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Detailed Weapon Stats
Skeletal Club
3.7% OR 4.3% Chance-on-hit to cast a free Shadowy Bolt
3% OR 5% Crit Chance for the Shadowy Bolt
1.5x Crit Damage Multiplier for the Shadowy Bolt
+0.5 Damage-Per-Second on average from Shadowy Bolts
In-Depth Explanation
The Skeletal Club is a Mace that can only be equipped in the Main Hand. Its unique chance-on-hit ability will occasionally cause you to shoot a Shadowy Bolt at your current target that deals 30 Shadow damage.
I spent a long time hitting things 783 times with this weapon and it fired off 30 Shadowy Bolts altogether. From that testing alone, we can see it has a 3.8% chance-on-hit to fire. However, I did not test it as much as I could have and a couple thousand more strikes might produce slightly different results. Considering how common it was in Classic that chance-on-hit abilities were tied to both the speed of the weapon and how often it should trigger on average within a minute, we can probably assume a 4.3% chance-on-hit. 4.3% would equal an average of one Shadowy Bolt every minute for this weapon, which has an attack speed of 2.6 seconds.
Also, it crit once, which equals a 3% crit chance but I wouldn't take that number seriously due to the low sample size of crits. Rather, most item-and-gear-based chance-on-hit abilities in Vanilla had a fixed 5% crit chance, so I'm going to assume 5%. It also dealt 45 damage which means it has a 1.5 crit damage multiplier.
Assuming, therefore, a 4.3% chance-on-hit and a 5% crit chance, the Skeletal Club proc will add an average 0.5 additional damage-per-second to this weapon. However, it is still up to random chance and deals damage in bursts, which is helpful in PvP and bad for threat management in PvE.
The Skeletal Club is very rare and may drop off of certain mobs between levels 20 and 26, but because it isn't Soulbound until someone equips it, you can often find this being sold on the Auction House.
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There are more questions about this weapon out there, chiefly among them being "does it scale with the +spelldamage stat?", but I am currently broke so I can't answer that question at this time. When that question gets answered, or any other discoveries are made, I will annotate this article.
What's Next?
These are the weapons I have in my possession which I will be testing next: the Wyvern Tailspike, the Supercharger Battle Axe, the Meteor Shard, and the Black Duskwood Staff.
I run tests using the addon known as Recount, which (as far as I'm aware) is the only addon so far that will track different sources of damage from an individual. I went around and meleed a ton of mobs to death while running Recount and set it to "never reset data" so that it would save my information even after restarting the game. Let me know if you find any other addons that fulfill this function and I'll add them to the list.
I don't think I'll ever be able to test every unique item personally, as most of the 300+ items with unique abilities are still untested to this day, and some weapons require certain professions or weapon skills or are faction specific or require months of farming for. If you want to help out, you can use Recount to record your everyday monster slaying with just about any chance-on-hit piece of gear and send me the screenshots. When I collect enough reliable data, I'll be confident enough to put out a new article regarding the item.
Thanks for reading, and remember, go crazy!
About the Author
I make videos about the lesser-known ways you can play the 9 classes of Classic World of Warcraft. I'm also a big fan of level 19 twinking. If you would like a video made about something, feel free to let me know!
