I once stroked a cue stick down onto tile/cement floor (to test/break in a tip) and managed to explode the ferrule. The sphere I was shooting against weighs more than a ton. I think the ferrule was bad because I wasn't hitting all that hard.
As long as you shoot not too hard at the steel ball -- like a lag shot -- you should be OK. Unless I slipped a minus sign, shooting against an infinitely heavy ball gives the same tip/ferrule stresses as a shot 4 times faster against a cue ball. Or, for a given stick speed, the steel ball will quadruple the forces the tip and ferrule see.