It’s that time again! Another round of stepping out of some fire and cleansing some stuff. Another round if icons and names. Another incremental increase in stats. And for flavour, another trinket.
Let’s see what Halion’s loot table has in store for holy pallies.
10 player:
- haste/crit plate belt: [Surrogate Belt]
- haste/mp5 cloak: [Abduction's Cover]
- haste/crit leather gloves: [Changeling Gloves]
The belt’s a much cheaper and lower ilevel alternative to spending frost emblems or a few grand for the current 264 equivalents. I suspect that it’ll be an upgrade for approximately zero of us. The gloves are good if you don’t mind wearing gross leather and haven’t had access to, say, the gloves from 25-player Deathwhisper. At least the cloak pairs its lame mp5 with haste, making it a nice alternative — again — to blowing frost emblems on the crit/mp5 cloak.
25 player:
- haste/crit plate boots: [Foreshadow Steps]
- haste/crit cloak: [Cloak of Burning Dusk]
- haste/mp5 ring: [Ring of Phased Regeneration]
- haste/crit cloth bracers: [Bracers of Fiery Night]
- haste/crit leather bracers: [Phaseshifter's Bracers]
- haste/crit mail belt: [Split Shape Belt]
- healer trinket: [Glowing Twilight Scale]
The boots are great, grab ‘em. The cloak is fantastic but, like the cape from Dreamwalker, you’ll have to pry it out of the cold dead hands of every caster dps in the raid. Let us know how that goes. The ring’s Wowhead tooltip is apparently lying to us, evidentially the item has haste instead of crit. So, not too shabby.
And then there’s a sea of non-plate upgrades. Grab ‘em only if they’re about to be disenchanted, I say.
The trinket is the only truly interesting bit of loot in the raid. Let’s look at it from a few perspectives.
In the ranking of trinkets with passive spell power, it comes in second only to the heroic [Althor's Abacus]. Presumably the heroic twilight scale will come in first. That alone makes it interesting for a lot of healers in a lot of situations.
But the on-use effect is where the real fun begins. For 15 seconds every two minutes our direct heals leave a 6 second buff on people who then heal people within 10 yards every second. Read that twice.
First, the cooldown is disappointing. We’ll only get a few swings at it each fight. That’s fine for the single exhale in a farming Festergut kill these days, but it won’t do a thing for Sindragosa’s constant frost AoE pulse. The trinket is nothing like a pocket druid, it’s more like being able to duct tape healing stream totems to a few of your raiders a few times a fight.
The range of the AoE healing buff further limits when it’s helpful. If you’re spread out and still want lots of raid healing, you’re out of luck. That applies to a decent number of raiders in a decent number of fights.
The most critical limiting factor, though, is that it’s only proced by direct heals. The closest we have to a multi-target direct heal is the [Glyph of Holy Light], and the current working theory is that the glyph heals won’t trigger the buff. If this ends up being the case then this trinket will almost certainly be put to better use in the hands of shammies and priests.
Finally, it’s fun to imagine the trinket’s proc generating shields during [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings]’s proc. That might be a bit of a stretch, given that JoL doesn’t generate shields, but one can hope. Right?
We’ll see. I’ll try to upgrade this post once I learn how the trinket really works.