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Spiritual Guidance: The 7 best shadow priest trinkets in patch 4.3
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen comes from out of the shadows to bask in your loving adoration. He loves Lisa Simpson, and when he grows up, he's going to marry her! I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Gearing in Cataclysm is a no-brainer. Blizzard finally gets the needs of different classes and seems to be making gear that we actually want. Spirit plus haste gear is all over the place. So is mastery plus haste gear. And since almost everything worth getting has red sockets, we don't even need to do the math on what gem to use. And even with the "wrong" gear, reforging can make it almost as good as a best in slot. There's one place where gearing up is still somewhat of a challenge, and that's the trinket slot. Instead of flat secondary stats, trinkets typically rely on procs with unspoken internal cooldowns and hard-to-theorycraft bonus damage.
Spiritual Guidance: Patch 4.2 shadow priest trinkets
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen rains sheer purple destruction down on the growing list of WoW Insider columnists who oppose him (and sometimes, even on those who don't). I've said it before and I'll say it again: Gearing in Cataclysm is boring. It's not that there aren't best-in-slot pieces -- there absolutely are -- it's just that reforging makes getting those best-in-slot pieces a lot less important. After all, if you need more haste or more hit, you can always reforge other stats until you have as much as you want. Simple. There's one slot that's absolutely compelling, though, and that's the trinket slot. Trinket bonuses are so specific that it's often impossible to tell what's an upgrade and what isn't without a calculator or spreadsheet. And while those new i378 boots are almost guaranteed to be better than that i359 pair you currently have equipped, the same can't be said for the new trinkets. So, which of the new patch 4.2 trinkets make the cut ... if any? Is the Darkmoon Card: Volcano still king? And further, what the heck are our new stat weightings in patch 4.2 going to be so we can figure these answers out?
Patch 4.1 PTR: Trinkets of tier 12
Blizzard seems to be putting a lot of thought into trinkets this expansion. In Wrath of the Lich King, it was a struggle to get your hands on a pair of good, strong trinkets. In Cataclysm, while perhaps not every trinket is strong for every class (I'm looking at you, Fury of Angerforge), there does seem to be a whole lot more of them. The data for a whole slew of new trinkets in patch 4.1 is already in the game, with the heroic versions clocking in at ilevel 391. The full list of trinkets is behind the break below (and it's quite a list), but I wanted to highlight a couple of them, as they have some fairly unique mechanics. Note that the numbers I cite below are from the heroic versions of the trinkets. Stay of Execution In addition to an impressive amount of dodge, this trinket has an on-use effect. "Absorbs up to 29125 damage for 30 sec, but once the absorb expires, you take 20% of the damage absorbed every 3 sec for 12 sec." Assuming you use the entire absorption bubble, that's 5,825 damage every 3 seconds. In most situations, that certainly makes that damage spike much more manageable. Of course, use it at the wrong time and you end up with a DoT ticking away as soon as a boss's enrage kicks in. Hungerer In addition to a glob of agility, "When using an ability causes your Energy or Focus to fall below 20% of your maximum, you will gain 1730 haste rating for 15 sec. This cannot occur more often than once per minute." Except in situations where you're pooling Energy or Focus to apply a debuff or interrupt a spell, all classes that can use this trinket bottom out their resources rather frequently. The cooldown will determine the trinket's power and not the actual mechanic of the trinket's proc, but on the surface it seems much more interesting. Time (and theorycrafting) will tell if it actually proves useful, though. There are, of course, a lot of your typical procs and stacking stat trinkets (which many people prefer) mixed in with this batch, but it's nice to see cool new mechanics as well. Once again, the full list of new trinkets is behind the cut below.
