It scales way to well. 6 expansions from now people will be begging me to go kill broodlord for their warrior alts to grab it.

Cleary the hp restored/added needs to be capped at something resonable like 1500.

I'm not so sure that its overpowered but I sure am going to cry when/if I swap it out for the Sapphiron Trinket.

Lifegiving gem is indeed a fairly precious trinket. So versatile.

A cap is quite warranted, if only because it makes it possible to create a better trinket under the same premise in an expansion or two.

I thought of the same thing when Fetish of the Sand Reaver dropped the other day. This kind of trinkets will be very handy in the expansion(s).

There's a bigger issue here. All percentage bonuses like +hit, +crit, +dodge, +defense, etc, obviously have caps on how high they can ever go. Once you hit +18% hit vs level 63 mobs, that's it, more +hit is useless. While crit and the others could eventually be taken to 100% from gear, I don't think Blizzard ever intends to do that. Sure, they could keep putting out gear with ever increasing crit/dodge/etc, and maybe hit 75% crit by the very last expansion in five years. But my guess is that Blizzard intends to keep the top-end gear consistently around 30% crit for rogues, 20% dodge for tanks, and similar levels in other stats to what they are with Naxx gear now. The real scaling stats will be stamina, AP, +damage/healing as we've been seeing. If you're familiar with the itemization formulas and costs, then you realize that crit currently costs a fixed amount, but provides an effect that scales with level. If the cost of one point of crit remains the same for higher-level items, then those items will have more crit (maybe a 4% crit blackhand's) and you get out-of-control crit values. If the cost scales with level to match the expected effect that one point of crit gives you, then the level 70 blue crit trinket will be the exact same as the level 60 blue crit trinket...2% crit. One solution is to avoid pure percentage items like that, and always mix percent bonuses with flat bonuses, like ap and crit, or spell damage and spell crit. But there are a few pure-percentage trinkets in Naxx (Kiss of the Spider, Eye of Diminution), so maybe my prediction about consistent crit levels is wrong and we'll see level 70 rogues with 40% crit rates.

So as far as Lifegiving Gem goes, I don't think the solution is nerfing this particular trinket, but overhauling the whole system to fix the bigger problem, which is something they're probably doing in the expansion.

They're fixing the hit/crit issues in the expansion with new stats called "Critical Hit Rating", and so forth, which presumably will scale with level regarding how much of each is required for 1 crit or hit. So Blackhand's Breadth will be changed to be something like "Equip: Increases your crititcal hit rating by 28", while a level 70 equivalent will need something closer to 50 crit rating to have the same effect (numbers pulled out of my arse, as i haven't really the foggiest how they scale).

Yep- as I mentioned in a previous thread- will there ever be a better PvP trinket for rogues than Renataki's? Ever?

So incredibly glad I begged my guild until we got mine.

On a similar note, with it scaling perfectly, and with the new TBC rogue talents, I predict Venemous Totem will suddenly get some demand now.

I think Shiv can take care of all poisoning needs tbh. Why rely on chance still and occupy a trinket slot with a Venomous Totem?

Because Shiv looks very energy expensive. If it's only a 50% OH hit for ~SS energy costs...

Obviously Venomous is still a PvP thing - but to get those 5 DPs on for Disembowl?

You certainly don't have the extra energy for multiple Shivs when performing a stunlock or similar.

Yeah, but if you perform a proper stunlock, your enemy isn't going anywhere or doing anything and poisons are irrelevant.

Unless you're 41 Assassination, and rely on Mutilate and Disembowel, both of which require poisons on the target to work effectively.

Changing existing equipment to "critical hit rating" etc and making it scale down on the way to 70 does deal with the issue of how they're going to avoid ridiculous gear mudflation in TBC, but they've got to scale everything to do it. Lifegiving Gem, Fetish of the Sandreaver, the Visicidus healing shield trinket, etc will all be as good at 70 as they are now. Possibly better.

They might want to just slap a "requires level 60. Cannot be used by a character above level 69" and be done with it on those to avoid needing to balance around equipment from obsolete content (or, alternately, having to provide even better scaling trinkets in the new content).

I'd agree there needs to be a cap on the gem but I wouldn't make it that low, come the expansion you're going to need something that can restore a good chunk of your HP as a tank that isn't a potion, maybe 3000-5000 In that region I'd say.

It only restores 15%. For it to heal 3k you'd need 20k hp. I doubt we'll get that high in the expansion. A 1500 cap means you need to upgrade the trinket once you're running over 10k on a regular basis.

Oh I thought it was more than 15%.

I need to inspect our MT again...

Inspect? why bother

http://www.thottbot.com/?i=38253

15%

Personally I think it would be a healthy thing to have an item or two in BWL that can't be replaced by equipment in the expansion. That way the content will still be seen (and people will be able to get a shot at the Broodlord's head in the process). Perhaps "Broodlord Runs" will be common just as many guilds do "bindings runs" in MC.

My problem with Lifegiving is that it's a trinket that is amazingly useful for every warrior Spec, while the other class trinkets (except mages and shamans) while scaleable are either spec/style dependant (Scrolls of Blinding Light, Metamorphosis, Arcane Infused Gem, Venomous Totem) or laughably useless (Aegis, Black Book)

In PvP maybe, in PvE I really don't see the point of having a lifegiving gem on anything but a tank, which usually means a specific spec anyway. It's a very good trinket tho, that's for sure, has a few weakness(doesn't work when silenced, has a global cooldown) but it's still one of the best saver/zerk mechanism counter there is in the game, with last stand, and the cool thing is they both stack. Is it better than other class trinkets? For sure. Should it be capped so it stops scaling in one year? Probably.

But well who knows, if they add some crazy passive trinkets later, you might keep your gem only for very specific situations where having 15%hps for 20secs would really help. I know I didn't use the gem on every boss fight, but I really liked it for trash when healers fell asleep or were wasting mana on healing rogues who couldn't walk out of whirlwind range ^^

That is not a good thing.

Here's an extra period for emphasis.

.

What? What class? Did I miss something? I'm approaching 23 tohit with great gear and haven't seen a problem. Rogue, btw.

I put my Gem on for Loatheb. Saves me looking for tubers and gives the locks some space :P Plus the damn thing crits there as well, easy 2k health back when I'm fully buffed.