Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street just made a post on the officials forums stating that Blizzard is "trying to make haste a slightly more attractive stat for classes that utilize a lot of damage or healing over time spells," including Shadow priests, warlocks and Resto druids. The team may make specific HoT and DoT spells tick faster with more Haste, which would mean more damage or heals over time. The trade-off would be that you'd have to refresh the spells more often.
In order to test out the concept first, the team is planning to introduce it through glyphs. You may see new glyphs for Shadow Word: Pain, Corruption and Rejuvenation pop onto the PTR for patch 3.3 "that would allow these spells to tick faster with the more haste you have." Ghostcrawler emphasizes, however, that these are not promises. You may see some or all of the glyphs on the PTR, or you may not. He just wanted to get the idea out there so players can supply feedback.
You can read the full post after the jump. Although it may not be implemented, what do you think of the concept?
We are trying to make haste a slightly more attractive stat for classes that utilize a lot of damage or healing over time spells, specifically Shadow priests, warlocks (though especially Affliction) and Resto druids. We realize other classes use hots and dots too, but I think we can all agree that it's a bigger problem for the ones I mentioned.
I'm going to share with you an idea that the class and item designers came up with for 3.3. This is a work in progress so it's possible we'll end up going a different way after we see how it plays. However I also wanted to explain our logic here in case it wasn't obvious.
We have new tech that will allow specific hots and dots to tick faster -- the time between ticks would decrease. This means more damage or healing per time but also having to refresh those spells more often. Since there is a trade-off, we're not sure the change is a no-brainer, especially in the healing case.
Because of this, we are planning on introducing the concept through glyphs. Glyphs represent a great test bed for new ideas because they are easier to change (and easier on the players when we do change them) compared to core spell functions or even talents. If we like the way it feels and players like the way it feels and the glyphs prove popular or fun, then this may be the kind of thing that shifts from glyphs over time -- not unlike the way some favorite set bonuses eventually become talents.
For 3.3 we are talking about introducing three new glyphs for Shadow Word: Pain, Corruption and Rejuvenation that would allow these spells to tick faster with the more haste you have. There are glyphs of Corruption and Rejuv already, and we're not sure how we're going to resolve those yet. For Shadow Word: Pain, we are likely to rename the current glyph to Glyph of Mind Flay, remove the old Glyph of Mind Flay, and increase Mind Flay by 10 yards in the base spell.
Again, these are not promises (nor ponies). For a variety of reasons, you may see these changes on the PTR or you may not. If you do see any or all of the three glyphs implemented however, we wanted you to have some idea of what we were trying to do. Feedback is certainly appreciated, especially if you get to try them out.