Thoughts on Tanking and Blood going into Legion (LONG)

[Deleted]

I don't know why critical is so valued. Yes it gives parry but you require so much critical rating (515) to get 1% parry and that's ignoring the DR. yes there's skeletal shattering but face it it's pathetic. You need 12.5% critical to get 1% Damage reduction from SS
Mastery (349 for 2% more shield) blood shields aren't that small according to your logs. Furthermore while BS is up you get 50% leech. 50% leech that's a lot. Critical is also unreliable whereas mastery is always there for you.
On another topic all the tank trinkets seem underwhelming. Night hold trinkets all have critical except the Guldan one which has mastery. Their absorb amount is like 600-700k which isn't that much for a 2min CD. I think the best trinkets would be xavius trinket (damage reduction on hit, stacks but doesn't refresh duration) and versatility trinket (flat vers + vers proc)

Yeeah but 2% to a 90k blood shield isn't really amazing.

[Deleted]

I don't know why critical is so valued. Yes it gives parry but you require so much critical rating (515) to get 1% parry and that's ignoring the DR. yes there's skeletal shattering but face it it's pathetic. You need 12.5% critical to get 1% Damage reduction from SS
Mastery (349 for 2% more shield) blood shields aren't that small according to your logs. Furthermore while BS is up you get 50% leech. 50% leech that's a lot. Critical is also unreliable whereas mastery is always there for you.
On another topic all the tank trinkets seem underwhelming. Night hold trinkets all have critical except the Guldan one which has mastery. Their absorb amount is like 600-700k which isn't that much for a 2min CD. I think the best trinkets would be xavius trinket (damage reduction on hit, stacks but doesn't refresh duration) and versatility trinket (flat vers + vers proc)

Death strike heal can crit Same for other heals. I like that personally.

Also the bigger hits the better it is to parry it entirely with Blood Shield being as weak as it is.

[Milocow]

Death strike heal can crit Same for other heals. I like that personally.

Also the bigger hits the better it is to parry it entirely with Blood Shield being as weak as it is.

Are you sure? DS heals critting is a gamebreaking revelation

[Philondra]

Are you sure? DS heals critting is a gamebreaking revelation

No, he's wrong. I double-checked Kanj's logs to make sure something didn't happen in Legion that I'm not aware of.

[Milocow]

No, he's wrong. I double-checked Kanj's logs to make sure something didn't happen in Legion that I'm not aware of.

Yea I knew that
DS heal critting is a damn old mechanic in the beta where they used to had the Might of Mograine passive which increased DS Heals crit to 250%instead of usual 200%

[Philondra]

Yeeah but 2% to a 90k blood shield isn't really amazing.

It definitely isn't. But then again, neither is .68% parry chance.

[Deleted]

It definitely isn't. But then again, neither is .68% parry chance.

The difference is that a slightly bigger Blood Shield does nothing for you besides slightly reduce damage you take, whereas a parry will prevent both Blood Shield and Bone Shield from being consumed, resulting in a higher uptime on UT as well as allowing for more HS in your rotation, on top of slightly reduced damage taken.
Another difference is that your mastery only reduces the damage of one attack per DS, whereas parry can happen all the time, allowing mastery to at best affect half of the auto attacks taken. Also parry scales better with damage taken than mastery does (on most fights).

Skeletal Shattering and higher damage (=leech) are just an added bonus to an already great stat.

The fact that parry has such a high conversion rate is totally justified considering just how good it is.

[Deleted]

Parry suffers diminishing returns however, while Blood Shield doesn't. Considering the low conversion from crit to parry, and the fact that is an rng based defense (just like crit is rng based bonus damage), like Garalon I really can't bring myself to value Crit that much (concede, I'm not in beta). Skeletal Shattering should never be used as an argument because is almost non-existent.

Mastery consistently boost both defenses and damage.
Maybe I'm terribly wrong, but on paper I still prefer a mastery > crit approach.

[Milocow]

Assuming 5000 of a stat
5000 crit = 14.28% crit chance, 9.70% parry (before diminishing returns) and 1.14% damage reduction from Skeletal shattering
5000 mastery = 28.65% more blood shields and a 14.28% attack power multiplier
Still prefer the reliable mastery

[Deleted]

Yea I knew that
DS heal critting is a damn old mechanic in the beta where they used to had the Might of Mograine passive which increased DS Heals crit to 250%instead of usual 200%

Oh bugger. Didn't follow changes that closely. Sad panda

[Deleted]

It definitely isn't. But then again, neither is .68% parry chance.

Saying crit only gives parry is disregarding every major trait that benefits from crit.

[Philondra]

Saying crit only gives parry is disregarding every major trait that benefits from crit.

By "every," do you mean Skeletal Shattering? Because that's the only one that benefits from crit but not mastery, and we've already been over how it's the worst of our major traits. Don't forget that mastery also gives attack power.

Also, (and I could provide you with some math if you want), the amount of Bone Shield charges you save with that .68% parry, and thereby the number of runes you're able to spend on Heart Strike instead of Marrowrend, is one, maybe two at the best. That's also not taking into account that one parry does not necessarily mean one Bone Shield charge saved, because the Bone Shield consumption could already be on cooldown from a different instance of damage.

Edit: In the end, it essentially boils down to this: Do you want slightly smoother damage intake or the unreliable but burst survivability? I suspect the answer will largely boil down to personal preference and how many hots (resto druids) you have in your group.

[Milocow]

There was teamcap vs teamironman now there's teamcrit vs team mastery

#teammastery

[redfella]

#teamvershiddenop

[Deleted]

By "every," do you mean Skeletal Shattering? Because that's the only one that benefits from crit but not mastery, and we've already been over how it's the worst of our major traits. Don't forget that mastery also gives attack power.

Also, (and I could provide you with some math if you want), the amount of Bone Shield charges you save with that .68% parry, and thereby the number of runes you're able to spend on Heart Strike instead of Marrowrend, is one, maybe two at the best. That's also not taking into account that one parry does not necessarily mean one Bone Shield charge saved, because the Bone Shield consumption could already be on cooldown from a different instance of damage.

Edit: In the end, it essentially boils down to this: Do you want slightly smoother damage intake or the unreliable but burst survivability? I suspect the answer will largely boil down to personal preference and how many hots (resto druids) you have in your group.

How is a blood shield more reliable? You can't have a blood shield for every hit from a boss either. You won't be able to heart strike all day to generate the RP required for that. You'll be too busy spending your runes on Marrowrend. Sure, Heart Strike is spammable in dungeons and mythic+ but on mythic raid bosses keeping up Marrowrend is a real struggle.

Having enough RP for Death Strikes will be an even bigger struggle on some fights. Relying on Death Strike and Blood Shield is a lot more bursty in raids.

[Grandork]

Shouldn't the theorycraft make a clear victor of what is better? If it's Crit or Mastery? It can all be mathematically calculated, so why is there even a discussion?

[Milocow]

Because there's different metrics to "tankiness". Damage taken per second (DTPS), Effective health pool (EHP) , and Theck-meleoree index (TMI). One stat that maybe the best in lowering DTPS may not be the best to boost your TMI, so it's quite complicated to calculate tankiness

[Deleted]

There was teamcap vs teamironman now there's teamcrit vs team mastery

#teammastery

In the shadows of this thread, there is a teamversatility lurking in silence.

How is a blood shield more reliable? You can't have a blood shield for every hit from a boss either. You won't be able to heart strike all day to generate the RP required for that. You'll be too busy spending your runes on Marrowrend. Sure, Heart Strike is spammable in dungeons and mythic+ but on mythic raid bosses keeping up Marrowrend is a real struggle.

Having enough RP for Death Strikes will be an even bigger struggle on some fights. Relying on Death Strike and Blood Shield is a lot more bursty in raids.

The amount of HS you can use should naturally go up as we stack more haste. Surely with parry preventing stacks from being consumed, we could use even more, but is still an rng driven gameplay.

Mastery is more "reliable" because everytime you use DS there will be a Blood shield. While everytime you take a hit you're not garanteed to parry. The same goes for damage: mastery will boost it at every hit, while crit might fuck you with bad rng (as well making you a Monster with good rng).

Because there's different metrics to "tankiness". Damage taken per second (DTPS), Effective health pool (EHP) , and Theck-meleoree index (TMI). One stat that maybe the best in lowering DTPS may not be the best to boost your TMI, so it's quite complicated to calculate tankiness

This has to be said more.
The nature of Blood dks tanking model (spiky no matter what) makes TMI a valuable tool, but as I've been reading around, bosses in legion dish out more sustained damage compare to WoD, making DTPS more important than ever. You also have to take into account how every boss fight works, making it quite difficult to find a "universally best stat".

[Philondra]

In addition to what Garalon said, what's best for one type of content isn't necessarily what's best for another.

[Deleted]

@Sugarlol Trust me. On some of the fights on mythic difficulty, we were in need of haste just to keep the Boneshields up. They dropped off me and the other Blood DK on Botanist several times which also caused us to wipe. Those boneshields they drop off like flies on some fights, it's ridiculous, and as soon as they were gone it's dead. There'll not be a lot of time for HS on some fights regardless of your GCD being 1.25Ssec or 1.0Sec.