Zen Meditation: Demistifying Hellfire Citadel trinkets

At this point in Hellfire Citadel, many Mistweavers may find that they have a pretty decent amount of options in trinkets. Especially when taking into consideration Sacred Draenic Incense, there may be some questions in terms of what trinkets to use when. After all, that trinket was designed for our class! Surely it ought to be fantastic for us! However, there are a lot of options with Hellfire Citadel trinkets, and some trinkets may be better in certain situations than in others.

Unstable Felshadow Emulsion – The Leech Trinket

First, let’s take a look at Unstable Felshadow Emulsion, simply because it is that good. Browsing several high-HPS Mistweaver logs, its potential seems pretty great in general — it’s likely that many healing classes will be clamoring for it.

The way that this trinket works is that if you heal another person in your raid for 10,000, then they will gain about 1.1% (~80) leech for 10 seconds. Given that this person is likely doing 40,000 DPS, this translates to around 4,500 more healing that you don’t have to use mana to cast — or about 45% more “free” healing from a single heal alone. Of course with higher item levels, this will go up greatly — especially with many players doing far more than 40,000 DPS currently.

This may seem rather contrary, given that Leech seems to be the least desirable of the possible tertiaries that gear can randomly roll with. However, this trinket does provide free healing, and the kickback from Spirit will also allow you to cast far more (plus the fact that Mana Tea now scales with Spirit rather than your overall mana pool). Considering that Mistweavers are fantastic for general raid healing with Uplift, this means that you can grant your raid tons of leech for tons of free healing.

Mana-Saving Trinkets

Demonic Phylactery‘s 556 mana reduction seems incredibly underwhelming. However, look at it this way: a good healer is almost always casting. Additionally, this trinket applies its mana reduction for each tick of Soothing Mist — meaning that every time Soothing Mist pushes its resource charge, that amount is reduced by 556. Unfortunately, it does not work on your spells that have a chi cost, given that it only reduces mana cost — NOT chi cost.

Many Mistweavers might already be hitting an area in which they feel they have perfectly good mana at this point, which is fine. Perhaps at that point, a different trinket choice should be considered. However, this trinket can certainly hold its own if you ever feel yourself going dry, and would certainly compliment a Chi Explosion or Rushing Jade Wind build.

Intuition’s Gift comes as a fairly recommended trinket, if only for its on-use effect. The additional Crit would allow you to time some burst healing for certain, more difficult encounters, or even for your Revival. Similar to the leech trinket, the static Spirit also scales very well for Mistweavers. That said, while having the ability to time its proc can be rather beneficial, the truth is that most non-use trinkets usually have their other benefits available more than once every minute and a half.

Slightly less interesting choices

Iron Reaver Piston and Flickering Felspark are likely the least interesting of the choices in Hellfire Citadel, but still certainly worth a look.  Static stats allow for less randomness during progression, and thus can be quite beneficial — especially if you were not able to get higher item level trinkets in Blackrock Foundry. Thus, these should certainly not be sharded and wasted if you do not already have something comparable or better.

That said, the pure stats from Flickering Felspark are simply not as impressive as other choices. Haste and Mastery in particular are wasted by Mistweavers — especially Mastery, as we all know. For Iron Reaver Piston, the Haste is also not as beneficial as a different stat, but the Crit and additional Intellect are certainly not wasted. If you have to choose between the two of these and another trinket mentioned previously, likely your best choice would be the other trinket and the Iron Reaver Piston.

The Class Trinket

Last, and certainly not least, the Sacred Draenic Incense. This trinket certainly has an entire novel that could be written on it, how it could be changed, and how it could be strong. After all, it’s designed with Mistweaver in mind, like set bonuses. Who doesn’t like something that we can compare to set bonuses?

Well, keep in mind that plenty of classes have altogether avoided their set bonuses in the past. Sadly, the Mistweaver’s class trinket is not terribly different.

Don’t get me wrong. The trinket isn’t completely awful, and can be useful in the right situation. The problem lies in the fact that it only rewards you for remaining in Serpent Stance, and the fact that it only grants a benefit to Soothing Mist, but your set bonuses encourage more gameplay centered around Renewing Mist and Uplift. In other words, your set bonuses encourage you to use your baked-in raid healing spells, and grant a good bonus to using them, while your class trinket grants raid healing to a smaller cluster of people. They just do not work together as well as they should, and you are also sacrificing a trinket slot that could be granting you another secondary. It is simply not worth the sacrifice for most situations.

However, I would not completely discourage anyone from using the class trinket based on this. There are certainly situations in which it may end up strong, but the leech trinket and the Phylactery will likely still be stronger in most encounters and progression. Overall, though, this tier has certainly granted Mistweavers the ability to put some thought into which trinkets they want per encounter, rather than a simple setup. In the comments, what trinkets have you really enjoyed this tier?