Saw this mentioned in the sustained dps thread, and it piqued my interest. I haven't heard much about this, aside from it being changed in 1.11, when I kind of forgot about it. Is it worth having one guy in your raid use it to be the Nightfall bitch, depending on your raid makeup? What about proc rates? How many casters would you need to make it more useful than an Ashkandi-wielding warrior over a 5 minute fight? If anyone can stick any info or numbers in here it'd be great, sounds like it could be awesome depending on the fight/proc rate.

I have a hard time believing that's effective at all? Jowis needs to be refreshed every 40 seconds, so you're bascially dedicating a paladin to melee when he could be healing. You could replace that paladin with a warrior, and have one of the healing paladins jowis it.

Seems much smarter to put it on a warrior, for one he actually can do real dps with it (though less then ashkandi for sure), and he can proc it off of hamstring. Hamstring + flurry surely can beat out that paladin haste spell in terms of hits / time?

Judgment of Wisdom needs to be refreshed every 10 seconds, 40 with full talents, which, incidentally, not that many paladins take. Many paladins speccing to optimize healing neglect it for Imp. Bow and Imp. LoH, or only put one or two points into Lasting Judgment.

Paladins in many boss fights can both melee and heal. Admittedly, they're probably better off wearing plate than cloth, but at the point at which you have access to this axe, there's no shortage of healing mail and plate.

Nightfall's speed is 3.5. That's enough time to cast a HL or multiple FoL in between melee attacks and not miss a swing. Not that it really matters if you do miss a swing, you can actually swing, back up, heal, and move back in for another swing to still keep the judgment up, dodging in and out of range between swings like a good warrior in PvP.

Obviously this wouldn't be such a good idea in fights like, say, Ouro; but in those fights you generally don't have warriors DPSing either. Most fights where rogues, fury warriors (And feral druids - there, I said it.) are able to DPS, a paladin can survive being near the front lines reasonably well.

Furthermore, even if the false dichotomy that a paladin needed to melee *or* heal existed, simply meleeing and keeping up Judgment of Light is in many cases more net healing for the raid than having the paladin not melee and just spam heals, which means you have one paladin in melee already.

Also, a paladin will also derive more benefit than a warrior from Nightfall in 20-mans, 5-mans, and solo and small party situations.

There are many other arguments for putting this in the hands of a paladin (or shaman), both from a warrior's perspective and a hybrid's perspective, but that was not the original intent of this thread, so I'll wrench this back on the rails and try to theorycraft with what information there is so far.

On a 2h fury warrior (the best spec for keeping said proc up), the loss in DPS, barring differences in AP for BT, is very close to the difference in the weapons' actual DPS. The vast majority of a raiding warrior's DPS comes from attack power, there is no multiplicative skill analogous to backstab. Even MS adds a flat amount of damage, with Smite's Hammer or Sulfaras. Obviously, you wouldn't want to make your guild's one DEoI warrior your "Nightfall bitch", as you so eloquently put it, rather, the raid would be best served by giving it to that one warrior who's still hanging on to his OEB or Zin'Rokh, as his DPS will be nearly equivalent. Depending on what the proc rate actually is, and whether it stacks, decides whether it's worth having multiple melee using it.

I'd imagine it would also be optimal in fights like the drakes in BWL, and dramatically less useful the more agro-sensitive or dynamic the fight is.

Even if it's only one proc per minute (active for 25 seconds of a 5 minute fight before flurry/SoCr/WF), it seems like all it would take is 2 mages and 2 warlocks for it to potentially out-DPS an Ash'kandi. Because the 15% is a debuff on the target, it's applied last, after talents, after spell damage gear, after trinkets, after vulnerabilities, at the same time as Imp. Scorch and Shadow Weaving. And it doesn't just affect mages and locks, either: TF procs, stings, poisons, and so on all add up.
The real question seems to be how many times can you get away with Nightfall proccing before the increased caster DPS gets your raid Zibro'd?

I think its usefulness would hinge entirely on how often it procs. Can you have it up there permanently if a shaman/paladin/warrior melees with it. It wouldn't be that good if it only procs occasionally, and say it procs while mages/warlocks are casting and it takes a few seconds for their spells to even make it to the mob, will it hit when that proc is up? Do spells count before their graphic reaches the mob? If not, spells in transit and just barely missing the proc wouldn't help much.

Lately, my guild has had a shaman wondering about that and if we could get a shaman to go enhancement and just have fun with the shiny axe. For the most part, one less healer won't prevent you from killing a boss. Maybe the spot that this proc bitch is taking could do more than just the 15% increase and what dps that person puts out.

Also, if I'm right, you can't do much more than use this axe the whole time rather than healing to keep the proc up as much as it can be up. If you stop attacking, it doesn't remember how much time you have left till the next swing, it resets the swing and makes it take another 3.5 sec.

A parse posted on thott put the procrate at 18% ish, which comes out to almost exactly 3.0 ppm.

Still extremely skeptical about about efficacy of putting it in paladin/shaman hands though. If there's a question of "is this dps gain actually worth it", then putting it in the hands of the person that can keep it up the last amount of time seems not to be the way to approach it. Then again, I guess once you have the recipe learned, it's quite cheap to make and you might as well equip every melee you got with one.

Edit: removed incorrect infoz, apparently i was wrong, corrected by someone below.

Paladins/Shamans don't get their swing timer reset on instant cast spells. However, it is reset after casting any spell that is not instant.

Oof, my bad then, basing that information off my shamans shocks is probably a bad thing :p Carry on!