DF Nightfall

The current placement of nightfall in the DF trees makes it a gatekeeper for shadows embrace which is a fairly attractive single target talent. The problem is that nightfall works poorly with drain soul and tormented crescendo (i guess we’re changing names now).

To get any value from nightfall with drain soul, you have to cast the full drain since contrary to the tooltip, it only adds tics rather than increasing damage. Even if it did just increase the damage of the tics, you would still only get partial benefit if your have to break early.

When crescendo procs, you generally want to cast it immediately in case you get (un)lucky back to back procs and you end up wasting one which would cause problems if it procs during a nightfall proc’d drain soul. To avoid this anti-synergy, I think either TC would need to stack higher than you could proc it in a single cast, or when you cast drain soul with a nighfall proc it does X damage instantly with the 30% TC proc chance. Alternatively, nightfall and shadow’s embrace could switch places so nightfall could be avoided. This would be fine for pve, but I could see pvpers being uninterested in shadows embrace.

Anyone else have thoughts?

Nightfall is an example of a common theme we’ve seen recently for warlock design - abilities that are considered iconic, but no longer fit with the rest of the toolkit, or are brought back in a drastically different form that’s far less appealing(Soul Swap, Soulburn, etc).

For Nightfall specifically, I think it’s fair to question whether it really makes sense anymore now that Shadowbolt is no longer the nuke it was back in vanilla/TBC/WotLK