Warlock Trinkets and Cooldowns – WoW Classic

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Trinkets

On-use-Trinkets are often times very underrated compared to the ones passively giving stats. The reason for this is that it’s very comfortable to calculate Trinket damage in a vacuum. For example: The MC Trinket Talisman of Ephemeral Power gives you an extra 175 Spell power for 15 seconds, and has a 90-second cooldown. One way to calculate the overall worth of this item is to see that this trinket is active 1/6th of the time and gives 175 Spell Power so all you have to do to understand the usefulness of this Trinket is to divide 175 by 6. 175/6 = 29 Spell Power. So it’s as good as the Trinket “Briarwood Reed” then, as it also gives 29 Spell Power?

That’s not a realistic way to calculate the value of an On-Use Trinket. There are two main reasons for this:

1. The trinket will most likely be on cooldown even after the fight ends. If we take the MC Trinket I mentioned above as an example again, any time the fight is not exactly (N * 90s) you will get more DPS out of the trinket than you “should”. For example, if the fight is 2 minutes long you get to use the trinket twice over a 120 second period. 120/(2*15) = 1/4. 1/4 multiplied by 175 is 43,75. That makes the Trinket a clear upgrade from the Briarwood Reed 29 Spell Power Trinket. And if the fight is only 15 seconds long the Trinket gave you 175 Spell Power flat over the entire fight. Any cooldown left on your Trinket when the fight is over is a DPS increase.
2. When you fight a boss you don’t cast Shadow Bolt the entire time. You move around, you hide, you Life Tap or alt-tab to check out some girl on Instagram. Assuming you are a decent player you only use the Trinket when you know the next 15 or 20 seconds will be spent Shadowbolting the boss, so when you later have to run to the other side of the room your Trinket cooldown is ticking down. If you play an encounter like the Four Horsemen where you dps a boss ~half of the time then your on-use Trinkets becomes twice as effective since you use them twice as much per second that you are actually dpsing. This way, your trinket becomes more effective the smarter you use it.

Don’t treat Active Trinket-effects as if they were in a vacuum. There are very few times you shouldn’t have an on-use-Trinket equipped assuming you looted Talisman of Ephemeral Power or the Zul’Gurub trinket Zandalarian Hero Charm.

If you have multiple on-use trinkets you might be wondering which you should be running? If you know in advance how long the fight will last (thanks to logs or prior experience) you can fool around with the following Trinket Spreadsheet. This is made by Bwps one of the resident warlocks of the Classic Warlock Discord. You can make a copy of the spreadsheet and fill in your information to get a quick comparison of how good your trinkets are in different situations.

Cooldowns

Warlocks seemed to be the last on Santa’s list when damage increasing cooldowns were shared out. The only thing we can really do for increased burst damage aside from our rotation is use trinkets. However, there are a couple of other noteworthy cooldowns that although not direct crit or spell power increases can lead to overall improvements in our DPS.

Voidwalker Sacrifice

All of our pets have different spells and abilities, all of which fill a certain niche. The voidwalker can sacrifice himself and in doing so grant the player a damage-absorbing shield. This shield can be used to circumvent pushback from enemy spells. In fights like Vaelastrasz, this makes a big difference, before the fights start you get your voidwalker out and sacrifice him, following that you summon a new pet (in the case of SM ruin another VW for a second shield, DS ruin needs their Succubus for the increase in damage).

Amplify Curse and Curse of Doom

Those of us that go the Shadow Mastery route get an extra toy to play with, at least if we are not on Curse Duty. Thematic as it is for affliction warlocks they can increase the damage of Curse of Agony, this thanks to amp.

An amplified Curse of Agony is stronger than Curse of Doom. However, Curse of Doom deals more DPS than a normal Curse of Agony. This is due to taking up fewer global cooldowns and the high amount of base damage the spell has. On the contrary, it does take 1 minute before it goes deals damage, and if you miss you can not reapply it till the minute is up. Now the question becomes if you have amp and the fight lasts longer than a minute should you use it or should you opt for CoD still? As the amplification only counts for 1 CoA and not for all three that you can fit in the same time frame. The answer is that you will still want to use CoD in that particular situation, although the difference is close.

You can see the math behind this in this spreadsheet that compares the different situations.

Black Book

The Black Book is a trinket available for Warlocks during Phase 3. When used, this item empowers your pet, increasing pet damage by 100% and increasing pet armor by 100% for 30 sec. This spell will only affect an Imp, Succubus, Voidwalker, or Felhunter and has a 5-minute cooldown. This trinket applies a literal buff to your pet. Due to this you can buff your pet before an encounter, and swap back to your normal trinket for the fight. This is known as a “pre-pop”. Of course our pets aren’t always the best choice for fighting in raids, due to the nature of them dying so quickly, or us using them to buff ourselves by sacrificing them. However, as SM Ruin you can get away with using your Imp to deal a bit of extra damage in certain fights. This item also stays this way for many expansions to come and keeps being a niche Best in Slot item.