There has been a lot of discussion over at the Peak of Serenity discord about the various uses of Secret Infusion and its interaction with Thunder Focus Tea. I wanted to write down some general guidelines on how or when to use which buffs. Please use the comments section to add or question anything I may have missed.
Overview
Quick introduction to Secret Infusion:
The trait provides a 10 second buff after your use a spell’s Thunder Focus Tea empowerment. The buff depends on the spell empowered, and the empowerments are:
- Enveloping Mist – Critical Strike
- Renewing Mist – Haste
- Vivify – Mastery
- Rising Sun Kick – Versatility
To note, you only get a single buff each time you cast Thunder Focus Tea, so if you have taken Focused Thunder, you will only get a buff based on the first spell you cast after Thunder Focus Tea.
Basic Usage
In general, in a raid setting you will not be changing your Thunder Focus Tea usage. You will still primarily be using it on Vivify or Renewing Mist, gaining the Mastery or Haste buffs respectively. With Mastery being better for us as a raid stat this expansion and the fact that Vivify does not cast mana when empowered by Thunder Focus Tea, the Vivify empowerment makes the most sense as the default Thunder Focus Tea usage spell in a raid.
For Mythic+ you end up with being able to target specific stats to buff during the encounters. For the most part, Thunder Focus Tea and Renewing Mist will be used together, so you are gaining the Haste buff there, but there may be specific pulls or instances where the other buffs pull ahead. Use your judgement, and knowledge of the dungeon to make an informed choice here.
In short, Secret Infusion doesn’t change your default Thunder Focus Tea usage.
Advanced Usage
While your general usage of Thunder FOcus Tea may not change, with SI you can do some interesting things. You can leverage a specific stat increase for certain situations as they occur. I’ll try and outline some below, but if there are specific examples, please feel free to comment.
To note, delaying the use of TFT is almost never the play. If you have to wait more than 7-10 seconds for the timing to align, look at either adjusting your overall usage or just ignore the timing and use TFT as normal. Also, for raids, if mana is an issue, I would not adjust your TFT usage.
Common Situations in a raid:
- Enveloping Mist – Critical Strike
- Use before large, raid wide damage, and pair with Essence Font or Revival. This has the change to be more healing than Versatility, but will rely on getting crits on your spells
- Rising Sun Kick – Versatility
- Use before Revival to boost your overall Revival healing
- Use before a large raid damage hit for the reduction, but pair this with Essence Font to also get a healing boost
- Renewing Mist – Haste
- None, that may require a specific call out
- Vivify – Mastery
- None, that may require a specific call out
If you have others, or some more specific examples, please let me know either in the comments or over in discord.
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Any advice on how many stacks of Secret Infusion you should run with? I’ve currently got it on all 3 pieces and love the crazy big buff it gives my stats but I’m wondering if 3 is too much and should be running with 2 instead. Thanks in advance, Nav
Depends on what your other traits are on those pieces.
I would say leverage the QE Live tool over at https://questionablyepic.com/live/ to compare pieces and that should give you an idea of what to select. Generally stacking anything nowadays isn’t the best course of action.
A good setup for ride wide healing is full ef into tft into (2x) rem into mt and spam vivify with 2k haste buff, similar setup could be done with full ef into tft into vivis for 2k mastery and double proc but that might be a lil bit overkill at timer, crit proc would be awesome into full ef if we have ef trait. Rly a lot of cool setups could be done, smażony trait to stack