Blood Pact: Patch 6.2 Warlock trinkets

Welcome to Blood Pact, Blizzard Watch’s regular column for Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction Warlocks. This week, your hostess Megan O’Neill (@_poneria) says Flaskataurs are her favorite NPCs.

The tier sets and new Warlock trinkets have appeared on the Public Test Realms (PTR) outside of raids, courtesy of the great NPCs called Flaskataurs that provide normally loot-only gear at a gold cost, so that we can more easily test things on the PTR. I just spent the last week without a priest around to cleanse me of the disease I had, so I’ve unfortunately been spending more time sleeping than testing the PTR or running simulations. So, admittedly, I haven’t seen many of the new raid encounters to thoroughly judge these set bonuses and trinkets in their environment, but I can theorize until then.

Traditional trinkets

These are the straightfoward trinkets that provide either flat stat or simple stat buffs via a proc system. Little to zero management is required to maximize damage from these.

I’m not entirely certain Chipped Soul Prism is final. It’s got Intellect plus every caster secondary stat — Critical Strike, Haste, Multistrike, Mastery, and Versatility. Perhaps the Intellect on that one is low because of all the other stats, but since they’re all the same 170 number, I feel like it’s still a placeholder set of stats. The stats missing from other trinkets are Multistrike and Versatility, so I imagine a more final pick-two kind of trinket that we normally see would be Multistrike and maybe Mastery.

The other flat stat trinket is Iron Reaver Piston, which has Intellect and even amounts of Critical Strike and Haste.

Finally, the kind of trinket with a flat secondary stat and then an Intellect proc is Desecrated Shadowmoon Insignia, with flat Mastery.

Special effects trinkets

These are the trinkets with a special DoT or damage attack that happens instead of a stat bonus.

First, let’s talk about Unblinking Gaze of Sethe. From the wording of the trinket, I was on the lookout for a flashy, wide beam that I could have time to aim better, but I didn’t see that. What I saw — or, what I think I saw — was just a flash of dark purple shadow fly out toward my target, there and gone in the blink of an eye. It was almost unnoticable when I was testing it as Affliction or Demonology, but I finally saw it when it stood out against fiery Destruction.

I’m not excited about this as a trinket, even meant as an AOE kind of trinket. Sure, we ranged stand in the back of the room, but hitting the most targets with this beam means choosing from the back of the add pack, not from the center like our traditional AOE spells normally demand. This trinket seems like a free, passive damage spell that hits at least our target if not more, and life will be aggravated by not being in the “best” standstill DPS spot in the room for every boss fight. Oddly enough, I think it would end up better as a single target DPS trinket, since all the bolts are guaranteed to hit your target, rather than hoping that the adds align in an AOE type of fight.

Prophecy of Fear is the other special effect trinket. Certain spells apply a Mark of Doom debuff on the target for 10 seconds, and then certain spells that hit the target while the Mark is still up cause the target to explode for some Shadow damage.

By “certain spells” I mean “direct damage spells” and that’s the problematic part of it.

This trinket won’t bother Demonology and Destruction. Demonology is going to be casting Soul Fire a lot this tier and Destruction has only one spell that isn’t direct damage, and even that one has a direct damage component. However, for Affliction, only Haunt can trigger the Mark to occur, and to make it even worse, Haunt is the same duration — 10 seconds — as the Mark debuff is. Furthermore, Affliction set bonuses aim the Warlock toward casting less Haunt, not more. My testing with this trinket as Affliction on Stormwind test dummies reveals that the Mark doesn’t even deal a consolation final explosion if you don’t manage to trigger the explosion at all. So this trinket is nothing but a flat Intellect bonus with a dud proc for Affliction.

The Archimonde trinket

Archimonde in Hellfire Citadel will offer 11 different trinkets, one for every class. Instead of stat bonuses, the trinket is just one passive effect for each spec. Our Warlock trinket is Fragment of the Dark Star, and the spec effects are discussed below.

• Affliction: Reduces the duration and period of Agony, Unstable Affliction, and Corruption by 27%.

Affliction’s trinket effect is an obvious increase in damage, but comes at the annoying price of having to refresh the three main DoTs more.

I wish I had more to say about this trinket effect for Affliction, but it appears that unfortunately the devs still don’t know what to do with Affliction to make it exciting or useful. Everything just ends up as a buff to either DoT damage, Haunt’s impact on our DPS, or to using Drain Soul more. None of the Warlock Archimonde trinket effects drastically change the rotation at all, besides make a few set bonuses easier to play with. Both of the other Warlock specs’ Archimonde effects tie one ability into another ability rotationally, but Affliction’s is just this boring damage buff.

• Demonology: Hand of Gul’dan has a 60% chance to also summon 3 Wild Imps.

This effect is nothing new: instead of having just one beam of fel green leap from your hand into an imp, a triad of beams do it after casting a Hand of Gul’dan. With a 60% chance, it happens a lot, and it’s very fun to look at.

The effect of more Wild Imps doesn’t take hold until you look at the set bonuses for Demonology. Wild Imps can proc Molten Core — in fact, that’s usually why you want to summon them. The 4-piece is a 30% chance on a Molten Core proc to summon a passive guardian that does damage to your target. The 2-piece means casting Soul Fire — which we only do with a Molten Core proc up — incrementally increases the damage done by our demons, up to 25% increased damage.

So this trinket means Demonology ends up with more chances to take advantage of its tier 18 set bonuses.

• Destruction: Incinerate increases the critical strike chance of your spells against the target by 3% for 10 sec, stacking up to 5 times.

Casting Incinerate on a target will put the Flamelicked debuff on the target, with 5 maximum stacks. The trinket says 3% per stack; the Flamelicked debuff says 2%/5%/8%/10%/13%. In the Wowhead tooltip, the percent per stack is clarified to be 2.74%, and tooltips in game like to round things. (Do you remember the Amplification trinket in Siege of Orgrimmar?) The percents per stack come out to these numbers, for all you budding theorycrafters out there: 2.74%, 5.48%, 8.22%, 10.96%, and 13.70%.

At first, I thought, maybe this is a sort of Haunt for Destruction — a single target debuff for Destruction to maintain on a priority target. But no — both multi-target methods for Destruction can spread Flamelicked to another target with the same cast. All targets being hit by an Incinerate empowered by Fire and Brimstone get a stack of Flamelicked, and so do targets hit by an Incinerate off a Havoc use.

The implications of this trinket come down to a maintenance buff on the target for Destruction. When standing still at a training dummy, the debuff doesn’t come close to falling off, even if I cast a few Chaos Bolts in a row. As evidenced by being able to apply it to multiple targets at once, even multi-target scenarios won’t suffer much for this effect.