A few posts back I wrote about wrath trinkets. I included the [Ephemeral Snowflake]. For some reason I felt compelled to summarize its performance with a single MP5 value. Honestly, I just skimmed the wowhead comments and made up a number. 100’s nice and round, right? Codi, of Moar HPS, pointed out that 100 MP5 for a pally was something not entirely unlike crazy talk.
That, of course, got me wanting to see how it actually performs. The next week I tossed it on for some of our ICC fights on our way to Arthas. Let’s see how it went.
Replenished: Energizes for 11 mana.
The snowflake returns mana every time certain heals land. Its cooldown is very low, on the order of .3 seconds. The cooldown was added after the trinket was first created to stop it from generating an enormous amount of mana for healers who kept HoTs rolling on entire raids.
To understand how much mana it can give us we have to find out which of our heals can trigger its effect. I joined a group with a guildy, threw on the trinket, and we ran to our nearest training dummies.
- Procs: Flash of Light, Holy Light, Beacon of Light, Flash of Light HoT, [Glyph of Holy Light]
- Does not proc: Judgement of Light, Seal of Light
I was disappointed to find that I couldn’t get it to proc on JoL heals. I have seen reports that it does, but I couldn’t get it to for the life of me. If someone can, I’d love to hear about it.
The mana regen does proc when you’re at full mana and it does proc on heals that are 100% overheal.
So to get the most out of this trinket we have to generate heals at the highest rate. That means spamming HL and getting all 5 heals from the glyph, transferring the base HL through beacon, while keeping the FoL HoT rolling.
The Snowflake Storms Some Citadels and Plagues Some Works
Here’s the average MP5 the trinket generated in the following regular ICC 10man kills:
- Marrowgar: 2442 mana in 2:50 = ~70 MP5
- Deathwhisper: 2310 mana in 3:15 = ~55 MP5
- Saurfang: 3135 mana in 3:17 = ~75 MP5
- Rotface: 2354 mana in 2:41 = ~70 MP5
- Festergut: 2882 mana in 2:54 = ~80 MP5
- Putricide: 3905 mana in 5:34 = ~55 MP5
So, on average, it amounted to about 70 MP5 for me in those fights. That’s not terrible. Compare that to [Binding Light], for example.
Scaling Regen
But that average MP5 number doesn’t tell the whole story. The trinket proc depends on our casting rate. If we generate more heals it will return more mana. That’s an interesting twist. To understand that, let’s look at two fights in depth. Let’s graph the amount of mana returned in every 5 second interval during the fight.
Snowflake regen during Festergut, 5s intervals
In the Festergut fight we’re healing pretty hard. Melee is nice and grouped up so we have a great chance of maximizing the number of heals that the HL glyph can generate. The trinket never drops below 44 MP5 in the fight and sometimes gets as high as 110 MP5. That’s 10 procs in 5 seconds, or .5 seconds per proc. That’s awfully close to the supposed internal cooldown.
Snowflake regen during Putricide, 5s intervals
The snowflake’s regen during Putricide is less consistent. We’re not generating heals when we hike up our t10 pally skirts and run across the room. The trinket stops giving us mana. The Tear Gas stuns also show up clearly. The trinket stops giving us mana all together while we’re staring at the floor waiting for tear gas to fade. A trinket with normal passive MP5 would happily be ticking away in that case.
So? Figure 70 MP5. Ish.
If you keep the FoL HoT rolling and consistently land heals that also transfer through the beacon you’re almost sure to get 7 heals every 5 seconds. Just keep in mind that if you’re not casting it’s not giving you mana.
If you know the fight has lots of motion or down time then the trinket might not work out so well. It’s no [Solace of the Defeated], that’s for sure. But it’s much easier to get.
I’ll close by pointing out that in every single one of the fights I measured the trinket returned more mana than the [Insightful Earthstorm Diamond], sometimes twice as much. That puts both the trinket and the IED proc into context, I think.