Dragonflight Dungeon Trinkets I

Healing trinkets for most of Shadowlands were rather dull stat sticks. The upside was that we always had good trinkets available like Unbound Changeling, Soulletting Ruby, Elegy of the Eternals and many more. In Dragonflight they’ve leaned way harder into weird and (hopefully) wonderful designs. There’s a Whelp that you teach, a Tome that gives you intellect but actually lowers your crit, and a fancy new mana trinket that also deals damage if you’re high on mana. Designs like these in the past have often been quite weak, let’s see what the current state of them is.

There are a huge amount of trinkets when entering an expansion so we’ll split this article into three parts. Two on dungeon trinkets and one on raid trinkets. To compare specific item levels, you can use Questionably Epic Live when the expansion opens. Part 2 of the Dungeon Trinket Preview is now out and can be found here.

Before you go on…

All calculations are on the 372 ilvl Mythic versions of the trinkets. This is the highest we’ll have access to for the first few weeks of the expansion. Some of the trinkets scale with your secondary stats and might vary slightly depending on your loadout but this doesn’t tend to be major. Blizzard tend to do a lot of trinket tuning in the leadup to release but I’ll keep note of any changes.

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

• 25% Crit
• 15% Haste
• 10% Versatility

Beta & Article Updates

• None yet!

Emerald Coach’s Whistle

Initial Rating: B- (Raid); C+ (Mythic+); F if excluding partner buff
Season 1 Available Item Levels: 346 (normal) -> 421 (+20 Vault)
Drops from: Algeth’ar Academy

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • This is one of the few “boring stat sticks” this expansion, and even it has a twist. You and your chosen ally both get the Mastery buff. Unlike “slight support” trinkets like So’leah’s Secret Technique and Elegy of the Eternals, this one splits it’s item budget in half.
  • You can swap your chosen ally as often as you like. The trinket does nothing if you are not playing with others. No ally = no buff.
  • There aren’t many passive or static stat trinkets available in the first two weeks which makes this one of the few.
• Numbers wise:
  • The trinket gives us and someone else in our raid 655 Mastery. That’s equal to 3.6 base mastery percentage points but that will translate differently per spec, Resto Druid for example can expect to gain 1.8% mastery from it, whereas Preservation Evoker would get almost 6.5% mastery from the proc.
  • You can expect about a ~17% uptime on the trinket which is on the low side.
  • This averages out to ~109 flat mastery for you and your friend.

Mythic+

• Mastery tends to vary heavily in value in Mythic+. It’s often a good healing stat (with some exclusions) but doesn’t add any damage. On the other hand, the support aspect is of even higher value – particularly if you have someone in your group with excellent mastery scaling.

Verdict: Poor for personal performance. Just ok overall

Emerald Coach’s Whistle is an on-budget stat stick divided into two. Generally giving stats to a DPS is quite a nice benefit, but you’re giving up quite a bit of personal power here. You’re likely to find it quite useful if you pick it up in the first few weeks, but you’ll ultimately replace this with something stronger.

It also both that you like Mastery and that you have a partner that likes Mastery. Quite easy to find in raid, but not guaranteed in Mythic+ or for specs with poor personal mastery scaling like Resto Shaman.

Water’s Beating Heart

Initial Rating: D-
Season 1 Available Item Levels: 346 (normal) -> 372 (mythic)
Drops from: Halls of Infusion

The Breakdown

• Scales with: Haste, Crit, Versatility
• You should know:
  • Heals for twice the amount if the target is below 20% health. The increase is linear from 100 -> 20%.
  • The armor amount is flat and doesn’t scale with target health.
• Numbers wise:
  • Water’s Beating Heart is on a long two minute cooldown. It does at least scale with all secondaries so we’re looking at around ~800 HPS if used on a target around half health. Passable at early gear levels, but then also consider that 8 seconds is a long time for a target to stay injured and that you’re likely to lose a portion of it to overhealing.

Mythic+

• Hypothetical applications on a tank that’s overpulling, but realistically there are just way stronger trinkets.

Verdict: Paltry heal over time effect on a long cooldown

Water’s Beating Heart is by far one of the weakest trinkets currently available. The heal over time effect is small and on a horrendously long cooldown. It wastes some of it’s budget on armor which reduces it’s applications further since such a buff is only useful on tanks. There are no scenarios where I’d recommend using this.

Spoils of Neltharus

Initial Rating: A
Season 1 Available Item Levels: 346 (Normal) -> 372 (Mythic)
Drops from: Neltharus

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • You can track which buff you’re going to get via a buff on your character. It changes stat extremely frequently and all four secondaries are valid choices.
  • You’ll use on-use trinkets at set points in the fight usually, so you’re not going to have a huge amount of control over which stat you get. You can probably afford to reroll it once, but it would be much more difficult to seek out a specific secondary. That makes this strongest on specs that have decent secondary scaling with most stats.
• Numbers wise:
  • You get a massive 2116 secondaries on use. That’s 12.4% haste, 11.8% crit, 10.3% versatility or… a spec dependent amount of mastery.
  • Averaged out you’re looking at around ~352 secondaries, but that’ll be a little bit of an underestimation of it’s value since we’re going to time this with a period of big healing.
  • 2:00 is a decent cooldown timer for most healers. You can combine it with every second Convoke the Spirits, every Avenging Wrath, every Dream Flight and sometimes even with Evangelism depending on fight timers. This is a great trinket even if you just match it with regular spells, but massively buffing your cooldown windows is very high value.

Mythic+ 

• Just as strong in Mythic+. You might not emphasize combining it with big raid cooldowns quite as often, but the high average stat gain makes it a monster regardless. It also has some bonus offensive use on specs like Holy Paladin that can combine a non-mastery proc with wings to deal larger damage.

Verdict: Amazing, but level capped

It’s a real shame that Neltharus isn’t a Season 1 Mythic+ dungeon since this is a fantastic trinket that’ll see limited play purely because of it’s low 372 max item level. For now you can consider it a lock in for best in slot trinket before the raid opens and look out for it when it comes back as a Mythic+ item later in the expansion.

Tome of Unstable Power

Initial Rating: F
Season 1 Available Item Levels: 346 (normal) -> 421 (+20 Vault)
Drops from: The Azure Vault

The Appearance

Yes it’s that small and hard to see. Good luck!

The Breakdown

• Stuff you should know
  • Tome of Unstable Power will buff up to 4 party members standing inside. Note that if you’re in a raid, anyone outside your group will not benefit – even if stacked.
  • You can leave and rejoin the circle at any time. It won’t disappear if you leave. Of course you might just lose track of where it is given the near invisible animation and small size.
• Numbers wise:
  • You and your friends gain 872 intellect in exchange for 761 crit chance while you’re in the circle. Despite the numbers being close, intellect is much more valuable so this is a power increase while active but you’re looking at a paltry +7-8% healing. That’s critically poor from a personal perspective for a 3 minute cooldown. You’ll need to stack the circle with friends to get any value here.
  • Averages out to +72 intellect, -63 crit chance if you manage to stand in the circle for the full duration which you won’t. Awful.

Mythic+

• An already awkward trinket is even more awkward in a dungeon environment. You have no chance of stacking all five party members in the small circle, will struggle to stand inside for 15 seconds yourself anyway and the payoff is poor even if the stars align. This one goes in the trash can.

Verdict: Back to the drawing board

They tend to make one of these trinkets every expansion and they are near unusable because they insist on giving them a tiny radius. That’s difficult enough to play for a trinket that only buffs yourself, but chronic for one that you want to stack four other allies in. This one also isn’t very good numerically and there are other on-use intellect trinkets that just do the same thing in a much better format.

Miniature Singing Stone

Initial Rating: B+
Season 1 Available Item Levels: 346 (normal) -> 421 (+20 vault)
Drops from: The Nokhud Offensive

The Breakdown

• Stuff you should know
  • Miniature Singing Stone applies an initial buff to a single target. When it’s consumed, or when it runs out, you’ll get four full strength versions on other allies. The initial target can’t be shielded twice, even if there aren’t four alternatives in range.
  • There’s a brief travel time on the shield spread but it’s quick and shouldn’t matter too much.
  • The spread effect appears to have a very big range.
• Numbers wise:
  • Each target is healed for 32,107 x versatility and it’ll regularly hit all five targets. It’s an absorb so little should be wasted. We can expect somewhere around ~1500 HPS from it.
  • That’s very strong for a flat healing trinket. It should compete very well early on in the tier.

Mythic+

• Trinkets like these are great additions to the pool because they allow every healing spec to have some form of effective HP gain to give to a target. That can be really nice in Mythic+ where we can use it as a psudo-defensive on a squishy DPS (or even ourselves).
• You’d love to line up the four-shield portion with a dangerous mechanic but it can be difficult to do so since you need the initial shield to either expire or be used up first.

Verdict: Acceptable

This is a solid choice early on in the tier. It’ll fall behind when we can access the very powerful raid trinkets and as our throughput rises but it’ll hold up for quite a while. Solidly tuned trinket. Might see high level dungeon play to counter dangerous one shots.

We’ll cover the rest in the next few days!

Dragonflight preview series

Dungeon Trinkets I | Dungeon Trinkets II | Dungeon Trinkets III | Raid Trinkets (coming soon)