Mage trinket advice
 

Quick discussion on Mage trinkets--I don't think there's specific talk on this in the Mage Megathread. And I haven't gotten around to running the numbers myself.

Right now, I have Neltharion's Tear and Xi'ri's Gift. I also have Bangle of Endless Blessings to play around with, when I think the 2-3k mana is worth wearing a non-DPS trinket.

I'm trying to decide whether to buy an Icon of the Silver Crescent. Basically, I have the Badges for it now, but I don't want to sentence myself to more future Badge farming if it's not necessary.

So, firstly, if I do buy it, it is likely to wind up in the bank in any reasonable amount of time? Is anyone who has it very frequently not wearing it?

Second, what do people think about two timered trinkets? Useful, or annoying/inefficient?

The only time Icon goes in my bag is when I'm tanking Krosh Firehand and need the hit from Scryer's Bloodgem. I don't have Quagmirran's Eye yet so I can't say for sure that Icon is better than that, but it's the only thing I've seen that might come close.

I tend to stay away from two activated trinkets. I just find that it's annoying. Perhaps it would be better than my setup:

I tend to run with Xiri's gift and the Nexus horn. They don't share cooldowns and will stack. With the nightbane robe you can get get the stars to align and have 505 +damage just in buffs and launch a nice AP+pyroblast on a clearcast. Maybe not the best dps choices but certainly the most fun i've had since netherwind 8 piece.

That being said I probably will swap my xiri's for a icon once I get the badges.

I'd love to see some data and/or serious calculations regarding Quagmirran's Eye. There was a caster trinket thread which touched on this, but all the conclusions people were making were based on guesses, or that's the way it seemed to me.

Silver Crescent seems like it would continue to be useful on trash pulls since you can increase your ratio of active/inactive during combat.

It's probably best to keep in mind that this post is coming from a guy with a white quality trinket equipped.

I have:
Lightning Capacitor
Nel's Tear
Icon of the Silver Crescent
Xi'ri's Gift

I use:
Lightning + Icon when I have elemental shaman to hit cap me or I'm farming.
Nel's + Icon when I need to be hit capped on bosses with no elem shaman.
Lightning + Xi'ri's when I'm AE'ing.

If I had Quag's eye, it would most likely be icon + eye all day, every day.

I can throw all sorts of numbers at you for a deep frost build, and those numbers would be close to accurate for a deep fire build (in both cases, the Gift stays on the vendor or in the bank). Unfortunately, I haven't modelled deep arcane specs yet. Either way, my gut feeling is that 32 crit rating won't hold up to 44 damage in any build, and you'll be better off going with Tear and Icon.

(For reference, Xi'ri's Gift would need over 65 crit rating before it would pass the Icon in a 10/0/51 build.)

One quick note is unlike Fire and Frost, Arcane builds tend to be hit-capped due to Arcane Focus, which diminishes the value of Tear.

I'd like to see your numbers for the eye. My girlfriend is 18/0/43 and uses tear/eye. She really would like to know if she should bother with the heroic badges trinket.

I don't know what to tell her... I only have 37 intellect, I can't figure out which trinket is better.

As arcane mage I'm using Icon of the Silver Crescent, Mark of Defiance and The Lightning Capacitor.

That's a problem and I'm not sure how much my numbers will help. All three are similar amounts of damage, and then the secondary effects are difficult to quantify. My numbers are more along the lines of "at 141 hit rating with 35% to crit, one point of hit rating is worth 2.5 crit rating". The Eye, Icon, and Tear are all dependent on the application where number crunching doesn't help.

The general theme of my time spent in Excel this week can be summed up as: "Deep frost mages should get gear with both +hit and +damage until they're hit capped, and then fill in the gaps with gear with +damage and +crit".

On a hit capped frostmage chain casting frostbolt with a 5% half casting time metagem, the secondary effect of the eye is equivalent to X "+damage."

The effect has a 10% proc chance, 6 second duration, and 18 second cooldown (I think). If you start casting while the haste buff is up (even .01 seconds remaining), you'll get the decreased cast time for that cast. I don't know how quick it makes your cast. If I were modeling it, I would use ~0.3 seconds cast lag and probably assume it proc-ed on the 5th or 6th cast after the cooldown ended.

Edit: I guess I should be looking at http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t10096-haste_magical_dps/ which is more related to spell haste.

The other thing with the Eye--how easily is it integrated into an Arcane Blast rotation?

It isn't easily integrated at all, which is one reason I never really seriously pushed experimentation with deeper arcane builds. The other of course is that I simply never parsed any appreciable benefit when I did use AB rotations and I frankly don't care for the utility on trash. Perhaps I should but I just don't.

1 -> 7 rotations suit me well as a boring 10/48/3 but the reduced attention to spell rotations does afford me a little more attention for various raid matters. In the end it is all about finding what works well for you of course.

It'll muck your cycles is all you can say. Quag's Eye is mostly suited for spam. If I want to play with 1.5 spells (Scorch/AB) I usually equip Shiffar's Nexus-horn. Oh and the Icon trinket is worth it's weight in gold. 5 seconds is an tangible difference between the Icon and the rest. With my current 10/48/3 I usually equp QE and the Icon.

I'm having the same difficulty as most of the other people here, trying to decide what in the world to do for my trinket situation (and failing miserably).

I'm (my warlock) currently using the Scryer +hit gem, and Shiffar's Nexus Horn, for my 0/40/21 build (not ideal, I know, but since my guild's Main Tanks are quite weak in terms of aggro production, along with the huge scarcity of raiding paladins, having the -threat from a master demonologist imp is almost a necessity). I know that Quagmirran's Eye would be a huge upgrade (especially if I stick with this build, guessing it would be somewhat gimpy for affliction, due to all the instants, if I was ever able to respec), but I'm also considering the Icon of the Silver Crescent as a possibility also.

However, I'm not really sure if I should try for either, as I'm really hurting for +hit as it is, and most of the gear available to me doesn't seem to get me close to the 16% cap (I'm at about 10% hit, 25% crit, 800 +damage, with my partial tailor set and unenchanted gear), and Shiffar's Nexus Horn is pretty sweet for my relatively high crit rate.

Basically, like everyone else, I'd really like to see in-depth math on Quagmirran's Eye, Icon of the Silver Crescent, and Shiffar's Nexus Horn, to decide precisely how worthwhile each are, and if they are worth losing the +hit from the Scryer trinket (is the additional damage gained from each and their procs worth being under the hit cap?).

I guess I could just switch to heavy affliction and pick up some points in suppression, but I'm already threat-capped as is, so it really wouldn't do me much good...