Project Lore

Blizzard is 100% serious about making us think before we chose to replace our items. While I still have not replaced much of my S2/T4 gear, I am finally at the level which this should start happening. At the moment I have only easily replaced four items, both of my craptacular trinkets from The Burning Crusade days and the rings to boot. The odd thing is, I have replaced my old pair of trinkets nearly three times over. That is right, I have a total of five trinkets that are an obvious improvement.

Of course, this is where the difficult choices Ghostcrawler discussed come in to play:

• First Mate's Pocketwatch
• Fury of the Crimson Drake
• Talon of Hatred
• Fury of the Encroaching Storm
• Death Knight's Anguish

Unfortunately, the WoWHead item comparison isn't of much help because of the trinkets possessing “Use” or “Chance on hit” buffs. Initially, I went back to min-maxing, a practice that I became to loathe so much from vanilla days. Rather than performing the calculations of average gains over time and all that crap, I just guestimated what was best, taking into account the vendor potential. And no, I didn't even bother checking shared cooldowns for swapping potential. I did check for this post though, the Pocketwatch is the only “Use” trinket not shared with the others' cooldown.

My thought process went something like this. Fury of the Crimson Drake is easily vendored once I look at that Pocketwatch, which beats it in every category. Due to my fast weapons, Death Knight's Anguish pops to its full extent (+150 crit) nearly every fight, adding a solid amount of +crit. To top it off it gives you two separate buffs, making me look more beefcake to the opposing faction and generally badass.

The second trinket seems like it will be a more difficult decision, Fury, Talon or Pocketwatch? Fury and Talon offer the same benefits, static +Haste with AP on use. Naturally the numbers are ever so slightly different, Talon with more haste but less AP. However, Fury is only on a one minute cooldown, meaning I can pop it twice as often. Seems like a good enough reason to beat out the Pocketwatch as well.

Pop in a simple macro and finito:

/use Fury of the Encroaching Storm

/cast Slice and Dice

Now that you are out of my head, you can see that I have finally recovered from obsessing over a small increase in DPS. The case can be made for using the later two “Use” trinkets, Fury and Pocketwatch, since they are on separate timers. The added haste over crit would probably increase DPS due to energy generation off of Focused Attacks, though, and again proving Ghostcrawler's point, I would be losing a chunk of +crit to get the haste. I am just gonna stop now...It'll all get replaced soon.

How do you guys go about these hard decisions? I have a few friends who just go for “whatever is cool,” rather than racking their or someone else's brain over the numbers. This goes for everything, armor, tabards, weapons, trinkets. If the gear is comparable the only stat they analyze is coolness. How I envy them.

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