I have my raid tank set to all offense. I’m currently running the 259 Codex of the First Technique and the 226 Reactive Defense Matrix. When I run upgrade finder, it says the only better trinkets are higher item level versions of these. Do you really think that’s the case? I know ranking trinkets is a tricky business, but it’s shocking proposition that a 226 Reactive Defense Matrix would do more damage than a 278 dps trinket like the Bottled Flayedwing Toxin or Phial of Putrefaction. In this humble panda’s opinion, those 52 item levels should mean SOMETHING.
I checked out those items in the simulator… Everything seems to be ranking according to the simulations. Reactive Defense Matrix might be ranking a tad high, but not enough to notice a problem in-game.
I’d have to do some math to see if blizzard budgeted a bit more to the those procs than on some other trinkets - maybe they assume that some amount will be wasted in a real game situation.
I think the RDM and Codex values might be a bit inflated on AMR, at least for raid. Based on the incoming damage profile for different specs on a sliding ilvl scale, i.e. they do more damage/healing the more damage you take, so at higher overall ilvls when you take less damage they become less effective. That will vary significantly between specs and fights too. For example, it’d be less good for Paladins because they rely heavily on damage mitigation, and better for Blood DKs that want a thick HP pool to face-tank big hits they can just out-heal.
I would say RDM will likely stay competitive with Codex despite their potential ilvl difference though. I ran keys on the tournament realm as Blood and a 252 RDM was producing pretty much the exact same numbers as a 278 Codex.
I was discussing the codex in another thread recently. It doesn’t seem to be performing all that well in-game, so we’re going to adjust our default value for it, even though its potential on paper seems high.
The RDM looked ok when I compared it to what I’m seeing in logs. There are probably some cases where it won’t do as well, but it can be a solid trinket in many cases.