Just looking for a bit of math if anyone has it. Does Briarwood Reed, if I popped the trinkets whenever possible, outdamage ZHC or ToEP? I've seen tons of mages on Allakhazam using Tear of Neltharion (Hopefully gonna pick it up soon) and Briarwood Reed, and was really wondering if Briarwood outperforms either ZHC or ToEP.

Well, if you use it every time it is up, ToEP is approx. equal to Briarwood Reed in longer fights. It's up 15 sec and 75 sec, it is not up. If we divide our 90 seconds into 6 segments of 15 seconds, it will look like this with ToEP: 175/0/0/0/0/0. If we look at the same for Briarwood, it looks like this: 29/29/29/29/29/29. And 29 * 6 just happens to be 174. Marginal difference, especially if you take into account casting lag and the point that you won't exactly on 90s from the first use pop ToEP again, more like 92 or 93 sec from first use. ToEP, on the other hand, can be controlled when you want it. Mostly, this makes for a 'whichever combination I'm going to get first' on Nelth + ToEP / BR. I'm personally sporting the first as I've seen Briarwood drop only twice and lost the roll on them as well.

As for ZHC, that's a different story. It's 204 and segments of 17, 12 charges I think, on a 20s timer and a 2 minute cooldown. Seeing as I don't have the trinket from guildruns and my PuG rolling luck only extends to 5x Hakkari Coin a run and the occasional Bijou, I can't really comment on it, how it works etc. :)

The sustained damage of the timered trinkets is easy to compute.

Tear: 44 + 2% hit
ToEP: 175 * 15/90 = 29.2
Reed: 29
ZHC: 200/2 * 20/120 = 16.7

So the only real contention is between ToEP and Reed. ToEP generally wins out, due to the fact that the trinket can cool down during times when you're not casting. Also, its lets you focus damage where it's most important.

Examples:
Emps -- ToEP. You spend a lot of time running around, and 15s is almost exactly the right length of time to park in front of Vek'lor and blast away (however, you have to stand alone to avoid getting interrupted by Blizzard).
C'Thun -- ToEP. DPS on vulns and Flesh Tentacles is disproportionately valuable.
Anub'Rekhan -- ToEP. Use it on the Crypt Guards during Swarm. No chance of being wasted by Impale, and it cools down while you're waiting to deal with Scarabs.
Patchwerk -- ToEP. You get 5 usages in 7 mins, which is a favorable ratio.

So wait, is ZHC really that bad?

I take it the new Talisman of Ascension from the AD doesn't factor in at all, really?

Yes, post-nerf. Blizz has stumbled across a bit of logic here--you actually want the two that are available in raids.

What these sustained computations don't take into account is that in many cases you cannot continuously cast for the duration of the trinket cooldown, causing them to compare more favorably vs. the Reed.

Trinkets are also quite nice for seeding ignite stacks and one can somewhat make an argument for the old 2% crit trinket (or new for that matter) on some fights being worthwhile for fire mages. The main perk though of the clicky-trinkets is for trash or for targets that have a needed burst period through vulnerability or through enrage-type mechanics. Still, if you are a little lazy or just hate damage spikes, the old BWR is not too bad at all.

In a raiding enviroment, for a fire mage with 600+ dmg, I find Eye of Beast better than all other 3 trinkets in most situations.

One thing of note about the ZHC is that it's tooltip is incorrect. It actually provides 12 charges worth 17 damage/34 healing each now (Starting at 204/408), not 8 charges worth 25 damage/50 healing (starting at 200/400). (It appears I have a Chicken's eye sight, I missed someone saying this earlier in here)

The Talisman of Ascendance from AD is mostly notable in it's short cooldown at 1 minute. I'll leave someone else to calculate the numbers though, I've never been much of a maths person.

I'm sitting on +500 fire damage at the moment and until recently used Eye of the Beast and Neltharion's Tear mainly becuase I was too lazy to switch/activate trinkets. Now I use a very heavily modified version of TwinTrinkets that switches ToEP, ZHC (and if both on cooldown EotB) around and I'm fairly sure my damage has gone up by a fair amount. Not entirely sure if it would be better than Briarwood Reed but I suspect so.

Briarwood outdamages zhc&toep but not that new ad toy.

Well, as was said before ZHC is (at least according to the tooltip) 12 charges of -17 damage each, which makes it much less bad than 8 * -25.

I'm a frost mage so I've done my calculations for frostbolt; the end result is the same for fireball / scorch tho. There's just lag that you need to take into account. Even with my relatively low ping I don't usually seem to get more than 6 frostbolts out of one ZHC use, which means 200 + 200-17 + 200-17-17 (etc 3 more times) = 945 total +dmg for the duration. With ToEP the lag gives me five frostbolts, so that's 175*5 = 875. However the cooldown on ToEP is 90 seconds versus ZHC's 120, so that makes ToEP better (945 / 120 vs. 875 / 90).

Talisman of Ascendance, I understand, gives the buff a maximum of five times. 20 seconds is also plenty of time for 5 frostbolts, so the total bonus is 40 + 40*2 + 40*3 + 40*4 + 40*5 = 600 +dmg for the duration. The cooldown is only one minute so that means ToA slightly better than ToEP (600 / 60). The difference is only a few percent, but it's still a difference. ;)

For Briarwood Reed I'm assuming 5 frostbolts over 15 seconds because of lag, which works out to 20 frostbolts a minute. At 29 +dmg for each that's 580 / 60 which is very close to the burst trinkets. However Neltharion's Tear is clearly the best trinket at 880 / 60, not even including the +2% hit.

In my opinion the main thing about the burst trinkets is the "ease of use". On many fights - indeed, I'd even claim on most fights - you can't get the full use out of a burst trinket. Maybe you need to dodge some AOE right when you pop it, or maybe the mob dies too soon or whatever. This leads me to believe that Briarwood Reed & Neltharion's Tear are, in almost all situations, the two best mage trinkets currently available. (I'm discounting any horsemen / Sapphiron / Kel'Thuzad drops as these bosses haven't been downed yet.) An interesting point is that ZHC is actually better than ToEP in many cases (such as often in pvp), because ZHC starts out better than ToEP and only becomes worse if you manage to use it for long enough. :)

About Eye of the Beast; as a frost mage all I gain from more crit is damage, at around 10 +dmg = 1% crit, but a fire mage (especially with better gear than mine) might prefer Eye of the Beast over Briarwood Reed. I can't be bothered to do the math at this hour tho. :)

(First post here, whee.)

I'll try that addon out, thanks.

For a Fire mage with the now common +600 mark broken, 1% crit = around 15 damage, and more importantly, it scales with flasks etc. The AD +48 to undead trinket is still better in most Naxx situations though.

The MQG calculations are wrong also, it assumes you get 3 extra casts, also lag isnt really calculated in as frostbolts avg under 2.7s is a rare commodity. Most people have an avg of around 3,0s and with some optimization and fastcast you should be getting 2.7-2.8s.

Inspired from the same sheet i made a .xls covering the trinkets it does not assume any lag just theoretical values.

http://www.darkstormguild.com/members/trinkets.xls ( i am aware that the xls isnt working correctly if you change the base values)

MQG is anyways the best burst damage trinket out there, if you just need 1 burst during a 5mins time, for example huhuran and maexna, its great for trash also if you are swapping trinkets around.

In my opinion this statement is false. Trash fights rarely last long and therefore ToEP/ZHC etc shine as their cooldowns don't matter. Long sustained dps boss fights are a different matter.

Post 1.12:

At around 600 +dam, eye of the beast represents ~0.5% increase in dps over toep for a warlock shadowbolting only. The % increase is slightly less if you shadowbolt and corruption - but its still greater than toep. Only if you are using shadowbolt, corruption and coa does toep win - and then only by like 0.1%. This includes factoring in of lifetapping

(simulation run with my current gear on http://www.skav.org/theorycraft/warlock_simulator.php)

WoW, AD is only a minute? Might have to try that out.

How useful are people finding trinket-swapping? The length of a trash pull is not appreciably shorter that the cooldowns of these things, so I just don't see where it has any place.

That's the case for me anyway. It's not so much about how fast the trash dies, but about the amount of trash. The more trash the better passive trinkets gets. I could also mention the same reason you said, trash don't last very long so often you dont get all the 15 seconds out of say Toep and so on.

Add the fact that you might not click it as soon as it's up and boom, not so efficient now eh? Nah, in the long run, passive trinkets owns.

It's not like you have massive options anyway, you should have a Tear in one of your slots and later on TREoS.

Since the cooldown on trinkets is 2 minutes, you could swap out a passive trinket after combat is over, and then swap back once the cooldown is <30 seconds. It does take micromanaging (via Itemrack or similiar mods), but some people feel it is worth it.

Are you just fighting a series of 30s combats?