Thoughts on Tanking and Blood going into Legion (LONG)

[Highwhale]

Just give up, he is playing a different game than the rest of us.

If you dont agree with my opinion it doesn't means im wrong. And vice versa.

[Deleted]

If you dont agree with my opinion it doesn't means im wrong. And vice versa.

Opinion: Deflection is good.
Fact: Decomposition is better.

[Highwhale]

Opinion: Deflection is good.
Fact: Decomposition is better.

Your fact based on opinions. Show me math.

[Zemask]

Your fact based on opinions. Show me math.

If everyone tells you you're wrong, do you think they are all wrong or can you even consider that MAYBE you're not as right as you think you are ?

And https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...XKpIyWRNQ/edit (credit to Troxism, the one who made this document)

[Casterbridge]

If everyone tells you you're wrong, do you think they are all wrong or can you even consider that MAYBE you're not as right as you think you are ?

And https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...XKpIyWRNQ/edit (credit to Troxism, the one who made this document)

To be fair just because the majority of people believe something to be true it in no way means they are correct, this happens all the time.

Asking for a bit of evidence to back up a claim, regardless of what the majority believe, is never a bad thing.

[Crevan]

To be fair just because the majority of people believe something to be true it in no way means they are correct, this happens all the time.

Asking for a bit of evidence to back up a claim, regardless of what the majority believe, is never a bad thing.

Some numbers from memory (can provide log links when I'm back home if people are interested).

Dragons of Nightmare heroic, about 7.5 minute fight. Avg 860 equipped.
3.2m HP, 3.375m averaged over VB uptime. Need to take 844k damage in a single hit to proc SD. Only breaths did enough to proc it; adding them all up and taking 16% of that gave me just under 2m damage potentially mitigated by SD.
Since I was using RD, its benefit could be measured directly. With a dreadful DnD uptime of ~34% I got 120 RP out of the talent over the course of the fight - 3 DStrikes (with orange bracers). (Average DS heal+absorb)x3 was roughly 1.35m mitigation, plus an average of 635k damage done. And roughly 2.65m extra DnD damage as an added benefit.

Given that every breath could be covered by cooldowns anyway, I see no reason to sacrifice 3m+ damage and a smoother rotation for extra 650k mitigation. I can see some very specific situations where the tradeoff might be worth considering (e.g spear on Cenarius if you don't have externals available, or perhaps Necrotic affix in m+, though that is less certain), but for general-purpose builds it's not worth it.

[Resurgo]

Quoting Jellospally here: (with regards to using Spectral Deflection)

Except now you are Marrowrending more which is now 16 less RP per EXTRA marrowrend(if its single target, if its more ITS EVEN MORE RP loss) you have to cast in the fight. It now make Foul Bulwark weaker. Now you are making Red Thirst weaker because you are genning less RP and spending less. Ossuary now becomes useless because you will practically never be over 5 stacks. You do less dps.

Rapid Decomp has plenty of reason to be used single target. DnD is a single target increase. 15% more RP is very strong single target. That is more Death Strikes per minute. How is that bad? If we lose the benefit of literally every talent row besides the last one because of picking Spectral Deflection why would I want it?

[Grishnok]

Shit seriously needs to change... Tanked EoA +8 today and we simply do not have the abilities baseline to deal with the mechanics when we are dumping every rune we have into marrowrend because of the fucking aura and constant damage... its a joke.

[Tojara]

We aren't awful in Mythic+, at least with the current US affixes.

With the current US affixes and the proper instances/group, 10 and 11 weren't that difficult from a blood perspective. That's not to say however that there aren't better options than us, because there are.

[Krisppo]

Necrotic really kills any enjoyment I had left playing Blood as my OS... Kiting with 100% movement speed to reset stacks, watching your bone shield wither away from the dot, having to spam marrowrend like crazy, it just fucking sucks.

[redfella]

If you dont agree with my opinion it doesn't means im wrong. And vice versa.

Facts are not opinions. Your personal feelings about talent balance are about as relevant as my mothers. Only facts matter when you try to tell others why they should pick something and that using those talents is playing the class right, while others are doing it wrong. Without anything but your opinion to back up what you are stating, your feedback is worthless and at worst is misguiding people who pop by this thread and see what you are saying. You are allowed to play your character in any way you want to, but coming here and telling others to pick bad talents because you personally like them is not okay.

The actual numbers behind what the talents provide are facts, and those numbers favor Rapid Decomposition, Ossuary and Foul Bulwark since they have great synergy with each other. In essence the debate can be broken down two separate arguments, yours and the general consensus of multiple experienced death knights & theorycrafters. Keep in mind that everything you are about to read have been stated in this thread multiple times already, yet you insist on "math" when thread tools exist, and would let you check everything quite easily yourself.

1 -- Your argument: Spectral Deflection and Anti-Magic barrier are superior and people not using them are playing the spec wrong.

Wrong, as stated before by multiple people. Now, your proof is two scenarios where you like to use the talents to offer you more defensive cooldowns in order to not die. In reality, those talents are not required to survive those situations. Furthermore, your talent choices can also be broken down to the following actual changes in gameplay:

SPECTRAL DEFLECTION instead of RAPID DECOMPOSITION

• You will generate substantially less Runic Power
  Spectral Deflection forces you to use more than twice the normal amount of runes on Marrowrend, due hits eating two stacks of BS and SD removing the ICD in BS charge consumption. Marrowrend on single target and cleave generates substantially less RP than two Heartstrikes. Against enemies that never hit hard enough to proc SD, the talent is in effect wasted, but you are still lacking the RP generation that RD would give.
• You will deal less damage
  Spectral Deflection forces you to use more than twice the normal amount of runes on Marrowrend, due hits eating two stacks of BS and SD removing the ICD in BS charge consumption. Marrowrend on single target and cleave deals less damage than two Heartstrikes. Death and Decay deals less damage without Rapid Decomposition. Against enemies that never hit hard enough to proc SD, the talent is in effect wasted, and you are sacrificing a lot of damage to run with a talent that has 0 benefit.
• You will selfheal a lot less
  Gimped Runic Power regen will make you lose out on a lot of Death Strikes, which makes you have to rely more on your healer than your own sustain.
• Your average maximum health will be lower
  Since Spectral Deflection will constantly push you on low Bone Shield stacks, you will not benefit from Foul Bulwark as much as a DK using proper talents.
• You will gain 16% more baseline mitigation, but only if every hit exceeds 25% of your max health (Pretty much never true)
  This would be nice, but the penalty of lost DPS, lost maximum health and especially the lost RP generation is greater than the increased of 16% baseline mitigation -- if the enemies even hit hard enough to proc SD.

ANTI-MAGIC BARRIER instead of OSSUARY:

• 25% max health once per minute for 10 seconds
  It's a nice bonus, but most of the time we can't just pop AM as a HP increase cooldown since the magic mitigation and debuff immunity is actually needed to handle certain mechanics, and AMS deals with those mechanics well enough even without the added HP increase. It also makes your Death Strike cost 13% more RP when compared to using and utilizing Ossuary properly. It also makes you unable to bank up to 3 Death Strikes for high burst mechanics. On the contrary to your belief, all Death Strikes in the 5 second window benefit from damage taken bonus, nost just the first one. We can push out all three Death Strikes with the damage taken bonus from some hard hitting ability, if we choose to, and believe me, in higher M+ and Mythic raids there are scenarios where you want to recover from a high damage ability via banking RP, firing one DS to top you off just before the cast hits and firing two DS to bring you up right after.

Now, if Blizzard fixes the Boneshield ICD and makes SD not use two charges when you are low on Bone Shield charges (so a protection against having BS suddenly drop off), it would be a valid talent for some hard and slow hitting enemies, but at the moment because you sacrifice so much sustain and dps to take it, it is simply not worth taking at all. IF you were in a situation that you needed pure extra mitigation, then the correct answer would be to drop Foul Bulwark for Rune Tap (e.g. Cenarius Spear in Emerald Nightmare).

I want to drive my point further, the scenarios which you describe (HoV spear, DHT Grip) can be handled without gimping yourself with the subpar talent choices you stated. For example, Crushing Grip is Nature damage and AMS takes care of it easily without having to talent for the 25% health increase. You can pop Bonestorm for the second Crushing Grip and Vampiric Blood for the third, and if you have dead/slow DPS, you can keep rotating those three.

The facts prove what I am saying, those facts exist in this very thread in greater detail than what I wrote above. Everyone who has stated that RD + Ossuary aren't the best, have only been able to say that they feel so, while providing example scenarios in which the talents they listed aren't even needed, but the players in question have struggled to play correctly in and have resorted to gimping their runic power generation and dps output just to survive niche situations they should be surviving from, even without resorting to talents that gimp you .

Finally, again, you are allowed to play your character in any way you want to, but coming here to mouth off at others and telling people to pick bad talents because you personally like them is not okay.

[Philondra]

I don't know what's more ridiculous--that people are still taking those terrible talents, or that they come here, don't read the thread, and demand proof that we've given ad nauseum.

Everything redfella says is true, and I'd like to add one more fact about the Rapid Decomposition/Ossuary/Red Thirst/Foul Bulwark combination: They reward you for doing something you should be doing anyway even if these talents didn't exist. You'll almost always want to have high stacks of Bone Shield as a buffer against not being able to Marrowrend for a while (boss going invulnerable but pulsing aoe damage, etc.) We've already pointed out over and over that beyond the first couple Marrowrends to get you up to 8-10 stacks, you'll need to be using the same number throughout the fight regardless of how many you start with.

So not only are these talents the strongest, they don't require you to alter your playstyle in any way.

As an aside, this is one of the big flaws of the dk talent tree--all the talents that offer changes to our playstyle are either not competitive (Mark of Blood, Blood Tap) or just plain bad (Soulgorge, Tombstone)

[Mokuna]

Spectral deflection isn't bad by itself at all, pretty much every mythic boss but dragons melees hard enough for it to proc on melees, the problem is it's just not usable on EN fights:

Nythendra: rot eating your bone shield, don't have nearly enough runes to keep up
Elrethe: the boss isn't the danger on this fight, you'd rather have more rp to keep up with spiders
Ursoc: rend flesh+the boss meleeing+the adds meleeing+miasma destroy your bone shield stacks, you need rp because you're getting constantly trucked so death strike has an insane value
Dragons: permanent dot eating your bone shield, nothing really does enough damage to proc spectal deflection except the breathes and you have ams/vamp blood to handle that
Ill'gynoth: survivability isn't an issue if you kill the horror fast enough, you want every bit of dps you can find for the p2 (not true after the hotfix so SD could become a good option )
Cenarius: dot eating your bone shield
Xavius: dot eating your bone shield

So yeah the talent is pretty much fucked by dots ticking, and when the content hits hard enough to make SD seemingly useful, it also makes your death strike really strong and your rp has more value than getting more dr

[Grishnok]

We need changes. All DK specs but blood and frost in particular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdAbE8AAerg

[Snuffleupagus]

The talent trees should use the same formula for all the non CC etc. talents.

1. Passive Effect (mix of DPS and Survival)
2. Active/Passive Effect (DPS)
3. Active/Passive Effect (Survival)

This is part of the reason I don't want to see Rune Tap baseline. I would much rather see the Mastery Shield buffed to become active mitigation that you have to time properly again.

- Death Strike: Shield buffed, and hits over x% of hp will absorb or mitigate additional incoming damage (including magic) for 3-6 seconds.
- Bone Shield: Doesn't lose stacks to AoE and DoT spells.

All put together, you get some good variety, and talent choices can be determined by gear AND playstyle preference.

[Deleted]

There is only one encounter this tier you go for talents like SD, Rune Tap and AMB. That's il'gynoth mythic. The only things you tank are the tentacles and dread horror. Most of the time you stand around doing nothing. If you were doing the one phase strat you don really have any externals for the Dread horror. He does 3 Mil shadow damage then 6 Mil shadow damage. Without the legendary waist you can't have vb up for every 6 Mil hit. Since your not tanking much and when you are ranking it's super high damage SD is really good. I switched to SD and Rune tap after a few pulls and was able to survive horrors pretty easily. I might even go AMB next time I do the fight. Since my dps doesn't really matter on that fight.

[redfella]

There is only one encounter this tier you go for talents like SD, Rune Tap and AMB. That's il'gynoth mythic. The only things you tank are the tentacles and dread horror. Most of the time you stand around doing nothing. If you were doing the one phase strat you don really have any externals for the Dread horror. He does 3 Mil shadow damage then 6 Mil shadow damage. Without the legendary waist you can't have vb up for every 6 Mil hit. Since your not tanking much and when you are ranking it's super high damage SD is really good. I switched to SD and Rune tap after a few pulls and was able to survive horrors pretty easily. I might even go AMB next time I do the fight. Since my dps doesn't really matter on that fight.

Your dps matteted, but post fixes not as much.

Taking all 3 of those is an overkill tbh.

[Deleted]

Probably. But the healers in my raid team are so garbage. I gave to call out to be heal'd while tanking the add which does 6 Mil damage.

[Deleted]

Blizz a week ago: "Don't worry guys, we aknowlegded that Brewmasters and Blood are in a weak spot and may need some help".
Ptr patch notes come out, no Blood or Brewmaster changes.
Ok.

[Cirayne24]

Blizz a week ago: "Don't worry guys, we aknowlegded that Brewmasters and Blood are in a weak spot and may need some help".
Ptr patch notes come out, no Blood or Brewmaster changes.
Ok.

Homie, BrM's got a 5% Stagger buff XD