The Potential Impact on Haste Changes to Kitties.

The big news for me is the changes to HoT’s and DoTs in the notes about the priest changes.  

All HoTs and DoTs will benefit from Haste and Crit innately. Hasted HoTs and DoTs will not have a shorter duration, just a shorter period in between ticks (meaning they will gain extra ticks to fill in the duration as appropriate). 

Rake, Rip…assuming that this applies to these DoTs as well, it becomes a very interesting development for kitties.  Although, the one thing that kinda bothers me about these developments is the potential for haste “soft caps.”

Rake is an easier example to use, because it has less modifiers unlike rip.

With 0 haste, you’ll have a tick at seconds 3, 6 & 9.

So say you have 10% haste, then you have ticks at 2.7s, 5.4s, and 8.1s.  In this scenario, it actually does shorten the duration and you don’t really get much gain out of it, other than having to re-apply rake earlier.

Once you reach 25% haste, it becomes an entirely different story.  Then all of a sudden, you will have a tick at 2.25s, 4.5s, 6.75s and 9s.  Basically, from 0 – 24% haste actually makes kitty “rotation” tougher.

Granted, I don’t know for sure exactly how Blizz is handling it.  One, kinda odd, solution is to apply the DoT to every fraction of a second or on the last “tick” of the Rake add a proportional amount of damage based on the timing since the last tick.  Say my example with 10% haste, at the ninth second it had been 1/3rd of hasted tick since the last one, so it then creates an extra tick that does 1/3rd of the damage.   (Of course, I haven’t done the math to figure out if it would be better to clip it in that scenario.  And wow, if that works when to clip would become quite complicated, because it would depend on what raid buffs you have.)

And, of course, I am assuming that the kitty DoTs work the same way.  (We tend to be a unique class, < 1 auto-attack ftw. 😉 ) I definitely like the idea of haste effecting our DoTs this way.  (And energy regen for that matter.)  But I just worry that if not done correctly, we’ll get a series of “caps” that are worse than the defense cap.  They wanted to simplify things, but if agi is better until you get close to XYZ haste amount, then gem for haste to get over the limit, then agi is better again, it definitely doesn’t simplify things in my mind.

But, of course, I like kitty because it’s complicated.

What do you think?