Spell Haste will affect global cooldown, to minimum of one second
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.
