Why are trinkets in the game?

[Bombkirby]

Back in the Vanilla days 90% of trinkets were simply there for utility effects instead of being stat sticks. It'd be interesting if they went back to that design.... ya know. Someone would bring in a lasso trinket allowing you to "Life Grip" party members and etc. The downside would be that different raid fights and PvP settings would require specific trinkets and things would get grindy real fast.

[The Glitch]

actually before they were turned into raw stat sticks they were more or less a 3rd trinket.

Indeed http://www.wowwiki.com/Idols is a list of Druid specific ones, I quite liked them, but can see that for balancing issues it was probably a good idea to go the stat route at the time.

[Tziva]

Trinkets have the potential to be fun. They can have cool procs, and they can also provided an additional cooldown (if you choose an on-use one), and also allow for some customisation depending on the fight (spirit vs throughput for heals, or mitigation vs avoidance for tanks, or burst vs sustained for DPS, etc). I like trinkets, and we've had some cool ones in the game.

[LilSaihah]

I can see the appeal, but I think they could be a little fiddled with.

On use trinkets are pretty bland; they may as well be tied directly into your class's DPS cooldown of choice, which people already do with macros.
Proc trinkets are something to react to as much as anything else.

[Sandrox]

Most trinkets are fairly boring, but a trinket like Mirror of Broken Images http://www.wowhead.com/item=62471 is amazing. This trinket was useful for tanks for all of cataclysm situationally. I want more trinkets like this, game changers.

[invader]

trinkets are my favourite thing....

[announced]

trinkets are infact really useful and situational for dps tanks and healers.. all other pieces besides the wep are really meh.. stat sticks etc
id rather see extra bonuses added onto things like rings with fun effects.. even comical ones that have no dps gains.

[Bosen]

I think you're just being negative.

Trinkets are in the game for the same reason other gear is in the game- we're playing a game where you're always looking for the next piece of something to make yourself stronger. The act of collecting things is part of the appeal of any MMO. Why have rings? Same reason.
Stats. Why have armor at all? Why not have the same armor that scales as we level? Because that'd be stupid.

What I'd like to see from our ethereal buddies, is the ability to merge the silly visual things of old trinkets to whatever trinkets we get in the future.

[Frozenbeef]

Can't that be said about all equipment slots? they all just provide a passive benefit the only difference is armour and weapons can be seen >.<

[Deleted]

I liked it when trinkets were ... quite literally trinkets. They rarely had anything useful or awesome stat wise, but an interesting or fun effect.

[Cirque]

The only thing I don't like is that, after weapons, trinkets seem to be the most hotly argued drops. I see far more trinket arguments than, say, "But that would have been my 4 piece, that only gives you 3/4 so I need it more!" I hate the importance placed on trinkets, and use trinkets are actually kind of annoying. Proc trinkets are (often, but not always) equip, maybe reforge, then forget.

That's an issue on a whole different level. If your guild is not handling loot properly then there's going to be arguments no matter the slot. And honestly, if you "equip, maybe reforge, and then forget" your trinket, you're doing it completely wrong.

[Viggers]

can you imagine how boring affliction lock, or shadow priest etc would be if you didnt have to react to trinket procs? trinkets add not only cool effects sometimes, but they will actually effect your rotation and gameplay. not other piece of gear does this except for tier set bonuses maybe.

and i miss the relics that were like trinkets. class specific relics were good, i remember on my DK in T10, the previous tiers relic was better than the current one in a number of fights. and the trinket from chimearon HC was BiS throughout firelands too, no other item slot will be BiS for longer than its own tier, which makes them interesting

[mysticx]

Back in the Vanilla days 90% of trinkets were simply there for utility effects instead of being stat sticks. It'd be interesting if they went back to that design.... ya know. Someone would bring in a lasso trinket allowing you to "Life Grip" party members and etc. The downside would be that different raid fights and PvP settings would require specific trinkets and things would get grindy real fast.

Having fun on-use effects was pretty much the purpose of trinkets way back in vanilla (Things like the old "Nifty stopwatch", "Linken's boomerang" and "Carrot on a stick"), but then "Blackhand's breadth" came along (+2% crit back in vanilla, oh the nostalgia), and put an end to that, because when there are trinkets with stats but without fun effects around, nobody in his/her right mind will use a "Fun effect, no stats"-trinket anymore...

Read this in one of the WoW-magazines, cba to look up which of the 5 it was though :P

[Raintola]

They need to bring back the old relics that were actually, god forbid, interesting.

Are you referring to the ones that added a tiny amount of damage to one ability?

OH MAN SO INTERESTING.

[Adam Jensen]

They got rid of old school relics because they wanted fewer items usable by only one class. It's never fun seeing things drop that no one can use, and getting rid of class specific items cut down on a lot of that.

Removing them was a bad idea.

Adding more flavorful items to more classes would have been better. A relic slot for everyone, for example. They should have expanded on the relic idea, not simply axe it.

[Ferocity]

It's great that trinkets, besides nice /on use and /on equip effects, have a nice chunk of stats. Remove passive stats boosts from gear and WoW will go even further away from RPG. Developers already made mistake by removing gear slot (ranged/relic).

They got rid of old school relics because they wanted fewer items usable by only one class. It's never fun seeing things drop that no one can use, and getting rid of class specific items cut down on a lot of that.

They never played their own raids then. 10-men drops all kind of things usable only for DE. Instead of fixing lottery system of rewards, they "fixed" something which wasn't broken at all.

[Eldrad]

DUDE, lay off my trinkets.


I LOVE trinkets. Back when BC hit and vanilla trinkets were still marginally useful I had like a collection of 26 trinkets that I used for different things,.... most of the time just for kicks. My guildies called me a trinket whore. Not every trinket does something fun and interesting, but lots and lots do. If they were removed it would be like removing "fun", which is never good in a video game.

[snuzzle]

Indeed http://www.wowwiki.com/Idols is a list of Druid specific ones, I quite liked them, but can see that for balancing issues it was probably a good idea to go the stat route at the time.

Yup! It was a lot of fun going back and farming old content (imho) to get a relic that helped with a specific spell for certain fights. But I can see why Blizz changed them because they decided that wasn't good design anymore (they wanted new items to clearly be upgrades) so relics were changed to be straight stat increases, then ultimately removed as redundant in MOP.