Is haste for locks? The new gear from zul'

[edfoo]

Do i roll on the gear with + haste. What can i give up as a affliction lock? crit?, hit?
I guess im a noob but lost when it comes to haste what clothys use it?
tha\nks in advance. nortel

[tioga]

As i understand it, haste is going to affect any spell that has a cast time.
As an aff lock in my current build, that means SB, Imol, Inc.
But the vast majority of my spells will not take advantage of the haste.
Its nice for SB spam, but will not yield any benefit for your insta cast spells.
As aff, i am willing to loose some crit for haste, but will not loose any Hit for it.

[edfoo]

Makes sense to me thanks. nortel

[Afflictor]

look at my best raiding gear post for crit and haste conversions to +damage.

for both aff and destro haste is better than crit. especialy for affliction, although stacking +damage beats everything immensely for affliction, immo and UA are affected by haste but that puts you under the GCD so you effectively get no dps boost.

for destro haste starts to scale amazingly well as you get better in gear, for ex in almost full t6 quality gear, haste will become almost as well scaling as damage. also helping your ISB uptime if you think about it because more spells cast in X amout of time = Y amount more crits.

[cryodrene]

So I assuming that Haste does not affect the global cool down. Even with instant cast spells you still have the global cool down to deal with. So there isn't any real instant spell casts.

[Afflictor]

haste does not affect GDC, you are correct, thats why their is the thing called the haste cap, especialy for melee, but for casters its pretty much whatever makes your main nuke under 1.5 sec. and useless.

bloodlust is the only thing that affects GCD, it scales it down with it so your gdc is 30% less to match your 30% faster cast speed.

[ydnandrew]

Haste can be nice for locks. One add-on I used for a while calculated how my damage on spells would change if I added hit, crit, spell damage or haste. In all cases haste had more of an effect than crit, but less than spell damage. I'm hit capped now so that's not an issue. For raids I'm not going to change out any gear if it drops me below the cap.

To give you an idea of how much haste effects casting, a druid tank I ran with this morning used the drums of battle, which increases spell haste by 80, and my shadow bolt went from a 2.5 second cast to 2.38. I haven't check for the exact conversion on spell haste though.

For this to really matter in PvE it would either have to be a really long fight or you would probably want to be something other than affliction. I'm affliction and 3 of the 6 spells I cast most often are instant, so they would gain nothing from haste. For PvP, however, which a lot of the new badge gear appears to be designed for, it could make a big difference. You get your Fear, UA, and SB all off just a little faster. That would be considerable, since people will typically be chasing/beating on you and you don't want to stand still for long.

[edfoo]

thanks for all the info. much appreciated. nortel