criticalstrikerating
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More levels means fewer crits
To go along with the spell haste rating post from yesterday, Relmstein reminds us all about the apparent problem with the new combat rating system: if you don't replace it, the gear you're wearing gets progressively, comparatively worse as you level up.Gloves of Spell Mastery, for instance, a high level tailoring item that used to say "+2% chance to crit" before the expansion now says a critical strike rating increase of 28. That still gives a +2% chance to crit at 60, but if you've made it to 66, it only gives a +1.5% chance to crit, and at 70, that drops to +1.26%. They're the same gloves, but the crit bonus you gain from them has dropped in almost half.As an aside, don't forget that RatingBuster, an addon Eliah looked at last week, can help you out with all of this-- it'll let you know exactly what those ratings mean for the level you're at. You can literally watch your numbers drop after you ding!Of course, as Relmstein points out, this isn't really anything to get worked up about, because the equipment is scaling with the rating, and so by 70, you'll hopefully be finding gloves with an even higher critical strike rating. And this does have, as he notes, the added benefit that 57s-60s (like my rogue right now) will get a little buff from having overpowered gear for their level, since the Gloves, for example, will actually give more than a 2% crit when worn by someone below 60. But it's true that on the way up, classes like Warriors and Rogues that depend so much on hits and crits will suffer a little bit.
Spell haste rating revealed
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.
