My understanding is that haste rating lowers the GCD. Is this also the case with effects that increase cast speed by a % (Wrath of Air totem, Elemental Mastery, Troll Berserking, Blood Lust)?
If I want to know what my GCD is with my current set of gear/buffs, will it be the same as the cast time of a spell that is base 1.5seconds? So I can just look at at my cast time of Lesser Healing Wave to see what my current GCD is? And if my LHW's cast time shows a number less than 1 second, that means my GCD is exactly 1.0 seconds?
btw yes, the spells you have mentioned reduce GCD as well.
example: with 0 haste my gcd is default 1,5 -> by using Elemental mastery it shows 1,3 gdc (with the addon I have mentioned)
At level 80, 50% haste (equivalent to 1639 haste rating) is required to reach a GCD of 1 second.
In most raids, you will have a total of 8.15% provided via raid buffs: 5% from Wrath of Air Totem + 3% from Improved Moonkin aura (balance druids) or Swift Retribution (retribution paladin). Haste is multiplicative so the total benefit is 8.15%. The remaining difference (equivalent to 1269 rating or 38.7%) must be made up for by gear.
My understanding is that haste rating lowers the GCD. Is this also the case with effects that increase cast speed by a % (Wrath of Air totem, Elemental Mastery, Troll Berserking, Blood Lust)?
Troll racial and Bloodlust will let you go under the 1second GCD cap for their duration.
And if my LHW's cast time shows a number less than 1 second, that means my GCD is exactly 1.0 seconds?
No, because it could simply be a spell that is, by essence, faster to cast than 1second. The right way to know if you are GCD capped would be to look up the calculation i quoted above.
You could even google it, gcd cant be less then 1 Sec, unless u are those kind of people who buy scripts for exploiting gcd to even less, you will notice that better in arenas at high rating, when some1 nukes u in 2 sec under def cds