Quote Originally Posted by Tiberria View Post
The Persistence trait is the strongest minor trait on paper. However, I think that the 15-18 second ticks of Rejuv tend to inherently be less valuable in a lot of cases than ealier ticks, because of the additional propensity to overheal and how long the 18 second duration is. I think looking at things assuming 100% effective healing probably makes Persistence look stronger than it really is. With that in mind, I don't think Persistence is strong enough to warrant the most efficient path in terms of getting major traits. Also, most artifact power calculators estimate that we should have 22 traits before raids open. If you go to Dreamwalker then back to Tranquil Mind, you will still have 3/3 Persistence for week 1 of raiding.

You could argue that the mana reduction traits are worth bypassing the min max of major traits, but I don't agree with that either. The 3/3 6% Wild Growth mana reduction trait is actually an extremely weak trait relative to almost anything else along the paths to the major traits. It's a fairly trivial mana savings. Knowledge of the Ancients is the one really strong trait that you won't have for week 1 of raiding if you follow the Dreamwalker/Tranquil Mind path, and 6% total mana regen is significant. However, I still don't think it's good enough to warrant taking a weak major first and having less majors. You can work around having less regen by having more throughput on the spells you do cast if you're smart about it. You should be able to get Knowledge of the Artifacts at 3/3 by about week 4-5 of raids.
I completely agree with this. Since my last statement in here regarding what I'd be taking, I had actually looked at an estimated AP gain, and it was about in line with what you said, so I will likely be doing the generic Dreamerwalker->Tranquil Mind->PotA, just because I can get Persistance before raid starts. And If I'm farming hard, maybe even grab some Knowledge of the Ancients.

I did not however take into full consideration all of the Suramar quests, just because there were some smaller AP gains in it, and I never finished mathing out how much of a gain the Artifact Knowledge change would actually affect the Suramar AP. When I had logged in to verify that the AK did indeed affect the Suramar tokens, I had R14 AK (I think), and one of the tokens was giving me 34k AP. So, my plan will be to hold off on the Suramar questlines as long as I can, while still doing the World Quests for them, just to get as high of AK as I can before starting. With all of that, it may be possible to get all 3 gold traits if you know life this.