MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 2 - Stat Choices

Welcome to my second part of How to Disc Priest, this time we'll take a closer look to one of the favorite subjects for any disc priest to argue about - stats. More specifically what stats to choose, and why.

Previous post in this guide;
- Part 1: Talent Choices

Over the course of WoW, what stats you want to go with as a disc priest has rarely been set in stone. Even Icy-Veins state that;

"The statistic priority as a Discipline Priest is very much subject to personal preference. Your final choice will depend greatly on your spell usage, healing style, and encounter requirements, and we encourage you to experiment until you find what works best for you."

Most of the time there has been a primary stat we want to stack as much as possible, and the secondary stat has mainly been up to playstyle. There are usually recommendations as to which stat is overall the best one, overall in this case meaning "for most encounters" and/or "for most playstyles". And that's in the end what it really comes down to - what are you fighting (dungeons, pvp, raids) and how are you playing your priest? Other factors that will affect your choice somewhat are raid composition, for instance which other healers you run with, and your gear level. If this all seems like too many factors to think off, don't worry - hopefully it will be somewhat clearer once I am done here (I'll try at least).

What are stats anyway?
So how do we know what stats we want to use? Is it fine to just read what someone says in some think-they-know-it-all-blog (like this one) and smack it all on to my gear? Maybe, but wouldn't it more interesting to know the reason to why you want a certain stat over another? I've always thought so, and it has helped me greatly to adapt to certain encounters and raid groups over the years. It has meant going against the stream on several occasions, but most of the time it has worked out better for me rather than just assuming that the general advice will work solidly regardless.

Stats do one thing - boost our output. Be it passively via stamina or spirit, or actively via spell power, in the end stats are all there to make sure you can do your job for as long and as much as possible (obviously I'm not thinking of strength or agility or other stats that don't do anything for us). You should be able to look at any stat and think "how much more healing will I get from 1 more point of this?". Sometimes the answer is straightforward - 1 more spellpower might give you 1 extra heal point. Most of the time however the answer is heavily dependant on outside factors and this is exactly why you need to know more about each stats function to make the right decision and this is something I've written about before.

Take stamina for instance. By 99,9% of the healing community not even mentioned when talking about stat choices. That is because nowadays, most of the time you get enough stamina passively to not ever have to choose stamina over almost any other stat. This does not mean stamina is a meaningless stat worth ignoring however. I remember back in Wotlk (I think it was), casters were required to have more than 10.000 hp for certain encounters, or they were just too difficult to keep alive. Some had to actively enchant/gem/gear for stamina to get up to those numbers. In many ways stamina can be considered the very basic of stats, which without all the other stats are completely meaningless, because a dead healer won't heal anyone. No matter how much spell power, intellect or haste you might have, if you can't stay alive you're worthless to the group anyway.

Now I am not trying to tell you to throw every other stat out the window out the window and stack stamina, I am merely trying to point out that stats might seem simple at a first glance, but they often correlate both to eachother and outside factors that make them worth giving many extra thoughts. Rarely is that more true than for disc priest, who have many skills that are affected differently by different stats. Most of the time this is something I have enjoyed about being a priest, sometimes however it has been quite frustrating.

As you can see I am clearly in favor of adapting your stats to your playstyle rather than adapting your playstyle to your stats, although of course overall a good balance is the best. But, this must never mean that your choices should handicap your raid in any way (this is especially important in progress raiding, less important in whatever you deem to be easy content). Don't pick a stat just because "it's more fun" or "I like to crit" like one shaman told me when I had some questions about her gearing. Let there be thought behind your choices and even more important, firm results. Play around, but make sure that you in the end are able to perform the job you're there to perform. Disc priests have the benefit of being allowed a lot of leeway in their stat choices, but if something turns out to work a lot better for you, you should definitely consider running with it even if it's not an immediate favorite of yours. I have on occasion been allowed to try out some weird ass ideas, but that is because I've had a lenient raid group. Don't do that without asking first.

To wrap up this rant somewhat, here are a couple of things to keep in mind about disc priests and stats just to give you an idea as to the complexity;

• Stats affect our spells differently. Some spells benefit more from a certain stat than others. We have skills that are more actively affected by mastery (fx PW:Shield) and more passively affected by mastery and actively by haste (fx Prayer of Healing). Because of this it's important to consider spell usage and the encounter when choosing stats.
• Some stats boost eachother, so that having more of one makes another better. The more mastery you have, the better haste becomes. The more crit you have, the better mastery becomes. The more mastery you have the better crit becomes. There are correlations between most stats.

You're probably thinking "yeah that's all swell, but what does it mean?". Or maybe you skipped that wall of text up there and jumped straight to this section. Either way, let's get to the actual stat choices.

What do our stats do?

Intellect - Has long been our go-to stat, since we used to have a big portion of our mana regeneration through intellect via Rapture, back before it was nerfed to only proc once every 12 seconds and worse, when they locked our mana pools to set amounts. Intellect is still a very important stat to us, it's just had to make some room for spirit as our mana regen stat instead. My personal stand point on Intellect is that it is the most important stat for us right now, but only if you have enough spirit to be comfortable with you mana regeneration. Intellect will give you bigger heals, which in turn means you have to throw less heals and therefor might need less spirit. It's important to find a good balance here, but overall, start to really stack Intellect once you've reached your spirit comfort zone. More about that up next.

Spirit - Spirit is both one of your most important stats and least important stats. Without enough of it, all your other stats are pretty useless, since you won't have the mana to cast them. Once you do have enough mana regen however, any additional spirit is basically useless since you only need as much mana as you need to keep everyone alive for whatever you are killing. How much that is of course totally depends on your playstyle, whether you're doing mostly raids or dungeons and raid composition (if you happen to do regular raiding). I found that a good benchmark to aim for was crossing the 10.000 combat regen mark for raiding. After that you will need to simply estimate based on whether you oom a lot or not if you need more spirit or not. As long as you still have trouble with your mana pool, pile up some more spirit (or consider if you're using your spells wrong, more on that in spell usage in another part). As soon as you notice that you end the encounters with some mana, without struggling throughout the encounter to not oom, no need for more spirit!

Disc healing 25man Cho'gall

Mastery - Mastery has historically been pretty much on par with haste, and it has basically been down to personal preference. Do you want to cast faster heals or have bigger absorbs? Although the disc community has seemed to lean slightly towards favoring Mastery since what seems like forever, I've always been a haste-fan myself. It's simply felt better, and trust me, I regularly tried gearing/gemming mastery to see which seemed better. Come MoP and especially enter Spirit Shell, and I feel like things have changed however. Back in Cata my heals consisted of roughly 10% shields and 15% DA. 75% of my healing was unaffected by mastery, while only 10% would be unaffected by haste. These numbers did not change much with mastery heavy gearing, because Prayer of Healing was such an important spell to us back then (as it still is) and it loved haste more than mastery.

Nowadays however, mastery also boosts our healing, meaning it is less of a one-or-the-other choice that it used to be. Because of Spirit Shell combined with Shield and DA, absorbs now also make up a much bigger portion of my, and probably your, healing than it used to. Spirit Shell is one of the most powerful tools a discipline priest has when wielded correctly, and boosting its output is definitely recommended.

Haste makes you cast out spells and thus get up Spirit Shell faster, but you risk only wasting Spirit Shell absorbs this way since it doesn't stack. With Mastery on the other hand, your Spirit Shell will become stronger, which you definitely want. Because of this, and the general awesomeness of Spirit Shell, I recommend going for Mastery as your main secondary stat.

Haste - Haste has been my favorite stat for most occasions, and only rarely did I spec mastery (and never crit). Because of the resent changes to the discipline spell book and choice of spells (read: inclusion of Spirit Shell and even more preference towards absorbs), mastery has overtaken haste in MoP. A lot of priests would even put crit, a stat I've always scoffed at, higher than haste now for the same reasons (and more about crit in a second). Personally I still prefer haste, since crit, unless you have shit tons of it, is still an unreliable stat whereas haste affects almost all of your spells no matter how much or how little you have.

Crit - So let's talk a bit more about crit. As I just mentioned, crit has come in from the cold in MoP because of a couple of changes to it made in MoP. A critical cast now gives roughly 200% heal rather than the old 150% (or something like it), unless you are a discipline priest. If you are (and I think you might be), you get a Divine Aegis proc equal to the amount healed. Divine Aegis is affected by mastery, which you should have a lot of and therefor they are great. You want many Divine Aegis.

Crit still suffers from the major drawback of its unreliability however, meaning that even if you have loads of crit there will be occasions where you don't crit. Theoretically you could do a whole fight without crits. It won't happen, I know, but it points at a flaw of the stat I simply don't like about it. Haste is now considered weaker, but at least it delivers. When I have one point of haste, that haste will give me haste to all my casts (with few exceptions), whereas a point of crit might only benefit me occasionally. And maybe not even when I actually want it to. Crit is dealing with probabilities, and I've always wanted to cut uncertainties out from the equation.

There is obviously a point where crit is so useful that the stat on average outweighs its own uncertainty, in the end this is something you have to notice for yourself depending on your playstyle.

TLDR!
So to conlude, here is my personal suggestion for how you should prioritize your stats. You might not agree, your friend might not agree, some other blogger somewhere might not agree - this is my personal preference, it works very well for my playstyle and I couldn't recommend you more to test different things yourself if you have the time and interest;

1. Spirit (until satisfied with combat mana regen)
2. Intellect
3. Mastery
4. Haste
5. Crit (crit being the joker here, you either love it or hate it).

And what should I gem/reforge/enchant to?
The obvious answer is that you should reforge/gem to whatever boosts the stat you need. Below are some suggestions, there is also the Perfect cut of the green quality equivalent. Here is a good list too.

Red - Brilliant Primordial Ruby (320 int)
Blue - Sparkling River's Heart (320 spirit)
Yellow - Quick Sun's Radiance (320 haste) or Fractured Sun's Radiance (320 mastery) or Smooth Sun's Radiance (320 crit)
Purple - Purified Imperial Amethyst (80 int + 160 spirit)
Orange - Reckless Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 haste) or Artful Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 mastery) or Potent Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 crit)
Green - Energized Wild Jade (160 haste + 160 spirit) or Zen Wild Jade (160 spirit + 160 mastery) or Misty Wild Jade (160 crit + 160 spirit)
Meta - Revitalizing Primal Diamond (432 spirit and +3% crit effect) or Burning Primal Diamond (216 int and +3% crit effect).  

 For enchants I suggest you check out Icy-Veins list, it's good and probably better than anything I could produce.
 

Top 5 Good Looking Gear Sets

When transmogrification was first announced I raised it to the skies as one of the best ideas Blizzard has had in the past year, throwing sentences around me like;

I can't even express how happy I am about this implementation.

and

Now I'll be able to finally wield my Benediction/Anathema in a raid with pride!

Then unfortunately Blizzard also decided to design tier 13 to not look completely retarded (*cough t11 cough*) so in the end I only ended up transmogrifying my staff into Anathema. As for every other character I've been too lazy to farm any nice gear since I don't care about them much enough to spend time on things like that (although I did still have the starter set for my DK which I then transmogrified into). So far, my usage of the transmogrifier has been, to put it mildly, limited.

However, the first glimpses of the upcoming tier made me think about it again since I am far from certain I want to run around looking like that. Right now I am only hoping things will improve, but in case they don't I need to have a plan B. There are many good looking sets for my priest to wear, but it's a dwarf which really limits my options. Don't get me wrong, I love dwarves and they are by far my favorite alliance race, but they do look stupid in many gear sets that otherwise look really cool - like tier 5, Arena Season 3, tier 8 and so on. Actually most sets unfortunately. This thought process travelled on in my head into "which are the coolest looking gear sets out there that aren't part of a tier set or similar?".

And here you have it, my top 5 list of gear sets that aren't part of a tier or arena set. If you disagree I am sorry, but you are wrong. (Special thanks to wowroleplaygear.com for the pictures).

5. Vanguard 

The Vanguard set is one of those sets that fascinate me because it, as a proof of any violent feminists worst nightmare, looks completely different depending on whether it's worn by a male or female character, especially the chest piece. While male get a sturdy piece of plate, female get a plate bikini barely worth taking into a battle with stranded whales. But Zinn, why must you ruin everything, can't you just let sexy ladies be sexy without wanting to spread your hairy armpits everywhere? Yes, regardless of what the set says about the view of women and men in WoW (because frankly, none of them is especially flattering, with women being nothing but sexy objects and men being nothing but moronic blockheads (yes, I am looking at you Wrynn and Hellscream)), I still think the set looks good. It has a nice design and many varying color schemes for anyone who wants some variety (Lofty, Glorious, Imperial). My warrior would look awesome in it, she doesn't need a body covering armor to kick ass anyway.

4. Chief Brigadier 

The Chief Brigadier set suffers from some similar features as the Vanguard set, by looking slightly different on male and female characters. But that color scheme is to die for. There is no way you can go wrong with fiery red on black, which is why so many people put bitching flames on their bitching Volvos. The only thing I could improve on this set would be the head piece (not shown, probably for that reason), because that raggy looking mail coif doesn't really do it for me. I think the Jaw of Repudiation head piece, or anything that looks similar to it, would fit that set perfectly.

 



3. Taunka Garb 

Probably the most wholesome set in the list, I like the down to earthy style of the Taunka Garb a lot. It is perfectly designed to suit the snow-living taunkas, and I like the simplicity of it, yet it feels detailed and thought through. Most people would probably call it boring and bland, but if you look closely you can see the knitting in the leather. It gives me a wolfy sense of seriousness (don't mess with a serious wolf), and I like how it covers the entire body in a rough and tough looking armor - this isn't some fancy pansy prancing around in an armor barely covering the nipples. Yet again, I am not overly fond of the head piece - it suits the gear but I know most characters look stupid in it. I could live with that however.

 


2. Warped Leather

I remember the first time I found a Warped Leather piece and decided to dress it. I had obviously found Warped Leather pieces tons of times before, it's the kind of gray item that drops from every second mob on lower levels. For some reason I decided to check out what it looked like on my rogue (actually because he didn't have any better gear...), and I was instantly hooked. With a blue-black color combination that looked like a dusk sky, I knew I wanted to have the entire set on my rogue and I wanted it yesterday. Some pieces were available on the Auction House, from the ever lovely people who are bothered with putting up gray items there for no other benefit than making the odd weirdo collector happy. The rest had to be farmed, at which point the drop rate drastically dropped in what is known as the WoW-farming Paradox. When I eventually deleted that rogue and started a new one (don't ask me why, because I don't know) I made sure to save the Warped Leather set. The Warped Leather set is one of those sets that Blizzard have designed to look really good, but it was very rarely put into use. The time I had my rogue as my bank alt I ran around Orgrimmar wearing it, but since it's not transmogrifiable you won't ever see this in combat. Fortunately, the Clefthoof set looks exactly the same, and that is transmoggable! I especially love how it fades between black and blue from top to bottom.

1. Venomshroud 

In a sense I am stupid to put this as my number one set, when there is really just one piece of the set I really like. But then, I really like that piece. The way a cat likes lying on your keyboard while you're playing. The shoulders, pants and actually most of the pieces don't look very good at all, but the chest is completely awesome. Worthy of a tier set, if you ask me, it has a huge spider covering the entire front of the chest (the dress piece, not the vest piece). I fell in love with it immediately when I found it, I even remember which mob it dropped from in Silverpine Forest. And it comes in a few really nice recolorings so you can choose between green on yellow, brown/red on yellow or teal on green and. They all have one thing in common though, they're probably the best looking robe in the game. Simple, with uncommon color combinations to make you look smashing regardless of going to a guild meeting, fighting Deathwing or getting married on the steps of the Stormwind cathedral. A dress for all occasions.

Killing the zeros

A recent blue post addresses the issue of constantly increasing the stats in a game like WoW. It is a subject I have pondered myself, trying to figure out a way to navigate around it or preferrably solve it completely, since with each new expansion it feels like the numbers are ridiculous and bloated. What bothers me about it is that eventhough I get 100 more strength from one item to the next, I know that my character hasn't actually advanced at all, when compared to the challenge offered by the surrounding. In fact, to keep us interested, Blizzard have to make it look like we take a step forward, and invisibly in the same time make sure we take one step back. Because if we really only took steps forward, as the gear make it seem, we would soon own everything we see just by looking at it, kind of like going back and soloing Karazhan as a level 85.

So eventhough we get better, so does everything else. No progression is really made. We only get new content and the impression that we constantly overpower content. We are overpowering content, but only current content. Until it's not current anymore and we have a new threshhold to climb. And we do this over and over. Like I said in my old post;

"Cataclysm will have my character just as good/bad compared to the npcs as all the other expansions have. In fact we're rebooting ourselves. Come Cataclysm even those with über ICC gear will have to start out fresh again and start dressing up in greens, struggling in instances and become overjoyed when some "cool" blue item drops. Doing the first raids and getting that first really good epic item, until we're all epic geared again and start replacing epic items with epic items and... Wrath and BC all over again. "

I don't mind it, it is what makes the game still fun after six years, to constantly feel like there still is some challenge in this game and a reward for overcoming it (which isn't just glory, but pretty purple pixels as well). The sense of progression, however imaginary, is clearly a very strong motivator that keeps us interested. But there are casualties of this war, of this constant battle of telling us we're moving ahead when we're really moving back and forth. And the bloated stat numbers are one of them.

If you had told a new WoW player in early Vanilla that characters would once be able to level up to 100 (if we get there) and wear gear with stats that valued up to the tenth of thousands he'd have laughed spittle all over your face. Because everytime there is a new expansion and the new gear is announced I find the new stat values crazy. And those items are usually just the first, measly greens of the expansion. Then we have the epics and whatever item that comes towards the end of the expansion. In fact, I chuckle at my own psychic powers when I guessed what stats we'd be having in Cata in the post I wrote a year ago;

"What can we expect to have in Cataclysm? 10k spellpower? 100k hp on a caster? It might sound ridiculous now, but I'm quite sure these are numbers we'll be working with soon."

We quickly grow accustomed to the new values, but practically there is no difference between an item that has 1000 strength and one that has 10 strength, as long as it is used in current content. The things you fight now will somehow magically take as long and be as difficult to kill as the monsters of the previous expansion. We wouldn't want to have it any other way. So do we just accept that the numbers must increase?

Blizzard tell us they know about this problem (it's kind of hard to miss, so I wonder if anyone thought otherwise), which isn't just aesthetical, but practical as well and they offer two possible solutions - although of course they tell us these are just examples of ways to handle this. Both solutions are similar, and aesthetically close to identical, they do however have different practical values.

"Mega Damage

The first solution could include changes like adding commas and the like to large numbers. We could also compress all of those 1000s to Ks and all of those 1,000,000s to Ms, much like we do with boss health today. Internally, we have been calling this the “Mega Damage solution” because instead of your Fireball hitting for 6,000,000 damage, it would hit for 6 MEGA DAMAGE (queue the Arcanite Ripper guitar solo)."

"Item Level Squish

The second solution actually involves compressing item levels, which is why we call it the “item level squish solution.” If we can lower stats on items, then we can lower every other number in the game as well, such as how much damage a Fireball does or how much health a gronn has. If you look at the item level curves, you can see that most of the growth occurs at the maximum character levels for the various expansions. This is because we keep rewarding more and more powerful gear to make the new raid tier and PvP season in an expansion reward significantly better gear than the previous one. However, those huge item level jumps don’t accomplish a lot once the character level has increased again. Very few players notice or care how much of an upgrade the Black Temple loot is over the Serpentshrine Cavern loot when their characters are level 80.

With that in mind, we could go back and compress the big item level increases that occur at level 60, 70, 80 and 85. The Mists of Pandaria gear would still grow exponentially from patch to patch, but the baselines would be a lot lower. Health could go from 150,000 back down to something like 20,000. The big risk of this approach is that players will log into the new expansion and feel nerfed… even if all the other numbers are compressed as well.

In other words, your Fireball will still do the same percentage damage to a player or a creature that it does today, but the number would be smaller. Logically, this seems like it would work, and it does. But it feels weird. When we tried this internally, everyone agreed that it just felt off throwing a spell for hundreds of damage when you are used to it doing thousands of damage."

We either have the Mega Damage or the Item Level Squish. Aesthetically they both do the same thing in that they devalue the numbers. Instead of a lot of zeros, you have either no zeros or hide the zeros behind the name "Mega". Practically it differs between actually removing those zeros in the calculation or keeping them.

When I first read about these two propositions I thought it was ridiculous that one would feel better than the other. Would adding "mega damage" to the end really make all the difference? Would it bother me if I did 100 damage or 100 Mega damage? I'm not sure how much I'm concerned with the numbers of the skills I do. I want them to be good, but good compared to what? Compared to the numbers I did with this character before I switched weapons or compared to the numbers everyone else around me are doing? I'd like to think the latter, in which case the size of the number in itself is irrelevant, as long as it is on par with what everyone else is doing and as long as it gets the job done. would I feel weak doing 100 damage with my Eviscerate if I knew 90% of all the other rogues only did 90? I'd like to think not.

But I shouldn't underestimate the power of progression and especially the power of suggestion. Getting a bigger power than what I had previously suggests that I have improved - in a way I have, only so has (or rather will) everything else. It is quite possible I will think it is completely horrible that my renews only tick for 50 health, although the tank only has 6k hp. On the other hand, I do remember Blizzard actually devaluing stats before, half way through Burning Crusade they revalued the spell power numbers (or healing power as it was called then for healers), making us end up with roughly half of whatever we had had before. Fortunately, as I recall, it didn't nerf our healing output with half, but it did nerf us somewhat. I was freaked at first when my numbers had dropped by such a significant amount but I quickly got back into rythm when I realized that I could still do my job. And I'd like to think that eventhough people would be freaked at first, what really matters is whether you're winning against the evil guys or not.

I have been pondering whether it would be a good idea to scrap the whole value-based stat system all together. Blizzard initially started out with solid numbers - say, 2% crit - on items, but quickly realized that as they gave better items more stats, it would eventually lead to everyone having 100% of everything. So in a sense they did scrap the value-based stat system when they implemented ratings, a system where the value is completely dependant on your current level. I was writing about something along those lines already in my other post;

"What if gear worked like inverted BoA - the further away from it's required level you are, the less stats it gives. That means only the gear with the right level requirement for you will be really good. So level 60 gear will be really good, but only around those levels and then you have to switch it."

This is actually kind of like how ratings work, but we still have value-based stats, like spellpower, strength, and all the other primary stats. Maybe the next step would be to make those into a sort of rating as well, giving us 15 agility rating which would be valued less or more depending on level. The problem is, ratings aren't there to solve the bloated numbers issue. As it is now, Blizzard can shove as much rating in our faces as they want since the usefulness of the rating usually diminishes the higher level you get, which explains why I actually become less and less good from level 80 to 84, eventhough I have the same gear. The drop isn't proportionate to the increased skill of the mobs, but actually goes downward. Ratings are there to prevent us from capping our secondary stats, not to prevent us from having lots of zeros on our gear. And like I said in my previous post;

"It is clear we need something to differentiate good gear from bad gear. And some sense of individual progression is obviously a really important part of mmorpgs. Maybe numbers really is the only way to make that in an easy to understand way. 10 strength is better than 5 strength (or in WoW rather; epic color is better than blue color). Easy maths. "

It seems whatever idea I come up with it always ends up with numbers somewhere, because it is difficult to show why item A is better than item B without using some kind of value which always ends up being some sort of numbers. Maybe we are simple minded and can only understand "more is better than less", so maybe numbers indeed is the only way to go about it.

Reminiscing BC & Wrath Priest Tier Set Bonuses

So here we are, with my second part of looking at and evaluating old tier bonuses. Let's get right to it.

Burning Crusade

Tier 4 - Incarnate Regalia
Obtained from: Tokens from Gruul's Lair and Karazhan
Incarnate Regalia was the first set to be obtained entirely from tokens. This was Blizzards first try with having tier drops rely less on luck, because back in Vanilla you could be left out of tier just because it never dropped for your class. Another reason for this change was that Blizzard implemented 10 and 25 man raids, where you could expect a couple of classes to be missing, as opposed to the 40 man raids where you knew that nearly any tier drop would go to someone in need. Indeed, I still feel like one of the biggest issues with the current tier system, eventhough we have tokens, is that some get their tier way faster than others just because of luck - but that is probably unavoidable as long as tier tokens will only count for a couple of classes a piece. Blizzard also made some changes to how the tiers looked, giving us fewer pieces and fewer set bonuses.

2 pieces: Your Prayer of Healing spell now also causes an additional 150 healing over 9 sec.
Then: Yet again, we see the infacy of what was later to become a standard feature of some sort - this time it's the Prayer of Healing glyph. Prayer of Healing wasn't used as much as it is today (it sometimes makes out some 30-40% of my healing, not counting DA), and still had the same issues that it had in Vanilla, namely that it was only castable on the priests own party. I don't remember exactly how much hp people would run around with in BC, a rough estimate would be 7-10k for a caster, which means 150 healing over 9 sec sounds very little.
Now: The glyph that this mechanic turned into in Wrath is usually considered one of the must-have glyphs for both specs of healing priests, mostly because of how often PoH is used.

4 pieces: Each time you cast Flash Heal, your next Greater Heal cast within 15 sec has its casting time reduced by 0.1, stacking up to 5 times.
Then: Here we have the original version of what would later become Serendipity. Greater Heal was something of a standard heal back then too, but if I remember correctly we were still able to downrank then which meant we could use lower and faster ranks of GH, which were affected by spellpower in the same way the max rank was (which meant holydins could use rank 1 Flash of Light for basically no mana cost but all the spellpower gain, that was crazy). I am unsure if we had any talents to lower the cast time of Greater Heal however and the usefulness of this set bonus was probably similar to the one Serendipity has today - when you spam Flash Heals it's usually because you need to dish out fast hps and a faster Greater Heal is quite welcome then.
Now: The usefulness of Serendipity is debated - personally I don't use it often but like mentioned above it's one of those talents you're happy to have when you need it.

Tier 5 - Avatar Raiment
Obtained from: Tokens from Serpentshrine Cavern and The Eye
Yet another full token set (they all were in BC), Avatar Raiment is often considered among the coolest looking priest sets, and I have to agree. Especially if you managed to get the head and shoulders in combination - they really got this tier to make you look so very priestly. I am guessing this will be one of the gear combos we'll see many priests run around with after transmogrification enter the scene.

2 pieces: If your Greater Heal brings the target to full health, you gain 100 mana.
Then: Like mentioned, Greater Heal was much then as it is now - big, slow, mana efficient (even more so back then than now) and considered among our base heals. This was probably a decent way to increase the mana efficiency of Greater Heal some more.
Now: It's an interesting mechanic to reward a healer for topping someone off (something I wish they'd still have today so I don't have to stand around and wait for a heal when tanking). Blizzard have since tried to move away from mechanics that reward us for healing when X is at some certain healing pool because they noticed that that in fact influences our whole way of healing, rather than just be a bonus when something occurs. Eventhough we're back to the mind set of having to constantly top people off in raids, that wasn't initially the idea in early Cata, where Blizzard hoped to give healers more leeway and time for choices. I like the idea of this mechanic, but I am unsure how well it would work in practice.

4 pieces: Increases the duration of your Renew spell by 3 sec.
Then: This was just pure good - a longer duration on Renew meant having to cast it less often which meant more mana saved for other spells. Renew was used as often by holy priests back then as it is now, but I am unsure how useful this was for disc priests. Although I actually did play disc back then, since BC was the expansion that made disc healing somewhat viable, I would think that this set bonus favored holy as much then as it would now.
Now: This would still be a very useful set bonus, although nowadays most people rather want more ticks from their renews than a longer duration. But who says we can't have both? Haste for the extra tick and a set bonus like this for longer duration. Disc would need some equivalent though, perhaps extra duration on shields or DA?

Tier 6 - Vestments of Absolution
Obtained from: Tokens from Black Temple and Mount Hyjal
Vestments of Absolution was the first set to have different names between the healing and the shadow set (Absolution Regalia). It was also a set that went back to the 8 pieces we saw from tiers in Vanilla, although Blizzard still only designed two different set bonuses. Tier 6 is also considered among the better looking priest tiers, although it differs greatly in esthetics from tier 5 - being dark and low profile as opposed to tier 5 light and high profile style. Blizzard were definitely on a role when they designed the BC tiers if you ask me.

2 pieces: Reduces the mana cost of your Prayer of Healing ability by 10%.
Then: Prayer of Healing has always been among our costliest spells, for obvious reasons. Reducing the mana cost of it would have made priests very happy without being too overpowered, like it might have been to lower the mana cost of some more frequently used spells like Greater Heal or Flash Heal.
Now: Although of course a very boring set bonus, I'd love to get this today because of how often I use PoH. On the other hand I think tier bonuses should be more of a "fun" style (which probably is why I love 4 set tier 12 so much) rather than overpoweringly good. I really didn't like the 5% crit bonuses that tier 11 had for example.

4 pieces: Increases the healing from your Greater Heal ability by 5%.
Then: Yet another set bonus to provide pure throughput, but with extra healing rather than extra mana. 5% isn't very much, but probably balanced enough to be a good set bonus.
Now: This is very similar to the 2 set bonus - boring but useful. Fortunately we've got this through talents nowadays instead of in our tiers.

Wrath of the Lich King
A new expansion came with yet again new ideas for tier designs. This time around Blizzard implemented tiers that came in both a "normal" and a "heroic" version, they were basically the same only the heroic version had more stats on them. They were also acquired from the same raids only, you guessed it, heroic tier came from heroic mode.

Tier 7 - Heroes' Regalia & Valorous Regalia of Faith
Obtained from: Naxxramas and Archavon (VoA)
All the tier 7 were remakes of the old tier 3 sets, since you got them from Naxx which was a remake of the old Naxxramas. This too was one of the better looking priest tiers. Tier 7 was the first tier set I managed to completely collect, the closest I'd been before that was tier 4, so it holds a special place in my heart.

2 pieces: Your Prayer of Mending will jump an additional time.
Then: Prayer of Mending is one of my favorite spells, which I have ranted about before plenty of times. It has worked the same way ever since it was implemented in BC, although initially it didn't have a cooldown (which was far too op of course). It's just one of those spells that provides, and I think everything about it is so well designed - it's not too good, but still good enough, it doesn't feel spammy but you can use it on cooldown, regardless of situation you can always toss out a PoM. Enough of the love declartion though - adding a jump to it would be very useful during aoe situations, and less useful any other time. I love this set bonus, but looking at it objectively I'd have to say that the extra healing from it is actually very low.
Now: Massive aoe bursts are more common now than ever (or so it feels anyway). Nonetheless, I rarely get full use of PoM before I toss out another one, partially because the PoM Glyph rewards throwing out new PoMs all the time. I don't like to say it, but I still don't think that this set bonus would be very useful to us.

4 pieces: The cost of your Greater Heal is reduced by 5%.
Then: Wrath saw Flash Heal become the main heal of both disc and holy, and at least towards the end of the expansion I don't recall using Greater Heal much at all. Why bother when Flash Heal had way higher hps and mana wasn't an issue? This might've been a decent set bonus in early Wrath, but honestly I think it was too weak even then to be considered a good 4 set.
Now: We all know what happened to Flash Heal in Cata, and Greater Heal has definitely taken its place as much as it can. Reducing the mana cost on GH by 5% is still something I'd consider weak for a 4 set bonus though - not to mention that it's rather uninventive.

Tier 8 - Valorous Sanctification Garb & Conqueror's Sanctification Garb
Obtained from: Tokens from Ulduar and Emalon (VoA)
Also good looking! Hey Blizzard sure knew how to make nice priest tier back in them days.

2 pieces: Increases the critical heal chance of your Prayer of Healing by 10%.
Then: Blizzard had fixed one of the biggest drawbacks of Prayer of Healing, that of it only being castable on your own party, in early Wrath. This meant it was becoming as useful as it is to us today, and an added 10% crit to this spell must be considered a rather strong 2 set.
Now: As I've said plenty of times before, because of how much we spam PoH in current content, any buff to that spell would be considered really good. Although it's a boring bonus I'd definitely not turn down the prospect of a 10% straight up crit bonus to PoH.

4 pieces: Casting Power Word: Shield also grants you 250 spell power for 5 sec.
Then: Shielding was never something you did often as holy, so this would interestingly enough be one of the few bonuses that would be better for a disc than a holy priest. 250 spellpower back then was a nice buff, and this would actually have most holy priests try to weave in a lot more shields in their healing than they otherwise would've. These kind of set bonuses are interesting because they force you to change the way you heal just to accomodate the extra buff (as long as that would be the best course of action of course). Some enjoy to have to rethink their healing styles, some think it's annoying to have to completely change what they do just because of one set bonus. I'm probably somewhere inbetween.
Now: Like I just said, I stand inbetween when it comes to these kind of set bonuses. I don't mind changing the way I normally heal as long as it makes sense  - casting extra shields as holy might not feel entirely natural, kind of like having this kind of buff but with Renew would feel wrong as a disc. But on the other hand, if it is beneficial i.e you gain more throughput by using the set bonus, then why not? Whatever it takes right? In any case, it definitely would spice things up a little.

Tier 9 - Conqueror's Zabra's/Velen's Raiment and Triumphant Zabra's/Velen's Raiment
Obtained from: Tokens from Trial of the Crusader and Koralon (VoA).
This not only had different names between specs, but between factions too. The question of course has always been - who the heck is Zabra? Esthetics wise, this, tier 10 and 11 are among the worst priest tiers.

2 pieces: Increases the healing done by your Prayer of Mending spell by 20%.
Then: One of my all time favorite set bonuses, it was so good that I kept it for as long as humanly possible even when we had moved on to ICC. This is 20% extra to every jump, and an overall really nice boost to healing done. In my opinion one of the best designed set bonuses there ever was.
Now: I'd completely love to get this set bonus back, although it might actually be considered too good in its current state. 10% wouldn't be too much to ask for though? PoM POWER!

4 pieces: Increases all healing you do by 5%.
Then: Tier 9 was overall given some very good set bonuses, first the 20% to POM and now this. 5% extra healing to everything you do? Yes please. I don't remember however whether this affected our shields and DA, if I know Blizzard right it probably didn't. But still, any healer would like this kind of set bonus - boring but extremely good.
Now: See above, this set bonus would be insane. I doubt many set bonuses since have had this much impact on our overall healing output as this set bonus did (Cauterizing Flame as comparison seems to be about 1,5% extra healing on average).

Tier 10 - Sanctified Crimson Acolyte's Raiment
This time, Blizzard thought it would be enough to just put a little "heroic" tag on the heroic gear instead of giving it another name. Maybe that is for the best, who cares what the gear is called after all?

2 pieces: Your Flash Heal has a 33% chance to cause the target to heal for 33% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
Then: Considering how much we used Flash Heal back in late Wrath, I always did consider this a rather good set bonus, it was basically a ~10% increase to Flash Heal output (if my math isn't all wrong) which is very good for a 2set bonus.
Now: We use Flash Heal way less than we used to, on the other hand it has become a lot stronger than it used to be too. I still don't think we'd have much use of this set bonus, but I wouldn't mind seeing a version of this on some other skill - like Greater Heal. But maybe the holy mastery is too similar for Blizzard to go that way.

4 pieces: Increases the effect of Power Word: Shield by 5% and Circle of Healing by 10%.
Then: The first set bonus ever to actually try to accomodate both specs, unfortunately it fails on one major point. Shield is available to both specs, while CoH is available only to holy, meaning holy has the benefit of both bonuses while disc only has benefit of one. Ah well, Blizzard will never get that entirely right I suppose. Both bonuses are very good though, and even balanced towards eachother.
Now: This would be considered a good set bonus now too, although perhaps 5% to shields is slightly better than 10% to CoH, considering CoH has a cooldown. It's a boring set bonus however, and I am glad everytime Blizzard think of something else than these straight throughput bonuses.

And that's that folks. All the tiers and set bonuses we've had up until Cataclysm. It makes me wonder how far it will go? Kind of with the Final Fantasy series. Will we have Final Fantasy 30 and tier 32 in ten years? Though I think we'd have gotten a new huge mmo by then. We saw some interesting mechanics early on which Blizzard obviously liked much enough to give us as talents or glyphs, and I am happy they did. Those mechanics were often good enough to not be wasted on only ever being some tier set bonus. One can always argue what the idea behind set bonuses is supposed to be - on the end it is meant to offer the wearer a stat boost (every set bonus is some kind of stat bonus when broken down), that just isn't obtainable through off-set gear. Overall I think Blizzard has succeeded with this mission, although I would've preferred it if they skipped the pure stat gains alltogether (like 5% extra crit and such). We get plenty of those from every other gear, set bonuses are supposed to hide the boring stat gains in fun mechanics. Which set bonus would you like to see make a come back?

Reminiscing Vanilla Priest Tier Set Bonuses

Four set tier 12 is the first set bonus I've been longing, and working really hard, to get since 2 set tier 9. Not because it is awesomely good, in fact I haven't checked up on its healing output (there is seriously a void regarding the information on this set bonus, but that's matter for another post), but because it seems like fun! And fun is why we play this game after all. In any case, it made me reminisce about old tiers I've had and didn't have but wished I did. What kind of set bonuses did they have, and were they any good? How has the idea of set bonuses for priests changed over the years? Let's take a look shall we?

Since there are quite a few by now, I've decided to focus on the pve tier sets.

There are many things unique about the old Vanilla tiers that Blizzard decided to change with upcoming expansions. First of all, there was no dps tier - if you wanted a tier set you had to heal. This was true for most multi-role classes, where warriors only had a tank tier, druids only had a healing tier and so on. Hybrids could also have funny combinations of stats, with intellect and strength being on the same items. Back then, Blizzard only made tiers for one spec or for the class as a whole (regardless if that class could fill several roles), and everyone else had to gather other kind of gear. What the reasoning behind this was, I have no idea. Did Blizzard design an entire spec and then not think it would be a viable end game spec, or did they just think shadow would be fine with off sets? I have no idea. Let's just be happy they realized that it wasn't a good plan.

Another unique property of the old tiers, although not necessarily a bad one, was that they had more pieces and therefor also more set bonuses. Tier 1 had no less than 8 pieces, and 3 set bonuses. Why they decided to change this I can only imagine - probably because it was a lot of work to design three decent set bonuses. What with them releasing tiers in an ever faster pace (or so it feels anyway), most of us probably wouldn't get to smell the highest set bonus until it was time to trade it for the next one anyway.

Tier 1 - Vestments of Prophecy
Obtained from: Molten Core

3 pieces: -0.1 sec to the casting time of your Flash Heal spell.
Then: Flash Heal used to be one of our bread and butter spell, before Cataclysm that is. In modern terms, this would be like giving .1 sec reduced cast time to Heal or Greater Heal. It does convert into a decent amount of haste, back when haste didn't even exist, and for the first set bonus it's an ok one.
Now: Although we use Flash Heal more and more now, we don't use it often enough for this to be noticed much. Perhaps on fights like Baleroc where spamming out as many Flash Heals as possible usually is the point of the fight. But considering most of us already have a decent amount of haste and the cast time of Flash Heal already is low we wouldn't find much use for this set bonus.

5 pieces: Improves your critical strike rating by 28.
Then: Tiers were among the few items in the game that provided secondary stats like haste (above) and crit. Priest specifically didn't have any special need for crit, no more than they do now (bigger heals, proccing Inpiration). 28 crit rating converts to roughly 2% crit, which wasn't awesome even back then.
Now: Back in Vanilla, we didn't have fancy stuff like "ratings". This item probably provided 2% crit straight off. Unfortunately, having gear that gave straight stat increases meant that you could actually cap yourself eventually, and it also made it difficult for Blizzard to introduce better than previous gear - an item that gave 2% crit at 60 would do so even at 85. So they introduced the rating system, with the explicit intention to make old gear less and less useful the higher level you got. And of course, that means this set bonus isn't very useful to us today, since it would give about .15% crit, and crit being our least wanted stat too. But looking at it as a crit bonus (instead of focusing on the numbers), we can see that is something Blizzard has continued using throughout the tiers. Tier 11 had crit bonuses as 2 set, and I am sure we will see more of crit in the future tiers as well - maybe it's just one of those stats that is fairly easy to balance.

8 pieces: Increases your chance of a critical hit with Prayer of Healing by 25%.
Then: Yet another crit bonus, this time looking like what Inner Focus would be if it were a set bonus. The difference of course being that it is a permanent 25% buff to your Prayer of Healing. Prayer of Healing used to have a couple of crippling drawbacks back in the day, most importantly that it only healed the priests own party (remember, this was back when you had 40 man raids divided in 8 groups). It meant that it was very useful when doing dungeons, but to get the most out of it in raids you probably would want to swap around priests to cover as many groups as possible (the kind of swapping we still do today to accomodate PoH, although for slightly other reasons). A strong bonus mostly limited by the spell itself.
Now: PoH has become one of our most frequent used spells. On some fights I feel like I do nothing but spam PoH. Imagine having a 25% straight off crit buff to all those PoH? Pretty insane huh? This set bonus would indeed be really good for us still today, in fact it would be better for modern priests than it was for priests back in Vanilla.

Tier 2 - Vestments of Transcendence
Obtained from:  Blackwing Lair

3 pieces: Increases your Spirit by 50.
Then: Back in Vanilla, spirit only counted for out of casting regen, which meant to benefit from it you had to stop casting for at least 5 seconds and wait for your mana regen to kick in. This was something commonly used by healers of course, like I said, it was the only way to regain mana during a fight (except of course there was no cap to using mana pots, so you could chug as many as you liked on 2 min cd). Spirit was still about as important a stat back then as it is now, and this was probably considered a rather strong set bonus - 50 was a big number back then.
Now: This is a pure stat bonus, something that was uncommon back then, but we see on every gear nowadays. Blizzard have tried to make set bonuses special and set apart from regular gear in that they provide stats but in a "funner" manner than just raw stats (the Cauterizing Flame is an excellent example. Eventhough spirit is among our most important stats, and we'd do well with a chunk of spirit at any time it's not likely Blizzard will design tiers with these "boring" set bonuses again.

5 pieces: When struck in melee there is a 50% chance you will Fade for 4 sec.
Then: Wait what? Fade? As far as I remember, pve priests weren't hit much more in melee than they are now, and we had regular Fade back then too. If we ever did get aggro, which happens, we could just Fade. Why would we have even more aggro after that? The only time this would be useful is... no wait, I can't think of any time. It's not good for pvp nor pve. Blizzard did a couple of wonky set bonuses like this one back then, before they had decided that each spec, role and arena would get their own kind of tier. Like I mentioned above, it's like they realized somewhere that they had a lot more content than just pve healing, and thought they had to accomodate all the other priest types out there as well. But in nearly any setting this set bonus is very weak.
Now: This set bonus is about as useful to a pve priest now as it was back in Vanilla, ie not. We're not supposed to be hit much in melee and this does basically nothing to improve our healing.

8 pieces: Your Greater Heal spell now also heals for 315 over 15 sec.
Then: Adding a hot to Greater Heal isn't such a bad idea at all - we're seeing a predecessor of Holy Mastery here. Until Cata, priests only ever had Renew as a hot, and hots have always been very useful. Greater Heal was also an often used spell, and I can imagine that this was a very good set bonus indeed.
Now: If we look aside the fixed bonus healing, because that is of course far too weak to be of use to us today, the idea of a hot to a heal is a very good one, and I am glad they gave us this kind of healing through the Holy Mastery. If they had done something else with the Holy Mastery, I'd have loved this kind of set bonus myself.

Tier 3 - Vestments of Faith
Obtained from:  Unavailable (used to be old Naxx I think)

This tier was super special and had no less than four set bonuses! Unfortunately, this tier is no longer available in the game *sad face*. If you want something that looks like it you will have to go get tier 7 from Naxx.

2 pieces: Reduces the mana cost of your Renew spell by 12%.
Then: Holy was the spec to be if you wanted to raid back in Vanilla, and if I remember correctly Renew was a pretty commonly used spell back then too, about as it is used today. Reducing the mana cost of that spell by 12% would be an awesome set bonus (consider too that this is only the 2 set bonus!), fitting of one of the most hardest to get tiers.
Now: As we've seen with later tiers, this set bonus would be skewed in favor for holy of course. Eventhough using Renew is far from taboo for a disc priest, it's usually not used very often and this bonus wouldn't end up to much for a disc priest. For a holy priest however, this would be a really good bonus and something I wouldn't mind to see the return of in later tiers (as long as there is an equivalent bonus for disc of course).

4 pieces: On Greater Heal critical hits, your target will gain Armor of Faith, absorbing up to 500 damage.
Then: It's always fun to see how mechanics that were later implemented in the game, often started out as set bonuses. Here we have another one - do you recognize Divine Aegis in its infacy? It has a fixed value, but 500 damage back in Vanilla was far from shabby. The only real drawback is that it only affects one spell, but like mentioned, GH was much used in Vanilla. Depending on your crit this could've been a really powerful set bonus, much like how crit influences the power of DA today.
Now: For disc this would basically be like an extra Divine Aegis, maybe an extra strong DA on your GH crits, and why not? This would definitely be useful for holy as well, but considering this mechanic has already been thoroughly implemented in the game, we probably won't see anything like it again.

6 pieces: Reduces the threat from your healing spells.
Then: Like I already said regarding tier 2 5 set bonus, threat has just never been that huge of an issue for priests. This feels like the kind of bonus you'd throw in because you have to have something and you don't want to use up all your good ideas on one tier. This should've been the 2 set bonus if anything.
Now: I can see this being a decent set bonus for those healing classes that currently actually have some issues with threat, most notably resto druids. Priests have always been able to rely on fade, and it has done a great job throughout the last six years. I can't even remember the last time I thought "gosh darn, if only fade had a shorter cooldown" because of my massive threat.

8 pieces: Each spell you cast can trigger an Epiphany, increasing your Spirit by 60 for 30 sec.
Then: With a 5% proc chance, this would have roughly 1 ppm, or an average of 30 extra spirit overall. And remember what I said about spirit? Only useful out of casting. This makes this bonus actually weaker than 2 set tier 2, which I find very odd indeed.
Now: Proccing spirit is what has become our trinkets today, we see this kind of mechanic all the time. With the proper amount of spirit this is a good bonus, which DMC Tsunami can attest!

Next time - BC and Wrath bonuses! (Pictures from wowpedia.org)

Old Darkmoon Cards

The other day as I was randomly scanning AH in lack of better things to do, I noticed that someone had put up Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon for 250g. Definitely not worth the money, of course, but it got me interested in the old Darkmoon Cards. What do they do and are any of them still worth getting? Let's have a look.

Level 60
The simple but odd trinkets.

 
Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon - Caster

Equip: 2% chance on successful spellcast to allow 100% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting for 15 sec.

This is a remnant from the Vanilla days when casters didn't have mana regeneration at all during combat. Trinkets like these were the only way, and I can only imagine that this was one of the best healing trinkets in the game, especially considering that getting any trinkets at all was pretty tricky. They didn't exactly hang from trees back then, as they do today. But how good is this today?

It seems to not have any inner cooldown, which means it benefits you more the more casts you can fit in to any given time frame. Casters like resto druids, shadow priests and affliction locks might see the most use of this item. Paladins and disc priests might see the least. Generally dpsers tend to have a lot less spirit than healers in endgame, but they usually use the same gear at lower levels. "Spellcast" also seems to mean basically any skill that isn't physical, much like how Clearcast can proc from just about anything, like herbing, switching specs or crafting. It does not however, proc from each tick of a hot or dot.

100% of your mana regeneration is a lot, but 2% is very little. How much you can gain from this trinket varies greatly with your class and gear so it's difficult to say some numbers, it's probably better to look at uptimes. You'll need 50 casts in average to get a proc. If you're dpsing you might have higher uptimes since you normally do more casts when dpsing than when healing. If we estimate one cast every two seconds while dpsing (average over all caster classes) you could hope to have one proc every 100 seconds or roughly every one and a half minute giving it an uptime of 15%.

At level 60 this actually is a decent trinket, and if you find it anywhere below 100g and don't happen to have any other trinkets that rock your world, I'd definitely recommend this one. In fact, some people are even arguing that this is a great starter trinket for healers in Cata (!), because it's usually rather cheap and it has relatively high mp5. Healers also stack a lot more spirit now than they did in Wrath.

Darkmoon Card: Heroism - Melee

Equip: Sometimes heals bearer of 120 to 180 damage when damaging an enemy in melee.

This trinket wasn't even that good back in Vanilla. Some loved it, some hated it. On the bright side, the procs do stack, don't seem to have an inner cooldown and they can crit. On the downside, 120-180 damage is a fixed number and for most people it's just not much enough to make a difference. This is even more true now that many classes that didn't have any way of healing themselves back in Vanilla, have become heals since then, like Recuperate and Victory Rush. The less hp you have and the more strikes you can get off in a time frame the better it will be. Druids with swipe can have it procs tens of times per minute, other see it proc a couple of times per fight.

It's not awful, but it's usefulness depends a lot on your situation. If you find it cheap and feel like surviving while questing is your biggest issue, it might be worth a shot (in which case you might also want Crusader enchants).

Darkmoon Card: Maelstrom - Melee

Equip: Chance to strike your melee target with lightning for 200 to 300 Nature damage.

As with the other trinkets, it doesn't seem to have an inner cooldown, so yet again this is heavily dependant on how often you strike something. It does work in shapeshift (as I assume Heroism does too, but haven't found confirmation). The proc rate seems to be around 2%, which is true of Blue Dragon and probably true of Heroism as well (Blizzard liked to make things even that way back then). just as with Heroism it can crit, it is affected by modifiers such as Stormstrike, but doesn't seem to be affected by spellpower.

On a level 60 character, this is actually a rather nice dps upgrade apparently. If you find it at AH at a reasonable price, you should get it as it could serve you well for many levels to come.

Darkmoon Card: Twisting Nether - Any (Pvp)

Equip: Gives the wearer a 10% chance of being able to resurrect with 20% health and mana.

This has always been considered mainly a pvp trinket, unless you're one of those who die a lot while questing and instancing. It is more of a fun trinket than a useful one, but it does actually work in Bgs and Arenas! I'd like to see the faces of the opposing team when the disc priest they just struggled to kill gets back. 20% mana and health isn't all that of course, and the stat loss is probably not outweighed by the few times you'll have use of this. Remember that eventhough it will resurrect you every tenth death (on average), that are nine deaths where it is absolutely useless. I'd only get it if found dead cheap on AH and your character lacks a trinket. On the other hand, as kingbread, commenter on Wowhead puts it;

"the only item like it. its always funny to pop back up and fireblast that cannibalizing UD rogue. and laugh in its face, cause the shock on a dead rogue's face is simply priceless"

Amen.

Level 70
No healing trinkets here unfortunately.

Darkmoon Card: Crusade - Any dps

Equip: Each time you deal melee or ranged damage to an opponent, you gain 6 attack power for the next 10 sec., stacking up to 20 times.  Each time you land a harmful spell on an opponent, you gain 8 spell power for the next 10 sec., stacking up to 10 times.

It's fun to see how Blizzard started thinking about hunters when they designed the level 70 trinkets, as compared to the level 60 ones. Overall, level 70 (and Burning Crusade) is marked by the realization from Blizzard that they have to design their gear with less specific targets in mind. If they do gear that only works for one class, they have to put in the effort to design a completely nother gear for another class. If they make it so that some items work for anyone, they only have to design one item!

• Crusade gives either 120 AP or 80 spellpower for 10 seconds. First of all, it's not really balanced across the classes. 80 spell power is way more than 120 AP.
• On the other hand, this is basically a permanent buff as long as you're in combat and you keep on swinging/casting, since each new swing/spell will refresh the buff.
• Any spell cast works apparently as long as it's harmful, ie no healing.
• It's based of off landings rather than casts, which means channeled spells (like Arcane Missiles and Penance) will give multiple stacks.
• Wanding will give the AP buff.
• Aoe attacks will give multiple stacks, one for each target, which means you could get a full stack with a well timed aoe attack.
• Some classes (paladins and shamans for example) that have attacks that count as both spells and melee will get both buffs, depending on what skills they use. This makes it especially valuable if you happen to use different dps specs, since the trinket works for both ele/enhancement or balance/feral.
• Passive effects (such as armors doing damage) do not give procs.

Although players have way more spellpower when leveling through those levels nowadays than they did before Cataclysm, this is still a really good trinket for those levels.

Darkmoon Card: Madness - Any dps or quester

+51 Stamina

Equip: Each time you land a killing blow on an enemy that yields experience or honor, you gain the Power of Madness.

Along with Vengeance this is the first Darkmoon trinket to actually give some sort of stat bonus, a plain stamina so that it works for any class. It doesn't actually mean that it's mainly aimed at tanks, but just a buff for the equip. So what does the equip do? A whole lot of things actually, depending on what class you are;

•     Delusional: +70 attack power (Rogue, Hunter, Paladin, Warrior, Druid, Shaman)
•     Dementia: "Down the rabbit hole..." Every 5 seconds either gives you +5% or -5% damage/healing. (Druid, Shaman, Priest, Warlock, Mage, Paladin)
•     Kleptomania: +35 agility ( Warrior, Rogue, Paladin, Hunter, Druid)
•     Manic: +35 haste (spell, melee and ranged) (All classes except Hunter)
•     Martyr Complex: +35 stamina (All classes)
•     Megalomania: +41 damage/healing (Druid, Shaman, Priest, Warlock, Mage, Paladin)
•     Narcissism: +35 intellect (Druid, Shaman, Priest, Warlock, Mage, Paladin, Hunter)
•     Paranoia: +35 spell/melee/ranged crit strike rating (All classes except Hunter)
•     Sociopath: +35 strength (Paladin, Rogue, Druid, Warrior)
•     Extra: The player will occasionally exclaim "This is madness!" This is similar to the things said by NPCs in combat. It is not controllable.

Eventhough you'd have to look at which class you are to fully evaluate this trinkets usefulness, the buffs are actually all pretty well balanced among the classes, which means that the trinket is about equally good regardless of which class you are. We have to take into consideration that the buff is granted when you land a killing blow, which makes this best for grinding/questing, maybe also pvping if you happen to be one of those classes that get a lot of killing blows. As such it is also unfortunately rather useless for anyone aiming to be an instance healer, but so is pretty much everything else around this level. Unless you plan to level your way through a killing spree, I wouldn't recommend this trinket. If you find it cheaply you could get it just for the funs of having a trinket that procs random buffs, and to get your char to yell randomly.

Darkmoon Card: Vengeance - Tank/pvp

+51 Stamina

Equip: You have a 10% chance when hit by an attack or harmful spell to deal 95 to 115 holy damage to your attacker.

Now this would actually be considered a tank trinket if anything. I know back in BC you had some paladins get the shield from Sporeggar, a shield spike and this trinket and be able to kill off huge amount of mobs just by doing loads of mini-damage. As such this trinket (and that complete combo) probably works really well for any paladin or warrior who plans on leveling that way. For the rest of you this might be a decent pvp or questing trinket, and if you don't have anything else, why not?

Darkmoon Card: Wrath - Any dps

Equip: Each time one of your direct damage attacks does not critically strike, you gain 17 critical strike rating and 17 spell critical strike rating for the next 10 sec.  This effect is consumed when you deal a critical strike.

This trinket works rather differently for melee and casters. Melee will probably stack up faster since they usually get off more skills within a time frame. Also, this trinket is of course better the less crit you already have. Aranarth over at Wowhead.com has kindly provided us with some information;

"Base crit --> Average trinket gain

5% crit --> 5% (110 crit rate)

9% crit --> 4% (88 crit rate)

15% crit --> 3% (66 crit rate)

24% crit --> 2% (44 crit rate)

41% crit --> 1% (22 crit rate)

Based on 100 000 000 tries simulations, assuming you attack or cast a direct damage spell at least once every 10 sec."

This conversion list is rather rigid of course, but in short it means that this trinket becomes better the more you need crit and the less you have of it. At level 70 you might actually be rather badly geared out on crit, and this trinket could probably provide with a lot of extra needed dps. I definitely recommend it, especially if you're a class that relies heavily on certain crit procs. As another commenter, Phinar, points out, this is also a great tool to combat increasing resilience on your enemies if you happen to pvp around these levels, since the more resilience they have the less you crit and the more crit buff you will get.

Level 80
The double equip trinkets!

Darkmoon Card: Berserker - Pvp (or possibly a moon lighting tank)

Equip: Increases your resilience rating by 100 (3.83% @ L80).

Equip: You have a chance to gain Berserker when you deal or take damage in combat, increasing your critical strike rating by 35 for 12 sec.  Effect stacks up to 3 times.

Resilience at low levels either points towards pvp, or towards a tank. As a pvp trinket, any class interested in some extra crit could have use of it, as a tank trinket it's actually a lot less good since tanks don't need crit for anything (unless you happen to be a Deep Wounds Warrior). Also, at level 80 tanks won't need the extra resilience anylonger since they'll all have the anti crit talent since long, which means only someone who doesn't have that talent could be interested (and I'm not even sure resilience works anti crit anymore, think they changed that in cata). Long ramble short, ignore what I said about tanks - it's for pvp.

It's important to note that it procs both of off taking and dealing damage, which makes it not all worthless for a healer (especially since I have been hearing that healers are targeted like never before). Since most healers don't value crit very much, this trinket is probably best for the pvping crit-lover, and there aint that many out there.

Darkmoon Card: Death - Any dps

Equip: Increases your critical strike rating by 85 (1.85% @ L80).

Equip: Each time you deal damage, you have a chance to do an additional 1750 to 2250 Shadow damage.

This is like the prequal to DMC: Volcano in that it deals extra damage as a proc (35% chance in this case). As with Volcano you should probably see the extra damage as a bonus rather than the big whoop of this trinket. It has an icd of 45 seconds, which was very common in Wrath. It can proc of off dots, the damage can crit and seems to be affected by various talents and buffs and crit chance, but not spellpower. Nonetheless, the proc isn't worth much dps and should either be seen as a tool (to interrupt bandaging in pvp perhaps) or as mentioned, a small bonus. 85 crit rating is 1,85% crit at level 80 which makes this trinket an overall rather weak trinket for its level.

Darkmoon Card: Greatness

+90 Spirit/Agility/Intellect/Strength

Equip: When you heal or deal damage you have a chance to gain Greatness, increasing your Strength, Agility, Intellect, or Spirit by 300 for 15 sec.  Your highest stat is always chosen.

This is probably the best of the level 80 DMC trinkets, and that was the case already back in Wrath. +90 in a primary stat of your choice with the possibility to get another 300 as a proc is still really nice. The only reason not to get this trinket at level 80 is if you know you'll go through level 80-85 and replace this trinket too fast for it to be worth whatever money you put into it. Only you can make that decision.

Now go out there and find yourself a nice trinket for your lowbie alt.
Thanks to wowhead.com for the pictures and specifics.