Legendary Mechanics

Since it was announced that the first legendary of Cataclysm would be a caster weapon people have been asking questions and speculating about it and wondering what the proc would be. When the tool tip became available during 4.2 questions we finally got to see the proc. "Equip: When you deal damage, you have a chance to gain the Wrath of Tarecgosa, duplicating the harmful spell." While this answered one question, it created a thousand others for obvious reasons. Now that we are a month and a half into patch 4.2 the Legendary Staves are starting to come out and we are starting to get some answers. Siiz of Premonition was the first to get one on August 10th, and luckily for us a moonkin Happyjojj was able to get one a day later and has been posting some of the results from his testing of the proc on the European forums. You can find Happyjojj's thread here and Siiz's post is here. Also, I want to say congratulations to Happyjojj and Siiz on completing the legendary and thank you for doing the testing and posting the results.

The Highlights:

• The Basics - As the tooltip says, when you deal damage, the Wrath of Tarecgosa (WoT) proc has a chance to duplicate the harmful spell, but this means different things for Direct Damage spells and DoTs. According to Siiz, when WoT procs on a DD spell the duplicate acts like a completely independent spell and with its own damage calculation. It's possible for casted spell to proc but the duplicate to not and vice versa. DoTs on the other hand do not behave the same way. When WoT procs on a DoT tick it does not refresh the spell. It only duplicates the DoT tick and has the same damage as the original tick.



• The Proc Chance - Happyjojj didn't address this directly but I did look up the log he did while testing on World of Logs. You can see the results in this CompareBot report.
  
  According to Siiz, duplicated DoT's are listed as Wrath of Tarecgosa rather then the spell that caused the proc. In an effort to calculate the moonkin proc rate I divided Happyjojj's Wrath of Tarecgosa hits by their total number of DoT tick. According to that math the proc rate is around 11.2% (38/340=0.11176) give or take a couple percent. It's important to note that this is a fairly small sample and the actual proc rate is probably a percent or two above or below this number. So, please don't go quoting the 11.2% number I quoted as a fact. We need to get more data to say what the proc rate is more definitively.



• Duplicate Nuke Energy - When Wrath of Tarecgosa procs off of moonkin nukes the WoT procs will generate lunar or solar energy. For example, if you proc when casting a Starfire that generates 20 energy, the WoT proc will generate at least 20 energy also. It is unclear if the WoT proc can benefit from Euphoria, but Happyjojj has confirmed that the original and duplicate cost do not necessarily generate the same amount of energy.
  
  My Thought: This is huge! Getting duplicate casts is significant enough as it is, but generating energy with the duplicate casts makes this proc even more amazing. It basically makes the proc behave like a haste buff without the mana consumption. Moonkin that are able to get the staff will transition between Eclipses even quicker. This will allow for more Eclipse buffed DoTs and greater Nature's Grace uptime. I'm jealous.



• Moonfire and Lunar Shower - When WoT procs on the Direct Damage portion of Moonfire, the duplicate Moonfire will not stack Lunar Shower or generate energy.
  
  My Thought: I know a lot of moonkin don't use Lunar Shower regularly anymore, but I'm happy that it works this way. Having the duplicates stack LS in movement heavy situations would be helpful, but I think that is the exception rather then the rule. Most movement is usually done in fairly short bursts and probably insignificant when compared to the possibility of having MF generating energy when you don't want it to due to WoT procs.



• Wild Mushroom - Each mushroom that is placed is treated as an individual spell, but if a mush room is duplicated it is duplicated for all the targets hit by that mushroom. For example, if three mushrooms are placed and each mushroom can hit three targets, normally you would see a total of nine hits. If one of those mushrooms procs WoT then you would see a total of 12 hits.
  
  My Thought: I'm not surprised by this. I'm sure some people would rather that it duplicated all of the Mushrooms placed, but it probably doesn't matter mathematically. Yes the damage of an individual mushroom will be less then if all three were duplicated, but you are probably three times as likely to get a proc with each of the mushrooms treated as individual spells.



• Starsurge and Shooting Stars - Duplicate Starsurge casts will consume a Shooting Stars proc that occurs while you are casting Starsurge, but will not put Starsurge on cooldown. To put it another way, in rare occasions your Starsurge casts with Shooting stars will not be instant casts.
  
  My Thought: This is the one negative I saw from Happyjojj's testing. It sucks but it should be rare enough that it isn't significant.



• Hurricane - Damage from Hurricane behaves like a DoT when it comes to Wrath of Tarecgosa, and when it procs for a Hurricane tick it duplicates the damage for all targets hit by the tick.
  
  My Thought: Hurricane isn't used that often by moonkin anymore and probably isn't mathematically significant either way, but this is nice to know.

Thanks Again:

Once again, I just wanted to say a quick thanks to Happyjojj and Siiz for doing the testing and posting their results on the forums and in World of Logs.