Greetings again all you intrepid hunters. With your permission I’ll be sidestepping my usual exotic hunter tanking topics to discuss the much more mainstream subject of hunter DPS. The focus of today’s journey is a little toy I managed to snag a couple weeks ago, the trinket, Deathbringer’s Will.
For those of you in the know, this drops from Deathbringer Saurfang in Icecrown Citadel. It adds 155 to armor penetration and causes your attacks to have a chance to “awaken the powers of the races of Northrend”. For a hunter this means one of three different effects:
- Agility of the Vrykul: 600 Agility
- Power of the Taunka: 1200 Attack Power
- Aim of the Iron Dwarves: 600 Critical Strike Rating
On Elitist Jerks, posters estimate a 50% proc with a 105 second item cooldown. All of my parses so far reveal a total uptime of about 29-34%. This is consistent with a cooldown of of between 90-105 seconds, also pretty certain they’re right about the proc rate. You can pretty much count on this effect triggering after the first couple hits. My higher uptime may be a result of some faster trash pulls and/or ending the fight with a proc active, I would expect an average of 30% uptime to be expected. That 30% average translates to an increase of 360 attack power, or 180 agility or crit rating over the course of the fight. Certainly an impressive increase, also nice to count on an initial dps burst at the start of a fight for a solid 30 seconds.
The individual procs can bring my stats to very impressive levels for short periods of time. So far I’ve seen my Attack Power reach numbers over 13K, Agility approaching 4k, and a critical strike chance of over 85%.
Beyond this yummy dps increase, you get to be transformed into the form you’re channeling. As far as I can tell Iron Dwarf and Taunka forms have just the one form each, but the Vrykul buff can either make you a long red haired Vrykul or a bald shirtless one. Pretty fun, even if the Taunka looks like a Tauren that walked face first into a brick wall!
One warning however. There is currently a glitch (or at least I hope it’s a glitch) that will prevent you from using the rocket pack in the Gunship Battle event while this effect is on you. If you’re part of the boarding party in this event it’s probably a good idea to macro the rocket pack with a /cancelaura command for all three of the above effects.
All in all, I’m very happy with the trinket’s performance, an excellent choice for dps and fun too!
Note from Gar: e-hugs and high fives to all those who can guess the song referenced in the lightbox caption of the pic at the top of this article. Damn I’m old school. 😉
