Trinket trouble

Yesterday I got a chance to sort out my new rotation and try out my new trinket.  I do a lot more damage based on the new rotation but the new trinket was a real disappointment.  It managed to illustrate very well the difference between theorycrafting a patchwerk fight and real raid encounters.  The trinket in question:

Fury of Angerforge:  Melee attacks stack up a buff on you that stacks to 5 and has a duration of 15 seconds.  When it gets to 5 you may remove the buff to give yourself 1926 Strength for 20 seconds (2 minute cooldown).  Not to be ignored is the benefit that I turn into a dragon when I use it and look really cool.

This seems pretty sweet at first glance.  The 2 minute cooldown and 20 second duration are identical to Avenging Wrath (AW) and Zealotry so I can sync them up to massively boost the power of the trinket.  The problem is that there is an internal cooldown on the trinket stacking up its buff and the proc isn't at all reliable so quite regularly I get it up to a 3 or 4 stack after 30 seconds or so and then it falls off!  Suddenly I have delayed my AW for quite a long time and the trinket won't be ready to use until a full minute into the fight.  Worse, it might not even be ready then as I might need to move or be stunned or whatnot which increases the chance I drop the buff even more.  Certainly last night I was not popping the buff as much as I should as I was trying to sync it up with AW but it ended up with uptime lower than 5%.  AW also ended up with uptime around 13%, which is far lower than it should be due to me trying to get the two to play nicely together.  Even if I simply popped either of them whenever I could and didn't sync them Fury of Angerforge wouldn't be very good because it still would be unreliable.

The trouble with this sort of thing is that FoA shows up as extremely powerful in a simulation.  Normally simulators just aren't very good at dealing with fight interruptions, movement and target switching and this is no exception; in a simulator the buffs sync up and generate very impressive numbers but in real raiding they require lots of extra babysitting and end up being very lacklustre.  One thing that really shocks me is that this is the buffed version of the trinket... prior to 4.06 it had an even longer cooldown on gaining a stack and was absolutely rubbish instead of simply subpar like it is now.  I am not surprised that Blizzard got the trinket wrong in the first place but noticing that it was bad and then buffing it so that it is still bad just feels sloppy.  Once you know you screwed up in a particular spot it seems worthwhile to take the time to get it right if you are going to do anything at all.

I also got to test out my new rotation a bit.  Initially I had figured on syncing up Zealotry, AW and FoA all at once for some huge beats but this proved problematic.  Not only did I have all the issues outlined above with FoA but trying to link Zealotry and AW was annoying.  Zealotry is only castable with 3 HP so I often ended up not linking them quite right (or waiting too long on Zealotry) and spent far too much time and brain cycles worrying about it.  I have gone back to my previous style which is to have Zealotry macroed to both my finishers so it goes off without me having to think about it.  This way I maximize uptime and minimize the amount of time I have to think about it. I left AW and GoAK as the cooldowns I actually manage since they are usable anytime and set up my new trinket (which has an uncontrolled proc) to give me a big fat PowerAuras notice so I can punch AW/GoAK when it is up.  Hopefully I can stack on another 1k dps with these changes and lock up first place on the meters.  :)