I'm not too thrilled that it has both the 10% proc rate AND the 45s ICD. That's my biggest complaint on a lot of the items that have an ICD. I do think putting ICDs on procs are a good thing because it allows them to be a LOT less random by upping the proc rate to 25-50% (look at lightweave embroidery for example.) However, after the ICD expires, you could be waiting for another ~15 seconds before it procs.

Actually, given that the hammer is a crit/haste piece, a mana-related proc would have made a fair amount of sense. Something along the lines of a proc that returns mana based on effective healing. Also, a mana-reducing/returning would be something that's universal for everyone; everyone can use more mana. Though with their recent concern with regen levels, I can see why they'd want to shy away from a mana-related proc.

If (and its a big if) your guild is strictly handing out shards based upon usefulness, then I would point out that some classes have distinct advantages. IMHO the proc will be better off in the hands of your best player, as the class difference is not huge, but its there.

Assuming players of equal skill, advantages are as follows

1) Druids...lots of proc chances due to multiple HoT/heals. This means the time between the ICD and the next proc are shorter on average. In addition if the 8 sec timer on the shield is reset a HoT will automatically keep the shield up for the full time between the proc and the 23 second mark. this is a HUGE advantage because as a Druid you may have half a dozen HoT's up before the proc even takes effect. ALL of those start building shields as soon as the proc occurs. Lastly Druid have alot of control over when they get big heals with blooms and swiftmends. Time those right and you can make maximum use of a shield on a raid member or tank. dont even get me started on
Tranquility

2) Holy....some of the advantages of Druids with HoT's (proc increase, pre HoTing) but not as much. However Holy has PoH and CoH, and Divine Hymn. All of those will make very good use of the overheal which is typically associated with their use. 15% is not awesome but its nothing to sneeze at either. Holy and Shammies who want to spam over heal to build up a shield are going to pay a big cost in HPM. For some fights this is not a big deal. For some it might be.

3) Pally....This is pretty simple. Massive crit and throughput mean that when MT healing you build some really nice shields. The problem with Pallys (and Shammies, and Disc) is the lack opf HoT's mean that getting the next proc may take more time. Its not huge but it's there none the less. As a MT healer the 8 sec shield will be renewed the vast majority of the time, so that is not an issue. And with their overheal normally being so high you dont need to worry about killing your HPM to build the shield

4) Shammies.....Similar to Holy with a few downsides. HST probably wont count towards shields as it is considered a pet in the combat log. ES will however since the healing is atributed to the shammie. And unlike PoH, if CH does not jump due to lack of targets, it wont build shields. The longer proc issue is also a potential problem compared to Holy/Druids. Not as bad as pallies if each jump can proc the weapon. The shield may drop off of people more since CH spam tends to jump around alot (no pun intended). Being a shaman myself, the idea of this weapon plus 1.7s chain heal spam with the 4 piece T8 bonus does make me drool however.

5) Disc.....not much to be said. Kind of get screwed on this one unless they make it build shields/proc from PW:S and DA.


Two other points

Shields >>> Healing. The value of shield go up as the value of the dmg approaches your current HP pool.

While the 3.75-5% value would work out to be true for effective healing, the fact that this uses overhealing raises the number significantly. I have not doen the numbers, but the 10% number thrown out by others in this thread seems to be reasonable.

All in all an amazing proc.

NM... failed at reading comprehension

When calculating the value of this proc to effective healing increases you cannot simply add 15% of all heals to the total and call it a day, this and things like PWS/Aegis directly lower the heal part of your effective healing by reducing damage taken and increasing overheal. What it does does do is give extra cushion against spike damage. Example, tank gets smashed in the face for 20k health and pally with this weapon crits for 19k this places a bubble on the tank of 2850. Next swing boss hits tank in the face again for 10k health and the pally lands another 19k crit (she's on fire today) tank takes 7150 damage and has another 2850 bubble on him. However the pally's effective healing is 19k +2850x2 +8150 = 32850 effective healing. Without the proc the tank would still be at full health and the pally would have healed 30,000 k health. The only actual gain is the residual 2850 which is 8.6% of the pallies throughput, while the buff is in effect.

Note that divine Aegis is about the same throughput and is a whole lot more reliable, my experience is that it is in the 6-7% range of my healing and raid buffed will be near as good as this proc but it is up ALL the time, basically the proc looks to me as if it is as good as 1 talent point spent in Aegis which is not exactly inspiring for a legendary proc.

Unlike trinkets or other procs, you can equip and unequip this mace in combat to help influence when the proc will occur. No guarantee on perfect timing, but if you know a sudden surge of damage is coming, you can equip the mace a bit before it and hope for a proc (with ticking hots, AOE heals, etc, you can increase the chance of the proc occurring when you want it to).

Not ideal, but really nice. Let's not forget how much better the shard system is than random drops, too; guilds can build towards the mace rather than farm hoping for lucky drops. Overall, definitely a nice legendary. I think people are underestimating the value of the shield; even in the next tier of content, flat percent of healing as a shield will scale quite nicely.

There seems to be a general consensus that the proc will be quite useful for raid damage mitigation. However, I am not entirely sure that the buff will allow the healer to put bubbles on all raid members. Here an excerpt from the blue post regarding the effect of the mace that may lead people to believe the effect can affect the raid:
This language sounds like it may possibly affect the entire raid, however if you put those aside for a moment and focus on the description of the effect, it isn't quite so clear. From the posts, here is my understanding of the mechanic.

1. A Healer casts a spell on a target that is below 100% health. The mace has a 10% chance to trigger it's effect. If it does, the 45 second internal cooldown is triggered.
2. A heal triggers the proc, this immediately places a buff on the healed target, providing a shield for them that will absorb 15% of the amount of effective healing.
3. Simultaneously, the healer gains a buff that will allow any of their additional heals to increase the amount that this single shield will absorb.
4. If the target takes damage and the entire shield is absorbed, any heals cast on that target will cause a new shield to be generated, as long as the buff remains on healer.

Further, Ghostcrawler seems to have elaborated on Bornakk's remark.
I know that GC's final remark refers to all healers getting 'juicy bubbles'—and this is the only occurrence in these posts of referring to the effect in plurality—however, I think he is referring to all of the bubbles that the healer will create over their healing career, not the bubbles they will create while the buff is up.

In short, I don't think the hammer will affect the entire raid, however I do think Blizzard will need to make another post to address this specifically.

edit: grammar

That makes no sense , then it'd be useless for anything but tank healing. How much clearer can they make it? Do you need him to type "bubble(s)"? It was very clear how it was going to work from the tooltip alone, the only thing we couldn't reasonably assume being the duriation of the shield and that it wouldn't activate if no actual healing was done.

That is absolutely ridiculous Denrire. Ignoring all common sense and logic just because GC doesn't use plural for bubble in his posts? Really?

Ok some people are mixing up between the proc of the blessing and the bubble-proc. They work in 2 different ways, so we need to look at them differently. I've read the blueposts over and over again, but I'm not 100% sure if I am right, so you might correct me if I'm wrong.



1) Proc of "Blessing of Kings":

This seems to be clear. If one of your spells actually HEAL, you got a 10% chance to proc the blessing. No matter what spell you use, no matter for how much you heal, it just needs to be a heal (say 1 hp or more). 2 Examples:

-A Paladin casts 5x Holy Light in 15 seconds. With his beacon up, he got 10 heals in sum. However, 4 of them hit the target at full health. So at the end, he did 6 actual heals, means 6 chances at 10% to proc to blessing.

-A Holy Priests casts (empowered) renew, prayer of mending, flash heal, Circle of Healing, flash heal, prayer of healing, flash heal. At best, renew ticks 6 times, PoM 6 times, 3x flash heal, Coh hits 6 people, PoH 5. That's 26 Heals in sum. However, assume 10 of those heals are vasted (100% overheal, not all people in range, etc). So he still got 16 chances at 10% to proc the Blessing.

So if there's raiddamage, Holy Priests (or druids) can pop up the blessing pretty fast compared to Paladins or Shamans, which should be somewhere in between. If there's no raiddamage, a Priest can spam CoH and whatnot, he won't be able proc the blessing.



2) Proc of the "bubble":

Once you got the "blessing of kings" on you, every cast places a bubble on the target(s) you are going to heal. The amount the bubble can absorb is 15% of the total heal done to the target no matter of overheal. A 20k Holy Light will pop up a bubble with 3k, no matter if you actually did 100% overheal or a 20k heal. Or Prayer of Healing healing 3x 4k and 2x 6k. So 3 targets receive a bubble worth 600 hp, and 2x 900, in sum 3600 hp but split up on different targets.
Every tick of a HoT will add to the bubble as well, however you need to remember, that this will just happen as long as the blessing is active. If you cast renew 2 seconds before the blessing ends, you won't see a bubble on the target as the first tick occures after 3 seconds (if you didn't skill empowered renew tho *g* ).



I think this Mace is pretty usefull for any healing class away from Disciplin Priests (sadly, can't understand why Blizzard didn't add Shields to the proc). People may discuss if it's better for MT heal oder raidheal, but as it is a Proc with an internal CD, that's no matter in my oppinion. You cannot be sure to have it in the right moment, so it makes things smoother, but if you can't win a fight without the mace, you won't win with it.

regards

Solifer

I'm probably completely wrong here but surely; as the stats on it arn't absolutely godly you could switch it in to get the proc at a critical point and switch out to another weapon while it's on the ICD? You may not be able to do this multiple times in a fight if it somehow locks out the ICD on weapon switch but I'm not aware of anything like that being in the game I immagine melee have more experience with this kinda thing.

Would that be at all viable? When raid damage starts getting high hit your macroed mace switch. Granted it won't be perfect timing but it's still generally going to be better than having it proc at a time when it will be useless.

I was thinking along the same lines until I did the math a few days ago (this was before the blue posts so the disc priest is off now):

In a theoretical encounter with heavy tank and raid damage, where no HoT tick was 100% overheal, and assuming any healing/PW:S done could proc the buff (am I missing anything?):

Paladins do 23 heals every 3 seconds (12 from 2xHL+Glyph, 2x from Beacon, 9 ticks from Judgement of Light). [Looked at some random Saph kills on WWS and JoL seemed to average 2-4 ticks/second in 25 mans]
Druids do 28 every 3 seconds (18 WG ticks, 3 LB ticks, 6 RJ ticks, 1 from RG).
Shamans do 14.5 every 3 seconds (8 from 2x CH, 1 Earth Shield tick, 0.5 from casting Riptide, 2 Riptide ticks, 3 Earthliving ticks.)
Holy Priests do 11 every 3 seconds (3 from CoH, 2 PoM bounces, 5 from PoH, 1 Renew tick) [Could add 5 ticks from Glyph of PoH, but I haven't seen a Holy Priest using it?]
Disc Priests do 7.5 every 3 seconds (1.5 from Penance, 2.5 from PW:S, 2.5 from PW:S Glyph)

Basically, any fight that a Druid is getting every HoT tick, a Paladin will get almost as many ticks.

I agree with the people saying this should go to a Paladin. The chance that a MT healer's proc and shields aren't wasted is much higher than a raid healer's chance.

EDIT: Thanks Jalhar.