Tiny Abomination in a Jar (heroic) > Tiny Abomination in a Jar > Death's Verdict (heroic) > Whispering Fanged Skull (heroic) > Death's Verdict > Deathbringer's Will (heroic) > Whispering Fanged Skull > Herkuml War Token > Deathbringer's Will > Darkmoon Card: Greatness > Comet's Trail
Usually unmentioned is the fact that the ultimate source for this ranking is the Elitist Jerks forum post "Retribution BiS lists for 3.3." The lists in that thread are derived entirely from Rawr. Now, I use Rawr, and normally I trust it (although there are some issues with its calculations for the value of Haste Rating). But in this case, there is not much reason to put a lot of faith in it. Rawr does not accurately model the special effect of the Tiny Abomination in a Jar. The author of the BiS lists posts has implemented a workaround for his purposes, but it is a very rough approximation and still not accurate enough to put a lot of faith in. Still, no one really doubts that Tiny Abomination in a Jar is BiS for retribution paladins. But I'd like to dig a little more into the justification of that claim.
I recently acquired a Tiny Abomination in a Jar, and got to use it in our last Icecrown Citadel 25-player (ICC25) raid. Here is a link to the World of Logs combat log parse from our Festergut kill. Now, my total effective dps for the fight is reported to be 12698.9. However, that number seems to be inflated by damage from the boss ability Blighted Spores, which for some reason shows up in the breakdown of damage-by-spell for me. That added 169870 to my overall damage done, so subtracting that from the total and dividing by the length of the fight (214s), we can see that my effective dps from my own attacks was 11964.4.
How much of that dps can be attributed to the special effect of Tiny Abomination in a Jar? Fortunately for my purposes, I was already at the 8% hit cap before I got the trinket, and so the Hit Rating from the trinket was entirely wasted (I've since upgraded my gear so that I make use of some of it, but at the time of this parse I hadn't yet). So we can neglect the Hit Rating contribution of the trinket entirely, which will simplify things. The attack triggered by 8 Motes of Anger shows up in the combat log as Manifest Anger. Over the course of the fight, I had 18 Manifest Anger hits and 19 critical hits (appropriate, given that my raid-buffed critical strike chance is ~50%), for a total damage of 101016.
However, that's only a small part of the damage attributable to the trinket; one of the primary reasons the Tiny Abomination in a Jar is so good for retribution paladins is that it also procs our active seal. So some portion of the 703917 damage done by my Seal of Vengeance was caused by my trinket. In particular, an average Seal of Vengeance hit during the course of that fight did 3519.6 damage. So we can estimate that the 37 total Manifest Anger procs caused an additional 130224 damage, for a total damage of 231240 attributable to my Tiny Abomination in a Jar. Notice that the damage from seal procs is actually more than the damage from Manifest Anger itself; thus, the damage from the trinket is more than doubled, and that explains why this trinket is so good for retribution paladins, but not best-in-slot for other melee dps classes. Tiny Abomination in a Jar contributed an effective dps of about 1080.6 in the Festergut parse linked above. Impressive, for a single piece of gear!
Now, to compare that to other trinkets, I intend to use Rawr, since Rawr should model the other trinkets in the list much more accurately. However, since Rawr's estimate of my total dps is likely to be higher than it actually would be in practice, we won't want to compare dps attributable to the trinkets (even though, on such a comparison, Tiny Abomination in a Jar already comes out ahead). Instead, I will compare the ratio of dps attributable to the trinket to overall dps. So, in the Festergut log parse above, Tiny Abomination in a Jar accounted for 1080.6 / 11965.4 = .090310395, or roughly 9% of my overall dps. Still quite impressive for a single piece of gear!
Now, let's compare the heroic version of Death's Verdict, our other BiS trinket. According to Rawr, with no trinket in my second slot, I ought to be able to do 12121 dps on an undead target in a stand-and-deliver type fight like Festergut (with the Strength of Wrynn buff, which I had in the parse linked above). We shouldn't put a lot of stock in that number, but we need it as a reference point. Now, Rawr thinks that adding Death's Verdict (heroic) should add 732.63 dps. So then I'd be doing 12853 dps, and the portion of that overall dps attributable to my trinket would be about 5.7%.
If we compare the normal version of Death's Verdict (I skip over Whispering Fanged Skull (heroic) in the priority list because that's the trinket in my other slot), the latter would amount to 648.4 dps, or about 5.1% of my total dps, according to Rawr.
Now that's only one data point, and it would be nice to compare two (or ideally more) combat log parses in otherwise equivalent gear rather than a combat log parse and a Rawr estimate. I'm not going to strongly defend the methodology of this post. But, despite potential methodological difficulties, the difference between even the non-heroic Tiny Abomination in a Jar and the next-best trinket is large enough that I feel confident that it really is significantly better, even if we can't confidently arrive at a precise quantification of how much better. And remember, that's just the special effect we're talking about; if you can utilize some portion of the Hit Rating on the trinket, it just gets better.
Final verdict: Tiny Abomination in a Jar really is best-in-slot for retribution paladins, or at least for me, by a wide margin, even if the Hit Rating on the trinket is entirely wasted.
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