Empowered Fire

Trinkets yes, pretty trinkets!

Haven’t been posting much — as Ais said, the holidays and some real-life issues have interfered. (All good things, though!) But it’s a new year and we’ve got some questions to field. All of these are about the piece of gear that frustrates me the most: trinkets.

I’m an arcane mage currently running with Illustration of the Dragon Soul and Abyssal Rune. Should I replace one of them with the Talisman of Resurgence?

The short answer to this is yes. Yes, yes, yes. Nearly every single arcane mage should have Talisman of Resurgence: the only exceptions are if you have some combination of Reign of the Dead/Unliving (heroic or regular – you can use both), Dislodged Foreign Object (ew), Muradin’s Spyglass, or Flare of the Heavens. You can use Rawr to figure out what would be the best combination for you, but for the majority of arcane mages, we’re gonna have Talisman of Resurgence in one of those spots. Getting the badges is easy: if you don’t have one yet, farm heroics until you have the 50 Triumph needed to pick it up. In this case, Abyssal + Talisman of Resurgence is the best combo of those three. Keep in mind that Abyssal Rune is a random spellpower proc, which means it could go off as you’re moving out of fire or right before you need to kite Anub’s spikes. I still think that even with inopportune procs it’s a better choice, simply because the passive haste is so good for arcane. Good news is, Abyssal Rune is pretty easy to get: it drops from regular ToC5.

How does the Talisman of Resurgence compare to the stacking haste from Talisman of Volatile Power?
Well… the Talisman of Volatile Power is a concentrated piece of crap. Let’s just assume you’re an arcane mage. The passive bonus on the trinket is critical strike rating, which is the worst caster stat available to arcane mages right now (aside from int and spirit — and even then it’s only about a .3 DPS scaling difference between crit and int). At first glance, the haste bonus looks nice: it increases your rating by 57 each cast, which is 1.7% casting speed increase. (Casting speed is not the same as cast time, mind.) Not too shabby! Where it falls apart is the 20 second duration of the effect. Let’s assume that you have 600 haste rating and are specced for Netherwind Presence. Your AB cast time is 2.01 seconds. You pop your trinket; the next cast is 1.98, then 1.95, then 1.93. As a player, you’re not going to notice the two to three hundreths of a second cast difference, but even tiny differences do add up. But the effect only lasts 20 seconds: it’ll take you over 15 to stack it to eight (assuming perfect execution and no lag). You’ll get maybe two to three casts with the full effect. The DPS increase from this trinket is just so teeny, even stacking it with other cooldowns.

It’s … it’s just not very good. Sundial of the Exiled is much better, even for an arcane mage. Forge Ember, a blue trinket from HoS, is better. I’ll say it again: if you don’t have Talisman of Resurgence, grind the badges and get it.

But, Meta, why is Muradin’s Spyglass good if it has all that crit?
Yeah, yeah, crit isn’t very good for arcane casters. However, the secondary effect of that trinket is a stacking spellpower buff. You can’t charge it up before combat (mages with Illustration could cast a couple of spells (Slow Fall or AE) before the fight began), but you’ll be running with 180 spellpower for the majority of the fight. Fire mages will especially delight in this trinket, as the ticks from Living Bomb will maintain the stack.

Unlike Reign of the Dead/Unliving, the heroic and non-heroic versions of this trinket (and Dislodged Foreign Object) cannot be used together. (This is per the 3.3 patch notes: “Icecrown Citadel Items: Normal and Heroic versions of Icecrown Citadel rings and trinkets are considered Unique-Equipped and cannot be used at the same time.”)

How do I weigh a proc versus a static bonus?
The short answer is that the average player doesn’t do this: you let someone else do the math and tell you whether an item is good or not. If, say, Nibelung drops and you have never seen the item before, you’re probably not going to be able to tell if the item is an upgrade for you. Even items with their proc spelled out, like Dislodged Foreign Object, are confusing: most players can tell it’s good, but they can’t tell you how good. Is it better than Reign? Is it better than heroic Reign? (The answer: I believe so.) And so the average player must do research before fights to find out what drops from what boss and then cross-reference those pieces of gear with math from trusted sources to see if it’s an improvement. Tools like Rawr help, but it takes a while for the procs to be accurately calculated and added in: Dislodged Foreign Object has yet to be modeled in the 2.3.5 release of Rawr. Blizzard seems to recognize the difficulty in eyeballing gear: we have multiple stats to juggle, procs that require a chunk of math to evaluate, and then just mind-bogglingly big numbers (think: a single weapon from Icecrown has more spellpower on it than my mage did total when I was doing Black Temple). Until Cataclysm fixes it (heh), most of us are left relying on others to do the mathy stuff for us.

That’s it for now, but if you have any mage questions, please feel free to ask either in comments, via Twitter (@empoweredfire), or shoot us an e-mail at empoweredfire AT gmail DOT com.

Tags: arcane-mages, arcane-trinkets, Icecrown-gear, Icecrown-mage-gear, mage-gear, mage-trinkets, Talisman-of-Resurgence