Season 2 Trinket Preview

Season 2 offers a very interesting selection of trinkets – particularly in raid. We get three very high item level class trinkets, an update on an old favorite and one of the strongest healing trinkets we’ve seen in years. In Mythic+ the options are a little more strained with the “new” Dragonflight dungeons offering little and the Battle for Azeroth / Legion returning dungeons having no healing or stat trinkets in them at all. Instead we’ll make do with Spoils of Neltharus and the new Rainsong in most cases and we’ll cover the latter below in quite some detail.

From a theorycrafting perspective the Aberrus trinkets are a little strange in that most of the stat procs scale with haste. This happens from time to time but is generally very rare. We’ll see if they leave it in for launch. We’ll also see that multiple of the class trinkets don’t proc at all off healing effects currently. This would be very disappointing if it went live, however the PTR is a quickly changing environment and we should expect them to work for all roles by the time the raid goes live.

Before you go on…

All calculations are on the Mythic versions of the trinkets (or 441 for Mythic+) however the conclusions apply to them at any item level. The new raid, Aberrus, has four different item levels for each difficulty with later bosses dropping higher item level loot. Keep that in mind when looking at specific numbers. You can see a full chart of all new and old trinkets at QE Live. It’ll be updated for 10.1 a little after servers come back up.

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

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

Trinket Tuning & Article Updates

• None yet though further changes are still likely.

Rashok’s Molten Heart

Initial Rating: S+
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 405 -> 444
Drops from: Rashok (Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible)

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • The healing portion of the trinket is only active when you have the mana buff.
  • While you have the mana buff (Molten Radiance) every direct heal you cast will leave a HoT on the target. You’re limited to 1 HoT per person per Molten Radiance buff. That means to get the most value you’ll want to hit as many unique targets as you can. AoE healing does count, so long as it’s direct. So Wild Growth is out, Light of Dawn is in. Big raid wide cooldowns like Tranquility will hit everyone in raid, though it might be tough to line it up with a proc. Notably Atonement also counts as a direct heal for this. This is worth tracking and each spec will have an optimal way to play into it.
  • Proc rate scales with Haste, which makes it one of the few mana trinkets to do so. The last one was the similarly overstuffed Forbidden Obsidian Claw.
• Numbers wise:
  • The trinket restores 7289 mana 2 x 1.15 times per minute for about ~16750 mana per minute. We restore 120,000 mana per minute naturally so about a 14% increase. You should find it restores a little more than Conjured Chillglobe over an average fight.
  • Healing wise you’re going to see a ton of variation since it depends on how many allies you’re able to tag during each buff. We’ll use 8 for our example here but if you pay attention to it you could average much higher. You’re also not all that worried about overhealing due to the versatility buff. With an 8 target average it should add ~6500 HPS at 50% overhealing. That’s a ton of healing and even on difficult mythic fights it should add 3-5% healing.
  • The versatility buff is kind of inversely powerful to the heal effect (since the more you overheal, the more versatility you’ll give to the raid and it’s actually even more powerful.

Mythic+

• Rashok’s is a little worse in Mythic+. Mana is slightly less in demand, you have fewer unique targets to spread the HoT to and it’s a little RNG. It’s still a great overall package and the versatility in buff in particular is of very high value.

Verdict: New Best Friend

When you combine the three portions of Rashok’s it adds up to a lot and this is a rare S+ tier trinket. It’s also only appealing to healing specs which will make it much easier to actually obtain, unlike a lot of other trinkets we’re going to cover. Assuming it goes in unchanged, you’re likely to see this out on week 1 on whichever difficulty you’re able to clear the boss on.

Ominous Chromatic Essence

Initial Rating: A+
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 405 -> 444
Drops from: The Forgotten Experiments (Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible)

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • There are actually five buffs or “dragonflights” available:
    • Bronze Resonance – Haste Buff – Oathstone is in Thaldraszus.
    • Ruby Resonance – Versatility Buff – Oathstone is in the Ruby Lifeshrine.
    • Emerald Resonance – Crit Buff – Oathstone is in Ohn’ahran Plains.
    • Azure Resonance – Mastery Buff – Oathstone is in Azure Span.
    • Obsidian Resonance – Buff value is split into all four secondaries – Oathstone is in the Waking Shores.
  • You can use your trinket next to one of the Oathstones in order to swap which permanent buff you get. You’ll also gives allies a buff if they’re a different Dragonflight than you. That’s going to be a bit tricky in Mythic+ and if the trinket is good for DPS you might find you’re asked to wear a specific resonance regardless of whether it is best for you or not.
  • The bronze buff is a little buggy on the PTR and doesn’t give its buff to allies. It’ll likely be fixed by launch.
  • Buffs are all raid wide, not party wide.
• Numbers wise:
  • Passively you get 562 of your favorite stat. That’s 2.7-3.3% outside of mastery. Already good but then you’re also able to collect four other buffs at a smaller power level.
  • Each other resonance (or dragonflight) you have access to in your raid or party adds ~66 secondaries. If you’re able to have one of each you’re looking at a heavy 826 secondaries. This isn’t a rare trinket and it drops off an early boss so it shouldn’t be impossible to get a few of these even early on. You really just need it to actually be good for multiple specs.

Mythic+

• In mythic+ it’s still at least “pretty good”. You’ll find it much more difficult to collect all five buffs and it’s less likely in general that every member of the party will own it and want to wear it. Passive stat gain is still always solid though.

Verdict: New… Close friend

Passive stats are very good as a healer and in many ways this is an even cleaner version of Incarnate Icon since you get to pick your secondary and the “group” buffs are also passive instead of being procs. The downside is you’ll need even more people with it, and they’ll also need to prefer a mix of secondaries. Once you’ve assembled a group with a set this is a great trinket, and because it isn’t “very rare” it’s much more obtainable than the trinkets below.

Screaming Black Dragonscale

Initial Rating: A+
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 408 -> 447
Drops from: Kazzara, the Hellforged (Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible)

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • Screaming Black Dragonscale has very high uptime due to its 3ppm and some wacky haste scaling which is incredibly rare on a stat proc trinket. You could see 50-60%++ uptime on almost 6% crit and 2% leech. It’s no Rashok’s but this holds up very well.
  • There’s also a really weird on-use that you can only use while airborne. If you’re at least 15 yards in the air you’ll deal some extra damage when you hit the ground. Just think of it as a slow fall buff with extra flavor rather than a core part of the trinkets power.
• Numbers wise:
  • The 447 version of the trinket gives 1017 crit and 319 leech on proc for ~600 average crit and ~190 average leech. This is really good and has the advantage of dropping off the first boss. Unfortunately though it is tagged as Very Rare so you’ll need to be lucky to yoink one in week 1 or 2.

Mythic+

• Arguably ever so slightly worse in Mythic+ but still a fantastic trinket for all levels of play.

Verdict: Big stat stick with high uptime? Good. Leech? Gooooood

There isn’t a ton I can write on a fairly straightforward trinket except to say that it’s very good.

Neltharion’s Call to Chaos

Initial Rating: C+ (Paladin), C (Evoker)
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 418 -> 457
Drops from: Echo of Neltharion (Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible)
Class Restrictions: Paladin, Evoker

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • This doesn’t currently proc off any healing spells including Dream Breath, Spiritbloom, Emerald Blossom or Light of Dawn.
  • Does proc off offensive AoE spells like Fire Breath (including the DoT), Azure Strike and Consecration.
• Numbers wise:
  • Putting numbers together for this one is a bit difficult in its current state since you’re going to be getting procs fairly inconsistently. With high Consecration uptime Paladin can get close to a good uptime but I don’t like to recommend trinkets that are mostly either broken or in such a poor design space. If it’s changed before the patch goes live then this article will be updated.

Mythic+

• Arguably even worse in Mythic+ where a random +5% damage taken debuff can easily get you killed on multiple season 1 and season 2 fights. You’d need a massive upside to justify such a risk and this trinket does not deliver it.

Verdict: Broken, not in a good way

A 5% random damage taken increase is already a contentious downside that is hard to justify when alternative trinkets are just as strong and with much less variance. We don’t need to concern ourselves with that debate currently though since the trinket is in such a poor state on the PTR that you’ll be trading away even a 457 item level version.

Neltharion’s Call to Dominance

Initial Rating: S (Monk), A (Shaman)
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 418 -> 457
Drops from: Echo of Neltharion (Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible)
Class Restrictions: Monk, Shaman

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • Neltharion’s Call to Dominance is the only class trinket that you actually have quite a bit of agency over. It procs off Celestial or big totem usages so we control when we want the power.
  • It also has by far the smallest downside of the class trinkets. You only get a small movement speed penalty and it’s only active when you have the huge intellect boost which means it can’t randomly kill you by proccing at a bad time.
• Numbers wise:
  • We get 3 + haste procs per minute on average. It’s a bit strange for an intellect proc like this to scale with haste but we see similar oddities through a lot of the 10.1 trinket collection. That means with our demo characters fairly paltry haste we end up with ~670 intellect on average.

Verdict: Class trinket done right

While a 670 int average is slightly smaller than other class trinkets (when they work anyway) but we can line this up with moments of big healing. We can also play around it for specific fights if we want and at 10 stacks it’s almost a 100% healing increase. We haven’t had a trinket in recent memory that offered this ridiculous an increase in burst HPS. The only real change they should make is to remove the haste scaling, and improve the base proc rate in exchange. That would reduce the gulf in power between different specs.

For Mistweavers it also offers an ideal secondary in Haste. It’s quite common to play 30%+ haste as a modern Mistweaver and that’ll blow out the trinkets average even more. Combining it with honestly either Celestial is a huge healing window and you’ll see a noticeable power increase by equipping this.

For Shaman it’s just good but not great. You won’t be running as much haste and the trinket triggers are much more awkward.

Neltharion’s Call to Suffering

Initial Rating: A+ (Disc Priest), F (Holy Priest, Druid)
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 418 -> 457
Drops from: Echo of Neltharion (Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible)
Class Restrictions: Priest, Druid

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • Does not proc off healing spells (are you seeing a trend?). That means if you want to proc it as Holy Priest or Resto Druid then you’ll need to be actively maintaining DoTs like Moonfire and Shadow Word: Pain.
• Numbers wise:
  • Neltharion’s Call to Suffering procs 1 x haste times per minute. That means our demo character will have an uptime of around ~20% and will average about 800 intellect. This is very solid for a trinket though not as exceptional as you might hope given it also carries a medium sized self-DoT with it.
  • In raid, Holy Priest and Resto Druid are likely to see a significantly smaller uptime. The trinket isn’t strong enough for you to commit to keeping a DoT on the enemy 100% of the time, and on average you’re likely to see very poor returns.

Mythic+

• In Mythic+ most players will at least see higher uptime since DPS spells are much more embedded in your rotation. It’s still kind of middling though, and if you’re forced to commit a lot of GCDs to healing for a while then you’ll basically never line up int procs with it.

Verdict: Worrying signs from the PTR

If you’re a Disc Priest then this is a top 3 trinket for sure. You’ll wish it had a higher uptime so that variance was a little lower but if you come across one before you’ve assembled Dragonscale + Rashok’s then it’s very usable.

If you’re a Resto Druid or Holy Priest then I’d recommend submitting bug reports so that this key feature of the raids loot isn’t unnecessarily unusable for your spec.

Rainsong

Initial Rating: B+
Season 2 Available Item Levels: 402 (+2) -> 447 (+20 Vault)
Drops from: Vortex Pinnacle

The Breakdown

• You should know:
  • The rainsong “ally” proc is only active while you have the haste buff active. This won’t effect your gameplay at all, but you can expect your group buffs to come in bursts rather than being consistently active.
• Numbers wise:
  • If you only look at the self-buff then Rainsong averages around 365 haste. This is quite below par for a 441 trinket and if we don’t particularly care for our friends then the trinket isn’t very good.
  • If we do care about overall raid or party performance though (and you probably should) then we can also include the ~243 average haste we give out to others. Combining the two is a much more appealing ~600 haste. That compares well with some of the stronger trinkets of the tier, and given the poor quality of dungeon trinkets this tier you could definitely find yourself wearing this if your spec likes haste.

Mythic+

• Like most stat sticks, this is just as good in Mythic+. The ally buff is arguably even better here.

Verdict: Sharing is caring

Trinkets like Rainsong are a fairly good place for them to introduce ally buffs. It’s not ridiculously overpowered like some other “support” effects which means you’re really just making a choice to share ~1% or so of your power with the group instead of as a personal buff.