Mad Priests on Madmortem

Ok, today’s post is about [Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon], or as I like to think about it, [Poor Man's Innervate].

First, to get the facts straight:
I will assume from my own testing and what I read, that the Blue Dragon does not have any internal cooldown. Also I will assume that there is no ppm normalization (which would mean a flash heal had only 50% of the chance to procc the trinket, as a prayer of healing would have).
A 2% chance means you can expect one proc every casts – but this is a statistical value meaning, you can have 5 procs in a row, or a full raid w/o anything at all. You should assume at least 50% of deviation in specific fights due to this!

Next, the areas of use we will look into:
First, your fight has to be long enough so you will negate any gains from waiting for a CD beforehand. In example, a 20 second fight will probably not proc the blue dragon, but you will easily be able to use your [Earring of Soulful Meditation] because you can wait out the cooldown before the fight begins.
Second, this trinket is a raw unpredictable mana regen trinket. If you need to do a lot of burst healing with longer periods of inactivity, you will gain neither plusheal / haste to improve your burst healing output, nor will it help you in your period of inactivity. Use a combination of the [Earring of Soulful Meditation] and the [Redeemer's Alchemist Stone] for example.
So, the primary area of use is a long time of very short heals. (Druids Lifeblooming anyone?)

There are a few other things we have to consider before hopping into the actual theorycrafting:
Since the trinket is proc based, you will always just have started your <a href=”http://dionadar.wordpress.com/mana-regen/#spirit”5 second rule when it proccs, and therefore your first 5 seconds are always spend at the Cards maximum utility.
Although you could wear a spirit on use trinket in your second slot to fire it just when blue dragon proccs, I will assume you do not, because there are other cases, where you could fire it just as well.

Let’s get started!

Number of procs:
From my usual time spent in the 5 second rule (75%+) we can deduce that 60% of time spent casting could be a pretty good average.
Also, I usually do Greater Heals, which take a bit less than 2.5 seconds in my mana regen gear.
Average Time Between two Procs := 50 * Casting Time / Time Spent Casting
This gives me a whopping 208 seconds on average between two casts!
Again, consider that using this trinket on fights below 300 seconds (5 minutes) can very well result in having a trinket which does nothing at all in that fight.

Strength of procs:
Essentially this is calculated very easily:
Mana regained by a Blue Dragon Proc while always casting := 3 * (OOC MP5 - IC MP5)
Where OOC MP5 stands for the mana regged in 5 seconds while not being in the 5 second rule and IC MP5 for the mana regged while being in the 5 second rule.
This value is even for Dionadar who is not very well spirit geared at 984 unbuffed.
Now, this has to be normalized for the 5 second rule:
Mana regained by a Blue Dragon Proc on average := 1 * (OOC MP5 - IC MP5) + 2 * Time spent in 5 second rule * (OOC MP5 - IC MP5)
The first summand stands for the first 5 seconds during which the 5 second rule is always running and the second summand stands for a statistical value for the remaining 10 seconds.
Dionadar would therefore regain 820 Spirit unbuffed.

Average MP5:
Average MP5 := 5 * Mana regained by a Blue Dragon Proc on average / Average Time Between two Procs
The value for an unbuffed Dionadar is 19.7 – which sucks!

WTF PEOPLE SAYZ BLUE DRAGON IMBA!?
*hem* yeah…

Did you notice I always said “unbuffed Dionadar” and “not very well spirit geared”?
The Blue Dragon card’s total formula is very spirit dependant if you look at it:
Average MP5 := (OOC MP5 - IC MP5 + 2 * Time spent in 5 second rule * (OOC MP5 - IC MP5)) * Time Spent Casting / (10 * Casting Time)
Therefore this value scales drastically with gear:
Average Blue Dragon MP5 for someone with better gear := 30
The input for this 30 MP5 answer is not taken out of thin air, but from a really good equipped priest on my server. And yes, this is still unbuffed. If you were to add [Elixir of Draenic Wisdom], a Spirit Buff, Kings, MotW and an Intelligence buff, this goes up even further.

However, there is something else we could optimize:
Usage!
Let’s just assume for a second that with potting and enough innervates, etc pp my poor unbuffed priest had to do CoH spamming for a longer time:
MP5 in this use case: 70.3!!

Now add another killer:
We will assume a buffed priest with about 100 haste and a (buffed) difference of 600 MP5 between IC and OOC, doing CoH Spamming:
Average MP5 := (600 + 2 * 100% * 600) * 100% / (10 * 1.4)
This gets an unbelievable value of 128.6 MP5.

Conclusion
[Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon] is an extremely gear and behaviour dependant trinket, which seems to get more powerful as content progresses – maxing out in Sunwell with CoH spamming and long fights which do not allow you to slack.