The Value of Storms Deck for Warlocks
Binds when picked up
Unique
Trinket
Requires Level 70
Equip: Each time one of your direct damage attacks does not critically strike, you gain 17 critical strike rating and 17 spell critical strike rating for the next 10 sec. This effect is consumed when you deal a critical strike.
Sept. 3, 2007
The Storms Deck is turned in at the Darkmoon Fair to provide the Darkmoon Card: Wrath trinket.
This is an interesting trinket because it can't easily be evaluated in terms of average crit benefit. In fact this trinket does much more than merely provide an average addition to your crit.
First of all, the lower your crit is, the more benefit you will see from this trinket due to the trinket proccing when you don't crit.
| Chance of Non-Crit Streak (10% base) | Crit Chance Increase | Chance of Non-Crit Streak (20% base) | Crit Chance Increase | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of casts | w/o trinket | with trinket | w/o trinket | with trinket | |||
| 1 | 90.00% | 90.00% | 0.00% | 80.00% | 80.00% | 0.00% | |
| 2 | 81.00% | 80.31% | 0.69% | 64.00% | 63.38% | 0.62% | |
| 3 | 72.90% | 71.04% | 1.86% | 51.20% | 49.73% | 1.47% | |
| 4 | 65.61% | 62.30% | 3.31% | 40.96% | 38.64% | 2.32% | |
| 5 | 59.05% | 54.15% | 4.90% | 32.77% | 29.72% | 3.05% | |
| 6 | 53.14% | 46.65% | 6.49% | 26.21% | 22.63% | 3.58% | |
| 7 | 47.83% | 39.83% | 7.99% | 20.97% | 17.06% | 3.91% | |
| 8 | 43.05% | 33.71% | 9.34% | 16.78% | 12.73% | 4.05% | |
Let's evaluate the trinket for various warlock playstyles/specs:
0/21/40 locks (shadow or fire)
If you spam incinerate all day, unless you have a very low crit rating, you are not going to benefit much from this trinket. Unless they make ISB affect incinerate, or unless you have some other proc that benefits greatly from crits, this trinket is not for you. Even if you have a very low crit rate (2% from gear, lets say) you should probably be focusing on getting your crit rate up, which means that this trinket will be eventually useless for you.
Reasoning:
From the table above, your chance with the trinket to get a non-crit streak of 4 casts is 39%. That means that 61% of the time, you will recieve 1.47% crit increase or less from this trinket.
If you have no procs that activate on crits and 20% crit rating, you can safely assume this trinket will provide you with about a 1.9% added crit, or 55 crit rating, however it does have the added benefit of making your crits occur a little bit more uniformly. That is, the chance of having a long fight with few crits is reduced, because the more crits you dont get, the more likely you are to get that crit you've been waiting for.
The crit rating equivalent at 30% crit rating is about 34 crit rating or 1.54% crit. The benefit of making your crits occur more consistently is reduced even further.
Conclusion:
Not very impressive for a 0/21/40 fire lock.
To take into account ISB procs, I ran a few scenarios through my DPS simulator and the result was approximately the same damage output increase as a 2.2% crit increase, with a lock wearing 1000 shadow damage and 15% crit from gear (23% crit talented). Remember, the benefit decreases as your crit from gear goes up.
Conclusion: Not very impressive for a 0/21/40 shadow lock.
42/0/19 and variants
With this build, often warlocks do not stack crit nearly as high as with heavy destruction builds.
Crit is actually still very important with this build, as an ISB proc gives you quite a substantial damage boost.
In my simulation, with a +1000 dmg warlock with 10% crit from gear, the DPS output gain was about the equivalent DPS boost of 40 spell damage.
Conclusion: Not impressive for a 41/0/18+2 lock.
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