or ranged attacks. Previously (and currently, as of this writing), Spell Haste was capped out by the Global Cooldown-- it doesn't matter how fast your spellcasting went, because you were stuck with the 1.5 second Global Cooldown every time you cast. But as of 2.4, that cap will go bye-bye for casters, leaving them to rack up as much Spell Haste as they can, aiming towards a 1 second global cooldown.

Now, Drysc does say that it would take a lot of Spell Haste to reach that one second-- more, he supposes, than is possible in the game at this point. One player speculates that it would take 785 Spell Haste rating to go from 1.5 to 1 second (+50% spell casting speed basically), and while I'm not sure about the math on that, there's no question that you'll need a lot of Spell Haste with the current gear to cast that fast. In the expansion, however...

Non-casters are unhappy, to say the least-- especially hunters, who are distraught that while mages will be able to shoot off fireballs faster, they won't be able to shoot off Arcane Shots any quicker. Melee don't have much of a leg to stand on (their attacks aren't limited by mana as caster attacks are), but hunters may have a point-- they get charged mana and can't go faster. They shouldn't get too ruffled yet, though-- odds are we haven't heard the last of the big changes in patch 2.4.

This came up when we reported on the new "rating" system a long time ago (implemented so that Blizzard could better scale gear on the way up), but like Cyberdemon of Frostwolf-A, I missed it. Alongside the self-explanatory stuff like critical strike rating, and the new resilience rating, there's a new rating called "Spell Haste." Cyberdemon wondered what it was, and Tseric confirms that a higher spell haste rating speeds up the cast times of all your spells. Pretty cool.

The reason we likely haven't seen it much yet is because so far, spell haste stuff only drops at the highest levels, and, from what I can see, in the form of temporary buffs that allow you to get a few casts off quickly. An equipped high spell haste rating would fundamentally change the way the game was played in many situations-- if mages could kick out a quicker pyroblast whenever they wanted, that would have a big effect in a lot of PvP situations.

Tseric also clarifies that this only affects cast time, not DoT tick time, or duration of spells. And while the two trinkets linked above are the only places I could find it in the game so far, I wouldn't be surprised if this rating found its way into certain instance specific buffs, either for us (players could get a DoT put on them that would kill them in 30 seconds, but let them cast all their spells almost instantly within that time) or against us (mind-controlled players get their spells hasted for a short period against the raid). Either way, as more and more players move into the endgame, spell haste will be something to look out for.

Update: Commenters have found a few other spell haste items, including this 60 trinket, and an awesome BoE caster sword.