Is Haste Overpowered?

There's a lot of talk about class balance and spec balance - making sure that everyone can put out equal dps with equal effort, in single-target, cleaving, and AoE situations, and making sure that, as the expansion goes on, and gear levels increase, that balance is maintained.

So perhaps it's silly to be worried about one stat becoming so powerful. After all, everyone has access to the stats they could use. Sure, sometimes items are better itemized to favor one or the other, but it's not like being a Paladin means you are unable to pick up anything with crit on it.

In fact, one could argue that having one secondary stat benefit the vast majority of specs keeps everyone balanced in terms of itemization.

That said, is it me, or does EVERYONE freaking want Haste these days?

Ok, backing up: sure, there are specs that don't want it. Warriors of all stripes put it at the bottom of the list (unless one of the two Fury variants uses it.) And yes, stat weights are a little more nuanced than what the typical person understands - there are haste breakpoints for DoTs, and having more of one stat will make another more valuable.

But with those caveats aside, from my count, haste is the top stat for at least Demonology Warlocks, Affliction Warlocks, Frost Mages, Windwalker Monks, Balance Druids, Rogues of all specs, Feral Druids, Elemental Shamans, Frost Death Knights, Unholy Death Knights, Retribution Paladins, and even Protection Paladins. And I don't know anything about healing stat weights, but I'd guess that after spirit, haste is typically the top one for all of them as well.

Crit is good for a handful of specs, and Mastery, which was once the top stat for a fair number of specs, is now lagging behind (even for Protection Paladins, which I think is heresy - see my earlier article.)

So why is this the case? Well, casters have always liked haste. (Well, back in Vanilla and BC there were two different haste stats, one for melee and one for casters, likewise for crit and hit, which made gearing a Ret Paladin basically impossible.) Haste makes your spells cast faster. There's a really clear benefit to the stat. Add in the fact that in Cataclysm they baked in a lot of old glyphs and such that made DoTs scale with Haste as well and you can see why it's such a dominant stat for nearly every spell-caster in the game.

The other big Cataclysm change is that they made Haste affect resource generation for Melee classes. Back in the day, haste would increase the speed of your auto-attacks, and that was it. Dual-wielding classes, who would get nearly 50% of their damage from auto-attacks, saw a real benefit to this, but anyone lugging a big, slow, two-hander was far better off with crit or other stats that have since disappeared (and been replaced with Mastery.) A rogue's energy would always regenerate at the same rate, regardless of gear, as would Death Knight runes (though runes never had downtime like they do today, so it was still pretty fast-paced.)

The effect, really, has been to make haste a hugely dynamic stat: You do things faster, in every way.

So is this a bad thing? Well, other than my own personal aesthetic preferences (I like the idea of swinging a giant warhammer and slamming down with the force of a nuclear bomb, not continually smacking at my opponents with a wet noodle faster and faster until they finally give up) there might not be much of one.

However, here are the little issues:

Lag: Having to hit our buttons more often means more things for the game to process in a shorter amount of time. How much of a difference does this make? No idea: I'm not a computer engineer. But hypothetically, just as Blizzard has talked about doing an item squish partially because it takes the computers that much longer to calculate 100,000 damage than it does to calculate 100, it's possible that all this haste is putting extra strain on servers.

Of course, the other big issue with lag is that having a haste-reliant class makes you more susceptible to lag spikes. If you're expected to hit ten abilities in fifteen seconds, you're going to be hurt a lot harder than if you're only expected to hit seven. Lag will also have you "wasting" pooled resources. Rogues (particularly Combat) lose significant dps if they let their energy cap.

Item Variety: If haste is so awesome for everyone, it means that everyone is going to want the same pieces of gear. That means big fights over that one trinket that gives a huge haste proc, while the others will be more of a "yeah, I guess that's ok for me" situation, and more focused min-maxers might not even take it, despite it being, iLevel-wise, an upgrade.

Anti-Homogenization: I don't really like to beat the "homogenization" drum a lot. Frankly, people who look back at the BC era with nostalgia infuriate me, because that was a time when there were specs that even the designers didn't intend for you to play. Sometimes, people call real balance homogenization ("I miss the days when Mages had the best AoE. Now everyone can do AoE and the game is terrible and Ghostcrawler should... [Fake Ed. note: several pages of obscenities removed.]") However, I would say that if everyone is getting the same enchants, and fighting for the same trinkets, the whole gearing game loses substance. While I don't want us to go back to the days of "gear for Balance Druids" and "gear for Elemental, but not Restoration Shamans" era, I think that there are enough secondary stats in the game to produce fun variety, and spreading the love around would be welcome. Gearing for haste on every toon is kind of unexciting.

Anyway, I wouldn't say that rebalancing the three main secondary stats is a top priority (giving the Alliance some lore-love is way higher on my list,) I do think that this issue could stand to be looked at.