Haste: An Introduction

Please note, this article covered haste rating in Burning Crusade, and should no longer be considered accurate in Wrath of the Lich King. 

So, you’re looking at a nice purple with haste rating on it, and you know people have been discussing haste a lot lately, especially the casters. Unlike spell haste for them, physical haste sadly does not lower the GCD. This affects a key point for us, in how our mechanics work.

You may or may not be aware that Auto Shot has a 0.5 second cast time, originally put in place to prevent it firing while we’re running. The bad thing about this is that Auto Shots can be interrupted if something else is occurring when they’re cooled down (your attack speed can be considered Auto’s cooldown) and attempting to fire. In our case, “something else” includes the GCD, thus it’s actually bad for us to have enough haste to go faster than the GCD.

For all our specs, the use of haste is to tighten up our rotations to have less dead time. BM is already fairly tight from talents, but MM and SV have two options regarding haste gear.

1. Apply large amounts of haste to approach 2.0 (or lower) seconds like a BM.
2. Apply small amounts of haste to trim normal attack speed to around 2.5 seconds.

Why 2.0 and 2.5 seconds? Because our GCD is not reduced, 2.5 is the nearly the lowest attack speed at which a 1:1.5 rotation can be achieved (your latency and reflexes play into this), while anything below 2.0 is forced to use a 1:1 rotation. Another thing to consider is haste is a fairly expensive stat in the item budget. Compare two roughly equivalent items and you’ll see the one with haste has significantly less direct damage stats. This is less of a problem for SV, where the emphasis is on crits, but MM relies on hitting as hard as possible, at least under Blizzard’s current vision.

Now we need to do a bit of math, but I’ll keep it brief. 15.78 haste rating is 1% haste, our quivers give 15% speed increase, Quick Shots (the Imp Hawk proc) gives another 15% (with full points, which we’ll assume here). To calculate your attack speed:

WeaponSpeed / (QuickShots * Quiver * TotalHaste) = AttackSpeed

If we were BM, you’d also toss Serpent’s Swiftness in with the other haste effects. Now, let’s assume a 3.0 bow and a nice round 100 haste rating. 100 rating divided by 15.78 gives us 6.337% haste. Converting to decimals, we’ll calculate both normal and Quick Shots speeds.

3.0/(1.15 * 1.06337) = 2.45 seconds.
3.0/(1.15 * 1.15 * 1.06337) = 2.13 seconds.

As you can see, with or without Quick Shots, we’re essentially forced into a 1:1 rotation, as we’re hard pressed to maintain a 1:1.5 when it’s up. There’s also significant dead time at normal speed, and this is with 100 haste rating. To achieve the tight 2.0 second 1.1 rotation without Quick Shots, we’d need roughly 300 haste! We’d have to sacrifice tons of damage stats just to achieve this, so the myth of “MM hunter at BM speed” is easily seen to be unfeasible.

The correct use of haste for MM is to trim your normal attack speed to around 2.5 seconds.