As an on-use trinket with no passive agility, the Kiroptic Sigil may not seem all that appealing. It also does not compare favorably on spreadsheets with other trinkets this tier (as Frostheim discusses here). However, it ends up being better than we might first expect.
The trinket’s on-use cooldown of 2,290 agility for 15 seconds every 1.5 minutes makes it remarkably useful this tier.
- Zon’ozz: The cd lines up very well with black phases where the boss takes extra damage.
- Yor’sahj: The cd is nice for adds and, being pure agility, works well for both the faceless packs and the Mana Voids.
- Hagara: The cooldown matches up perfectly with Hagara’s phases, allowing you to use it every time she enters her increased-damage-taken stuns at the end of a lightning or frost phase.
- Spine: The trinket is simply great for tendons.
- Madness: The trinket is good here again for when you need added burst, be it on bolts or Blistering Tentacles.
These fight-specific uses—and the advantage of being able to stack the trinket with other cooldowns—make the Kiroptic Sigil better than a spreadsheet might suggest. However, the very idiosyncracies that make the sigil useful also make it hard to compare to other trinkets. At the very least I would say that you want this trinket for progression on Spine because having the burst for the tendons is a great asset to have (particularly for SV).
I picked it up the other night and was pleasantly surprised with how it matched many of the times I needed that extra buff of agility
For MMs the trinket can be nice since its CD lines up well with RF. You can use it at the start of the fight with the RF during the CA phase when most of the MM attacks are ensured to be crits. Then each odd use of it after that aligns with RFs again. If you always use the trinket with RFs (can enforce this putting its use in a RF macro), especially the one at the start of the fight during the CA phase, then its value is greatly higher than what FD estimates it to be with its averaging.
The problem with the trinket is that although you can have great DPS during RFs and some other times during the fight, you are lacking in DPS over the rest of the fight since it is no agi during those times as oppossed to the 458 constant agility of other options. This means that 83% of the time you are short about 1008 AP and 1.55% crit. Hence, if critical fight situations occur then, you are going to perform worse than with other trinket options during those phases.
If you use the trinket at times where it is difficult to perform the ideal rotation (e.g., have to move, am interrupted/stunned/feared/etc, or having to switch targets), the benefit of the trinket is greatly reduced relative to the other trinkets that provide a constant benefit.
With that said, there are definitely some fights where this trinket works out well, while on the standard fight it probably lacks a little. It makes you really awesome during the CA phase and RFs, but relatively bad the rest of the fight.
A little more information on the trinket for MMs. I did 15s analysis in FD of the following 5 fight phase situations with no BL included in any:
1) CA with RF
2) RF during Standard phase
3) RF during KS phase
4) Standard phase unhasted
5) KS phase unhasted
I did the analysis for each of the following situations:
a) My current gear with Starcatcher Compass. Note that the duration of the Compass proc is 20s instead of 15s so the DPS benefit for this case is a little higher.
b) No second trinket equiped but simulating the 458 static haste of Sigil by hand editing the amount with 183 of it reforged as crit. Assumes that no other reforging is done.
c) In addition to b) adds the 2290 agi for the use of Sigil.
Compared to the a) cases, the b) cases did between 1900 to 2400 less damage while the c) cases did between 6800 and 7400 damage. Even with using the spread that most favors Sigil, the damage ratio of C) versus against b) versus a) is only 7400/1900 = 3.89. Since this is much less that the minimum 5 to 1 ratio of Sigil downtime to uptime, Sigil is definitely a worse trinket than the Compass for overall DOPS.
Thanks for this analysis, but I’m a bit unclear on something. Are you averaging across the five situations to reach the numbers in the final paragraph? Also, in situation a), am I right to assume that you only have the Compass equipped for trinkets?
Q: Are you averaging across the five situations to reach the numbers in the final paragraph?
A: No averaging of the numbers for the cases occurred. The 1900 to 2400 less damage brackets the range in the amount of change between each case. The lowest DPS change between the cases was 1900 and the largest 2400 when comparing a) and b), with 6800 being the smallest and 7400 the largest between b) and c). I then took the most favorable results for the Sigil (smallest change between a) and b) and largest change between b) and c)) to provide the best case scenario for the Sigil.
Q:
Also, in situation a), am I right to assume that you only have the Compass equipped for trinkets?
In both cases, I was using my other trinket for the second trinket. So the only difference netween a) and b)/c) is the whether the Compass or Sigil was used.
Ah, sorry, to clarify, my question was referring to the five phase situations, not the three gear situations.
i think that i’ll get that trinket for spine heroic (we’re going to be there soon) for BM. as everything seems to depend on the tendon-burst, meaning that i’ll be saving BW for this, it is an awesome combo!
unfortunately, there’s no situation i can think of where the BM cool down lines up well with boss abilities or procs, that’s really a pity and in some situations annoying like hell. 1:17 vs 1 min (many boss abilities and items like kiril) or 1:30 (this trinket).
Depending on fight length, could it be a DPS gain to delay BW by 13 sec to align with this trinket? I’m going to explore this best I can, but I’m not very experienced with theorycrafting.
20 second, I mean. I’m rusty on BM PvE.
That’s a good question, and 1:10 min cooldown is correct, I misinterpreted 1.17 min in the tooltip, was probably tierd :) … I never actually ran the numbers because I won’t be using it in normal circumstances, where you want to blow BW on CD. But I know my DPS is greatest when I use it directly on a pull, for example, without waiting for procs like Kiril, I had enough time on Ultraxion&co to test that.
But if you delayed BW by 20 seconds, that’d be one less in a fight that lasts 3.5 minutes. For example, in a 6 minute fight, which is very current, it would be 4 (you could fit a 5th cast in, but the fight would end when you press the button) instead of 6. I wouldn’t do that unless in situations like Spine heroic, where it really matters where the burst damage lands.
I’m really liking this trinket as survival. Picked it up since I had the extra valor and two haste proc trinkets (lfr starcatchers and arrow of time) didn’t seem ideal.
There seems to be quite a bit of fights with burst phases in DS. Spine, Hagara, and zon all have great times to use this trinket. Once I get vial/ wrath ill just swap the sigil in on these fights.
It feels like blizzard planned for these on use valor trinkets to be a third trinket that we should have at our disposal for DS.
On use trinkets are pro. I like how they line up with Bestial Wrath. I was lucky enough to obtain trinkets early on this patch. Maybe I can borrow it for 2 hours and test it out. Good points about the proc lining up with the bosses.
I switched from my compass (384) to the sigil, because in my tests on the dummy I experienced that the compass proc and the 4pT13 proc did overlap a lot and I didn’t like it. Did anyone notice that, too?