Don't you mean '+damage' instead of 'dps' for those trinkets? Or is it really such a big difference? Man, I need more time for boring heroics to get the icon even.

Heh, I feel rather foolish for missing it earlier, but I see the loss damage at the bottom. Also, the simulation gives the equivalent plus damage on a trinket. I didn't read the threadtext and went on my friend's word as to what it was about. Thanks for pointing that out dedmon, my mistake.

After reading the tread, and the piece on the bottom, supposedly if you have both the eye of mag and the skull of guldan, supposedly it is a better choice to go with 14% hit. Whereas for myself the tradeoff is not. It appears as though you need to have those combined trinkets to make dumping that 2% hit viable. I did the math and even with the highest dps trinkets other than the skull, the 14% eye of mag doesn't effectively add any damage, but it comes close.

Also, to proxy, you're right, again I should've thoroughly read the thread before posting, once again I apologize. I didn't mean 40 dps, it was the equivalent of 40 more plus damage. Which amounts to about ~18dps, which amounts to about a 1.7% dps output increase. Again, I can only apologize for not being more careful. Either way, it seems rather interesting that once you get the right combo of trinkets the hit cap is no longer a necessity.

Edit: The second part on the simulation I linked for the trinkets is probably going to suit the majority of priest specs 14/0/47 run at the hit cap, but also at a 1200 damage gear curve, though, in retrospect I'm uncertain if the -26.4 is subtracted from each individual trinket, or from the overall plus damage. If it is from each trinket, then there should be no reason not to be hit capped, but if it only from the overall +damage, 14% hit with the skull of guldan and eye of magtheridon is probably the superior choice.

A slight correction: If you are at 14% +hit and equip the Skull then you are effectively at 16% which means you need to look at the Mag_16 line item, not the Mag_14.

Using double threat trinkets and shrouding potions was never intented to be a particularly serious suggestion. I doubt many raiders find themselves in the situation where the additional threat they gain outweighs the lost dps.

However I do remember when my guild was first killing voidreaver, with 2-3 tanks and the fights went on so long we would barely beat the enrage timer. I would pull aggro about 2/3 of the way through the fight whatever I did. My aim was to maximise my dps and also to stay alive for the whole fight (I was the only SP so wanted to keep misery on).

I was already doing plenty of standing around doing nothing. Mana pots were useless as were consumables. My dps trinkets were doing nothing that I couldn't easily make up by standing around less. So I was effectively giving up nothing by using threat reduction items.

You are right that they don't do much really. Even with my low dps on that fight, each potion/trinket only bought me about 3 second extra of dps. But 9 seconds every 120 seconds is getting on for a 10% damage increase.


Finally, if you are heavily threat capped then standing around is all that can be done. Bandages & shield all generate threat, and we had people already doing these jobs without much of a problem and more importantly those people weren't threat capped. So doing these jobs just reduced my overall dps with little to no overall raid benefit.

Dedmon, I wasn't particularly sure if they ran the simulation with the +hit included, but if so then there really isn't and reason not to be hit capped, though it was an interesting thought.

Tedv, my issue was that typically most spriest didn't have access to the aq40/naxx trinkets. The typical pubbie spriest I see using said threat reducing trinkets are typically limited to the "hypnotist's watch" or that trinket from shadow labyrinth, which I typically chuckle at. Most guilds back in the 40man raid days didn't pass out coveted trinkets such as the eye of diminution or the fetish of the sand reaver, or they couldn't afford to. Shadowpriest such as Beckon had rare opportunities to get rather interesting raid gear pre tbc including the saph trinket from naxx. Not to mention the math I saw on the shrouding pots/watch/slab trinket was pretty much an aggro dump which amounted to nothing.

Amonra, I believe, is exaggerating on the threat dumped. According to what I've seen/read (and yes back in the day I actually tried the hypnotists watch once, though it was nothing short of stupid) the shrouding pots/trinkets ended up dumping less threat than fade. Meaning they do little to no good. Amonra you might want to check just how much threat these little items dump, also mention which trinkets you use.

For instance, the hypnotist's watch dumps (on a 5 minute CD) 720 threat, The Jewel of Charismatic Mystique dumps (on a 5 minute CD) 1075 threat, and shrouding potions dump 800 threat on a 2 minute cooldown. Personally, I have horrible luck on void reaver, so this won't apply to me, nor are we going to be doing tk much anymore. Anyway, fade rank 7 dumps 1500 threat on a 30 second cooldown. Now, if you are really so fortunate that you can stand around and nuke so consistently I assume you have VE up, and am going to wager you are probably producing (with salvation) ~700 tps or so. So assuming your guilds dps is solid overall, you probably killed VR in lets say 6-8 minutes. So that amounts to 3-4 shrouding potions (2400-3200 threat dumped) and possibly two uses of the ghetto threat trinkets (1440-2150 threat) or both trinkets (3590 threat). Now, the fetish of the sand reaver from what I've seen dumps the most threat, however I failed to understand the algorithm provided by thottbot ("Reduces the threat you generate by (70-2*max(0,PL+)% for 20 sec.") for which it reduces your threat by at 70, so I couldn't include it in this comparison.

But putting things in perspective, your threat reduction items do little to nothing when essentially you buy yourself under 10 seconds of full dps on that fight (wasn't sure what your gear looked like so I couldn't include the dps nerf from the lost +damage from trinkets (2.2 +dmg ~1dps?)). Honestly, probably not worth it. As for shielding and bandaging, they probably aren't generating nearly the tps your dps or hps (with ve) are. Though, to those of you fortunate enough to have a fetish of the sand reaver, as a priest, are probably gonna be doing some awesome burst dps/hps in the later content in the game, and I must admit I'm rather jealous. I'd honestly recommend dumping death from your rotation or dumping ve, that would lower your own threat cap significantly (dumping ve is probably about ~100 tps overall, so that more than anything would help in my opinion, and death is close to 1k threat on a 12s cooldown, so that too would help). Personally dumping ve and keeping death would be the recommended course of action for that fight. The orbs do an incredible amount of damage (4675–6325 according to wowwiki), and the hps you put on them in between orb intervals -probably- won't save anyone from a second orb, unless someone puts a downranked heal from them, and that is the only heal they get, or some freak accident like that. But for the most part, a second orb is probably going to mean certain death for most ranged on that fight. Generally, ve healing on that fight, aside from the melee group, won't do much good.

PL is the player's level. And the formula is: (70-2*max(0,PL-60))

At level 70 this is: (70-2*max(0,70-60)) = (70-2*max(0,10)) = 50%.

It lasts 20 seconds and has a 3 minute cooldown, so it's up 9% of the time. Ideally you'd use it in conjunction with other high threat abilities like Devouring Plague, but we'll just model the worst case of using it indiscriminately every cooldown.

At your estimate of 700 TPS generated, a 9% reduction over an 8 minute fight is 30,240 threat reduced. That makes it 8 to 10 times as good as the alternatives.

I have an [Eye of Diminution] myself, and absolutely use it on Gurtogg. It's pretty good there since I can use it pretty much every other non-Fel Rage phase. It's still 25% less threat, and that adds up when I use it typically 3 times in a Gurtogg fight.

Fixed threat drop trinkets are crap, the amount dropped is just so miniscule that it's hardly worth mentioning. If you're threat capped as a shadowpriest on Gurtogg, like most are, the best thing you can do is sub out some of your gear for Arena gear should you have any. It'll cut your damage down a little bit, and if you get Fel Rage, will increase your survivability.

The formula is 70 - 2 * min(0, level - 60)

* means multiply. This is used instead of x because * looks more like ·, the official symbol for multiplication in all mathematics beyond grade school. (x isn't used because it would be confused with the letter x as a common variable name.)

min(A,B) is the minimum of A and B.

So of your level is over 60, it reduces the 70% reduction by 2 for each level over 60 that you are. At level 70, the penalty is 20%, for a net of 50%.

I'd love to go back to AQ for the trinket, but the drop rate (1 in 12) means almost 3 months before anyone in your farming group would see even one copy.

Ah, I see, so it's a very similar setup to calc questions (Similar setup to an Integral or Derivative). It's been a while, so I wasn't able to recognize it right away. So the trinket functions from 60-70 and reducing the amount of threat reduced for 20 seconds, by 2% each level. Hence the 20%. Wow, that's incredibly impressive that at 70 it reduces the threat by 50% still, that scales far better than I originally imagined. Also, thank you for helping me recognize the equation again, that was a temporary lapse, I hope. Think it's worth going back to try to farm? Especially if one's guild is close to such content? Or are the hps encounters pretty feasible, and aggro reasonably manageable without the trinket anyway?

What came to mind:

70 - [ 2 x (B-60) ]; where B must be greater than or equal to 60 = Percentage of players threat reduced at level B.