On DoT’s, HoT’s, and Haste

The World of Warcraft development team have an interesting idea they’re playing with concerning how Haste affects DoT and HoT spells. It’s an experiment that we could begin to see starting patch 3.3 though Ghostcrawler said that it we might not see it at all, depending on how the testing works out.

glyph interface

At it’s current state, the only real effect haste has on DoT’s and HoT’s is lowering the global cooldown and the devs want to make haste a more attractive stat especially for Restoration Druids, Affliction Warlocks and Shadow Priests who use HoT’s or DoT’s more extensively than other classes and specs. Ghostcrawler said that they now have new technology that will allow HoT’s and DoT’s to tick faster. By this he doesn’t mean shortening the number of ticks but making each tick more powerful – that’s already in the game. It means making the time between ticks shorter, which would make sense for a haste stat.

Of course the drawback to this is that faster ticks means more refreshing to be done. Because of this the devs don’t want to use this new tech to change the base spells. Instead they want to add this effect using glyphs. If it proves popular then they might consider making them talents or even base abilities. For now, Blizzard wants to introduce this with three new glyphs that may or may not see the light of day come patch 3.3 – glyphs of Rejuvenation, Corruption and Shadow Word: Pain. This should allow these spells to tick faster the more haste you have. Blizzard said that Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain would likely take the place of Glyph of Mind Flay while increasing the range of the Mind Flay base spell by 10 yards. Since there already are Glyphs of Corruption and Rejuvenation, they’re not sure how to resolve that problem yet.

It sounds like a very nice buff for classes who use DoT’s and HoT’s often. I don’t really care if this is going to make you work a bit more by doing more refreshing of the spells as long as it’s ultimately going to help. I really this passes the test and makes it in the game eventually!