The obligatory gloat post (and second thoughts)

It was to be my last jaded foray into the cavernous maw of heroic slave pens.

After months of fruitless adventuring, I had resolved to make one last concerted lunge for quagmirran's eye. If, when, it failed to drop, I would give up and spend some badges on an icon of the silver crescent. You will no doubt recognise this latter trinket as the better option anyway, which is true. But I'm saving my badges for the dagger and this would have put me back weeks.

So we rolled up to the bog lord, whipped his grassy arse, and guess what sprung up on my screen? Yes indeedy, his bulging, bloody eye! Hooraah for me! Even better, there wasn't even a mage or lock in the group to roll against me. That trinket was mine!

The first thing I did was swap out that offensively green ancient crystal talisman and skip off to grind and test the proc.

As the tooltip says, the trinket provides 37 spell damage, a nice boost of 11 from the talisman. It also has a chance of increasing spell haste by 320 for 6 seconds.

I observed it triggering once or twice a minute, which fits nicely with the 10% proc rate listed on wowwiki. And while I have absolutely no idea how spell haste works in theory, in practice it chopped .3 of a second off a 1.5-second mind blast - according to Quartz. A back-of-a-fag-packet calculation using wowwiki's equations showed the cast time to be more like 1.25, so I'm assuming Quartz rounds off to one decimal place.

Spell haste is a completely new concept to me, but it appears to provide a percentage benefit based on the original cast time — so a 3-second mind flay benefits more from the trinket proc than a 1.5-second mind blast (by approximately .5 of second if my calculation is correct). As of patch 2.4, spell haste also affects the global cooldown, but I'm not sure by how much.

So the theory is this: the proc from quagmirran's eye reduces cast time and time between casts, enabling you to cast more spells in the same time than you would without the benefit of the haste boost. But while I ran around Nagrand skinning clefthoofs for the daily, I began to wonder if my lowly talisman, a mere quest reward from hellfire peninsula, might in fact be the better trinket. Oh god, had I really wasted months of my life grinding the same, gloomy instance for no reason?

Even with the combined might of wowwiki and my maths GCSE, I'm not at all certain. Shadowpriest.com says the eye is a decent investment for my level of progression and rates it above the eye (thank you Aaron M). But it's going to take some getting used to. I don't know whether to watch for the proc and adjust my spell rotations to take advantage of it, or just ignore it and let the haste do its work without a thought. If you have any experience of haste, please enlighten me.

At least I don't have to step foot in slave pens again, although now I see how close I am to exalted I'm tempted to keep grinding away. 6000 rep equals what, another three runs? Maybe just for the dailies...