Thoughts on the Patch!

I'm reading through the patch notes, and I thought I'd take a moment to mumble about important changes to game mechanics.

One notable change is the change to "spell pushback". That's what happens when you get smacked while trying to cast a spell - it takes longer... or, in the case of a channeled spell, it takes shorter.

So, it is no longer possible for any spell to take longer than one extra second to cast. Heal spells are now guaranteed to go off in at most one more second than normal. So, a druid casting Regrowth, for example, while being hit by many mobs will take at MOST 3 seconds to cast. I guess we will probably be seeing less use of hunter's snake traps, which (if I understand correctly) were intended to make it difficult for spellcasters to cast spells.

Here's the specifics of how this new mechanic works... When you're casting a spell, the first time something hits you, it will had half a second to the cast. Regrowth would go from 2 seconds to 2.5 seconds. The second time you get hit, it adds another half second so that it takes a total of 3 seconds. Any other hits after that will have no effect.

This is GREAT news for healers that pull aggro. It means that if your tank sucks, and you pull 2 mobs or 5 mobs, it will feel the same - your heals will be delayed by 1 second, but they will still go off. Flash Heal will take 2.5 seconds, no matter how many mobs are hitting you. As a healer, I look forward to this change. As a healer with instant Silence and Fear buttons, I'm not really worried about my opponents getting help with this new mechanic :P

So, this change also affects channeled spells. This is great news for mages like me who love to cast Blizzard, or priests who use Mind Flay. Druids are also now able to chain cast Hurricane, since it no longer has any cooldown (other than GCD). So, Druids can now AOE like frost mages. NICE!

Anyway, for channeled spells, here's what happens. When you're casting a channeled spell, and something smacks you, the duration of the channel will be reduced to 75% duration (shortened by 25%). The second time something smacks you, the duration will be reduced to 50% of it's duration. So, an 8 second channeled spell like Blizzard can, at most, be reduced to 4 seconds. This is MUCH better than having it last 1 or 2 seconds :P

So, my big question about all this is this: If the pushback cuts a channeled spell by 50%, then for spells that would normally tick exactly at that 50% mark, if you have ANY haste rating at all, does that cuase you to get that extra tick back? I'll have to test to find out. Blizzard has 8 ticks over 8 seconds. Mind Flay has 3 ticks over 3 seconds. So, I'll have to experiment to find out which does what, especially since many of us can now SPEC for some spell hate.

One thing I noticed on the test servers is that if you have spell haste equipped, then spell tool tips, even for talents that you don't even have are automatically updated to reflect the spell haste. For example, on my test priest, the Mind Flay talent button showed as doing X damage over 2.97 seconds, even though I didn't have the talent yet. When I removed my spell haste gear, and rechecked, the talent button showed 3.0 seconds.

If the channeling pushback pushes the duration back to 50% of the TALENTED spell duration, then I guess it doesn't make any difference, since it's a percentage of the duration, rather than a flat amount of time like unchanneled spell pushback. We'll see.