Rogue PvP Trinket Selection
Rogue gearing has less choice involved than most other classes. To some extent you’ll choose how defensive you want to be, though generally you will use whatever PvE gear you have available. Within your offensive gemming, you can choose whether to focus on agility, attack power, or armor penetration. Basically, though, you’ll either be wearing the rogue PvP set, the highest ilvl rogue PvE pieces you can get your hands on, enough hit rating to get to the specials cap and then damage, damage, damage.
That’s fine, though to some extent I’m envious of caster classes that get to worry about things like haste plateaus and actually get to consider the comp they’re playing when they decide how to gear. Nevertheless, there’s one area where rogues do have some options, and where playstyle and comp can affect your decisions significantly: your trinkets.
Let’s take a look at what I consider the different options for rogues in season 6. I’ll try to be relatively comp-agnostic, though my rogue+healer 2s bias will probably shine through.
PvP Trinkets – Medallion / Titan-forged Runes
If you’re a human, your active racial means you don’t need to equip a PvP trinket. For everyone else, a trinket from this category is absolutely essential. Thankfully now you have a number of options available to you for the passive part of this trinket. The default one available from honor provides passive resilience, but most rogues are going to prefer the offensive-oriented wintergrasp versions which can bestow attack power, crit, or hit.
Buff Proc Trinkets – Mirror / Anvil / Infuser / Blood / DMC: Greatness / Grim Toll / Mjolnir
These trinkets provide passive damage stats with a proc on a 45 second internal cooldown that provides some sort of short-duration offensive benefit. You get a better deal in terms of sustained dps compared to the activatable trinkets, but the downside is you can’t control the timing and procs can end up partially (or completely) wasted.
In terms of the procs, the huge amount of ArP Mjolnir and Grim Toll provide are the strongest, especially if you have other armor penetration on your gear. They synergize well, which humans can take advantage of.
Grim Toll, Infuser and Blood of the Old Good all have hit passives, which are typically wasted, though that will depend on the rest of your gear. The anvil has a resil passive, which is also not that desirable. For that reason Mjolnir pulls ahead of the pack, with DMC:G a very viable alternative.
DMC:G has another advantage in that the agility it provides confers a non-trivial defensive benefit.
Damage Proc Trinkets – Bandit’s / DMC: Death
These trinkets both have a chance on your attacks to deal direct magical damage, with a similar 45 second ICD. The proc rate is high enough that they’re extremely likely to occur in your initial opener, which makes them very strong for overkill burst openers.
Bandit’s Insignia is significantly better because of it’s very strong attack power passive, but because it drops off heroic Sapphiron it is also quite a bit harder to obtain.
Note that the ICDs for these two trinkets are completely independant, so if you’re a human you can use them both and they will often proc together. This is probably going to get nerfed, but right now it’s very strong!
On-use AP Trinkets – Loatheb’s / Platinum Disks / Wrathstone
These trinkets provide an attack power buff on a two-minute cooldown. The strength of them lies in the fact you can choose exactly when to activate them, so you can time them with enchant procs, with other trinkets, or for moments when you have momentum in the fight (successful kidney shot that your opponent won’t trinket, for example).
The flipside of this is that some people find another keybind challenging to manage; and the fact you’re waiting for a perfect opportunity means some time will be wasted. Activating these trinkets does not trigger a global so you could theoretically macro them to one of your other abilities.
The disks have a resil passive, but they’re very easy to get compared to the other two.
On-use Damage Trinkets – GLG
This trinket has been tweaked since its somewhat overpowered inception as a high damage cast-time nuke in season 5. It’s now instant cast and off the GCD completely, but it shares the 10 second “burst damage” cooldown category with activated buff trinkets and the pyro-rocket glove enchant. Compared to Bandit’s/Death, it has a slightly longer cooldown (60 seconds instead of 45) and can’t be timed with the rockets, but it has the advantages that it’s completely controllable and usable from range.
The crit rating is a decent passive, but the fact that this trinket still backfires means it’s not nearly as desirable as some of the alternatives. Not terrible, but not amazing, which I guess is to be expected from a profession blue.
Defensive Trinkets – Battlemaster’s / DMC: Berserker!
The Battlemaster trinket provides a short-term health boost which can be very helpful if you’re able to get it off (can’t do that while stunned). It’s purchased with honor, and much like the wintergrasp trinkets, you have your choice of passives: hit, crit, haste, ap. The attack power one is by far the strongest in terms of raw damage.
DMC:B is something of an odd customer. It procs off both incoming and outgoing damage, and has quite a high proc rate, so it’s going to be up pretty much all of the time you’re in combat. Essentially it’s a passive 105 resil and 105 crit rating. It’s not bad, but perhaps not as exciting as some of the alternatives.
On-use Tentacles – Vanquished Clutches
Tentacles. Need I say more?
