Blizzard has responded to concerns that the 
Nightfall proc in Classic WoW, which can apply a debuff increasing the spell damage taken by the target by 15%, was not working as intended. The proc is behaving as expected and they detailed advanced mechanics of the proc.
Blizzard
Greetings!We’ve spent a significant amount of time digging into the claims in this thread and at this time we can conclude that Nightfall is in fact behaving as expected.To respond to specific claims or theories in this thread, here’s a very quick outline of what we found:
- Nightfall can and does proc from glancing blows.
- Nightfall can and does proc from white hits or yellow hits.
- Nightfall is refreshed if the same player procs it twice within the 5-sec duration, but it is removed & re-applied if it is procced by a second player during the first player’s Nightfall effect.
- Nightfall can be applied from front & behind.
- If there are two players with Nightfall, it has approximately double the uptime as when only one is present. (A little less than, simply due to it being more frequent for player B to overwrite player A when both are attacking, than player A overwriting themselves when they are attacking alone.)
- The Nightfall proc effect is considered physical and cannot be resisted. No resists are even being attempted in the combat rolls.
- Over dozens of 5-minute “target dummy” tests against level 63 Boss mobs, we found that the effect had a roughly 8-13% total proc rate, which is well within expectations for a 3.5 speed weapon with a PPM of 2 (~11.6% raw proc-per-hit).
- Even in our higher percentage data sets (where we observed proc rates of 13% or more over 5 minutes) we at times went as much as a full minute between procs.
It’s important to understand there is no “bad luck protection” or other normalization for procs in Original WoW or WoW Classic. Its quite possible (and common) to go extended periods of time with no procs, or to have multiple back-to-back procs. You are especially susceptible to not seeing consistent procs when bosses die very quickly, or if there is a lot of movement or other mechanics that prevent constant uptime on bosses (The Chromaggus run-in, run-out “dance” is a good example of this).I’m going to go ahead and close this thread now as well, since we’ve determined that this item is working as expected. We very much appreciate the observations and analysis that everyone has provided for this.Thank you!
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