Well, it would be silly to intentionally nerf your +hit of course. But what I'm pointing at is say you have this trinket. Each mage evualates +hit as being equal to a certain amount of +dmg. So if you have this trinket, would it make you lean toward the +dmg item instead? Lets just say for a particular situation +1 hit = +20 damage. If you had a choice of a +1 hit item or a +20 damage item, what would your choice be? A +19 damage item?

Also, taking 2 extreme examples, this trinket proc would be worthless if 100% of your spells got resisted. It would also be worthless if 100% of your spells hit.

Surely you're joking?

I know several rogues that have soloed to it and of course the legions of soulstoned people.

EDIT: That mag trinket is so bad I just don't know what to say. One of my three trinkets right now is already 42 +damage and has a right click 20s 153 +damage effect. Oh, to match the cooldown on that easily obtainable trinket? I'd need to see one hell of a lot of resists.

You'd need 2 per 120 seconds (if that's the cooldown on your +153 trinket). 120 seconds is about 40 spells (depending what you're casting), so you'd need a 5% resist rate to have it be equivalent. What's a realistic full resist rate against a raid boss these days, given the elemental precision nerf, lack of +hit gems, etc.?

No no no, don't say so unless you've ran it trough excel...

Assuming 2.6sec avg cast time for a spell and a period of 120sec you'll get 46 spells out. Since each Frostbolt is binary resist, you'd have to get 2 full resist to be on par with the Icon of the Silver Crescent. 2/46 = 4.34%. Assuming your resist rate is bigger than that, it's "better" than the mentioned Icon.

To be at 4.34% resistrate for Frostbolt you need to have 8.66% worth of hit rating in your gear and fully talented Elemental Precision. Converting that to hit rating means that if you have more than 109 hit rating from your gear Icon is better, if you are under that, you'd do better with Eye of Magtheridon.

It's not a bad trinket for certain specs. Actually, I'd go so far and say that this is the best trinket for Frostbolt mage to be used in resist-fights... Tempest keep and fire resistance fights anyone?

Assuming deep Frost mage, Icon still is good, as you can time it with your Water Elemental to give +dmg boost for it also, not to mention that just the ability to choose when you have the +dmg is worth something. But if we had a patchwerk style fight with sapphiron style fire-aura, this would probably be the trinket to use.

For Fire or Arcane specs it has probably less uses, as I'd guess that the resist has to be full resist to be counted.


edit: As of supposed hit rating. I've got 99 hit in my "normal gear" but I usually go with http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29132 equipped for bosses, so I'm up in to 130's. Otoh, I'm certain that I have by far the most +hit gear from my guild... Still, I'm fairly certain that I won't be hitting the hitcap too soon, as I'm expecting to loose some +hit in forthcomming upgrades.

The real reason it's so crap with an Arcane build is that Arcane has 10% +hit on Arcane Blast, which is their primary rotation spell. Hit capping is pretty much the "normal thing" for Arcane.

Beyond that, the other issue is simply control. Say a ~4.3% "proc rate" as mentioned for the breakeven point... why would someone prefer to rely on a "random" proc with such a low rate, rather than a controllable trinket you can time with other cooldowns?

Even if you got some minor overall DPS upgrade from it in a rare case, wouldn't the control issues still make it somewhat non-optimal?

Why would one take a crit rating over +dmg, because +dmg is more reliable way of upping dps? Why take hit rating, because it's just 1% off your misses?

Yeah, it's not great nor probably the best trinket available. But it's not downright horrible, as some people seem to claim, especially under certain cirmustances.

Fair enough, I should know better than to eyeball such things. That said, I just hate things that have proc conditions based on conditions I am attempting to avoid. Heck, from the perspective of someone that is not hitcapped, you'd still be better with Nelth's here anyhow.

Well if I was a pvp specced frost mage with my current gear I would have a good 13% miss rate against a boss. Soooo... yeah, it's ok for certain specs. It's probably much better for warlocks. Trinket procs off a resisted shadow bolt, fire all your dots, etc. They typically get less hit in their itemization as well... at least they used to.

It's not something I would spend dkp on, that's for sure.

It used to be possible to artifically manufacture resists by abusing a Winter's Chill bug, but nobody could find a reason they'd want to artificially manufacture resists. Now that there's a reason to want controlled resists, they've fixed the bug.

(The bug was just that Winter's Chill could get resisted, and wasn't affected by +hit or by talents. Because of that, you could be hit capped but still have a 17% chance for Winter's Chill to get resisted by bosses. Mages were annoyed by it back before they fixed it, but it would be handy to have around now.)

I haven't noticed my Imp Scorch debuff being resisted at all since TBC. Recap tells me I've had > 10k casts of it just over the last week or so, if you figure 2/3 Imp scorch that's more than 6600 casts that would have applied the debuff since I've specced into it, and not a single resist.

Of course, my SCT might be mis-configured ... :/