Dragonflight Vault

Season 3 adds a ton of new embellishments to the game – most of which are varying forms of “here have some stats”. Embellishments in general are still very small portions of your power and you shouldn’t expect much more than 1% healing from each. Early in the season, you’ll also be quite limited in your crafts so keep that in mind too.

We’re only covering the new stuff here. We’ll also take a quick look at Undulating Sporecloak since it received a mini-rework. We’ll clear up some of the confusion about whether this was a nerf or a very big, very large buff. Ultimately most of these won’t end up seeing a ton of play at current tuning.

 

Embellishment Tuning & Article Updates

  • None, though I’m strongly expecting Sporecloak to be brought down. It’s likely it’ll still be a key pick for healers afterwards but we really need to see it first.

 


Undulating Sporecloak

Initial Rating: S
Crafted By: Tailoring

 

The Breakdown

  • You should know:
    • The shield size is half as big in season 3, but they’ve added flat versatility to it while above 70% health to compensate. This was more than adequate compensation and in fact Sporecloak has become one of the best stat embellishments as a result. If unchanged you might even find a good portion of your DPS are wearing it too!
    • Behind the scenes, there’s some reason to believe the size of the versatility isn’t intended. It appears to be using a scaling table intended for flat damage / healing effects but it’s a secondary proc. As a result, it scales very hard with item level.
  • Numbers wise:
    • At max level you get a ridiculous 482 versatility while above 70% health. That’s only a bit less than Elemental Lariat but with 3x the uptime. There’s a very high chance that gets nerfed before you can craft your high level version but check back on launch week for any updates.

 

Verdict: Ascended

I’m really restating it for the third time but this is an absolute priority craft in its current state. It offers more stats than almost any other embellishment, while also being by far the best defensive item in the game.


Verdant Conduit

Initial Rating: B-
Crafted By: Leatherworking (but usable by any armor type)

 

The Breakdown

  • You should know:
    • This is about as typical as stat procs come. Multiple times a minute you’ll get a 10 secondary stat proc that can be any of the four. It has a 10s internal cooldown so your procs can’t overlap.
    • You can expect to have one of the four buffs up about 50% of the fight. High uptime procs like this are really nice to see as healers since pull-to-pull variance isn’t very desirable.
    • Verdant Conduit has an extra mechanic that increases the size of the proc but reduces the proc frequency when you have 1 or 2 other allies that are also using it. We don’t know the precise mechanic at work here but it appears that you get 10% more power and a 10% lower proc rate, for each ally with it – up to 2 max. The funny thing here is that would mean the power actually decreases with each ally you add. We’ll be able to investigate this in more detail when it goes live but it doesn’t appear to make much difference to its overall strength.
  • Numbers wise:
    • You’ll get about 140 secondaries on average. Its uptime is hit quite hard by its 10-second internal cooldown. As a result, you’ll never have more than one secondary stat buff at a time.

 

Verdict: Design good. Tuning is not quite there

There’s no reason Verdant Conduit couldn’t be a top 3 choice for basically every healing spec. Sadly though the tuning just isn’t there and you’d rather have Elemental Lariat instead which is a similar design but with more choice over which secondaries proc. The upside is you can attach it to almost any armor slot.


Verdant Tether

Initial Rating: B
Crafted By: Tailoring (but usable by any armor type)

 

The Breakdown

  • You should know:
    • Verdant Tether gives you and your bonded target a variable amount of versatility during the proc. If you are 30+ yards away from them you’ll get the bottom of the tooltip range. If you are standing literally right on top of them you’ll get the top of the tooltip range. There’s no grace period here and even if lightly stacked you’d get ~90-95% rather than 100.
    • You’ll see a light green link between you and your bonded ally (pictured above) while it’s active to make it a bit easier to move toward them. Good luck tracking this during a boss.
    • Links last for 15 seconds so you’ll have close to a 50% uptime on the buff at some value.
    • Doesn’t do anything when you’re alone so won’t help much with any world content.
  • Numbers wise:
    • At max level, you should average about 160 versatility if you get about 50% efficiency on the “stand next to your tether” portion. We’ll see how realistic that is next week.

 

Verdict: Tuned well but it’s awkward

I find designs like this don’t mesh well with the power level assigned to embellishments. Having to track and change positions in order to turn a 0.5% effect into a 1% effect is never going to be very practical. You are already investing a ton of brain GCDs managing your spells, the fight, and more and by wearing this you’re adding another to that pile for paltry returns. A lot of encounters also restrict that type of movement anyway. If I’m on Mythic Sark on a ranged healing spec there are a lot of moments where I’m strictly unable to move into the melee camp and I imagine if I told my raid leader I was doing it for half a percent versatility I might not get an invite to the next raid.

The best way to play Verdant Conduit ends up being to ignore that part of the effect and just treat it as a passive – enjoying extra value when it procs on someone who’s already nearby. The tuning on it is reasonable overall. You’re getting more stats than similar alternatives like Elemental Lariat, but they’re shared and your pull-to-pull variance will be quite a bit higher.

 


Flourishing Dream Helm

Initial Rating: Potentially A-
Crafted By: Blacksmithing (Plate wearers only)

 

The Breakdown

  • You should know:
    • Procs on damage taken. The ally bond has a maximum range of 30 yards and is consumed when you move within 5 yards. You should have no issue consuming it on any fellow melee during most fights. If it procs on ranged players that are 30 yards away you’re probably just going to ignore it. Movement is too prescribed on most fights to be running back and forth for an absorb.
  • Numbers wise:
    • The shield here is quite big. You’re looking at around 150k at max level and then an extra 100k on yourself and your bonded ally. These absorbs do stack.

 

Verdict: Could be very strong defensively

Flourishing Dream Helm has some of the same issues as Verdant Tether above so give that a quick read first. The difference though is that more of the power is in the initial self-shield proc. It’s sufficiently big that if the other effect didn’t exist at all then this would still be a fine choice. It feels more like an added extra than a necessity though that’s definitely due to tuning more than design. Your bonded ally here is limited to 30 yards from you which means if the melee stack and ranged stack are further apart than that you’ll get very good value indeed.

Do note that the proc here is tied to taking damage rather than casting spells. That’s usually still quite a safe designation since most fights have constant damage but this is something we were not able to test in full on the PTR and will require live testing. I don’t recommend crafting it until we are able to verify it works well on these fights.

This is not a good Mythic+ item.


Dreamtenders Charm

Initial Rating: D
Crafted By: Jewelcrafting

 

The Breakdown

  • You should know:
    • This seems reasonable by looking at the tooltip. There’s one problematic catch that isn’t mentioned until you craft it: When you drop below 70% health you don’t just lose all of your crit stacks, you also can’t gain any again for 30 seconds afterward. Socketing your gear with Ysemeralds (gems with heavy haste) will reduce this downtime by “lingering” the buff for 1s per gem. The problem is, the parts of the fight we’re most interested in are when the entire raid is getting blasted, and being locked out of your best embellishment during those times is a deal breaker no matter how many gems we’re wearing.
    • It’s also probably worth adding that we wouldn’t love this even if they removed the 30s downtime. With something like the reworked Sporecloak, we regain the benefit immediately upon healing ourselves back above 70% (which is very fast) but here we’d have to wait 20 seconds to regain full power.
    • In a vacuum where we can guarantee we’d never fall below 70% this would be fairly good. It gives more stats than most other stat embellishments at max stacks, though still less than Undulating Sporecloak.

 

Verdict: Not an appropriate healing choice.

I’m not sure how this rates for DPS specs, but it’s not a good fit for healing.