Can anyone tell me exactly what spell haste does for a druid? I'm wondering because I see Black Temple Leather Wroking Patterns with spell Haste and +healing.

Haste will quicken the spell cast ( or how quickly a channeled spell ticks ). For a resto druid, this quickens regrowth, healing touch and tranquility.

With Tranquility having a long CD, it's benefit of +haste is questionable.

Here's the formula for spell haste cast time modification:

New Casting Time = Base Casting Time / (1 + (Spell Haste Rating/1570))

Regrowth: 2 sec cast.

It takes 15.76 haste rating to reduce a spell by 1%. You'd need about 500 haste rating to get regrowth down to about a 1.5 second cast. Going to assume you don't use healing touch too much, so I won't even do the math on that.

Spell haste is nice, you can fit more heals into the same amount of time, but it takes a LOT of haste to make a marked difference in your cast times.

Yeah, I figured. I'm a ToL guy and if its not going to do anything to my HOTs then I guess I still Going to still try to get in Prince Runs into kara.

Another reason I was wondering because I got the Dark Blessing from ZA, and I considerd it an upgrade from the Shard of Virtue. But I'm still going to go for Light's Justice because of the improved stats. I could do without spell haste.

Yea Light's Justice does look more appealing than Dark Blessing (just checked the stats on Dark Blessing on WoWhead).

Yea Light's Justice does look more appealing than Dark Blessing (just checked the stats on Dark Blessing on WoWhead).

Haha ya, The only thing is I've killed the Prince in kara 15+ times and STILL havn't seen it drop. First time I kill the last boss in ZA the Dark Blessing Drops.

Yea, spell haste is useless for tree druids as we operate with insta casts...or is it?

There is soe very interesting changes coming guys, in the new patch spell haste will affect the global cool down, and it can be reduced down to a minimum of 1 second. So you can cast those instant spells even more often

NOTE: it will take a lot of haste though to get it down to one second though lol.

Can you imagine moonkin wrathspam volleys, once a second every second? This spell haste change is a sick buff for balance.

Yea, spell haste is useless for tree druids as we operate with insta casts...or is it?

There is soe very interesting changes coming guys, in the new patch spell haste will affect the global cool down, and it can be reduced down to a minimum of 1 second. So you can cast those instant spells even more often

NOTE: it will take a lot of haste though to get it down to one second though lol.

I heard that was still a rumor though

Edit: nevermind I saw that it was confirmed.

I'm not sure if it will be worth the item lvls to go for some spell haste. Maybe if you have suffecient gear for the encounter to not have to worry about goin goom, you can switch to a spell haste stack to try and pump out faster lb spams :)

If you do manage to get it down to 1 sec gcd, you could have 6 people with a lbl stack at once, but you can say good bye mana lol.

I'm not sure if it will be worth the item lvls to go for some spell haste. Maybe if you have suffecient gear for the encounter to not have to worry about goin goom, you can switch to a spell haste stack to try and pump out faster lb spams :)

If you do manage to get it down to 1 sec gcd, you could have 6 people with a lbl stack at once, but you can say good bye mana lol. For Balance, it's awesome, as wrathspam is almost all you do. The faster you can PESS DA BUTAN the more DPS you do.

That said, with the spell haste change, three things will happen:

#1) Moonkin DPS increases by 30%, from ~900 to ~1200. Balance becomes a respectable choice. The armies of Azeroth learn to fear the owly wrath of a geared moonkin. They are (finally) included in some raids. And the peasants rejoice.

#2) Everyone realizes these jokers are now burning through their mana 30% faster, and of course, they already had a oom problem. They are kicked out of every raid. Their mana issues become much more obvious in pvp, and even grinding. Moonkin complain bitterly.

#3) Blizzard responds.

That's going to be the interesting part. They could just roll back the change to spell haste. Alternately they could nerf Wrath and/or Starfire so you need a 1.0 global cooldown to do the same mediocre 900 DPS. Or, which would be keen, they could buff Wrath and/or Starfire to be at least 30% more mana efficient. What I anticipate however is a creative change to the Balance talent tree that would result in a +30% increase in mana conservation.

Blizzard has mentioned both ret pallies and moonkin before as classes they want to make raid viable. Ret pallies are... basically the whole class, which is otherwise pretty finished and polished, would have to be overhauled for that imo. Moonkin are borderline. They need both a DPS buff and a mana conservation buff. This spell haste change will help with DPS but can only make their mana conservation problem worse.

Hopefully Blizzard has more up their sleep for the 2.4 patch. Otherwise the time between 2.4 and when their mana issues are addressed is going to be very awkward for moonkin.

Though reducing my GCD to one second sounds awsome. I think I'll stick to my gear that has spirit.

A lower GCD would be awesome for druids who have trouble using up all of their GCDs (i.e., keeping up four Lifebloom stacks or equivalent), but I won't sacrifice any bonus healing or stats for spell haste personally.