White Whales

About five or six months before I started this very blog, Jana was still my main and ToC had come out. I had hardly run Ulduar at all, but I had managed to get some gear relatively quickly.  My sore spot was trinkets, however. They would never drop for me, and when they would drop I would invariably roll low or be low on the Suicide Kings list or not have enough DKP or whatever.  So it was that when I started ToC, I was sporting some ilvl 200 trinkets, Embrace of the Spider and Sundial of the Exiled.  At some point I was able to pick up Dying Curse because I had gotten high enough on a Suicide Kings list of a Naxx-running guild, but that was an item level 213 item and I was running item level 245 content.

ToC offered four trinkets, two purchasable, one in ten man and one in twenty-five man. The ten man trinket was Fetish of Volatile Power, and it was utter junk. I remember theory-crafting it at the time and it turned out to be worse than the item level 200 trinkets. The purchasable ones were Shard of the Crystal Heart and Talisman of Resurgence.  Shard of the Crystal Heart was a decent hit trinket, but was quite bad if the rest of your gear made you hit capped (ah, the days before reforging).  Talisman of Resurgence was crap; in those days, intellect gave you more mana but was worth about a third of any secondary stat in terms of dps.

But then there was Reign of the Unliving. This was a fire mage’s holy grail.  Back when effective crit rates were above 50% and the trinket’s proc was improved by a fire mage’s talent, this trinket promised an extra 500 to 800 dps all by itself.  I don’t remember the exact number, but it was large — a dps improvement on the scale of 10% from this one item.

The problem with the trinket is that I could never get it.  Ever. It dropped off the final boss in the instance, which was a difficult fight, so a lot of times our 25-man runs just couldn’t get there to defeat it.  When we did, the trinket rarely dropped. And when it did drop, I lost.

I remember it dropping exactly three times.  The first time it dropped, I rolled a three, and it was won by a warlock who quit the game two weeks later. The second time it dropped, I was second on the Suicide Kings list to a fire mage who was a good friend of mine. The third time it dropped, a resto druid rolled and beat me to take the trinket for his boomkin offset (an event that led me to quit the guild I was in at the time).

Reign of the Unliving was Jana’s white whale.  For all of ToC and a good part of ICC I wanted that trinket for her, more than any other piece of gear.  And I never got it.

Now, jumping forward to the present day, let’s consider Saxsy.  Saxsy has never had any particular trouble with trinkets, primarily because she’s never needed to get any to drop.  She got the Darkmoon Card: Volcano relatively early on, which is an absolutely awesome trinket.  Because she’s an alchemist, she was able to craft a Vibrant Alchemist Stone as well, giving her two item level 359 trinkets when most of her gear was at 346 or lower.  When Brewfest came out, she was able to pick up the Mithril Stopwatch, though I’m not sure if that is actually better than the other two trinkets. In any case, her trinkets have always been a strong part of her gear, not lagging behind as Jana’s did.

When I found out I was going into Firelands, I naturally checked out the sort of gear that dropped there. And soon I found the item that would be to Saxsy what Reign of the Unliving was to Jana: the Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor. All the parallels were there. The trinket’s an update of the Lightning Capacitor, which was my favorite trinket out of Burning Crusade and may well have been the favorite trinket Jana actually ever got. It drops off of Ragnaros, the final boss of the raid instance just before the last one in the expansion. It promises to do an insane amount of damage through a proc. As soon as I saw it, I wanted it, but I realized my chances of getting it were really low: I would have to be a part of a Ragnaros kill (something my guild had never done before), and roll high on a trinket (something I had never done before). I wanted it very badly, but I was resigned to never actually getting it.

So it was that last night our guild went back in to fight Ragnaros. My feelings on the night before were documented in my previous post, and I wasn’t feeling too strongly about my chances with Ragnaros. The guild leader said that we would be swapping people in and out last night with the intent of doing whatever it took to get Ragnaros down. Because I was indisputably the lowest dps in the run and also very likely the least able to dodge what Ragnaros through at us because of my lack of general raid and specific Ragnaros experience, I felt I would be replaced very quickly. (The advantage I held was that I was one of the few people who could cast time warp or heroism.)

But that didn’t happen.  On our third attempt, we hit phase 3 and got him to 28% (I think.)  That was promising.  On our very next attempt, we pushed him to 15%.  There would be no swapping people out, no matter how badly I was doing on dps, because there was a feeling that we had the fight.  On our next attempt, we got him to 11%. Then we said we’d switch up a couple things to make the meteors work better.  Our next attempt was a wash; I forget exactly what happened but we wiped early. But the attempt after that, we had it. We got him down in a very clean kill.

Ragnaros’s phase 3 is a nightmare for me because there’s so much going on and I’ve only experienced it a few times. It took me a while to get the general idea of the meteors. But when I finally did get it, I recognized a value I had to the raid: I would prevent the meteors from hitting our feral druid and rogue, who were the top dps in our group. My dps didn’t matter, as long as I kept the meteors off of them. And the first time I tried it, the first time I was asked to handle that job, we got Ragnaros down. I had helped!

Then came the moment of truth. What would Ragnaros drop?

The first item was a set of tanking shoulders. Those went to our guild and raid leader; the off tank was in an off spec and didn’t bother to roll (I love it when people do that).

Then came item number two. It was the trinket.  I said please a few times.  I pecked out the letters to /roll.  I hit enter. And a number came up:

99.

I think I woke everyone in the house up at that point.

There was only one other person in our run who could possibly use the trinket, a shadow priest to whom I had given the other trinket yesterday. He declined to roll against me, although he did roll to see what he would have gotten.  (It was an 82).

Whatever Saxsy’s white whale is, it’s not this trinket.  I feel very, very lucky.

I think at the beginning of the run yesterday if you would have told me that I would have gotten only one thing out of this raid week, but I got to pick that one thing, I would have picked the Variable Pulse Lightning Capacitor and been happy to do it. So my gripes about gear yesterday are completely gone. I got my trinket. It won’t be haunting me like Jana’s trinket haunted her.

Now I just have to run Kara and get the original Lightning Capacitor. I am curious to see if their effects stack.