Well, 3.2 Demo pact was only realizing about a 70ish% uptime, with the change to the talent, it will be much much higher (and SHOULD be close to 99% if not 100%). This only adds to the value of a Demo lock in the raid, and will virtually eliminate the need for ToW on any fight that doesn't have a large amount of adds that need 3% crit on them.

In the weapon arguement,

Wrathful Gladiator's Blade of Celerity vs Frozen Bonespike(Heroic)

Wrathful Gladiator's Blade of Celerity:
58 haste
66 int
836sp
1socket

Frozen Bonespike:
50 crit
75 int
836sp
1 socket

as far as weapons go outside heroic LK, Id think the two of these are ~ equal, I didnt add any of the other stats in my post due to them really having minimal value. So if you have access to the tier two arena weapon, would you say its worth picking up and allowing bonespike to go to another caster?

haste > crit. Yes it is well worth it.

In the ongoing saga of [Phylactery of the Nameless Lich], it seems that the ICD is 100 seconds rather than the 90 which had previously been claimed/assumed. Source. Changing the ICD in ZAP! puts normal Phylactery just below heroic RotD again and barely above heroic Spyglass. Heroic version remains second best after DFO.

(Thanks to Sayam for noticing this.)

A revisit of Nibelung:

I was lucky enough to pick up Nibelung 277 very cheaply, so I started looking into how useful this staff may be for raiding.

Under the last posted assumptions in this thread, it appears it might be possible it outdps-es the combination of Marrowgar Bulwark 277 and Terenas II 277 which was actually quite a surprise to me as these are thought to be BiS.
I will test it a little more when I have a chance myself, but would meanwhile ask the community here whether they can also check some facts or share their knowledge:

1) what is the smite dmg (heroic staff) per cast?
I have seen 2240 reported but unsure whether this was without ICC buff and with the hotfixes applied.
My own tests on heroic dummy show ~1840 non-crit with no debuffs applied.
CoE definately increased the average dmg, but the contribution of other dmg-debuffs is not known (wowhead lists they don't apply but I would like to get some confirmation)
2) Is the dmg indeed unaffected by the players spellpower? Is it affected by the ICC buff?
3) Is the Valkyr's hp affected by the ICC buff?
4) What is the average casting time per smite (reported earlier as 1.81s), using WoA and pally buff?
Is this affected by player haste?
Is this affected by EM and/or Bloodlust?
I tested on the heroic dummy but the results are very inconclusive so any good data is welcome
5) Are there parses available showing the total dmg done per valkyr (preferaby heroic staff)? Please indicate debuff conditions and what ICC buff was, and ofc if it died early
6) Does the valkyr proc from searing/magma/fire elemental hits?
I did not see it happen yet, but I have very low statistics atm
7) Does the valkyr proc from casting a totem?
I tried spamming searing totem and ToW extensively but no procs so far. Also Lightning shield doesnt seem to proc it. Can someone confirm?
8) On which heroic fights can we see the Valkyrs die early because of raid dmg?

So far, the stat losses for using the staff w.r.t. Terenas + Bulwark are (incl enchants and gems):
- 44 stamina
- 69 intellect
- 123 crit
- 137 sp
- 131 haste
- 9262 armor
This translates into ~850 dps loss (ZAP BiS numbers at 50ms cast delay and 0 movement) which has to be regained by the Valkyrs dps.

Looking at my own parses of various fights, I noticed the average time between 'procable casts' including LO varies between 1.1 sec (static: Saurfang) and 1.7 sec (high movement/mc/etc).
Technically we should look at the Valkyr dps gain in static fights to compare with the 850 dps, but it is hard to determine whether the staff will perform better or worse on a high movement fight. The Valkyrs do damage while your running, but we tend to cast fire totems, flameshock and LvB more which decreases the chances of getting a proc. If anyone has any further thought on this, I would be interested but for now I simply assume the pro's and con's kinda balance each other out.

This brings us back to the average casttime/smite and dmg/smite which will make or break this weapon for us.
I must say I find it hard to believe we could reach 850 dps over a whole bossfight using heroic Valkyrs... (but let's find out)


The key disadvantages I can see of using this staff instead of a mace/shield combination are as far as I can determine:
- Valkyrs dying early due to raid-dmg greatly influences the total dps
- high RNG because of the low proc-chance. The downside and upside of this staff is very high and you need to be prepared to accept you get sub-par procs which will put a big dent in your dps. On the other hand, you may get lucky by having 10 valkyr proc in a single fight
- significant armor loss (some disadvantage at Saurfang, but otherwise not important)

This appears to make the staff situational, rather then BiS but I'm really looking forward to confirming/disproving this assumption. I'd rather use the staff then wait forever for my dkp to come to the level required to get the heroic LK mace (which will take a while to kill anyway )


Anyone who can add some of his/her experiences with the staff so far?

I gave nibelung 277 a shot as well (over Lockjaw hc and Bastion hc) in one of our 10 man hc runs, and it was outstanding on almost all fights ( for reference: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis ; was healing on valrithia and sindragosa). Break even point would have been about 250 dps from valkyrs, and I got about 500 dps.

Wanted to try it in 25 man today as well but Marrowgar kinda "ruined" my plan by dropping Frozen Bonespike. Regardless, until you get Terenas II normal, Tel'Thas hc or Bonespike hc you should be better off with Nibelung. The proc is worth about 500 dps if valkyrs never die, and apart from Marrowgar (and probably Sindragosa) they stay alive suprisingly much.

Thanks Skajin and Methenlol for putting in some logs; very helpful

From the logs, a number of things have become clear:
- average dmg/smite is about ~2025 non-crit when a 13% dmg debuff is on the target.
Indeed not affected by spellpower, but it appears also unaffected by the 10% ICC buff that is active! (In orgrimmar I had ~1840 non-crits on the heroic dummy and 13% extra gets close to 2025). This is considerably lower then some numbers reported on wowhead by boomkins, and it is unclear to me why boomkins should expect higher numbers
- the complete story on crit is unclear, so let's assume the 13% max crit as mentioned at wowhead is appropriate.
Your logs show significantly less however but the dmg increase is not very large
- the dps you found varies between 500 and 1000 over a complete fight


However, to see whether this is just lucky or something we can expect on average we need to understand how much total dmg we can expect from a single valkyr (which is not dying prematurely).
The logs unfortunately don't tell us how many valkyrs were up during the fights, so I have to guesstimate it. Looking at the total uptime and number of smites it appears we get some consistent numbers around 16-17 smites (~1.8-1.9s smite casts) per valkyr which means about 33500 dmg on average. Note that faster smites makes quite a big difference, but we have no evidence so far they are affected by haste buffs/bloodlust etc.


If we assume a static fight of say 5 min, we can expect to get about 270 proc-opportunities. This includes LO, EM, Bloodlust and 900-ish static haste and the relic. 270*2% means 5.4 valkyrs, or an effective average dps of ~600 during the entire fight; this is consistent with the logs.

For my stats in a static fight, with the staff I lose about 490 dps w.r.t. heroic Bonespike + ToC 258 shield on stats. This means the valkyrs outweigh the stats loss under average proccing. If you get the Marrowgar heroic shield, the numbers come pretty close and you could say you can use either weapon.
But....


There are some serious drawbacks with Nibelung:
- in non-static fights we tend to cast less LB and thus get less LO; this means a relative drop in 'procable' casts. Once we do get a proc one however, it's dps that is independent of our movement
- ICC buff doesnt seem to increase the dmg of the valkyrs (!)
- most fights are getting considerably shorter then 5 min, making the RNG factor even higher
- on several fights the valkyrs still die prematurely. On Marrowgar, LadyD, Putri, Sindra, LK and potentially Rotface this may happen. On Blood council and Valithria the valkyrs will use a lot of time just flying around a bit uselessly (ok, dps doesnt matter here anyway but still).

This leaves only Saurfang, Festergut and Bloodqueen as bosses where you can expect this staff to live up to its full potential, with a big chance for extra low or extra high dps. Saurfang especially I would say since the use of CL on the bloodbeasts gives some more chances of getting LO and thus more chances on Valkyrs.


So I agree with Skajin and say that if you have LK mace/frozen bonespike hc and a decent shield, you are better off using this then the hc staff.
Until that time, it is a nice weapon. It is also remains fun to use it at selected bosses afterwards until you get the LK hc mace (right.....)

Thanks for contributions!

I am confused about something:

Team Robot WoW Simulator

I've tried out that site and it seems quite nice, but the trinkets it's showing are confusing.

It's giving ROTD 258 as absolute BiS, followed by both 277 ICC 25, and then ROTD 245 better than 264 ICC 25, which in turn are both better than both versions of Muradin's Spyglass.

Now, that doesn't relate at all with ZAP!'s spreadsheet, which is showing 277 trinkets as BiS. And that does feel right, although ROTD 258 is powerfull as well.

But what I find weird is the discrepancy between both testing (truth be said, Openoffice and ZAP! have had issues).

Still, which are the BiS trinkets after all?

I think one of the critical points that has been discussed is that the RoTD proc does not need to be capitolized upon. It does better in the real world because it does not penalize as greatly for mistakes in the same way raw stats, or stat procs tend to. It's possible that the discrepency is coming from this factor.

Or it could be that the site is using values pulled from other classes. It's been discussed here that Reign seems to be worth slightly less for us than for say, a shadow priest.

Since it wasn't clarified, I'm going to assume you were just using the item rankings. The rank order of items are off but if you simulate, the results are more accurate. In my current gear set, Heroic DFO > Heroic PotNL > Heroic RotD if I simulate, but if i just go by the rankings, it is Heroic RotD > Heroic DFO > Heroic PotNL.

So actually simulate every time you want to compare items and you should have a much more accurate read out.

Just as a note, if you're going to assume your guild is capable of taking down the Lich King, I think it's a safe bet to assume that you'll win the heroic Gunship encounter, so you can bump that ring up to 277.

For most of the BiS setups I've come up with, I've generally shied away from the T10 legs since crit is our weakest stat. If you need the hit rating, go for the Stained Pants off of Festergut, which has hit instead, otherwise go with the crafted pants. You'll need to make up the hit from the shoulders, but that's easily done with either the Valanar's ring or the necklace from Gunship (and again, you can assume the heroic version if you're assuming an LK kill).

As a note, are you running 10-player mode as well? The heroic versions of the Lich Wrappings from Dreamwalker and the Coldara Carver from Sindragosa figure pretty prominently in most of my BiS sets.

All,

With Ruby Sanctum on the PTR, we have seen some new loot (check MMO-champion) that will change our BiS list a bit

Although we don't have the 284 ilvl stats discovered yet, we can estimate them closely by looking at the 271 versions. From a first look, the 284 cloak, wrists and belt all surpass the 277 ICC versions with about 25-50 dps as can be expected. So if you can't find the drop in ICC, I guess running RS will help you out fast

I am especially interested in the trinket stats however: Charred Twilight Scale
Assuming the 284 version will have 180 haste, an ICD of 45 sec and a proc chance of 10%, it will be on-par with the 277 DFO and thus will become BiS instead of the 277 Phylactery. The 271 version with this ICD and proc chance is on-par with the 264 DFO

For the people on the PTR I have therefore the following questions:
- does it share cooldown with DFO?
- what is the ICD?
- what is the proc chance?
so we can theorycraft where this trinket will get us. Thanks!