As I just mentioned, I picked up the [Vial of the Sunwell] last night in Heroic Magister’s Terrace, and I’ve been trying to assess its value.
A brief attack of theorycrafting (hello, Excel spreadsheets) later, and here’s what we’ve got:
Assumptions
- Healer is a paladin
- Healer uses approximately 75% Flash of Lights and 25% Holy Lights
- Healer is chain-casting
- Trinket is used every time the cooldown is up
Results
- On raw numbers, given the assumptions above, Vial of the Sunwell is worth 15 mp5 and approximately 55 +heal.
- Apart from raw numbers, this trinket has some particular strengths:
- Triggering the “Use:” effect doesn’t activate the global cooldown, meaning it stacks nicely on top of your regular healing rotation, and can either be macroed into your regular healing macro, or be used when you need burst healing to supplement your heals without eating a GCD.
- Unlike many trinket effects you can ‘charge it up’ ahead of time; the Holy Energy buff (which represents the collected energy, and stacks to 20) has no duration. This means that you can charge it up with 20 rank 1 heals before a fight starts.
- Edit: As Matticus just pointed out to me in chat, the effect of the trinket isn’t suppressed by silences, so it’s great for use on fights with silence effects and big damage, like Gruul and Nalorakk.
- Note that the effect can crit, for 3000 healing.
Variations
- The figures aren’t wildly different for paladins with different casting rotations. Chaincasting 100% Holy Light lands somewhere around 47 +heal; chaincasting 100% Flash of Light equates to around 58 +heal.
- Keeping the same casting rotation, and instead assuming you’re only casting 75% of the time instead of chain-casting, the value of the trinket rises to an equivalent of around 72 +heal.
- It is important to note that this trinket doesn’t magically do more for you just because you’re casting less often. These numbers are equivalents to give you an idea of the end effect of the trinket, compared with other alternatives you might equip.
Hey Siha,
I got mine two days ago and so far it’s been going great, I’m finding it a little hard working it in when I’m healing but I’m getting the hang of it, I’ve already got heaps of situational heals already.
But because it costs no mana, I’m finding that I can use it with inner focus to stay out of the 5 second rule a little longer for the mana regens.
Also, I haven’t used it yet, but this is going to be a good 4k heal at the end of phase2 on Reliquary of Souls.. I usually save my inner focus for after we have zero mana, incase the dps is a little behind and we need to keep the tank up.
I remember reading that the healing use of the trinket only had a 10 yd range. Is that still the case? If so, how are you working that in to your raid heals? Do you run up from max range to throw it on the tanks, or just use it for ranged people that need heals? I’d be interested to see how it fits in to the 25-man situations.
I actually haven’t noticed any range issues with it; I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.
Definately a trinket for RoS…