Retro weapons - Nightfall
 

Thottbot World of Warcraft: Nightfall
[Nightfall]
Chance on hit: Spell damage taken by target increased by 15% for 5 sec.

I'm not sure, but this still seems to be incredibly powerful.
Our maintank was wondering do any guilds still use this weapon on their offtanks as their personal dps is poor anyway?

Offtank dps is pretty poor to begin with, and if they were to spam hamstring to apply this debuff, the magic damage would be a huge benefit to the raid.
We're currently considering making 2 of these.

I think the problem with that weapon is that it's procrate scales, such as items like HoJ, much like the ratings change prior to TBC. There is a blue quest reward from SMV that does the exact same - or actually I think it was taken out? anyway, when it existed it had a very low procrate too. Very anecdotal I know, but I'm quite sure the information is correct.

All our tanks have it, so they use when they don`t have to tank. It`s pretty nice.

First I'd like to point out that this will kill the dps of whoever uses it. That said, we're talking about the OT (prot warrior?) so that point isn't quite as valid.

Using an uptime of 17-20% (I'm afraid to use an unverified number off wowhead, but I'm not going to do any testing), this gives an average spell damage increase of 2.55 to 3%. Now lets assume a group setup of: MT, OT, 8 healers, 15 dps. Suppose 8 physical dps, 7 magical dps.

2.75% damage increase (taking the middle of the range) * 7 people means 19.25% of a players damage being done (slightly better if we consider more mana returned). Now consider the lost damage due to a painfully low dps weapon, and the lost dps for using a suboptimal dps cycle (I don't know prot, but I assume shield slam or DW devastate are going to be the dps cycle, neither uses a 2H).

I don't see it being a significant enough improvement. The big pre-BC selling point was larger raids, meaning more people to get the buff.

Well I think it would be nice for raids that have 2 prot warriors going through trash to reach the boss and instead of letting them make meaningless damage on Gorefiend as example or telling them "thank you for your help on the trash but were going to replace you for something useful on this boss" give him that weapon and let him do some support sounds nice.

This got me thinking, however, what about
[Rivenspike]
For a prot warrior trying to dps, it's actually the right speed and it's 1H. Since the proc stacks to 3 and has a good procrate, you can do your normal attack cycle, so not lose nearly as much dps. Using values posted in This boss armor thread, Dayve points out that for a standard boss with sunder, recklessness, and faerie fire, armor penetration gives a % damage increase :
Extrapolating this to the 600 armor this weapon gives, you get 4.8%/4.4%. This is almost double nightfall's benefit. In addition, the applier has better dps, and his other weapon is probably much better dps. In addition, this boosts the tank's threat, which is always good.

Edit: I forgot about [Annihilator]
I seem to remember this weapon's proc was different from rivenspike's, and as a result stacked (havn't verified). If that's true, than this combo can be very powerful: -1200 armor.

I feel like I must be missing something, since nobody uses these. Anihilator, MH, way fast, perhaps I can see the argument. Rivenspike however, as a 2.9 speed 1H isn't quite as painful to use.

Educated Guess:
1. 38 / 41 dps isn't like ... wow... [Rising Tide]
2. The stacking debuff could be a self-buff like the one from [The Night Blade] and only benefitting yourself.


Disclaimer: I never had one of those weapons myself, nor did i ever play a Warrior.

1. My argument of Rivenspike not being *that* bad is that you could DW it with a 90+ dps weapon, whereas with nightfall you're stuck holding a 2H with 65 dps. This point goes away if you use both axes i listed, but then you're massively debuffing the target. Also I forgot to mention [Bashguuder], exact same effect as rivenspike (won't stack), but is OH if that makes your dps feel better.

2. I'm relatively certain it's a debuff, but someone would have to test.

The DPS spreadsheet now has prot support, so I did some quick inputting of my dps gear and my talents. My Al'ar fist weapons are about 1000 dps - this does assume windfury - and Nightfall is about 450 dps. It's highly unlikely to be worth the trade off in a 25-man if you've got decent prot dps gear.

As for rivenspike & annihilator, I anecdotally recall they rarely actually stacked up their debuffs even at 60. Can't imagine them being worth the effort now if the proc rate has gone down with level.

good to know, I figured there had to be a flaw with them somewhere.

With the addition of devastate in the 2.0 patch, protection warriors can do meaningful damage on raid bosses. At a BT/MH level, your tanks probably have random T4/T5 level gear that was saved from shards. This should allow them to do 1.2+k dps in a fight like gorefiend. I personally believe it is good for the tanks to be forced to dps in situations like this because it is a reminder of the versatility of their class which is often lost in raiding.

That said, I'd like to see the math / WWS reports with this weapon.

If the weapon difference ends up that big, then it might be questionable to use it.
I would love to see some more research on the effect though, especially the proc chance and uptime of the debuff.

Lets say we have a theoretical raid with 15 dps, 7 healers, 2 prot tanks, 1 bear druid.

2 rogues, 1 enhancement shaman, 1 fury warrior, 1 MS warrior. The enhancement shaman will see a slight increase in dps.
10 others, among which perhaps 2 hunters.
Then there should be about 3 mages, 3 locks, 2 shadow priests, each doing a rough estimate of 1750 DPS or 14000 total.
On a 100% uptime that would be 0.15*14000 = 2100 DPS (not including the healers or enhancement shaman).

So at a very rough guesstimate, for the proc to be worth it, it'd need to have around or above 25% uptime.
That is, if the warrior is in dps gear.

On some fights they might be in prot gear to offtank some targets, but when those are dead they might need to switch to dps mode. In which case switching to a different weapon could be very well worth it as their personal dps will be very low to start with.
Hydross for example requires 2 tanks to use resistance gear.

Is this post about retro weapons, or about Nightfall in particular? Asking because of all weapons I heard being useful even though they are long outgrown, The Ravager seems to be the most powerful. I have heard claims of major shifts on damage meters by using this weapon. Is this anywhere near plausible, you'd think?

I seem to remember reading in the enchance shaman topic that some people used it with decent results on AoE trash pulls. Besides that and maybe morogrim I dont see much use for it.

edit: I also vaguely remember that those -armor procs werent usable with sunder armor?
edit2: either that or they had a sunder armor agro component :)

If you have WWS parses that show decent damage increases from using these out of date weapons - sorry but the concept of using [The Gleaming Ravager] seems totally laughable to me - then post them - otherwise it's just anecdotal evidence which doesn't really help anyone very much.