Is this melee trinket Best-In-Slot for my resto shaman?

Two posts on ElitistJerks recently about the Herkuml War Token made me do a doubletake. Because of the 153 passive haste rating on the trinket (despite the completely wasted attack power proc), this trinket is still a really good throughput trinket for a resto shaman-- due to our voracious hunger for haste. In fact, a quick glance at my lootrank would actually indicate that for the content I am doing (non-25 man), this trinket is actually Best-in-slot for my HEP calculations! (Note that lootrank will show Muradin's Spyglass higher because it can't distinguish between healing and dmg procs). Is this correct? Should I really be spending Emblems of Frost on a melee trinket instead of a healing one? Perhaps.

Up until patch 3.1, melee and casting haste ratings were completely different. When they merged them at first, it seemed like a nice way to simplify stats. However, .2 patches later, I think we are seeing that this stat is scaling so differently for melee and casters that we are seeing odd phenomena like this trinket. Consider that for a melee cast (combat rogue) for example, haste is maybe 4th or 5th in their stat priorities. For a caster, including both my resto and elemental specs, haste is far and away the best stat I can stack, and only reaches diminishing returns for a resto shaman at ludicrously high numbers.

It's still very early into Icecrown Citadel- so far, the devs have not made mana regen a priority stat for healers like they had claimed to. Perhaps later wings will prove more challenging, mana management wise. For now though, mana regen trinkets like the Purified Lunar Dust are just going to pale in comparison to throughput trinkets for cutting-edge content.

So which troll shaman has two thumbs and may be sporting a melee trinket in a few weeks? This guy.

Playing with the new 5-man Healer Trinket!

When I finally got on to Borean Tundra last night, some guildies and I blew through the 3 new heroic 5-mans, and I got 3 upgrades! Also, 3 Battered Hilts dropped, but I didn't roll on them because I had already gotten some phat loots, and since they were dropping so readily I figure I'll get mine soon enough.

One very interesting upgrade I got was the new trinket, the Ephemeral Snowflake. In addition to a kickass on-use haste proc, it also gives you back 11 mana every time one of your healing spells heals someone. This is incredibly interesting to me. What I've found from half an instance of testing is:

• It procs off heals from hots and directly applied spells. For shaman, this is Lesser Healing Wave, Healing Wave, Riptide (including its hots), Chain Heal (including jumps)


• It does not proc from passive heals, like Healing Stream Totem, Earth Shield, Ancestral Awakening, or Earthliving Weapon.


• The proc is maximized for multi-target spells and hots. Riptide can return up to 66 mana (88 if glyphed). Chain Heal can return 44 if glyphed.


• The proc does NOT happen on overhealing, so it will only shine in heavy raid damage situations where hots are not overhealing and your AOE heals are actively healing all of their targets.

On Elitist Jerks, they've modeled it to be about 147 mp5 in ideal Chain Heal spam situations, assuming 2 riptides rolling. Obviously this would only be sustained by constant damage to be healed, and assumes perfect Chain Heal jumps and Riptide target selection. It's still not as good as either of the Solace of the Fallen trinkets from TOTGC, but it is very easy to acquire, and a lot of fun. And I just love weird trinkets.

I am dying to get it on my priest, to see if it procs on every target of CoH, every target of PoH, AND the PoH glyph hot? I can't imagine it does for that last one because that would be insane, but it's not like I really have mana probs on my priest anyway?

Speaking of which, the new 5-mans were really fun, but also REALLY healing intensive. Even with a pure guild run, we had some wipes on some bosses in there. The hardest one for me was the first boss in the Halls of Reflection, Falric. He has a really nasty AOE horrify that will do 10,000 shadow damage to all party members, and can be amplified by various debuffs he puts on you; he also has a magic debuff that can stun you if not removed in time. Like Violet Hold, if you wipe on this boss, you have to reclear the waves of trash up to him, which is non-trivial. The packs spawn all around the room and have a lot of caster mobs that have to be LoS'd to stick to your tank.

Anyway, despite some server trouble, yesterday night was great fun. I didn't get to play with the random heroic tool yet, but my guildies all said it was pleasant and easy to use. So far, 3.3 wins!