Need help with trinkets (Blood dk)

[Ikws 0]

So, I have:
875 Ravaged Seed Pod
865 Nightmare Bark (1.418 strength/986 haste)
865 Phantasmal Echo
860 Writhing Heart of Darkness

Which two should I keep?

Edited November 1, 2016 by Ikws

[Aegis 27]

Depends. What are your current stats, and what type of content are you gearing for?

[Ikws 0]

46 minutes ago, Aegis said:

Depends. What are your current stats, and what type of content are you gearing for?

Mythic raiding and mythic + (anything from +5-6 to +10 and beyond)

without any trinkets im sitting at 18% critical strike, 28% haste, 28% mastery, 3% versatility

with both trinkets containing haste, my haste goes to 34%

[Aegis 27]

Ah. To my mind, main issue is that your crit is way too low. you should be aiming to get at least 20% parry (main way to do that is with getting crit up) - this synergizes well with skeletal shattering. Also, given the way blood works, the only way we have to protect our bone shield stacks is with parry, so the higher your parry (chance to fully avoid an attack as opposed to mitigating part/all of it) is, the less marrowrends you need to cast - leading to a direct increase in self healing due to both your HS passive heals, and higher RP generation which means more DS (also, this double dips with Red Thirst - DS reduces cd of your vamp blood - if you have the legendary belt, HS ALSO reduces cd of vamp blood).

You don't really need more than circa 23-5% haste - any more is kinda overkill unless you can hit the next breakpoint (i've seen it variously at 40%, 42% and 50%). My DK is running with 25% haste and crit, and i have no issues with a +10. 

A good guide would be to go with crit and haste up to about 25% each, then invest more in either mastery or versa - which one you choose depends on what you're doing, and what you feel you need more of. Mastery gives you a passive increase in DPS and an active increase (although virtually negligible) in survivability by virtue of our undertuned blood shields (compared to WoD/Mists), and versa gives you a flat passive increase to all (but you need to stack the HELL out of it to get any mileage).

My suggestion is just to run with different builds and see what works best for you. I was running a full haste build (haste at about 39%) but seriously felt squishy - the bosses just smack you around so much. Switching to a equal crit/haste build lowered my EHRPS by a mile - i believe the difference was about 20% reduction on average across all bosses in EN.

To note: i'm not bothering with mythic raids right now, because i'm in a casual guild. We cleared Heroic EN 3 (?) weeks ago, and it's been on farm ever since. My main source of progression is Mythic+, cleared a 10 this week, but got an 11 CoS (obviously not able to clear - DPS insufficient for the damned last boss).

Edited November 2, 2016 by Aegis
Clarification

[Aegis 27]

3 hours ago, Ikws said:

So, I have:
875 Ravaged Seed Pod
865 Nightmare Bark (1.418 strength/986 haste)
865 Phantasmal Echo
860 Writhing Heart of Darkness

Which two should I keep?

For now, i would go with Phantasmal Echoes (BIS) and Writhing Heart of Darkness if you're facing challenging content. For easy content, Ravaged Seed Pod gives abit more dps, and the leech is fun to play with, but it's not as reliable. If you're lucky enough to get a high level Impenetrable Nerubian Husk (haste with an armor proc), that's really fun too.

[Lance171 0]

Phantasmal Echo is a BiS so you will always want to go with that. I dunno about the Heart of Darkness though. I guess you could stick with it if you can keep AT LEAST ~20% crit chance? Its pointless if you cant get the proc to work for you consistently. Otherwise Ravaged Seed Pod - haste is never a waste for blood dk. You dont rly want any strength trinkets if you can avoid it, so you can cross out the Nightmare Bark.

P.S.

I wouldnt overestimate the parry rating. I think its better to smooth out the overall dmg intake with more Death Strikes comming from haste, than parrying an auto attack once in a while. Sure, you dont want much more than 30% haste, but keep in mind that its still your MOST important stat. Even 34%, still isnt that bad. Unless you can actually get this 25%+ crit chance AND keep ~25% haste, put your focus on the latter.

[Aegis 27]

1 hour ago, Lance171 said:

I wouldnt overestimate the parry rating. I think its better to smooth out the overall dmg intake with more Death Strikes comming from haste, than parrying an auto attack once in a while. Sure, you dont want much more than 30% haste, but keep in mind that its still your MOST important stat. Even 34%, still isnt that bad. Unless you can actually get this 25%+ crit chance AND keep ~25% haste, put your focus on the latter.

I honestly don't believe that we can overestimate parry rating at this point, since we're still in the first tier of the expac. The problem is that without parry, it's gonna be more difficult to maintain a healthy number of bone-shield stacks, especially against multiple targets. yes, having more Death Strikes does help, but it doesn't smooth out damage intake as much as allow us to recover from it - if mastery was tuned better, you would have an extremely valid point there, but as it is now... it's just not enough. Bear in mind that for runic power generation, HS vastly outperforms MR - leading us to having more Death Strikes if we can prioritize HS over MR - in terms of priority, we only prioritize HS over MR when we have at least 5 stacks of bone shield (i tend to prioritize MR even when i'm at 6 stacks, but that's just me). Thus, the recipe for more Death Strikes would obviously be a certain minimum amount of haste (at least 20%) then balancing out the other stats - mainly still focused on haste and crit.

The name of the game  at this stage is balance, cause DKs are kinda in stats hell when it comes to tanking - check out the other threads on blood, especially.

Look at the replies there, it's a good insight into the different stats our class needs. When we talk about the stats mathematically, we're looking at relative breakpoints for different stats - like i said, 25% crit and haste is a good starting point, but for your individual gear, it might be slightly different. This is all mediated by how much versa you can get - if you can hit 25% crit, 25% haste, 40% mastery and 10% versa, you'll be at kinda the holy grail for right now. of course, ToV next week and NH in about 2 months changes that again, but for right now, seems like the best we have.

[Shells 64]

Aegis has summed it nicely. 

 

I would argue against the need for 40% mastery as its so piss weak at the moment that I would take any other stat in its place. 

I would go for 30% haste, 25% crit, 20% parry (mainly from crit and artifact build) as much versa as you can and 30% mastery with the mastery being bottom of my priority list. You get so much from gear that you wont need to gem or eat for it. 

Then again, as Aegis has said, mastery might get a buff and it would be super useful. Best keep a few pieces of good ilvl gear with mastery in the bank just in case.

Parry is good , its entirely passive, it might save a BS charge which is super and its not something you have to worry about.  Its just not as OP as it used to be or rather, we cant stack it to OP levels like we could in the past due to DR kicking in faster/harder.

[Ikws 0]

Thanks a lot for your answers! I can actually optimize my gear to sit at exactly 25% haste and 25% crit, that's how I roll with Frost. I thought getting a shitload of haste was more important than getting 25% crit. I'm gonna try the way you guys said and see how it goes.