Re: Issue with Darth Nihilus protection in the Sithraid

Yes, you are right but you miss something important.
With his "Lord of Hunger" He regains 3% Protection per Buff on his enemy's AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS TURN only. When a debuffed enemy hits Nihilus, the debuffed enemy looses 25% protection and Nihilus gains 25% max protection. But here is the clue - the Nightsisters loose their protection pretty quickly in P4 (in P1 probably not at all^^) and therefore Nihilus shouldn't regain protection at all.
That is the problem most Players are seeing.

No enemies retain protection for long in phase 4, but we still see the "Protection Drain" message appear when protection-less characters damage Nihilus. Based on this message, it appears that Nihilus is still increasing his protection by 25% of the attacking character's protection even after the character's protection bar is empty. If he didn't do this, these protection gains would be meaningless. The skill doesn't say "If any protection was lost this way, Nihilus gains Protection equal to the lost protection." The "Feed the Void" skill very carefully words the protection regeneration to indicate that he only regains protection if minions were damaged. Perhaps Lord of Hunger could be worded a little more clearly?

Using some pretty sketchy estimates, I did a calculation that estimated by the time of enrage Nihilus' max protection could be over 2.5M, which would have him regenerate ~300k protection at the start of his turn. If he only gained protection when debuffed enemies attacked him with protection, then he would probably only regenerate ~6-7k per turn, which is meaningless in a heroic raid. If his max protection is 2.5M, and he manages to feed the void with two minions alive, then he'll regain 500k protection - so definitely avoid that.

Of course but that was never the question^^ In my runs the minions are only alive to apply plague to DN/Sion and after that they die of pretty quickly and therefore can't feed DN anymore protection, too.
Feed the Void protection gain applies only with alive minions and not revived minions.
In the German translation it says indeed that DN gains the protection equal to the 25% lost one.
If he still gains protection, even when the toons doesn't have any, it would be pretty strange in terms of skill description. But this is one of the reasons I hope a dev will respond here 😉
btw thanks for responding 😉

Absolutely! This is the sort of investigation that I like!

I'm weirdly excited about recording Nightsister runs this week and manually parsing all the numbers - calculating Nihilus' max protection and actual protection value on a hit-by-hit basis, and seeing how high those go.