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.
We want to see all items. It’s tempting to zoom in on plate items, but then we miss rings, amulets, cloaks, weapons, etc.
This is a great way to filter out a lot of items that we can’t use. Staffs, relics, idols, daggers, ranged weapons — all that nonsense. This is a lot easier than trying to filter those all out individually.
This is how we limit to five-man heroic drops. We’ll see later that we have a filter for items that drop from heroics, but that includes “Heroic” versions of 10-mans, what the rest of us call 25-mans. We just have to know that ilevel 200 is used for Heroic drops. One way to see this is to look at a given item slot and sort by ilevel. You’ll can correlate the source column with the ilevel column.
These are our very broad searches. Searching for strength and stamina here is for the benefit of the non-plate slots. This stops us from seeing all those int and spirit rings, for example.
Honestly, I’m not quite sure why we need this. It seems that PvP items are sneaking in past the heroic drop filter, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I continue my fine tradition of pretending that PvP doesn’t exist by filtering these items right out.
This is where our specific filters come in. If you flip through the results you’ll notice that haste, armor pen, and crit are never combined with tanking stats. At least, as far as I could tell. We filter almost all of the DPS items by only seeing items that don’t have these stats. There are still some DPS pieces left that only have hit or expertise, though, because those two stats are definitely found along-side tanking stats. That’s OK, it’s only a few.
