Are you still a bit confused about haste in 4.0 (and in Cataclysm)? Soft caps and HoT break points too much to wrap your head around? I can help! I have tables!


Haste in Wrath of the Lich King

Our old goal with haste was to reduce our GCD down to 1.0sec. This was fairly easy to achieve with attainable gear and talents, but in 4.0 (and Cataclysm) we have lost our haste talents, and Blizzard wants haste “caps” to be harder to reach, so that we can’t simply put on a few standard pieces of gear, choose a couple of talents, and be done with haste. By making haste caps harder to reach, it means that collecting more haste will always be attractive; before, there was little point in going past the soft cap because after reaching the 1.0s GCD, haste was of little use to us as a HoT-centric class.


Haste going forward

To reach a 1.0s GCD, you need 50% haste. That’s 1640 haste rating without a 5% raid buff, or about 1406 (42.87%) with the buff. This is a stretch at current levels of gear, so we won’t be hitting the 1.0sec GCD as easily. In Cataclysm we will also be using direct healing spells more than we did in WotLK, and this means that we can keep collecting haste without it becoming useless, because the bar has been set higher – even past the soft cap, haste will still be useful for us.

But haste also has a new value for us – it speeds up our HoT ticks. However, instead of shortening the duration (like the old Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation did), at certain points of haste, “break points”, it adds extra ticks into your standard duration. So for example, if you reach 37.5% haste, your Rejuvenation will have two extra ticks, because it has reached two break points.

Now, luckily, things are a bit simpler now, with the revamp of Gift of the Earthmother, removal of Celestial Focus, and changes to raid haste buffs so that you can only ever have 5% (not 3%, 5%, 3%+5%). You’ll have haste from your gear, and you’ll either have 5% from a Moonkin, a Shadow Priest, or a Shaman.. or you won’t have it. Easy!


Resto Druid HoT break points

Here are the break points for our various HoTs, so you can see the milestones you would need to reach in order to add the next extra tick. I’ve put values for characters with 5% raid buffs and without – if you can generally count on one of the above classes to give you the 5%, then you can go for the lower value. If you don’t often have those players around, then you should aim for the higher value to ensure that you get your extra ticks.

The yellow cells represent the spot that we should aim for, or will probably be sitting at (if we aim for 1016 haste for maximising Rejuvenation).

The numbers along the top, of course, represent extra ticks on top of the standard number of ticks for each HoT. So “1″ is 1 extra tick, “2″ is 2 extra ticks.

Rejuvenation
1
2
3
4
Break points – without 5% buff
12.50%
37.50%
62.50%
87.50%
Break points – with 5% buff
7.14%
30.95%
54.76%
78.57%
Rating required – without 5% buff
410
1230
2049
2869
Rating required – with 5% buff
234
1015
1796
2576

Regrowth
1
2
3
Break points – without 5% buff
16.67%
50%
83.33%
Break points – with 5% buff
11.11%
42.86%
74.60%
Rating required – without 5% buff
546
1640
2732
Rating required – with 5% buff
364
1405
2446

Lifebloom
1
2
3
4
5
6
Break points – without 5% buff
5%
15%
25%
35%
45%
55%
Break points – with 5% buff
0%
9.52%
19.05%
28.57%
38.10%
47.62%
Rating required – without 5% buff
164
492
820
1148
1476
1803
Rating required – with 5% buff
0
312
625
937
1249
1561

Wild Growth
1
2
3
4
5
6
Break points – without 5% buff
7.15%
21.43%
35.72%
50%
64.29%
78.57%
Break points – with 5% buff
2.05%
15.65%
29.25%
42.86%
56.46%
70.07%
Rating required – without 5% buff
234
703
1171
1640
2108
2576
Rating required – with 5% buff
67
513
959
1405
1851
2297

Now, due to rounding, it may be best to tack on an extra value of 1 – to ensure you get that extra tick. For example, the 37.5% break point for 2 extra ticks of Rejuvenation is 1015, but for some reason some people don’t get the extra tick unless they go to 1016 (which is why 1016 is usually the number that most guides will give you to aim for). If you add an extra point, you can’t go wrong.

I’ve chopped off the ticks from 7 onwards, purely because of lack of space – and because it’s unlikely that anyone will be reaching 50% haste in the next few weeks!

Once again, another tip of the cap to Type “H” For Heals. Go there for much more eloquent and attractive lessons on HoT break points (with graphs!). Want to play around with your stats? Grab Hamlet’s TreeCalcs spreadsheet, plug in your info, and check the HoTs tab to see what you get.

Hope this helps you if you were still confused.

I’ll be posting the same tables for level 85 in my new Cataclysm guide soon.



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