Battle of Dazar’alor: Healing Trinkets

BFA opened with a big collection of stat sticks and mana trinkets. The few that tried to be more unique were either subpar (Voodoo Totem) or outright rubbish (Inoculating Extract).

Battle for Dazar’alor adds four trinkets and they’re a step up from Uldir. A tuning pass is quite likely and this article will be updated if we get one before release. In addition to the four listed below, don’t sleep on the 415 ilvl Alchemist trinket which is best in slot, or near best in slot for almost every healer spec. Indeed the biggest problem the new trinkets will face is that our current slate of trinkets are mostly quite powerful, even if a little plain.

Recent Changes

• Ward of Envelopment was buffed by 20%. This turns a good trinket into an excellent one.
• Incandescent Sliver nerfed by 15-20%. Still a very good trinket when you can spend most of the encounter alone but no longer a lock-in for many fights.
• Crest of Pa’ku buffed by 25%. This is basically on par with other stat sticks now and so is very usable.
• Mirror of Entwined Fate buffed by 30%. No change to the curse. This will be incredible for Mythic+ and niche but strong for raid.

Before you go on…

All calculations are on the 400 ilvl Heroic versions of the trinkets. Some of the trinkets scale with your secondary stats and you’ll have to plug your own numbers in to get accurate values.

Our demo character (henceforth known as Alexstrasza) has the following stats:

• 20% Crit
• 8% Versatility

None of the trinkets appear to interact with Mastery or Haste, and all healing procs scale with Versatility.

Incandescent Sliver

Initial Rating: A- (Fight dependent)
Drops from: Opulence

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • The trinket stacks out of combat, so you’ll begin every fight with a full 10.
  • The trinket ‘ticks’ every two seconds and checks for ally every tick. So sometimes you’ll run through an ally and not lose a stack and other times you will. It’s just chance unless you write an over-complicated weak aura to time it.
  • You’ll lose stacks at the same rate regardless of whether you’re standing next to 1 or 19 people. Pets don’t count.
  • You shouldn’t rely on other allies wearing the trinket. In a stack scenario it’s impossible for every other member to even have it, let alone it be good enough for them to be wearing it.
• Numbers wise:
  • This one varies heavily based on the fight so let’s look at it’s maximum value first. If you sit in a corner the entire fight away from everyone then the trinket is worth 220 Crit and 70 Mastery. In that (admittedly unrealistic) situation it’s a clear best in slot since that statline is much better than a standard stat stick.
  • If you sit at 10 stacks for about a third of the fight and vary between 1 and 10 for the rest the trinket drops down to a still ok 146 Crit and 23 Mastery. This is basically the minimum if you’re going to beat a different stat stick with it.

Mythic+

• There aren’t many mechanics that require you to stack in Mythic+ so Incandescent Silver can be pretty strong but it’ll depend heavily on which class you’re healing on and how your group composition looks. If you’re catweaving alongside two melee then you might find spreading five yards from them at all times to be too frustrating to justify the slot.

Verdict: Fight dependent but strong

It’s difficult to give this a concrete ranking before the raid is released but it has a lot of potential. Log analysis tools will give us a better idea of how it fares in actual fights but until then this is on my wishlist. You’ll likely equip it for fights where you’re allowed to spread and you’ll use something else when grouping is key to the fight.

Mirror of Entwined Fate

Initial Rating: A- (Raid) / A (Dungeons)
Drops from: King Rastakhan

The Breakdown

• Heal scales with: Versatility, Crit
• Self-Absorb scales with: Nothing (thank god)
• You should know:
  • You can self-cast it and the heal portion will hit before the curse.
  • The curse lasts five minutes so there’s no getting around healing it off. Fortunately ~16k is going to be removed almost instantly through HoTs, Leech and random AoE heals so you won’t worry too much about it.
• Numbers wise:
  • Looking at a “life saving” trinket from an HPS perspective can be a little unfair to it but it’s useful when judging how much throughput we’re giving up to wear it.
  • At 400 ilvl Mirror of Entwined Fate heals for a net 68,289 * crit * vers – 16,613 = 71,900 on a two minute cooldown. This is 600 HPS and we can expect it to contribute about 2.4% of our healing on a 25,000 HPS fight. That’s exemplary for an on-use trinket and the delivery mechanism is very good.

Mythic+

• Amazing potential in Mythic+ since there are specific single target healing windows in Mythic+ that you won’t have help with. Don’t equip it without one in mind but if you need an extra tool to deal with Nettles on a high Waycrest Manor key, or Spit Gold in Kings Rest then this is a powerful answer. You naturally give up some DPS given the on-use offers none.

Verdict: Mighty

Blizzard have given this a huge buff and it’s now strong from both a life saving and overall throughput perspective.

Ward of Envelopment

Initial Rating: A
Drops from: Champion of the Light

The Targeting Area

H U G E

The Breakdown

• Shield scales with: Versatility
• You should know:
  • This trinket has a bunch of unknown factors in the tooltip so let’s explore them so we can work out what this trinket actually does.
  • The shield is applied when you use the trinket to everyone in the targeted area. It doesn’t persist on the spot like Power Word: Barrier.
  • The size of the shield increases by 7.5% for each additional person inside when you use it (up to a maximum of five total people). To illustrate:
    • Hitting one person will give them a ~55k shield as advertised in the tooltip.
    • Hitting five people will give them a shared ~72k shield.
    • Hitting six people will give five of them a shared ~72k shield.
  • If five people have the 72k shield and player 1 takes a 50k hit then all five players will now have a shield of 22k. They are entirely shared.
  • The shield can hit pets but they’ll never be prioritized if five players are in the circle. This is actually a positive because the pets will bump up the shield for everyone else inside but take no damage themselves in most raid fights.
• Numbers wise:
  • Ward of Envelopment has a healthy radius and you should have no problem getting five people in most shields. That gives it a throughput value of 72,000 * Vers / 120 = 648 HPS. This is incredibly competitive for an on-use trinket and match or beat stat sticks in most scenarios.
  • It won’t scale particularly well with incoming damage so leave it out of your rank 1 attempts. Conversely that makes the trinket particularly excellent in normal and heroic content.

Mythic+

• You’ll often use this similarly to the Mirror of Entwined Fate in Mythic+. It’s an absorb that’ll counter single target mechanics well while not being particularly effective against strong AoE abilities that’ll chew through the shield immediately. It would have been very powerful in Legion at countering AoE one-shot mechanics but there are far fewer of those in BFA. The on-use also offers no DPS value so consider it a good trinket for healing, and just an average one overall.

Verdict: The stat stick empire has a competitor

This is a flexible trinket that competes with the best. It was given a sizeable 20% buff prior to release and is now an incredibly powerful option.

Crest of Pa’ku

WAS BUGGED ON RELEASE BUT NOW CORRECTLY PROCS OFF HEALING SPELLS

Initial Rating: B+
Drops from: Conclave of the Chosen

The Breakdown

• Proc scales with: Nothing
• Stuff you should know
  • If you’re Horde you can use it outdoors to port to the nearest Paku totem. …. hope that doesn’t come out of the items stat budget.
• Numbers wise:
  • Crest of Pa’ku procs 1.5 times per minute for an average of 185 haste. After the recent buff this is basically on-budget for a stat stick. Not particularly interesting but if Haste is a good stat for you then you won’t feel bad about wearing this.
  • The speed is a nice, almost entirely useless, bonus.

Mythic+

• Haste is particularly decent in Mythic+ and stat sticks are good in general. You’re likely to use it if it’s your highest item level trinket.

Verdict: Boring, usable stat stick

I’m ok with a stat stick or two if it means that we avoid tragedies like Inoculating Extract (good for very few healing specs). There isn’t much to analyze here. Stat sticks are good.

Battle for Dazar’alor Content

Dazar’alor Boss Guides | Dazar’alor Healing Trinkets | Dazar’alor Debuff List