Unholy Weapon

The only real reason to ever get this enchant is looks. For real, practical purposes, there is always something better.

My mining pick absolutely loves this enchant ;D

I have just finished some testing of this enchant moments ago, with two seperate weapons and attack speeds. I made some interesting discoveries.

First off, my conclusions are that this "can" be an effective enchant for a 19-29 bracket PvP player and against PVE mobs its very reliable. For high lvl players where saving 15 melee damage points is nearly useless, this curse is not good.

I was curious about many of the claims both good and bad about this so i got 2 weapons and enchanted both (needed the skill up anyway). First weapon was Boulderfist Claymore of the whale, it's 2H and plenty slow at 3.5 sec. The second Weapon was Ancestral Hammer of intellect, its a MH low damage but plenty fast at 1.7 sec.

Here is the data i got from killing a whole bunch of "Gordok Ogres" (maulers and shamans from lvl 52-54) as a lvl 67 holy pally with every speed and damage buff or talent turned off (gear is low 60's greens and blues mixed, nothing good, and would not effect proc rate regardless):

1) With the two handed 3.5 sword each fight took between 6-11 hits and lasted from 14 to 30 seconds. average was more like 26 sec's with the really short fights being a string of crits. here are the times from my sample string of 10- (duration of fight in seconds) 17s, 14s, 25s, 30s, 25s, 30s, 23s, 28s, 24s, 15s.

2) after skilling up my 2H sword skill to my current lvl 335 all results became much more uniform. I killed about 15-20 Ogre's before taking data from strings of 10 kills. my proc rates on my string of 10 are as follows- (# of procs per individual fight) 2, 1, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1.

2H slow weapon observation: 3min 51sec of fighting yields 16 procs. Even with fights only lasting 30seconds or less and avg of 9 hits in a fight, this curse never failed to proc. even outside my string of test kills, the proc was reliable and regular. since the curse is 12 seconds nearly half of every fight was under a curse and often the entire fight.

Next is the faster mace. at this point i had become better at counting both the seconds and the procs in each fight so i was able to get both data points off one final string of 10 kills:

1) With the one handed 1.7 sec mace, each fight lasted substantially longer (low dps), the shortest at 34 seconds and the longest at 50 seconds, with the avg being more like 40 seconds. Exact times were - 37s, 38s, 36s, 34s, 35s, 41s, 45s, 43s, 37s, 50s.

2)Proc rates on this same string of 10 were - 2, 3, 1, 4, 2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1.

Observations for MH 1.7 mace: 6min 36sec of fight time yields 15 procs. This establishes clearly that this enchant is not a "proc per minute" enchant. The phrase "will often inflict a curse" is likely a chance on hit % formula scaled to weapon speed. As you can see, the fights with a much faster weapon (and way more hits per fight) and nearly double the fight time, yeilded less uniform and less frequent proc results. even giving TWO zeros in a string of 10 fights.

Also, as a side observation i was checking my battle log to see what the avg drop in melee damage would be against me. I had heard that this may scale as a % of damage with higher level.... this does not appear true. i could barely discern a drop in damage at all and the 15 points was more likely.

Final conclusions: I think this enchant is overlooked and missunderstood. i believe it would be a very reliable and cheap enchant for a lvl 19 and possibly a lvl 29 PvP'er. my battle logs in Warsong Gulch show very often that im being hit melee for 30's and 40's worth of point damage, this is wearing leathers. As shown above, a slow 2H twink sword would likely have this curse up on your attacker for over 1/2 of any fight and in the 29 bracket that is cutting over a third of melee damage, at lvl 19 it would be even greater. Also the data shows that high lvl playeres should avoid this enchant because it has a relative tiny effect at the high damage lvls. I would also suggest rogues and any caster class steer clear of this one because it has no use at distance.

While i am very confident of this data, it is still a statistically small sample so there is some room for just plain bad luck and you could get a short string of lower results. But, I think overall, this is solid.

I think more 19's should consider this enchant since the mats can be had for fairly cheap and most enchanters will have gotten this recipe as a skill up enchant so its easy to find one to do it for you.

Hope this test info was helpful :)

Update: Although there is an awesome buff in the recent patch to add damage to this enchant, the answer is "Yes" i only used white damage for the above tests. All abilities that may produce an extra attack or holy damage were turned off. And as for the PPM designation, i still feel it is not this type of mechanics, although your reasoning below makes some sense.