It fell off the front page; you can bump it to talk about the new trinket.

For the most part, the best choice you can make with frost emblems for a feral tank is the cloak. Depending on whether you're planning on getting your 4pT10 or you'll have access to 277 gear, the next choice is likely the belt, followed by the non-tier gloves or chest. The CSK is fairly low as long as you have black heart and glyph.

If you are planning on getting 4pT10, I'd advise starting early.

I'm sorry if this seems obvious to some of you, but as a relatively new feral tank (and gearing in all blues to try an experimental "undergeared" run), I am trying to understand why I've seen some high end tanks using the 18 Stamina armor kits on their chests instead of 275 Health or 10 Stats. My confusion may just be a sign of my lacking understanding, but help me please.

18 Stamina, after Kings and Dire Bear form, still only gets up to around 23 effective Stamina, right? So why is that being used over the 275 Health option, when it seems to provide less total health? Similarly, doesn't 10 Stats also give you Agi (Armor/Crit) and Strength for mildly more TPS? What am I missing? Thanks.

You're missing a couple stamina multipliers - 25% for Dire Bear Form, 10% for Kings, 10% for HotW, 6% for SotF, and 2% for Improved MotW. Altogether that gives you 16.35 health for each point of stamina, so the 18 stamina enchant gives you 294 health.

I'm trying to get a better handling of [Trauma] in RAWR and I'm having a devil of a time nailing down the approximate number of people the proc off of this item can proc off of. I understand that it can proc only in the 10 yard radius from the initial proc, but say in a melee heavy raid, how many people would typically benefit from the proc?

I've got a very basic question. How much faith should I put in Rawr? Rawr tells me to use [Herkuml War Token] & [Whispering Fanged Skull] and not [Whispering Fanged Skull] & [Needle-Encrusted Scorpion]. This confuses me, since ArPen should be my best stat and I'm not reaching the cap.



If the information on wowhead is correct, the weapon effect uses the mechanics of Fountain of Light which heals for X every 1 second for 6 second. So if it Trauma effect switches targets, it seems, it can effect up to 6 targets.

NES has an up time problem. It has a 10% proc chance on crits, while most other proc based trinkets have a higher proc chance based on any hit. Due to this NES has a fairly low up time ~18%-22% even when raid buffed. There is also a large iLevel difference between NES and HWT, even if ArP is your best stat point for point, getting a significantly higher amount of most other stats is still a better deal. You could look at individual stat values in rawr and verify it; NES is 114 crit and 135 ArP(678*20%) vs. HWT at 153 Haste and 331 AP (3 minute static fight with 10 seconds to fully ramp).

The uptime for NES is really not that bad; while it does proc on crits it does so very frequently. That being said, there is a point where having 100% arpen some of the time is not as valuable as having x% arpen all of the time + having better proc trinkets, and that's what Rawr is telling you.

I personally switched when I had over 1000 arpen and two good trinkets (WFS and Herk). Ultimately it's going to be up to your personal preference; Rawr isn't perfect as a model, and SimulationCraft is going to give you more accurate results that are configurable. I will say that if your fight has a lot of target switching and/or downtime (like Sindragosa for example) something like NES will be better simply because it will give you more uptime when you're actually on target.

I think on a relative basis to other trinkets it is. Take the MRS for example, both have a 45 ICD, MRS is a 15% chance on any swing, NES is a 10% on crit. Assuming a 65% crit rate and a .8 sec swing, ignoring yellows, and assuming you swing right when the ICD ends you have average down times of 4.5 seconds for the MRS and 17.43 seconds for the NES. Those assumptions are at a pretty high gear level and the gap between the two of them will increase as gear quality goes down, due to NES's dependence on crit. Also adding in yellows and trying to line up the swing time would just hurt NES more as MRS benefits more from each swing since it can proc on all swings vs. only crits.

Despite a 6 iLevel difference the and a 13 ArP difference in proc value, the proc on the MRS is worth:
53 more ArP, over a 2 minute fight
35 more ArP, over a 3 minute fight
26 more ArP, over a 4 minute fight
20 more ArP, over a 5 minute fight
16 more ArP, over a 6 minute fight
30 more ArP, over a 7 minute fight
26 more ArP, over a 8 minute fight
23 more ArP, over a 9 minute fight
21 more ArP, over a 10 minute fight
31 more ArP, over a 10:10 minute fight where you eek out a little dps past enrage

So the up time cost for most fights is leaving 1 gem slot open or 1 open and putting a Puissant Dreadstone in another gem slot, which in my mind if you are min/maxing is a relatively big deal.

Why would you ignore yellows? That seems particularly wrong to me, and it's one of the reasons it does have a reasonable uptime - ferals tend to use a fair amount of yellow hits. I believe it even procs on yellow crits from bleeds.

I'm a bit skeptical of your math as well; 17 seconds past the ICD on average to proc? That seems absurdly low; in that time you'd have 22 white attacks at a 65% crit rate; the chances that none of them proc seems pretty low. Assuming a statistically average number of crits, you've got a 22% likelihood to not proc after 17 seconds - again, assuming only white hits.

In any case I agree that NES isn't going to win compared to having the two high-ilvl trinkets simply because they're better, even when you can't get 100% arpen.

I was able to compare NES with Herkuml yesterday on Saurfang HC and the difference was pretty small. Herkuml passed NES bei about 1-2%. Regarding Rawr, the 2.3.X.X version wants to regem everything to agi while 3.x prefers ArPen. Since 3.x is newer, although beta, I go with it.
I think the old Rawr perfers Agi because of Imp MoW and it's 2% bonus.


I might be better of with gemming [Lasherweave Legguards] with ArPen/ Haste instead of ArPen/ ArPen. But I'm not exactly sure how much I benefit from hast atm. In Cataclysm when haste effects the energy regeneration, it'll be more important.