I've had the staff for a week now:
I used it for our Anub25H night, so I was hitting about 5 targets all night long (we're getting quite close to a kill now). The Val'kyr did 6.67% of my overall damage that night. It appeared that Blizzard ticks had a 2% chance to proc and other spells had a 1% chance to proc. I played frost, as usual.
I was on standby for the ICC25+TotGC25 raid last night (we have too many mages now), so I spent the entire time on target dummies in Darnassus (they are closely enough packed that you can hit three of them and it's a nice and quiet area without too many curious gawkers asking you what you are doing and where the Val'kyr come etc).
Here's a summary of my findings:
- Running completely untalented, the Nibelung will never proc when casting Blizzard.
- Putting one point in Winter's Chill gives you a 0.3% chance to proc Nibelung on a Blizzard hit.
- Putting 3/3 in Winter's Chill givesy you a 1% chance to proc Nibelung on a Blizzard hit.
- Adding 1/3 Improved Blizzard increased the proc chance. Average went up to 2.38%, but I think some luck was involved since one segment of the test only had a 1.8% proc chance.
- Adding 2/2 fingers of frost and doing a quick test gives another 1.8% proc chance run. This is essentially similar to my raid spec as far as Blizzard is concerned and from the Anub25 log, I can assume that the proc chance is a flat 2%.
- Adding one point in Permafrost seems to push the proc rate to a fairly consistent 2.7%. Maybe the test wasn't long enough or I'm missing something, but a 3% proc rate would seem logical.
- Adding a second point in Improved Blizzard and doing more testing shows a flat 3% proc rate. (About 750 blizzard ticks worth of testing.)
Now those were target dummies and it's a bit unfortunate that target dummies don't always follow the same rules as actual raid mobs. After the main raid was over, I was invited to do ICC10 rep farming (clear the trash to Marrowgar and then reset & redo), so I got a few hours worth of AOE log from that (11565 overall SPELL_DAMAGE events). There were 258 Valkyr procs during that time, which puts the proc rate at 2.2%, but that's ignoring that I didn't use the staff all the time: I did some of the single target pulls using my dagger & offhand.
Here's a WMO analysis of the trash clear:
http://www.wowmeteronline.com/combat/10803304#damageoutWMO doesn't include the water elemental after patch 3.3, so about 10-12% of my damage is missing. There were some role & player switches, so the damage ranks do not tell the whole story (the shadow priest and rogue were however present exactly the same time I as I was).
It would be interesting to do Onyxia and make a whelps vs. Val'kyr movie or something.
Anyway, after the trash clear, I'm not 100% sure that Permafrost is increase the proc rate on actual mobs. Trading one point from Ice Floes to Permafrost is a tiny DPS loss (assuming there's no Nibelung equipped), so I'm going to keep my current spec and hopefully try it on Anub25H (I never seem to be put on standby on those days, but maybe there are fewer signups for wipe nights).
Here's a neat thing though:
As a frost mage, it's possible to control the Val'kyr as long as you have control over your water elemental. They will not obey a straightforward /petattack, but you can do the following and it will make the water elemental & val'kyr focus on your target (handy for breaking web wraps & bursting down a specific target):
/petpassive
/petfollow
/petattack
The staff is incredible fun in 5 man instances. It has a huge "wow" factor when you constantly run with a couple of Val'kyr girls. Consider this:
- The Val'kyr damage doesn't increase your threat - this is a huge bonus for random 5 man PUGs (the tanks aren't always that great).
- They do not use mana (DPM win).
- If you ice block, they will still damage and you can control them (in a really tight spot you can ice block and let the pets do the DPS).
There's a lot of QQ on the staff in the US DD forums and I can understand it... For anything but AOE and especially for other classes and specs, the staff is probably quite a bit worse than any other ICC weapon. There's no way to tell what Blizzard will do with the staff (if anything). For now, I'm going to enjoy Nibelung and hope it doesn't get worse.
