The War Within Season 1 Raid Trinkets
Season 1 of The War Within adds so many trinket choices that we’re going to break them down by drop location. We’ll cover the raid trinkets first (which are more complex on average) and then check out Dungeon and Delve options which are all fairly powerful this time around. The raid trinkets are more of a mixed bag. They’re very creative but this extra mental overhead can be a downside in some cases compared to simpler trinkets with similar throughput.
Note that they are very likely to tune every trinket in this article, and often do so shortly after publication. I’ve included one DPS trinket below too, you’ll see why.
Treacherous Transmitter
Initial Rating: C+
Dropped By: Nexus-Princess Ky’veza
The Minigames
When you press Treacherous Transmitter you get one of three mini-games that you have to complete to get your massive intellect buff. Here are the possibilities:
Jump
Jump three times. This is probably the easiest one to complete but can still be fairly annoying during heavy healing moments depending on your spec.
Portal
Stand in the portal for about 1.5s to get your buff. It tends to spawn quite close to you.
Orb
Chase down an Orb. It’ll run away from you.
The Breakdown
- Numbers wise:
- You’ll deal about 25% more damage and healing while the trinket is active. That’s a very high number. The issue with this trinket isn’t necessarily the value on it.
- It averages about 2500 intellect which is slightly underbudget but that’s often the penalty you pay for on-use trinkets.
Verdict: Waste of a future vault slot
The problem with trinkets like this one is that you’re introducing mental overhead to what is likely an already dangerous moment of the fight. You are also not able to leave your stack point to run after orbs or portals on a lot of fights. If you want a significant on-use trinket you’re likely to look to alternatives that aren’t quite as much work. The 1:30 cooldown is also not very good for a lot of specs.
Creeping Coagulum
Initial Rating: B
Dropped By: The Bloodbound Horror
The Breakdown
- You should know:
- The tooltip makes it fairly obvious, but the healing you use to feed the trinket is deducted and “lost”. You pay ~900k healing to charge it to full.
- The overhealing DPS portion is confusing and potentially bugged. It actually stores a value based on the raw overhealing the trinket did instead of its overhealing percentage like Rashok’s did in Dragonflight. The 88k on the tooltip can be misleading since typical values will be 250k+ and if you crit it’ll double again!
- The DPS portion can also crit itself which means it actually double dips. This is likely to be change before it goes live.
- Numbers wise:
- If you deduct the redirected healing then each use of the trinket is worth about 2.2 million healing. This averages about ~25k HPS. You can expect it to do 2% or so of your healing on a late heroic or early mythic raid boss. It’ll do a little better in lower-difficulty content.
- It’s worth noting that some of the healing it redirects would have been overhealing anyway.
Verdict: Buggy but underwhelming
We have around 5 million health on Beta so the equation here is paying 800k to get a 12% heal on 5 targets. You can’t even really charge it up ahead of time and then release it when you need it most since it’ll burst as soon as it finishes charging. I just don’t see many situations where I’d rather have this than a stat stick that’ll offer a more consistent benefit.
DPS wise the trinket does ok while it’s bugged. Not game changing but an acceptable bonus. If its value is ever fixed and approaches the 88k tooltip value (or even double it) then it starts to become unnoticeable.
Gruesome Syringe
Initial Rating: B
Dropped By: Broodtwister Ovi’nax
The Breakdown
- You should know:
- Charges of the trinket can overlap, and so can stacks of the intellect buff. So if charge A expires 10s into the fight and charge B expires 10s later then you will have two intellect buffs for 5 seconds and one otherwise. On the UI they will appear as one buff. Generally we like this kind of system.
- Numbers wise:
- If 50% of your charges become an int buff, and half heal then you’re looking at around 2.4k int and ~15k HPS. These are honestly very reasonable totals and compare fine with other trinkets. Having the intellect active when you need it is another matter.
Verdict: Awkward Design
The biggest issue with this trinket is it tries to be a flat-heal trinket with a backup if nobody is injured so that nothing is wasted. Good in theory but the int buff is much stronger than the flat heal – problem is you will only get it when nobody is injured and it doesn’t last very long. The heal value is also not very high. You are not saving many lives with an extra 300k heal. Ideally you have a few charges going into a big healing moment that expire right before for a decent int buff but it’s too inconsistent to guarantee that so you’d rather play another trinket in a similar niche. It isn’t awful though and if you get a high level one early then it’s usable.
Ovi’nax’s Mercurial Egg
Initial Rating: A-
Dropped By: Broodtwister Ovi’nax
The Breakdown
- You should know:
- You will always have 30 stacks in total, split between the int and secondary buffs. You’re never getting zero value from this trinket even if certain stack counts are stronger than others.
- If you backpedal then it’ll treat you as standing still and you’ll get the intellect buff. They’ll probably fix this by launch.
- Numbers wise:
- The perfect configuration is 20 intellect stacks and 10 secondary stats which will give you 3260 intellect and 1490 of your best secondary. That’s on par or slightly better than comparable stat trinkets.
- With 30 intellect stacks and 0 secondary stacks you’ll get 3912 intellect which is a bit worse.
- With 15 of each you’re getting 2445 intellect and 2235 secondaries.
- You will generally want to stay in the 15-20 intellect stack range and it will probably be worth grabbing a weak aura to help out.
- The perfect configuration is 20 intellect stacks and 10 secondary stats which will give you 3260 intellect and 1490 of your best secondary. That’s on par or slightly better than comparable stat trinkets.
Verdict: Very creative for a stat stick
Honestly, I was fairly cold on this trinket before I used it but it plays quite well. There’s an optimal number of stacks you’d like to be at (20 int, 10 secondary) but it doesn’t matter all that much. The trinket is only awful if you have to move so often that your secondary stack is very high (especially 20+) but you have ways to insure against that (stacking int higher before the heavy movement, or clicking the trinket to freeze it).
It’s still likely to be replaced by trinkets that require less thinking for similar performance like Unbound Changeling and Gale of Shadows but if you get an early one at a high item level then it’s very usable.
Spymaster’s Web
Initial Rating: F (Mistweaver); A (Everyone else)
Dropped By: The Silken Court
The Breakdown
- You should know:
- You can continue getting charges of the little intellect buff while the large one is active. That means you’re constantly stacking the buff over a fight.
- There is no deduction for being a healing spec wearing a DPS trinket. You get the same power as a DPS wearing it.
- It procs off damaging spells including DoTs.
- Mistweaver does not get any value here unless you are using the Master of Harmony hero tree since baseline kicks and punches do not proc it.
- For Paladin it’ll proc off spell effects like Holy Shock and Consecration but not Crusader Strike or Judgment.
- For Druid it does proc off Moonfires cast by Grove Guardians.
- Numbers wise:
- Most of the power here comes from the on-use but the stacking int buff does give you even more flexibility around your usage and it slightly encourages using it less often rather than more (since your average stack count will be higher on the passive). If you proc the trinket on cooldown and use it every minute then the passive is worth about 500 intellect.
- The on-use portion is a fixed average instead. If you proc the trinket every six seconds then you’ll get an int buff for 9550 for every minute you’ve charged it. It also lasts quite a long time for a high average around ~3200.
Verdict: Outstanding
Spymaster’s Web is basically the perfect healing trinket with one catch – it only procs off DPS spells and as a result is only on DPS loot tables. It provides some benefit at all times and can be used incredibly flexibly to supercharge your healing during the moments you need it the most. A resto druid might use it every minute with Flourish and Grove Guardians, or if the raid is feeling safe at 1:00 then let it tick over and be even stronger during your second ramp. You can even make the decision dynamically during the fight.
The downside, and only reason the trinket isn’t A+, is that you need a damage event roughly every six seconds in order to stack it. DoTs are the most efficient here and the trinket is strong enough that it’ll be worth casting a couple a minute. There are also a ton of free sources of damage that’ll proc it too like Treants of the Moon, or rotational offensive abilities like Fire Breath.
Given the power of the trinket, it might be nice if it’s changed to work with healing spells too. That will particularly help newbies who are less inclined to DPS during a fight. As-is it might be seen as a slightly more advanced option.