spellhaste
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Talasites to be slightly less useless in 2.4
For those of you who like Spell Haste, I have good news! Patch 2.4 is bringing you a few new Jewelcrafting recipes to reduce your Global Cooldown. Noble Topaz, Dawnstones, and our good friends the Talasites all recieve a new cut. Quick Dawnstone - +8 Spell Haste Rating Reckless Noble Topaz - +4 Spell Haste Rating and +5 Spell Damage Forceful Talasite - +4 Spell Haste Rating and +6 Stamina While the effectiveness of Spell Haste is still up for debate, new options for gems are always good. I have a feeling this won't do much to help the Talasite market, the +Stam/Resil cut didn't even help much, but at least it's another use for the things. I'm pretty sure everyone who plays WoW has a stack of them sitting in the bank.Additionally, we have a few new metagems coming our way!
Fear Ward and Spell Haste for facemelters
Yesterday's announcements brought two big notes that will be affecting Shadow Priests. The Fear Ward change and the fact that Spell Haste will affect the global cooldown.The Fear Ward change, like I mentioned in my last post, is primarily a convenience change for PvE. Reupping Fear Ward every 3 minutes when you need to keep putting Shadowform back on afterwards is annoying, and a large mana drain over long encounters. However, it wasn't crippling, so not a very big deal. What this will help the most is PvP, especially arenas. Having an arena match last longer than three minutes isn't unlikely, so you will probably want to put Fear Ward back up at some point throughout the match. Being required to drop Shadowform to do it is sort of a pain, considering both the loss of damage and the mitigation Shadowform supplies you with, arguably one of the Shadow Priest's strongest defenses. The Spell Haste change is what has me a little excited. I'll admit right away, I haven't crunched any numbers. I'm notoriously bad at breaking down raw stats, I usually just eyeball my gear and take a guess. I'm right or pretty close more often than not but don't hate me too much if my guesses here are completely wrong. If you want to see some raw numbers, you can probably check them out over at the ShadowPriest.com forum.
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.
