Hamstring Reduces the Proc Rate of Nightfall in 2020

EDIT: Bluepost response has clarified that this is not a bug but that the previous statement was false, here’s the bluepost.

I’m leaving the original post below for future generations.


Aggrend has by now thankfully divulged many of the specific functions of Nightfall to the public, such as it’s proc rate of 11.6% chance-on-hit as well as it’s categorization as being not negatively affected by Hamstring’s GCD in the Reference Client. However, in Classic over 4,000 attacks have been recorded with Nightfall while spamming the Hamstring ability almost every GCD and the results show an 8% chance-on-hit (which is consistent with the Hamstring 1.5s GCD blocking the 3.5 speed Nightfall’s auto-attacks from proccing).

This indicates that there is a bug involved, potentially involving the modern client misinterpreting Vanilla data that leads it to conflict with the Reference Client on the GCD interaction.

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Yeah, hamstrings GCD also impacts those proc weapons (it’s easy to test, put a coldrage dagger in the offhand and spam hamstring for 0 offhand procs).

I don’t think it was actually tested with hamstring specifically, and that explanation was just their best guess as to why it was happening. All GCDs block nightfall procs. (Honestly it would be strange if the game had 2 different categorizations of the “global” cooldown)

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We all know their client is severly flawed. This is just one of those things most of us tend to ignore during the day. From the way batching behaves, to TBC mechanics being in classic to now proc rate changes.

Classic is as reliable as some Pservers. Certainly a lot of quality behind it but not the real thing. Might as well have stuck with nost

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In many ways classic is closer to vanilla than any private server.

Those tended to assume that what was going on under the hood made sense when they very much did not.

Like this example.

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Im not disagreeing here. It is close but it is not vanilla. And you have to keep in mind that these private servers worked by gathering data from old videos and whatnot. They did not have an actual reference client like Blizzard does, nor the same budget to recreate their version of vanilla.

Im just saying, if its not the real thing, regardless of how close it is, its just another version of vanilla, like any pserver out there.

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In before locked and told its not a bug.

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Ahhh, this affects warriors. Definitely not a bug and needs to be fixed then.

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You could still just hamstring between weapon swings without having the GCD up during the white swing using a swing timer, similar to what hunters do with their shots.

While that is true, it goes against the way Aggrend described the Reference Client’s behavior and should be fixed.

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I am having the same issue with wingclip. If I wingclip 1.4seconds or less before I melee with nightfall I get no nightfall proc on the melee hit.

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That’s very good info, how much data do you have so far on it?

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Thanks everyone for the additional reports and commentary about this over the past few days. I don’t want to go too into the weeds about this, but in an effort to be transparent and accurate, I did want to call out an error that we made in our previous post about this:

This statement is, simply put, incorrect. This ended up being a bit of a red herring during our investigation that at the time we believed explained some inconsistencies in our test results. After further review however, we discovered this was not correct and felt it was important to let all of you know that we had this wrong.

The “good” news is, the actual results from the comparison between original WoW and Classic was the same, and that the actual answer for why these items are bound by the GCD was far more mundane; some proc effects simply have a data flag set to obey GCDs, and the items listed in the original thread about this all have that data flag set in the 1.12 data. We still don’t consider this to be a bug as the fact that this was set in the original data even more strongly suggests that these effects were intended to behave this way from the start.

Again, sincere apologies for the bad info. While we feel its important that some sense of mystery remains in the game for players to discover and decipher, we at least want to ensure that whatever information we do share to be correct and not contribute further to the misinformation that is common in discussions around game mechanics. We are still human and are not immune from making mistakes of our own, unfortunately.

Thanks for calling this (and us) out though, we really appreciate the dedication you all continue to show!

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Oh cool, thanks for clearing that bit up for us.

amazing
actual humility!
gives me a bit of hope that blizzard will be a better company in the future

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imagine using nightfall

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How do we know which procs obey GCDs and which do not??

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So with this confirmation about the GCD proc
The best weapon for horde to use on Viscidius would be Glacial Blade

and for Alliance it would be Darrowspike and Sliverblade

because all 3 of those do not proc the GCD.

of course this assumes that Iceblade Hacker/Cobalt Crusher do not work.

Best weapon to freeze viscidous is still the hammer of the northern wind + frost oil.

We just now know that you shouldn’t use any abilities when attacking now.

yes but Glacial Blade, Darrowspike, and Sliverblade all do not have the GCD issue so especially if it can proc off sinister strke for rogues pretty sure those will have higher proc rates.

We still don’t consider this to be a bug as the fact that this was set in the original data even more strongly suggests that these effects were intended to behave this way from the start.

How do you decide if something was intended or not? Do you just ask, “Will changing this affect the meta drastically enough to cause playstyle change from the last tier of content?” Then you go with the option that changes the meta as little as possible from the last tier of content?

It just seems to me when y’all decide what to #change, it seems to always be the path of least resistance in regards to the current meta instead of what was actually in the reference client. Baron Rivendare sword and Ectoplasmic Distiller caused enough of a meta shift in PvP and raiding to warrant a change, even if it was working as intended in regards to the reference client.

I guess what I’m getting at, is if comparing Classic to the reference client isn’t the end-all-be-all decision maker in testing interactions, and in fact you’re willing to change things that could negatively affect the meta, why not change other things that could positively affect the meta? Currently in raiding content, the best choice is to always just bring as many warriors as possible. If you could make a change to Nightfall procs that maybe boosted caster dps by ~2% and helped promote raid diversity by it falling more in line with other melee boosting items like Annihilator, why not make the change?

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