4.0.6 Review, Vibrant Alchemist Stone compared to Core of Ripeness

So in the wake of patch 4.0.6, a lot of alchemist healers are scratching their head looking at this shiny new Vibrant Alchemist stone and asking themselves “is this really worth getting?”

Right now I’m using Core of Ripeness and Darkmoon Card: Tsunami. While Tsunami is still a clear winner when it comes to static spirit, items like Fall of Mortality and Core of Ripeness are definitely more borderline when toying with the idea of swapping them out. With the nerf to Mana-Tide, we are now faced with evaluating how the on-use ability of Core of Ripeness (or equivalent effective spirit of Fall of Mortality) stacks up to the Alchemist stone’s stats.

In order to evaluate these trinkets I am going to make a couple of assumptions, they are as follows:

1.)     The Vibrant Alchemist trinket is reforged from haste to spirit, giving final stats of: 351 intellect, 116 haste, and 78 spirit

2.)     The druid in question has raid buffed: ~6200 intellect, and effectively 2700 spirit. I am making an assumption that your other trinket provides some form of spirit buff be it constant or burst. These numbers will obviously vary from player to player and are simply for example sake.

3.)     You are consuming a potion of some sort during every encounter. This makes the stone more expensive in the long run but that is unfortunately a product of being an alchemist. Our Mixology bonus does not work unless we are buffed with an elixir or flask as well.

4.)     You will note I only refer to the Alchemist stone as +30 intellect, I am only looking at the comparison between Core of Ripeness and the Stone for the moment and both of these have at least 321 intellect so that is baked into the starting stats listed.

Stats!

So using a player with 6200 intellect and 2700 raid buffed and in action (counting effective spirit from burst trinkets) we get the following statistics using the theoretical equation:  ER = ((Int+1180)*1.02)+((.000125*Int)+.55)Sp+.931

ER = ((6200+1180)*1.02)+[(.000125*6200)+.55]*2700+931

ER = 7528 + 3578 + 931

Under “mana regen” on your paper doll you would see the number 4509 and under spirit it would show 3578 regen.

If a player with these stats were to use Core of Ripeness, gaining an effective spirit bonus of 320 their stats would change as follows:

Under “mana regen” on the paper doll it would increase to 4932, and under spirit it would increase to 4001. A net gain of 424 regen.

Vibrant Alchemist Stone

Now instead of gaining that 320 spirit, let us take a look at what the stone brings to the table. Instead of the spirit, we will net 30 intellect from the difference, get only 78 spirit through reforging, and gain 40% of whatever potion we consume during the fight. These are all quantifiable items that we can evaluate so let’s do so!

Using this equation: ER = [((Int+1180)*1.02)+(I(Item)*1.22)]+[.000125*(Int + (1.17*I(Item)))+.55](Sp+S(Item))+.931

We make the starting intellect 6200, starting spirit 2700, and our new constants I(Item) = 30, and S(Item) = 78

Our theoretical intellect regen increases from 7528 to 7565 for a total o37 mana regeneration.

The spirit component of our regen increases from 3578 to 3696 for a total of 119 mana regeneration.

This places our stat based regeneration at 156 regen.

When consuming a potion we gain 4,000 mana for a regular potion and 8,000 mana for a concentration potion. Distributing this mana over an 8 minute encounter gives us the following values:

Mana Potion: 41.67 mp/5, or 83.3 mana regen.

Concentration: 83.34 mp/5, or 166.7 mana regen

The total amount of mana regen given by the Vibrant Alchemist Stone (beyond the base 321 intellect) is then the following:

Using a mana potion: 239.3 regen (185 regen less than Core of Ripeness, or 56% of its regen)

Using a concentration potion: 286 regen ( 138 regen less than Core of Ripeness, or 67% of its regen)

The Alchemist stone does convey additional spellpower as well as haste for throughput which could possibly offset the regen loss. What I do need to mention is that if you are the type to not religiously activate your Core (with the change to mana tide) and miss precious uptime it will skew the comparison more towards the Alchemist Stone.