Thoughts on Tanking and Blood going into Legion (LONG)

[supertigerlamp]

The idea that most of the changes to Blood seem less than positive aside for a moment, can anyone give a concise report about what it feels like to actually sit at the keyboard and play Blood in the most recent iteration of the Alpha? By which I mean: Are you able to effectively do what you're asked to do - successfully tank things? Or are you scrambling around just to keep yourself alive even on trash?

It's one thing to not like the mechanics and offer improvements -- kudos to the people who are taking time to do that. It's quite another if what they're asking you to do/recommending you to do just isn't working and effectively making the class/spec unplayable.

[Raiju]

Well we have buttons to hit now (some argue too much, f.ex the haste scaling issue) and dk's can tank even if they're far from the best at it.

It's very hard to answer how we will be tuned before tuning has actually happened in general past that.

[Deleted]

I'd be interested to hear what some of the higher level blood dk's thought of preach's vid on the legion tanks.

Personally one of the reasons I never mained a blood dk was the fact that you had to play blood tap / plague leech to be competitive, and i saw this as a much steeper learning curve than any of the other tanks.

The change to one type of rune and removal of rune regen talents is a plus for me personally but I see how a lot of people would miss the complexity

[Deleted]

You need to understand that all tanks got basically hit with a big power nerf across the board. Guardians are OP right now so it's less noticable on them but that is the way it is. Your actions will have less impact on your survival than ever before since the introduction of AM the harder the content becomes.

For 5 man content up to Mythic dungeons (can't speak abou Mythic+ with things like Necrotic though), Blood is doing very well power wise for the same reasons we always did: Self healing and absorbs are very good when the damage is relatively low. Leech, while crap on single targets and/or raids, also helps here. So does the unnerfed Tremble Before Me and, IMO, superflous Asphyxiate (I wish I could just trade this for something else).
So if you derive fun from being somewhat OP and good at surviving, you will have fun there.

On the other hand, a lot of things that I also considered being fun while playing like the plethora of CDs, being able to immune CCs or kite are weakened or non-existent so that's a detriment.

In fact, I pretty much stopped doing heroics on the DK because it is so similar to live in performance relative to other tanks (and that distinction is important; the loss of various abilities is noticable and makes it somewhat bland) that letting someone else tank on a non-DK and healing is more enjoyable because a lot depends on your performance there.
Healers are absolutely the winners of this tank/healing rebalancing, no doubt about it. Which is quite a shame.

[Deleted]

I'd be interested to hear what some of the higher level blood dk's thought of preach's vid on the legion tanks.

Personally one of the reasons I never mained a blood dk was the fact that you had to play blood tap / plague leech to be competitive, and i saw this as a much steeper learning curve than any of the other tanks.

The change to one type of rune and removal of rune regen talents is a plus for me personally but I see how a lot of people would miss the complexity

Well while I wouldn't say Preach is a terrible player. He picked playing a Warrior tank over a Blood DK tank in BRF, when Blood DK was the best/second best tank. He thinks that for all of WoD Warrior is the best tank (It's by far the worst tank). His content is made for the bottom of the barrel people. Not that, that is a bad thing. I just wouldn't really listen to preach for high end knowledge.

Anyway. Blood DK at the moment feels okayish. If it released right now it would be playable. It would in no means be good but most people could live with it. I think there would need to be a few changes then I would be happy with the new blood dk. Rune tap being basebline, along with Blood Tap being baseline and working how it does in live would, for me, all that BDK needs right now to complete their kit. Rune tap for on demand emergency mitigation, which outside of a 2 minute(?) 20% damage reduction talent we don't have anymore. Blood tap for just some added complexity.

At the moment Rune tap seems to be in a tier where it will likely be the most common choice, but I thought the whole point of redoing the BDK talent tree was to add some choice. Might as well make it baseline if you will always pick it. Blood Tap with how it works on the alpha is crap. Everytime you consume a BS you reduce it's CD by 1 second. You can only use up 1 BS every 2 seconds. So a maximum is 30 consumed every minute. So best case scenario you can blood tap once every 30 seconds. Which equates to, on a 6 minute fight, an extra 12 runes. Whoooo.

[Angeredsoul]

You forget about the abilities that consume bs, can't remember the name off the top of my head.

[Deleted]

Tombstone doesn't work with Blood Tap (no clue about SD but I am guessing not) and even then it would still be undertuned.

[Ikrekot]

So we get some dps increase on HS, DS, BB, D&D, BStorm, Soulgorge. Modification to Exsanguinate, it says now "You can move, parry, dodge, and use defensive abilities while channeling this ability." so can we use DS? In this new build HS>Marrowrend even more :/ No gameplay changes

[Deleted]

No gameplay changes

The blue post confirms that they started with tuning. Despite Blizz saying nothing is set in stone, I highly doubt they will change talents now.

[Kapaya]

In this new build HS>Marrowrend even more :/ No gameplay changes

How is that a bad thing? Marrowrend should be used to build up Mitigation, while HS when you don't need more. I mean the gameplay is really meh but it's acceptable thanks to these two abilities working like they do.

[Ten]

DPS has increased meaningfully this time through. Previously levelling was noticeably slow. DPS while levelling now seems much better, and the aoe potential we have with DnD and HS spam is great

[Ikrekot]

How is that a bad thing? Marrowrend should be used to build up Mitigation, while HS when you don't need more. I mean the gameplay is really meh but it's acceptable thanks to these two abilities working like they do.

But Marrowrend is more and more pointless. It is good only if you use few specific talents Spectral Deflection, Ossuary, Tombstone, Foul Bulwark. Press once every 6 seconds for bonus Haste and spam HS :/

- - - Updated - - -

Marrowrend should do more damage or generate more RP than HS.

Need more damage -> less RP
Need more RP -> less damage

Now

Need more RP -> more damage

[Kraeth]

It's a first pass though. Still gotta say HS got some holy grub-level of buffing. MR should hit like a train to compensate for that. Not complaining about the BB buff though; brings it up as something we want to use outside 'snap threat.' Not to mention DnD.

[Deleted]

But Marrowrend is more and more pointless. It is good only if you use few specific talents Spectral Deflection, Ossuary, Tombstone, Foul Bulwark. Press once every 6 seconds for bonus Haste and spam HS :/

Marrowrend is fine the way it is. Heart Strike is supposed to be your reward for doing your rotation well by doing more damage and generating more RP for Death Strike.

If you want to Marrowrend more, I suggest speccing Spectral Deflection and doing bosses that hit hard enough (which according to Troxism is a thing already) and check out how fast you lose Bone Shield charges.

I made a video to emulate this.

First off, I am totally cheating by engaging the raid dummy with fully stacked Bone Shield and RP but that is just to ensure I stay alive long enough to merit uploading the video.

The main points here are:

- Spectral Deflection just chews through your Bone Shield charges, potentially making a Haste build that focuses on Marrowrend only viable (depending on SD tuning anyway). It also significantly lowers RP generation over the normal rotation that actually uses Heart Strike.

- The legendary bracers are as broken as expected by allowing 25 RP Death Strikes (though you do lose Ossuary's effect at some point due to how quickly you lose charges).

- Death Strike healed for nearly 100% of my HP - though that was during Vampiric Blood so it's not base HP, but still. I mouse over the healing breakdown at the end, look at the bottom right and pause as necessary to see the min/max/avg heals.

- Vampiric Blood had about a 30 sec CD via Red Thirst there and that is without the other legendary that affect its CD (which, admittedly only works off of Heart Strike, so it wouldn't have helped in this particular scenario).

- Check out how little effect all the Leech effects had combined compared to the other healing.

[Ikrekot]

If bosses can still hit hard I fine with Marrowrend and HS damage. Yeah many legendary items are game changers. I would be very happy to get one very fast. And leech sucks :/

[Deleted]

might have overbuffed bloods damage abit, topping any 5 man dungeon right now or maybe im playing with bad pugs either way blood boil wrecks

[mmimzie]

might have overbuffed bloods damage abit, topping any 5 man dungeon right now or maybe im playing with bad pugs either way blood boil wrecks

Eh it'll get tunes back and worth, and will probably fly all over the place for abit.

[Patryn]

might have overbuffed bloods damage abit, topping any 5 man dungeon right now or maybe im playing with bad pugs either way blood boil wrecks

DPS while leveling still seems slow. Do we have to level as blood or can we start as Unholy and then switch? Don't want to waste artifact power.

[supertigerlamp]

If most of what is on Alpha now stays (in their words "Firm but not set in stone") when they do the Legion pre-patch on live, can anyone answer what we're (again, tentatively) looking at in terms of:

1) Ideal itemization?

2) Gearing in terms of trinkets. Are we still using the DPS trinkets like we did in actual WoD? Or will the changes necessitate dropping back to more "tanky" trinkets like Cursed Plume, or...the god awful class trinket?

[Deleted]

The class trinket hasn't been updated yet. It still buffs death coil.