Ghostcrawler recently made an interesting statement regarding his (and, by extension, the general feeling of the Blizzard system design team) on stats in-game. It was actually tangential to the topic he was dealing with, which was Blizzard’s decision not to let haste affect Shadow Word: Pain. GC’s main point was that Shadowpriest damage was where they wanted it without the buff, so they didn’t add it. That’s a completely acceptable line of reasoning, and I have no quibbles with it. What interests me, instead, is a remark he tossed off about haste versus spellpower during the discussion:
Simply keeping the current duration and letting the hots tick faster is problematic because then it’s a much bigger dps increase — you are just getting more damage per unit time. At some point, haste might even trump spell power as a dps stat
What’s interesting, to me, about this statement is that it effectively codifies stat homgeneity on a per-class basis. Every class is assumed to have some set of stats about which they care devoutly, and another about which they could give two flying farts (strength on cloth bracers leaps to mind). Then, they have a set of stats which are of relatively equal interest to every class, and it is about these which players have reasonable choice. This will only get worse in Cataclysm, as a variety of stats simply disappear.
I think it’s the danger of having solid theorycrafters working fulltime on WoW. People can quibble about Ghostcrawler’s comments and errors (nothing will ever top the ret fiasco at 3.0 release), but largely he and his team get everything tuned within a desirable range.
The downside is, as you say, because it means everything becomes approximately equal, if tuned properly. The problem, if there is one, is that there is only one metric on which people are judged: DPS. It doesn’t matter how you get there, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about randomly varying, deliberately varying, or a perfectly steady time series. So haste, crit, spell damage, attack power, it’s all one and the same.
I think it’s a major weakness in WoW, and one that’s become glaringly apparent now that the theory is more solid.
It’s a particularly strange comment given that haste has already trumped (or at least equalled) spellpower as a stat for fire mages, in top-end gear.