We heard a little while back from Ghostcrawler that haste would soon affect Heal-over-Time (HoT) and Damage-over-Time (DoT) spells,and sure enough,soon after that,Shadow Priests -- who use DoTs all the time -- saw a nice buff.But of course this is the PTR,and everything is subject to change,and so last weekend,Blizzard removed Shadow Word:Pain from that equation -- right now,it is not affected by haste at all.GC says that sure enough,Blizzard thought shadow priest DPS was too high with all of their DoTs given a boost,so SW:P got the boot (for now -- remember,this is all still on PTR).

Misery,my go-to shadow priest,has some good insight on the change,and says that sure,if shadow priest DPS was too high, it was too high.But it is too bad that Shadow Word:Pain had to take the nerf,especially since you get it so early on in the class and it is such an iconic spell for the spec.The reason these guys are so happy about the hasted DoTs is that DoTs as cast do not really scale with your gear -- they just sort of do their damage on their own.When haste got put into the equation,shadow priests became happy that they could go after more haste to increase the DoT part of the damage. They could tailor the spec and spells the way they wanted to use them.