I listed the five best items for Discipline and Holy healing priests yesterday, and one of them was the Ephemeral Snowflake. When I first got this drop though, the last thing that went through my mind was, “What a beautiful treasure!” My initial reaction was more along the lines of: “Wtf is this?” My spider senses tingled though, and so I took the trinket home from the world of random dungeon-land.

Then I did research.

Since Holy and Discipline healing are wildly different, I’m going to explain why this trinket is a win from both angles. First though, there’s some basic things you should know about your new (or desired) mana regen toy:

• It has an internal cooldown of ~0.33 seconds.
• If you activate it’s use constantly, it grants a 2.4% haste rating.
• If you proc it constantly, it grants ~165 mp5. (Theorycrafter needs evidence? Check out the source.)

So how do you use it constantly? Take your favorite spell–Penance is great for Discipline Priests and Circle of Healing works for Holy priests–and macro it so that you have it /use 13. My macro (which uses mouseover heals for Grid) looks like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover][] Penance
/use 13

Okay, now you have your Ephemeral Snowflake’s use interlaced into your healing rotation without having to think much of it. Let’s look at how to get it to proc constantly.

Procing the Ephemeral Snowflake as a Holy Priest

You want to make sure you’re healing, somehow, once every 1/3 a second. Sound crazy? It’s not that hard, actually.

Every time your Renew ticks (except the initial tick from Empowered Renew), you’ll be getting 11 mana back. If you’re raid healing, your HoTs will be all over the place, ticking for you while you’re doing other things. Then, of course, there’s the other HoT; Prayer of Healing’s glyph. Equipped with Serendipity and Healing Prayers, a Holy priest can easily have five different HoTs going off at once to push the internal cooldown of this trinket to its limit.

But you’re not done yet. When you cast Circle of Healing (glyphed, of course), you’ll be getting another 5 unique procs off. Your Prayer of Mending will also be healing people without your supervision (that naughty spell!) By exploiting all of your instant casts and HoTs in addition to your big spells, you can really push the proc to its limit and make sure it’s working even when your cast bar is tending to bigger things.

Procing the Ephemeral Snowflake as a Discipline Priest

This is a little bit harder. You’re glyphed so that your Power Word: Shield heals people, naturally, giving you the ability to get some of the procs of your insta-bubbles. Penance ticks pretty fast too, and you have Renew, even if it’s not spec’d. Your Prayer of Mending is working full-time, but your spec doesn’t let you get it out as fast, and it’s more expensive when you do. In short, you need to work out a better rotation.

Here’s how I found it worked the best:

1. Get the spare room for a Prayer of Healing glyph.
2. Instead of saying you’re a “tank healer,” volunteer to take care of the group your tank is in. Maybe throw all the tanks in group one.

Once you’re ready to start your endless Ephemeral Snowflake proc rotation, do this:

1. Renew the tank.
2. PW:S the tank for Borrowed Time.
3. Prayer of Healing the group. Hope the two HoTs are ticking totally off-beat with one another.
4. For six seconds, do all the bubbles and Penances you need to do. This should be getting the last third of the second, while Renew and PoH are picking up the other two-thirds of the second. Get a final PW:S off right before 6 seconds are up for another Borrowed Time.
5. PoH the tank again.
6. Refresh Renew as necessary, rinsing and repeating PoH every 6 seconds.

It’ll be a tighter squeeze than Holy healing, but it will work.

Is the Ephemeral Snowflake good for other classes?

Druids love this trinket, and for obvious HoT-gasm reasons.

Restoration shamans? Well, they can proc it with Riptide, but not with Earth Shield or the healing totem. Chain Heal also seems to give it a proc every bounce, though the bounces happen all at once, so you’re yet again looking at a restriction with the 0.33 second cooldown. In short, shammies are more questionable.

I don’t have enough experience with Holy paladins to assess that angle, but they have their own positive remarks on WoWHead, so something must be working. I’d be curious to hear a paladin’s opinion on it.

Where do I get one!?

Like what you’ve read? Then go get your very own Ephemeral Snowflake off Marwyn in Halls of Reflection! It works beautifully with a Darkmoon Card: Greatness for mana hogs like myself.