Guardian Thok's Tail

[lawrence131 0]

I was looking at Armories for some of the highest ilvl Guardians and noticed a handful of them are using Thok's trinket.  Even though the proc is horrible, is the 9% crit/haste/mastery a better survival boost than all the traditional "tanking" trinkets because of all the extra rage generation?  (should I be trying to get this trinket as a BiS?)

 

 

[Tarazet 144]

First, realize that the highest level Guardians most likely could smash all of the content using a PvP trinket. Second, the choices they do make are based on 1) having all BiS gear, and 2) doing maximum damage at the expense of all else. TTT does perform well if you have full BiS gear. If you don't, then other trinkets like Haromm's will be better.

[lawrence131 0]

if i'm only interested in survival though, i'm wondering if TTT is still better without the added bonus of damage.  Some of these top Guardians are using the *tanking* meta with the TTT which means their focus isn't just maximizing dps.  I don't know how to estimate the armor and rage generation difference from 9% secondary stats, but I have the Garrosh trinket and IJ trinket right now.

 

Comparing those, if I'm not worried about maximizing dps and just zerging through content, do you think the static 9% to all secondaries outweighs the short burst of crit through Garrosh (it's only 15% anyways), or the dodges I would get from IJ for progression?  Can Simcraft estimate this for me somehow?

[Pieorcake 0]

Well the reasons they use the tanking meta is because its extremely overpowered with something close to a 50% uptime on fights. While if you feel the need for the stam for the garrosh trinket thats fine but the IJ trinket is crap. The dodge and self heal are not worth it. I would say grab TED thats far and away BIS for guardians. TTT is a good trinket but requires close to full BIS to be worth the strength proc.

[Kazistrasz 216]

A few things:

 

Look at the available options for trinkets as a bear.

 

There's Assurance of Consequence, Haromm's Talisman, Sigil of Rampage, Ticking Ebon Detonator, Curse of Hubris, Rook's Unlucky Talisman, Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal, Vial of Living Corruption, or Thok's Tail Tip.

 

All of the Agi procs might seem nice, until you realize what they give you.

 

Excepting the Ticking Ebon Detonator, they all proc for the same amount of agility, which at 588 is something like 15% crit and 12% dodge (roughly speaking). The crit is mostly useless. Why? At high end gear, you're approaching the crit cap for white hits. That means the only thing it's going to affect, as far as survivability is concerned, is Mangle. Mangle is going to be critting almost all the time anyway, so the crit doesn't do as much for you. The dodge is actually nice, except that you're spending most of your time at close to 70% dodge chance anyway with Savage Defense, so it's relatively minor in comparison. But, the biggest reason the procs aren't that great is that you have no control over when you have them.

 

Now, the Ticking Ebon Detonator has a monstrous proc, about twice as strong as the others at the full 20 stacks. The problem is how quickly it fades away. It's a great trinket for Feral since they can try to snapshot it quickly. It's a poor trinket for guardians.

 

So, the important parts of your trinkets as a guardian are their passive effects.

 

The Assurance of Consequence doesn't even work for you. The Multistrike from Harrom's is actually a significant increase in damage (the heroic version is approximately a 6% increase on average at 4/4 upgraded). The Sigil of Rampage sucks just as bad for you as it does for the DPS in your raid.  The flat mastery from the Ticking Ebon Detonator is kind of disappointing. Mastery really doesn't do that much for you, given how often you're under 20% reduction between the meta gem or Barkskin, how much you're dodging attacks, and how much you can just quickly heal with a Frenzied Regeneration. Armor is just nice to have, but it's definitely nothing to write home about.

 

For the tank trinkets... all but one have stamina. Stamina is mostly useless to you at higher gear levels, because you're not generally getting hit so hard that your healers will need that tiny extra window of health to get heals on you. As a healer, I can tell you that when our bear goes splat, she goes splat, and there's nothing we can do to save her. A tank death is usually a result of something going wrong: either RNG BS happened in the fight that the tanks have to try to make adjustments for, or someone screwed up and put something into the fight that isn't supposed to be there, or some kind of IRL interference (like a puppy trying to play with you while you're raiding). If you're undergeared for what you're doing, you can make an argument for stamina, but it's a weak one.

 

The crit on use from the Curse of Hubris is no more useful than the crit aspect of the agi procs. The dodge and healing from the Focusing Crystal is surprisingly minimal. Even if you're doing ridiculous Vengeance-whoring to put yourself at 1M DPS, you're still only going to be seeing 36k HPS from the 588 version. The dodge on it is very small, and not enough you'd ever notice. Rook's Unlucky Talisman actually has uses if you're going to do something like solo-soak the Blood Rage on Malkorok or stand in Annihilates on Heroic Garrosh. Otherwise, it's useless. With good use of external CDs, it's not even necessary to begin with. The vial can make a little difference. A 588 version takes about 12.5 seconds off of your CDs for every minute of the CD. For Barkskin, you're looking at a taking off about 6 seconds. Big deal. For the others, taking off 37 seconds from a 3-minute CD isn't anything to write home about. But still, it's an option.

 

So now, we're left to look at the Tail Tip. Given that you're critting almost all of the time, adding that 9% crit damage is roughly as much of a straight damage increase as the Multistrike from Harrom's, if not slightly more. It also provides an increase to your haste. Our druid gets about 1100 haste from her Tail Tip, which is about as much as you'd get reforging a 588 Ticking Ebon Detonator into haste. It's not a huge amount, but it gives you more RPS for more survivability.

 

So, the Tail Tip is actually better to use under these circumstances. Then you have the option of Harrom's or the Vial. The vial just doesn't do that much, so it's not a big loss of survivability to increase your DPS by another 6%.

 

Also, Re: meta gem. The DPS meta gem was given a HUGE nerf to its proc rate for anyone in a tank spec. Tanks were originally using the DPS gem until Blizzard wised up and implemented a spec-specific proc nerf similar to the way warlocks have a 40% reduced proc chance on the trinket from Lei Shen.