Nightfall and TBC raiding

Primalr · 06/12/07, 10:48 AM

So, my question is: does Nightfall still work on bosses in TBC?

Was thinking of getting my guild to make it for the offtanks when they are not tanking, but would like to know first if it still works in the same way for TBC bosses. Or if it procs extremely low on them, or if it gets resisted alot by them.

As of the viability of it:

X = tank dpsloss due to wielding nightfall
Y = average caster dps
Z = number of casters
V = Uptime converted to flat %

if X < (Y*Z*V) then Nightfall = good
which pretty much means that just a few casters is enough for it to be good if it still works like it used to

Noximus · 06/12/07, 10:58 AM

It's obvious that it still works but now it's more of a problem as if it's worth losing a dps slot for a 5 sec debuff. (Not much happens in 5 secs in TBC)

As a raid leader and a warlock, I would not really want a Nightfall in my raid. Even though my raid's are mostly magic oriented with the regular melee group. The warrior that would be weilding this would have such shitty dps that it would not warrant the 5 secs. Obviously, in thoery, it might become to be beneficial but not as beneficial in the long term as it used to be.

Maybe a Nightfall 2.0 with 100 dps and a decent top-end would be worth it.

Anias · 06/12/07, 11:36 AM

Nightfall, or better yet the quested blue with a similiar proc, is probably a decent weapon for your holy pallies and prot warriors to have in the bag.

It's not worth losing a DPS warrior to keep it up, but losing ye olde OT's DPS once his mob is dead? Not a big loss.

sp00n · 06/12/07, 11:38 AM

It depends on who has the nightfall I suppose.
If by offtank you mean a protection warrior, the DPS loss due to the weapon wouldn't be huge I suppose.
If it's a fury/arms warrior (and I think Noximus is referring to this), I don't think Nightfall would be worth it.

vorda · 06/12/07, 11:45 AM

or better yet the quested blue with a similiar proc

That proc never worked and they removed the 'chance on hit' text a few patches ago.

Caligula · 06/12/07, 11:56 AM

I don't agree with "Not much happens in 5 seconds in TBC".

As a shadow priest every DoT I have will tic ~2 times. Mind flay can tick up to 5 times. Substitute that with a Mind blast/MF x3 tics or MB/SW

. That's a lot of things happening in 5 seconds just for myself alone.

With an affliction warlock heavy raid there is a potential for 20-24 dots to be ticking ~2 times each.

Mages and locks will both get off 1-2 direct damage casts in that time period as well. Maybe arcane shots, possibly moomookin/elem shammy spells if you run with those classes.

There is seriously a potential for 50 or more sources of magical damage to be dealt in a 5 second period depending on how caster heavy your raid is.

I'd be willing to bet some serious money on the benefits of giving it to a prot warrior outweighing their own DW devastate damage.

Whether it's worth giving to a DPS specced class for raid-wide benefit vs them doing their own dps is more debatable.

Kazanir · 06/12/07, 12:54 PM

Let's assume an auto-attacking paladin without windfury. He hits once every 3.5s and has a miss chance of 13.8% (8.6 miss 5.6 dodge) against a level 73 bossmob. That means his total number of hits per minute is 60 / 3.5 * (1 - .138) = 14.777. Multiply that by a proc chance of 15% (correct this if someone has better data) and we get 2.2 procs per minute.

Now let's determine the average proc uptime. Normally it's 5s, but what if it just procced 3.5s earlier? That would be a (1 - 3.5/5) = 30% reduction in uptime. This occurs 15% of the time, meaning that the average uptime is 5s * (1 - (.3*.15)) = 4.775s average uptime for the proc.

Now multiply the two and we get 10.505 seconds per minute debuff uptime. That means that it's up 17.508% of the time. So the total average debuffage over a Statistically Long Time (tm) is .15*.17508 = 2.626%. That's the OP's V variable.

So let's assume that our theoretical wielder is losing (being a prot warrior or paladin) 200 DPS from going from Gorehowl to Nightfall. I think this is exaggerating but whatever. That means that the total caster DPS in the raid would need to be 200 / .02626 = 7615 DPS in order to equal out the lost 200 DPS (which is a made-up number).

So, even assuming a minimal number of hits and a large amount of DPS lost (for an OT or holy paladin who is just autoattacking between heals) we see that it's a DPS threshold that is easily met with 8 casters, which is not all that unusual to bring to raids these days.

Now someone fix my math. =P

Edit: What the heck is with the posts that contain no math or other evidence, and just people saying, "I think ABCXYZ," lately? I don't mean to flame; there are just better ways to go about this than anecdotes or conjecture.

drats · 06/12/07, 1:14 PM

I've only tried Nightfall on several TBC bosses, because I doubt the proc is worth the loss of my DPS/ UR uptime. It does not seem to work on Gruul or Maulgar, but does seem to work on all the other enemies in Gruul's lair. I'll carry it around for more testing this week.

From pre-TBC I can tell you that you really need 2 or more people with the Nightfall to get the most out of it. We had 2 enh shaman using it and from what I recall the proc was up close to 50% of the time. (Windfury and Stormstrike cause it to proc.)

Digo · 06/12/07, 1:16 PM

Our resident ret paladin, Teleyn still pulls this bad boy out from time to time. Mostly on aggro sensitive fights where he can't just go balls to the wall with Stormherald.

galzohar · 06/12/07, 1:59 PM

Get % uptime of the debuff (or % chance to proc per second on average which allows calculating the % uptime, I can take misses into account if you can't do that), total caster DPS in the raid, total DPS lost by a full DPS warrior using this instead of your average T2 blacksmithing weapon, and you'll easily get if this is worth using or not. And while you can also calculate the benefit of having a prot warrior using this when he's dpsing for whatever the odd reason would be (tanked an add on mag, wasn't replaced for grul or any other fight that didn't need him to tank etc), I doubt the results would be against nightfall, unless if they gave it some kind of a "less effective above lvl60" kind of nerf like they did with just about anything that was good in the old world.

Primalr · 06/12/07, 9:22 PM

Originally Posted by drats

I've only tried Nightfall on several TBC bosses, because I doubt the proc is worth the loss of my DPS/ UR uptime. It does not seem to work on Gruul or Maulgar, but does seem to work on all the other enemies in Gruul's lair. I'll carry it around for more testing this week.

From pre-TBC I can tell you that you really need 2 or more people with the Nightfall to get the most out of it. We had 2 enh shaman using it and from what I recall the proc was up close to 50% of the time. (Windfury and Stormstrike cause it to proc.)

Well if it doesn't work on the bosses, it's kind of useless imo, since trash is not where I'm trying to improve the raid dps.

A prot warrior spamming hamstring (if it procs it: which some unverified source told me) would be extremely likely to give the highest uptime versus dps lost.

Examples of fights where this is interesting to have on a tank not currently tanking:
Magtheridon after the summoners are dead.
Tidewalker between the streams of murlocs.
Hydross for the Naturetank when it's frostphase (and vice versa).
Karathress when each tank's adds are dead.

But I guess this discussion is pointless if it doesn't work on bosses.

Edit:
Thottbot lists Infinity Blade as using the same type (same type, not the exact same one) of debuff as Nightfall. Hence I guess atleast illidan isn't immune to Nightfall? =)

Boramere · 06/13/07, 2:07 AM

Originally Posted by Anias

Nightfall, or better yet the quested blue with a similiar proc, is probably a decent weapon for your holy pallies and prot warriors to have in the bag.

Do you happen to have a link to the quest/weapon? First I've heard of it.

vorda · 06/13/07, 2:15 AM

Originally Posted by Boramere

Do you happen to have a link to the quest/weapon? First I've heard of it.

Originally Posted by vorda

That proc never worked and they removed the 'chance on hit' text a few patches ago.

That being said, it was this one: http://www.thottbot.com/i31010

edit: the blue post concerning it: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...75471770&sid=1

drats · 06/13/07, 4:02 AM

Took nightfall back to Gruul's lair tonight, and it does seem to proc on Gruul. I guess before when I tried it I was horribly unlucky. It still took almost a full shatter rotation to see one proc, so I doubt it would be worth the loss in DPS to use it for an entire battle. My mods were acting a little screwy tonight though (stupid x-perl), I'll go back with procwatch next week and see if I can nail down how many ppm I'm getting.

As a side note, I'm geared up for DW right now so I have a lot of hit on my gear. I could conceivably replace my hit gear/gems with pure AP/crit gear since Shaman hit the 2h hit cap through talents. With high crit rate/AP/passive haste you may be able to justify using this despite it's abysmal dps.

Blooodshot · 06/13/07, 4:58 AM

It works on everything and is probably worth it in the hands of a protection warrior that has been relieved from tanking (ie Magtheridon, possibly Vashj stage 3, Shade of Akama, etc)