Kainhighwind

So after reading a few of the class compendiums on EJ it has come to my attention that now haste effects all HoTs and DoTs and has brought on a concept known as “haste plateaus”. A haste plateau is simply a given amount of haste needed in order to provide extra ticks to a HoT or DoT. Many of the class pages on EJ have tables that show exactly how much haste is need for each class to get to the next haste plateau, however many of them do not include the 1% haste buff from goblins, or the 3% haste buff from Dark Intent, so I thought I'd provide the math needed to calculate your own haste plateaus, depending on the buffs you are given.

The general equation in order to determine how much haste is required to add a certain number of ticks to a given HoT or DoT is given as:

[(Desired_Number_of_Ticks – 0.5) / Base_Number_of_Ticks] – 1 = Haste_Needed

It should be noted that the Haste_Needed result will be in decimal form so multiple by 100 to convert to a percent. As an example a Holy Priest's Renew ticks 4 times over 12 seconds, so the required haste to increase up to 5 ticks from the equation would be 12.5%. This 12.5% number is an interesting number, as intuition might lead one to think that in order to get a 5th tick out of a spell that normal has 4 ticks one would have to decrease the time between ticks by 1/4th or 25%. It turns out, however, that as soon as you reach the halfway point to the next tick, in this case 12.5% (half way between 0% and 25%), you get the benefit of the extra tick.

So once you figure out the haste needed to add another tick to your spell, the next thing that needs to be figured out is the amount of haste rating required to reach that percent haste. This can often be confusing with different talents giving haste, along with raid buffs and what not. The formula below will provide you with the needed haste rating in order to achieve a certain haste:

[(Haste_Needed/(Haste_Buff_1*Haste_Buff_2*Haste_Buff_3*....))- 1 ] * 12805 = Haste Rating

The Haste_Needed and Haste_Buff numbers should be in decimal form so if you need 130% total haste you would plug it in as 1.30, and the same goes for buffs such as the Goblins racial buff of 1% which would be input as 1.01. For example, using a Holy Priest's Renew again, we found that we would need 12.5% haste in order to get an additional tick. Assuming we were a Goblin, had 3% haste from a talent, and had a boomkin in our raid for the 5% buff, we would need 383.16 haste rating. 12805 is the haste conversion factor at 85, 128.05, times 100 since we are dealing with decimals

[(1.125) / ((1.01)*(1.03)*(1.05)) -1]*12805 = 383.16

As you can see 383.16 haste rating is a fairly reasonable amount of haste to be able to have with pre-raid /T11 gear. The next haste plateau, at 37.5% (half way between 25% and 50%), requires 3313.86 haste rating which is a bit out of reach of T11 gear without the benefit of additional haste buffs. For example if a warlock were to put Dark Intent on our Holy Priest, adding 3% more haste, our Holy Priest would require no additional haste rating to reach the 12.5% haste plateau, and only 2844 haste rating compared to out previous 3313 rating to reach the next plateau.

With many classes having HoTs and DoTs these haste plateaus can be considered a new 'soft cap' to reach much in the same way as the 17% spell hit cap, and 8% melee hit / 26 expertise cap. I hope this examination of haste in Cata helps make this concept a bit easier to understand, and most importantly, helps increase those oh so important DPS/HPS numbers.