Our guide writer, Mandl, not only explains exactly how this new trinket works but also provides advice on when you might consider using this powerful trinket as well as some additional tips that can help you maintain your stacks.
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope Raid Overview
Every tier, players get to discover new trinkets and gear, and they typically all come with some limitations, some things they’re amazing at, and some things they might be lacking on. Today, we will take a closer look at Cataclysmic Signet Brand, a very polarizing trinket in terms of performance and what it is great at. You’ve likely seen it perform really well in some cases, and terribly on others. This article will attempt to shed some light on why, along with providing some interesting information you may not have been aware of in terms of how you can make it do more.
How Signet Brand Actually Works
Season 3 brings an interesting twist to a familiar trinket concept with Cataclysmic Signet Brand. Unlike previous incarnations, instead of having a time-based ramping stat proc like Old Warrior’s Soul or an active effect like Elementium Pocket Anvil, the ramping mechanism is an RPPM trigger – an average of 3 procs per minute (modified by haste) of Vicious Brand, a hefty DoT on a target. Each time you manage to apply Vicious Brand, you gain a stack of Firestarter, amplifying the damage of every proc of Vicious Brand, up to 15 stacks. These have no duration while in combat, and swap to a 15s duration when combat drops.
At 6 and 15 stacks, Vicious Brand also gains additional effects:
- At 6 stacks and above (This is not a typo – the tooltip says 5, but it is after your fifth proc and this is visible on logs here), any damage tick from Vicious Brand also deals 50% of the damage it deals to you. While this sounds like a lot, it’s a smoothly-ticking DoT with one damage event per second for < 10k damage to the user. There are scenarios where this can be dangerous, but you should evaluate this by yourself. This damage is also reduced by the player’s versatility and any other damage reduction effect. This effect cannot crit (and that’s probably a good thing)
- After reaching 15 stacks (i.e. maximum but not upon reaching 15 stacks itself), Vicious Brand will also cleave 10% of the damage it deals to its primary target to nearby targets, split evenly. This damage is listed as Radiating Brand in logs and details and does not reflect back to the user as friendly fire damage. This effect cannot crit.
The most interesting peculiarity is the damage formula for this trinket. Unlike a lot of trinkets, the direct effect Vicious Brand‘s damage scales exponentially with Firestarter stacks, gaining a compounding 20% for each stack – making the damage per tick the following:
damagePerTick = baseValue * (1+vers%) * 1.2^(firestarterStacksAtTimeOfProc)
To quickly put this in perspective, assuming the base value (i.e. 0-stack) is 100%, this is what happens:
| Firestarter stacks | Damage buff |
| 1 | 120% |
| 5 | 248.83% |
| 10 | 619.17% |
| 14 | 1283.92% |
| 15 | 1540.70% |
Pretty nifty, huh? Over 15 times the value per proc if you can manage to stack it up and keep it stacked up. It sounds daunting, particularly in Mythic+, but there are plenty of tricks we can use to keep ourselves in combat. Because this value ramps up so much based on previous procs, each spec will typically have a rough guideline of fight length at which point this trinket edges out the competition; this depends on how much haste you have as well as how many proc triggers you can line up per minute. For instance, for enhancement, the sweet spot is at the 2:30-3min mark – at which point every additional minute becomes a massive gain compounded on top of Cataclysmic Signet Brand‘s original value.
Combat Check Quirks
Mythic+ players will be acutely familiar with how much time spent out combat is problematic, both in terms of routing efficiency and just time spent doing nothing, and Cataclysmic Signet Brand does not disappoint in adding even more pressure on top of this. When you drop combat – or more specifically, when nothing is in combat with you, Firestarter changes from being a buff with no duration to a 15 second duration, and starts to decay – losing one stack every 5 seconds. After 15 seconds, all stacks disappear.
Tracking these drops on logs is made arbitrarily more complicated by two issues: at 5 stacks and 15 stacks, a trinket behavior quirk causes all stacks of Firestarter to be flagged as lost then one stack instantly regained, and stack drops while out of combat are not recorded as long as the player had more than 5 stacks of Firestarter when they left combat. This is a log-only issue, as the display of buffs is completely fine in-game, but makes it extremely difficult to track stack drops properly.
The check on the trinket is interesting in that it is easily fooled in three different ways:
- Taunting critters is a good way to deliberately extend combat for a bit. If you’ve watched the December 7th patch notes mentioning critters scaling off Challenger’s Might, this was why. Much like in Season 2, if you decide to use Cataclysmic Signet Brand, make a note of where critters are in dungeons and taunt them to put yourself temporarily in combat to keep stacks rolling!
- Much like Old Warrior’s Soul and Elementium Pocket Anvil, you can use Worn Doll in order to deliberately trigger combat at any moment in a key, up to once every 20 minutes. This toy spawns a non-targetable entity that you can then hit with a ground or untargeted AoE – anything that can hit something without targeting it works. This prevents the stacks from decaying until the Worn Doll disappears and up to 6 seconds after.
- Frost and Blood Death Knights able to Control Undead an enemy will notice that Firestarter never turns into a timed buff when combat drops, no matter where they are or how much roleplay they have to suffer through. This is because the NPC that was in combat with you, that you cast Control Undead on, still is recorded somewhere as being in combat with you as it did not die. This allows you to basically keep Firestarter stacked in Atal’Dazar and Black Rook Hold with absolutely no effort other than reapplying Control Undead every 5 minutes.
Raids
There are two massively important factors when deciding to play Cataclysmic Signet Brand: uptime on any target, and fight length.
The first is obvious: the more uptime you have on any target, the more events can trigger Vicious Brand (this is rppm but, as it turns out, spending 5-10s off target every now and then does matter), and as a result the faster you will gain stacks of Firestarter, thus making you do more damage with Vicious Brand. To be completely clear, Vicious Brand can only proc from direct melee hits from you (not your pets), and from abilities flagged as melee.
The second is also obvious: barring freakishly good streaks, there are only so many stacks of Firestarter that you can generate per minute. The more apt your group is – or often, the lower the difficulty – the worse Cataclysmic Signet Brand will perform compared to the competition. To give you a concrete example, here are some Blood Death Knight Cataclysmic Signet Brand DPS values for heroic (483) Cataclysmic Signet Brand across a handful of logs on Volcoross:
Downtime also very harshly punishes users of Cataclysmic Signet Brand, and a great way to showcase this is Mythic Tindral Sageswift, where a number of players will be flying upwards to deal with Flare Bomb and where all three phases have mechanics that force non-tanks off target relatively often. A very quick example of how hard extended downtime punishes you is this log, with four different profiles:
| Spec | Time to 15 Firestarter stacks | Cataclysmic Signet Brand DPS | Notes |
| Prot Paladin | 3:23 (P2) | 10.4k DPS | Being a tank means near-constant uptime on something on this fight. Their first time flying was late in phase 3. |
| Enhancement Shaman | 3:23 (P2) | 11.9k DPS | Got very lucky on p1 procs due to persistent uptime on boss. |
| Fury Warrior | 4:54 (P3) | 8.4k DPS | Got supremely unlucky with their first Firestarter stack 36s into the fight – just when the flow of mechanics properly starts, and never really recovered. |
| Assassination Rogue | 5:48 (P3) | 6.6k DPS | Very frequent uptime drops on the boss leading to significant times without procs. |
A good way to very quickly gauge whether Cataclysmic Signet Brand will have value for the content you are doing is to use simulationcraft/raidbots and to be very specific about encounter duration while doing so. Don’t just leave it on 5min by default, as this will overvalue Cataclysmic Signet Brand massively if you’re clearing trivial content such as the Volcoross logs above. Model your boss fights – and if you’re not sure, check somebody else’s kill time!
Mythic+
Unfortunately for us, Season 3 dungeons present an excessively large number of speed bumps that force groups to just stop and do nothing. Between the mandatory 30 second roleplay before Tyr, the Infinite Keeper becomes active, the slow-as-molasses elevator and eel gauntlet in Throne, and the excessive amount of travelling in both Dawn dungeons, there just aren’t that many opportunities to really keep stacks going in a lot of dungeons, aside from the tricks mentioned above. We’ll cover some examples of where to use Cataclysmic Signet Brand, and more importantly, cases where Cataclysmic Signet Brand just isn’t worth it.
If you are a Frost or Blood Death Knight, talent into Control Undead for Atal’Dazar and Black Rook Hold. In Atal’Dazar, you should be able to keep stacks rolling until you reach your first Risen Honor Guard (this works out to a major damage gain), which you then Control Undead and keep until the end of the dungeon. In Black Rook Hold, you instead Control Undead one of the Spectral Retainer in the first pull going either left or right (this also works out to a major gain for your team by removing one source of Soul Blade from these pulls), and then trade it for a Risen Arcanist upstairs.
If you are not a death knight, beyond considering rolling one, there are a significant number of critters in Atal’Dazar, and you can abuse the Troubled Soul that fly around the Amalgam of Souls in Black Rook Hold to keep yourself in combat during the 30 second forced roleplay after you kill it. The first staircase can be done without dropping Firestarter by using a speed boost, and you will want to use Worn Doll for the second – or drag a mob upstairs with you!
To give a concrete, very quick list of dungeons and whether you should or shouldn’t play Cataclysmic Signet Brand, I would cautiously advise the following based on common routes done in groups:
| Dungeon | Verdict | Notes |
| Atal’Dazar | Play | Go scout in m0 where the critters are or just vibe, use Worn Doll on the way to Yazma if you are not a death knight |
| Black Rook Hold | Play | It’s amazing! You just need to know where the Troubled Soul are and plan your Worn Doll usage if you’re not a Death Knight |
| The Everbloom | Play | Use Worn Doll if you cleared the lashers on the ramp behind Witherbark‘s room before killing him, everything else is all about not dawdling around after mobs die. |
| Waycrest Manor | Play | Use Worn Doll or find a mob when going downstairs after Goliath/Raal. |
| Darkheart Thicket | Debatable | The problem with Darkheart is that it really depends on the key level. The moment you start skipping Festerhide Grizzly, you incur a forced stack drop just before Archdruid Glaidalis. You can spawn Hatespawn Whelpling near Dresaron to keep yourself in combat while waiting for blood elementals to patrol away if you intend to skip them. |
| Throne of the Tides | Debatable | Throne has two mandatory drops you can do nothing about (going upstairs, going back downstairs) and since it’s an elevator Worn Doll doesn’t work. You can justify it for the second half of the dungeon but you will need to Worn Doll coming out of Mindbender Ghur’sha‘s room (or Ozumat if you did it backwards). |
| Dawn of the Infinite (both wings) | Avoid | Both Dawn wings have so much roleplay, forced combat drops, forced time spent waiting for bosses to spawn and mandatory dragon scenic fly-over that you’ll struggle to keep stacks up. Fall is slightly better in that you can technically keep your stacks after Chronikar if you’re fast, but that’s the only solace. The final shroud skip most groups do to get to Iridikron outright kills it for last boss as well. |
That’s it! I hope you enjoyed this quick trinket deep dive and learned a thing or two from it. Cataclysmic Signet Brand is an amazing trinket design and I seriously hope we get to see more content-dependent trinkets like it in the future.
About the Author
This article has been written by Mandl (Mandl#0001 on Discord). I am a tank multiclasser and Useful Minion for the Acherus Death Knight community, where I answer questions regarding death knights and discuss class and encounter strategies.
