Blessed Prayer Beads

You all know the problem in World of Warcraft, when you have two items and you have to decide which one to use. Do you want the one with the higher bonus to intelligence, or would you rather take the mana regeneration one? Plus strength or plus stamina? These things are often hard to decide, as the usefulness of each bonus depends on the situation. And you can't always take all the items and switch around.

My Alliance priest (not calling him "low level priest" any more) is now level 50, and did his level 50 class quest. Now the conventional wisdom is to take the Blessed Prayer Beads rewards, a trinket which you can activate every two minutes, to increase your healing by up to 190 for 20 seconds. But I did take the beads on my Horde priest, and nowadays I'm just not using them any more, they are rotting in the bank. The problem is that there are only two trinket slots, and other level 60 trinkets are better than the beads. I generally have problems choosing what trinkets to use, there is a much wider variety of functions in trinkets than in other items. And having one bag full of trinkets to carry around isn't really practical either.

While the bonus of the beads of +190 to healing is relatively big, you have to activate the trinket to get the bonus. And I found that I simply tend to forget to activate them every 2 minutes, only using the beads when a fight became difficult. You have to know that the beads don't add +190 to every spell, they add 190 to the biggest healing spell, Greater Healing, and proportionally less to the smaller healing spells like Renew or Flash Heal, thus the bonus is about +10% more healing for all spells. Even if I activated it every 2 minutes, with a duration of 20 seconds the trinket would work only 1/6th of the time, so even under ideal conditions the Blessed Prayer Beads make me only a less than 2% better healer.

So I think I'm going against conventional wisdom this time and take the wand. Yes, I'll get better wands at 60, but for level 50 the wand is very nice. And in the end it doesn't matter whether it is the beads or the wand I end up not using at 60. Until 60, the wand is obviously more useful for soloing. Especially since this priest is "wand spec'd", having chosen a discipline build over a shadow build. Another choice against conventional wisdom. That is probably the one advantage of leveling the same class twice to 60, you have a much better idea about the consequences of your choices, and can explore a bit off the beaten path.