Thoughts on Tanking and Blood going into Legion (LONG)

[Enosh]

- so apparently both dk and monk tanks are complaining over nothing. Thank god you're here with th truth in your hand showing us how bad we are. And yet again, you miss the point of viable =/= good

- yes mastery was always the way to go. You stacked hate > mastery (or mastery> haste, can't remember) in Cata and MoP, and Multistrike > Mastery in WoD.

quite sure I remember gemming and enchanting crit in mop, at some point you just had enough mastery with the 4 items of your set you picked up for the bonus and various other pieces of gear that there was no point in more mastery on top of it so you went with crit for more dps

[Tojara]

I've been running loads of +2 and +3 (most efficient gear wise at the moment) to proc 3 chests, and blood feels pretty strong at those levels. Honestly it has little to do with how weak we feel and how crappy bolstering is. Bolstering literally changes what good tanks have been trained to do, and really messes with the flow of a dungeon. Non-elite trash becomes cancer, pulling early before a pack finishes will make your job harder, and doing multiple packs at once without uniform AoE will cause headaches too.

I've done several +9 and while I can't speak to other tanks abilities fully, I don't think I'm the reason that we have deaths or fail sometimes. I still live just as well, but some boss and trash abilities require far more healer attention, which will correlate to deaths. Dungeons this expansion are filled with disengaging mobs, and also lots of mobs who cast/shoot on random targets regardless of threat. You can get around it with good stuns, but the felguards in blackrook hold are the perfect example of something blood DKs are really bad at. There aren't a lot of bosses and mobs like that, but the few in the dungeons that are available will make you cringe.

Blood also is feels nice when you hit that threshold of being able to tank 5 mobs consistently. RP flows well with that many mobs, consumption isn't ass and you generally won't fall over. The problem right now is bolstering in some cases prohibits you from pulling that many mobs for other reasons (either distance between mobs or what the mobs do).

Overall I don't feel we are complete dogshit in mythic+, but I still think our toolkit is pretty bad compared to other tanks in them currently. Mass grip is still useful, but honestly the way the current dungeons are setup, it's not as required as it was back in MoP/WoD. DnD snare is nice, but like mentioned at least in +9 you won't usually be the one to die. Kiting really doesn't help when tons of mobs cast on random targets, which is the real danger in some of the mythic+ dungeons.

[Deleted]

I had no real problems at +10 in EoA, or at least no problems that any other tank wouldn't also have. There's some trash that will hit like a truck, but the biggest problem was always group damage and our healer getting targeted by mechanics. Having a constant AoE through DnD and blood plague was actually very helpful with Skittish, although the modifier still requires you to tank like classic, constantly switching main targets to win back threat.

Maybe we'll have Necrotic next week. Then we'll see how things really are.

[KampKanye]

Switching gears:

For those of you who have done Cenarius, my understanding is that the spear he casts in phase 2 creates a patch on the ground whose size is relative do the damage that the tank takes. How do we handle this as blood, given that we do not have any damage reduction cooldown?

On normal, get a good tank with cooldowns like a pally, warrior, or druid to tank Cenarius the entire time with the DK tanking drakes and trees. DK's can cover half their own healing needed for that incoming damage while the healers focus on the tank that can handle the damage from Cenarius. On heroic, I couldn't tell you because I rolled a pally for more difficult content.

[redfella]

Cenarius' dmg is not really threatening in HC. I tanked him sitting on 100 debuffs on my DH for a good while without much babysitting, healers kinda focus on raid healing on that encounter.

[scwasp]

Hey guys, have a question for anyone who's tanked Xavius on heroic.

Quick summary - I've had to be the offtank this first week since our actual offtank went awol and never showed up. Blood is just my offspec that I haven't really invested much into, ie artifact only at rank 13. So I also haven't really had that much experience with it. However, I tried to read up on it to know what to do.

So, back to Xavius. Last night my guild was doing Xavius hc with me as offtank. Now, the problem that arose was that whenever I had to tank Xavius instead of our warrior mt, I just got slapped around by him. I was just taking so much dmg from him that it felt like i was playing with broken gear. Eventually I told my guild that I felt like I couldn't tank him and it was decided to get one of our dps warriors to switch over to prot instead. This was after a try where I died twice while tanking Xavius, with the first of those death being where I was hit for 1.8 mil dmg, 200k overkill, and 500k absorbed.

Can't provide logs atm unfortunately, so I know it's probably hard to say if I did something wrong. I'm really just wondering if my experience of Xavius sounds like I was messing up badly somehow, or if this is just how DK tanks are right now. Because in my experience after this first week or tanking normal and heroic, I feel like DK's are in an absolutely horrible state. I feel like when/if I run out of resources I'm fucked, and if I don't pool resources before taking boss I'm fucked. And then even when doing those things, I'm still fucked. Even when I do pool runic power and runes before taking a boss, I'll blow through all of it in like 10 seconds and then I'm left standing there unable to hit a non-filler button for several seconds while a big fat tank is wailing on me, I just feel powerless.

[redfella]

1.8m sounds like you taunted xavius with the 30s armor debuff active. You can’t swap @ 3 stacks in later phases, unless you have big cds up or overgear the boss.

My 845 DK alt was fine on him, and only lvl15 weapon.

[scwasp]

Aha that might explain that, since most of the time he'd hit for 7-800k.

The rest still holds true though. I really felt like a punching bag in a way I never did when i main tanked on my DK in ToT in MoP

[redfella]

Aha that might explain that, since most of the time he'd hit for 7-800k.

The rest still holds true though. I really felt like a punching bag in a way I never did when i main tanked on my DK in ToT in MoP

Yeah, Xavius tends to hurt and can be quite unforgiving when you make a mistake. I'm not really seeing the Blizzard model of "attrition tanking" that was advertized to be honest. Stuff is still freaking bursty and can oneshot if you don't CD up properly or taunt swaps are failed.

TL;DR; Welcome to Legion raids where healer attention is required for certain mechanics when progressing content on relevant itemlevels -- we no longer are self-sufficient.

[Deleted]

TL;DR; Welcome to Legion raids where healer attention is required for certain mechanics when progressing content on relevant itemlevels -- we no longer are self-sufficient.

Isn't that what they advertised too? Tanks being anything but self-sufficient?

[Deleted]

Isn't that what they advertised too? Tanks being anything but self-sufficient?

They did, but many tanks feels they went a little too far with it.
They also advertised more controlled and less spiky damage from bosses, but didn't quite deliver it.

[Tojara]

Skittish really isn't an issue if you run with all range. The problem with skittish, as far as I can tell, threat just instantly drops at certain times making it pretty shitty for melee in your group. When I run with all range with skittish none of them pull aggro, but when you do it with melee they can and will pull aggro from time to time. It's normally not a problem, but with classes like DPS DH who literally trade off very little single target for massive cleave (their cleave doing basically the same damage as their single target), it becomes difficult to maintain threat on an entire pack.

Literally the only people I have problems holding threat on during openers are people who can play DPS DH well. It's not like you can tell them to stop AoEing either because literally all of their buttons do that (part of the reason they are getting nerfed). None of the other melee have that strong cleave that also acts as single target, so the threat isn't as big.

Did you complete your +10 EoA on time? Personally I find EoA one of the easier ones because most of the trash (aside from double giants at the end, and some of the Naga casters at the start w/o proper interrupts) isn't all that bad. You pull a lot of the single giant naga mobs for points as they give loads of progression for the timer, and the bosses really aren't all that bad. Unfortunately for us every single high level +9 key we get is fucking Arcway or Blackrook hold, both of those being absolute and literal cancer. We would have done a +9 Neths air easy if not for the disconnects that randomly happen during dungeon content. Neth's lair as a whole isn't bad, aside from the those rock pelting assholes and those scorpions of death at the end.

[redfella]

Something I noticed was that our warrior was not taking damage from the scorpions - but all 3 ranged were. What's up with that?

[Deleted]

Did you complete your +10 EoA on time?

No, but we also didn't really try. We've been running M+ all day and nobody was in the mood for trying to force a +11 keystone during the first week. We already have the problem of certain parts of the guild outgearing others, because those people always run dungeons together. Of course the other ones never ask and instead expect to get picked up...
As a tank I've been doing so many duplicate runs in the past weeks, at least now it's not for nothing.

[Tojara]

We never thought about doing a +10 yet because it basically, from what I could tell (at least on some of them) require pots on trash. Right now we just pot on bosses.

[Deleted]

We never thought about doing a +10 yet because it basically, from what I could tell (at least on some of them) require pots on trash. Right now we just pot on bosses.

Considering regular trash has between 20m and 42m health that's probably necessary.

[ShiyoKozuki]

Yeah, Xavius tends to hurt and can be quite unforgiving when you make a mistake. I'm not really seeing the Blizzard model of "attrition tanking" that was advertized to be honest. Stuff is still freaking bursty and can oneshot if you don't CD up properly or taunt swaps are failed.

TL;DR; Welcome to Legion raids where healer attention is required for certain mechanics when progressing content on relevant itemlevels -- we no longer are self-sufficient.

I was #2 healer on my xavius normal kill ;p

[Deleted]

I was #2 healer on my xavius normal kill ;p

It has already been said. Bone Shield and other absorpion/reduction like Umbiculus Eternus or Blood Mirror count as healing done on the meters.
Your actual healing is ~30% lower than that.

[Highwhale]

Have a question about DS heal - do absorb from Blood Shield and other sources (like disc's shields) counts for "20% damage taken"? Or its just our hp pool?

[rawcode]

How does this Blood DK get 90% of his healing from Bone Shield?

warcraftlogs .com/reports/Xy9WtnLzBkb28ZKh#source=1&fight=33&type=summary

He is spec'd Skeletal Shattering, but no one else has numbers like that that. He is 3k into versatility, does it boost the 8% absorb?

edit: sorry for the url, I am not allowed to post links yet.