It’s pretty rare that we get snow up here in the Pacific Northwest. Mother nature seems to have gone a little overboard reminding us of this by dumping a decent amount of show on us in the past few days. So what do we do with ourselves after getting all bundled up under blankets and making a nice hot pot of tea? Right, we learn about the tanking trinkets that arrived with wrath! Clearly.
Yeah, I know, it’s another boring gear post. I sympathize with folks who don’t also suffer from the specific kind of brain damagge which leads to enjoying this stuff. I’m over here sympathizing while I happily play around on WoWHead. Sympathy city, population me.
Why trinkets? I noticed that they haven’t been seeing the same kind of upgrade love as the other slots in Northrend. I’m questing in Zul’Drak and have run Drak’Tharon Keep and The Violet Hold and I’m still using the two defense trinkets that I had when I first arrived in Northrend. There’s been a ginormous pile of melee DPS and caster trinkets but not so much with the tanking trinkets.
So I looked into it. And, in the continuing tradition of using this blog to as a kind of research logbook, here’s what I found.
- [Sonic Booster] — Engineering BoE
- [Indestructible Alchemist's Stone] — Alchemy BoP
- [Figurine - Monarch Crab] — Jewelcrafting BoP
Raise your hand if you’re a miner and a smithy! Yeah, me too. We don’t get to play with these but we should mention ‘em for our tanking friends who got into more exotic professions. The booster has a lame occasional threat buff, but at least it has a good deal of stamina. The avoidance in the form of dodge, along with a decent shot of stamina, make the stone a step in the right direction. The crab looks very nice indeed. You could put whatever gems you needed in those slots to fine tune the stats that you’re after.
- [Seal of the Pantheon] — dropped by Loken in regular Halls of Lightning
That’s it for quest rewards and non-heroic drops. Wrath apparently doesn’t have a quest like Hellfire Peninsula’s Cruel’s Intentions which gave us an interesting trinket for our role right out of the gate. I think this means that I’ll be trying to run HoL as often as I can while trying to reach uncrittable for heroics. It would have to be Loken, though, wouldn’t it?
- [Essence of Gossamer] — dropped by Hadronix in heroic Ajzol-Nerub
- [Lavanthor's Talisman] — dropped by Lavanthor in heroic Violet Hold
- [Offering of Sacrifice] — dropped by Gal’dara in heroic Gundrak
Here we have the drops from five-man heroics. The gossamer’s proc won’t be winning any awards but that’s a heaping crap-ton of stamina. In addition to helping juggle avoidance stats and diminishing returns, the block value from the talisman could provide a decent threat spike with shield of the righteous. The offering would be a situational piece if you needed that little extra bit of mitigation and EH, it doesn’t feel like a core piece.
- [Valor Medal of the First War] — 40 Emblems of Heroism
That’s it for trinkets we can buy from vendors. I imagine it’ll be pretty common to use this and the seal when entering naxx. Especially those of us who didn’t hit Northrend with nice toys from TBC content.
- [Repelling Charge] — dropped by Thadius and Gloth in ten-man Naxxramas
That’s a big chunk of defense. That’ll make room to rotate in some other pieces from slots that were contributing to our uncrittable defense cap.
- [Defender's Code] — dropped by various in 25-man Naxxramas
- [Rune of Repulsion] — dropped by Sapphiron in 25-man Naxxramas
Is anyone else underwhelmed by these two drops? I think I would have liked to have seen some on-equip avoidance from defender’s code. I can see the rune being a decent DK tanking piece, with their parry fetish, but will the rest of us care? My initial reaction is “meh”.
That seems to be it for the current content. I’m assuming that we’ll be getting more treats as the rest of the wrath raids are rolled out.