My guild is a casual raiding guild, and we've taken our time collecting the fragments - as of last week I have 29. After searching the web and coming up with different answers, I came to this site to try and find the RIGHT answer to my question.

I've searched this thread, I've searched this site...and it's still not clear to me. For those of you that have the mace, did your last fragment come from Yogg or elsewhere? It makes a difference in planning and expectations, especially with 3.3 coming more than likely next week.

'preciate your help!

I believe her question is....

Once you get the 29th fragment. Do you HAVE to get the 30th from Yogg then go back the next week and do Yogg+1 or can you get the 30th fragment from any regular drop.

Yes exactly. Does the last fragment HAVE to drop from Yogg?

You can get the 30th fragment from any boss. Then you combine them and turn in the quest item at the archivum data console behind Iron Council. Then you go kill Yogg with 0-3 keepers in his room and collect your mace off his corpse.

Will this mace be replaceable come ICC? Is it worth finishing the second half of one mace and possibly building a third one for ICC or would it be a complete waste of possible progression time?

50y is from the center of yogg saron, so 36y to reach the YS hit box is definitly enough to outrange the silence if you position yourself well.

Proc will still be nice, but not required in any sense of the word. Icecrown weapons will be beefier in other respects to balance the fact they don't have the proc.

Waste of progression time: yes.
Waste of time in general: not if you're fully progressed and can convince your guild to raid Ulduar just for fragments.

Don't sacrifice Icecrown time for it, but it doesn't suddenly become a bad mace in 3.3.

Its funny, for a druid I really don't think it will be replaced in ICC. With Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation - Item - World of Warcraft and ~90 haste below the haste cap for non-LB hots, my amount of healing possible during a Rejuv-blanketing situation has increased, thus the amount of healing I can do during the blessing proc (and the amount of shielding I can do, obviously) has also increased. If you take my recent ICC10 parse World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis for example (tab over to my healing by spell) it attributed for over 20% of my effective healing done throughout the instance. Now, there are tons of opportunities to blanket the raid with HoTs, so this may be inflated from a "normal" raid scenario, but you can also look at this recent ToC25 normal parse (I think there's Sarth in there too >.>) World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis, its still attributing for over 10% of my effective healing.

Now, you can make any argument you wish as to whether or not shielding counts or doesn't count as "healing done," but if you count it as effective healing, that would mean I would need to find a weapon that would increase my healing by 10% to overcome the value of the blessing. I really don't see this happening in ICC.

Shielding is effective healing when there is incoming damage to heal and it's possible to heal less as a result of said shield. Otherwise, it's ineffective/superfluous healing as we said many moons ago.

To give an example, if the shield obviated the need to cast the nth Wild Growth to top up the raid, that's effective healing. If even the shielded people still need the same rank of rejuv they always did, the shields didn't really do anything by being there.

Well, that 10% shielding was the shields that were actually absorbed, too. No clue how much shielding it actually does that doesn't get absorbed.

Blizzard never implemented proper absorb tracking like GC said they would, as far as I've been able to tell. WoL still guesses.