Idea's to improve blood strike

**Taronar** · 2012-02-02, 05:26 PM

Hello fellow Death Knights.

In this thread, I want to come up with some idea's and fixes for the current Blood Strike.

Blood Strike
1 Blood Melee Range
Requires Melee Weapon
Instantly strike the enemy, causing 80% weapon damage plus 850. Damage is increased by 12.5% for each of your diseases on the target.

Blood Strike is a far end behind Heart Strike for Blood Death Knights. It produces fewer threat. It does only single target damage. And the damage is way behind compared to Heart Strike.

Current uses

As a Frost Death Knight, the use of this strike is gone since patch 4.1.0. Back then you used it to get rid of you remaining blood runes. However the change "Blood Rites" made this strike useless since the Blood runes are now Death runes if you spec into Frost.

Unholy Death Knight don't use blood strike either. They have the Festering Strike ability, which increases diseases duration by 3 seconds at the cost of a Frost and a Blood rune.

Leveling Death Knights are the only ones who will properly use Blood Strike, UH DK gets Festering Strike at 64. Blood DK gets HS straight away. Frost DK gets Obilerate learned at level 61. That means you can use this spell for only 9 levels. That's fewer levels then the warriors spell "Strike".

Idea's for improvement.
I have been thinking about various uses for the Blood Strike ability. I will explain and motivate my suggestions below.

1) The first one is a very simple and very straight forward one, however it will cause "homogenization" with warriors.
As soon as you pick the Heart Strike talent, your damage from Blood Strike increases with 150% making it prior over Heart Strike in single target fights. This will cause the change in single target environment to Diseases>DS>RS>BS. AoE will still remain the same.

2) Another idea is to make Blood Strike increase your Blood Shield absorption by 5% every hit (even above 100% of own HP) and increase the duration of your Blood Shield buff by 3 seconds, so that your currently applied Blood Shield buff will have some remaining time instead of the tight gap in the current situation (I sometimes have less then 0.5 seconds remaining on Blood Shield before I refresh it). This will also give another opportunity to increase mitigation at the sacrifice of threat.

3) A third idea is not of my own, but has been stated in one of the Bone Shield threads. The idea involves adding Bone Shield stacks when using Blood Strike, at a certain, balanced rate of course. While I do encourage this idea, I think the current amount of Bone Shield stacks and the way they are used is fine at the moment. I'd rather refer to my own solution above, because it will also have influence when to use it. It's not interesting on a 27k Blood Shield but it is on a 230k one.

Feel free to post some of your own idea's of comments about Blood Strike as a reply in this thread and if you enjoyed reading this post, please consider liking it in the section top right

Have a nice day
~Taronar, Blood Death Knight Tank of Complexity

This is copy pasted from the official forum thread created by me
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...62628?page=1#0

**Skygoneblue** · 2012-02-02, 06:58 PM

I would like it if Blood Strike could remove excess apostrophes.

Infracted

**Thebestkid** · 2012-02-02, 07:06 PM

There are many abilities (for every class) that just get lost in a dust sometimes, it just happens.

**Taronar** · 2012-02-02, 08:01 PM

That does not really give any new perspective to this thread

**Darsithis** · 2012-02-02, 08:08 PM

I don't really feel a need to update Blood Strike to be useful. All specs have a way of either burning a blood rune (Heart Strike for blood, Festering Strike for unholy), or have blood runes as death runes at all time.

Blood Strike is just one of those talents that gets lost to the wayside as you level. It's akin to Primal Strike for Shamans or Strike for Warriors. Useful when you were at that level, but replaced by better abilities as you go on.

The idea of Blood Strike being useful as a Heroic Strike VS Cleave type thing is the only part that I really like (the absorption would just be too OP), and it would provide some variety for a blood DK depending on mobs, including more dps output on single-target fights.

**Taronar** · 2012-02-02, 08:51 PM

Well the difference between Blood Strike and Primal Strike or Strike is that those are mainly to learn new players handle ability's like Heroic Strike or Stormstrike. A player who can create a Death Knight already has a character of atleast level 55 so there is very little to learn about basic strike ability's. I would like some love to Heart Strike, as it was an ability which has a lot of possible uses.

**Sadinar** · 2012-02-02, 08:53 PM

I don't see the need to change, plenty of abilities become unused after leveling, primal strike for shamans, and blood strike for dks are good examples. If you want to suggest such abilities be removed/changed entirely well thats something else.

**Taronar** · 2012-02-02, 08:57 PM

Well it's like Blood Boil and Pestilince in the beginning of Wrath. You use Blood Boil to deal high damage if you have diseases you your target, you use Pestilince to deal low damage to spread diseases. The one ability needs the other. It would be cool to see a sort like system with BS and blood shield. A blood strike to make the duration on blood shield longer so you have more space to time your next DS right

**flashur** · 2012-02-02, 10:09 PM

I do agree they could do something with it. It doesn't necessarily need to be useful for blood since we get Heart Strike, but maybe an aoe effect, possibly a whirlwind ability that deals more damage than blood boil but has a smaller radius. Or it deals more damage than blood boil without diseases up, giving a quicker aoe for small packs that won't last long enough for pestilence, etc.

If they did this, they could also give blood boil a threat modifier with lower damage so that it still gets used by blood but blood strike gets used by unholy. Problem with this is that blood boil will increase in damage with unholy mastery, and the spec already has bad weapon scaling.

Just a thought at least.

**DemoBytom** · 2012-02-03, 08:02 AM

Get rid of it IMHO.. No need to add another "strike" to our rotations..

**Taronar** · 2012-02-03, 10:50 AM

Ty for your feedback flashur.
---
DemoBytom,

I think it is false to state that we don't need another strike. I am not sure if it is my play style or a mechanic issue, but I always have a lower activity then other tanks/dps around. First of all, as stated is above is this due to the fact that I sometimes wait with Death Strike to make a timed attack, if I don't have any spare blood runes I will just have to "wait".
Second of all, if you compare Death Knight to warrior, a Death Knight uses 5 main ability's: Pestilence, Heart Strike, Death Strike, Rune Strike and Death and Decay. A warrior for comperisation uses 9: Shield Slam, Revenge, Devistate, Shockwave, Rend, Thunderclap, Demoralizing Shout, Heroic Strike, Cleave

There is not an exclusive "need" to another ability, but it would be cool to get a little more utility out of the Death Knight tanking tree

**nameuser** · 2012-02-03, 11:05 AM

I think they should make blood strike a part of frost's rotation again and remove the perma death runes. it made frost too simple. and increase its damage too cuz it's really low atm.

**r3d3mpt10n** · 2012-02-03, 12:17 PM

Every class pretty much has spells they do use at the beginning and then dont use later on... Blood Strike is basically that sort of skill for the DK, same with Strike for Warriors and Primal Strike for Shammies.

There is no point trying to work out ideas to sufficiently improve it when this is the case.

Im not sure if blizzard meant for it to happen for every class, but obviously they saw it coming when they made Heart Strike hit multiple mobs and also hit alot harder then Blood Strike...

The way i see it, is that it was meant to be the way it is now.

**Vereesà** · 2012-02-03, 12:29 PM

Originally Posted by nameuser

I think they should make blood strike a part of frost's rotation again and remove the perma death runes. it made frost too simple. and increase its damage too cuz it's really low atm.

I'd say now that they gone through with such a monumental change, they can't just go back and revert it. Blood Srike's simply done. (For frost at least)

OT: I do like your idea about HS being the cleave and BS being the Heroic strike for blood.

**flashur** · 2012-02-03, 01:14 PM

I actually really like all of the suggestions in the OP. Making it affect Blood Shield would probably be the stand out one for me - I was hoping that the Death Siphon talent in MoP could possibly add to our blood shield as well as Death Strike, but using Blood Strike would also be viable.

**Taronar** · 2012-02-04, 08:18 AM

As I stated before, the change to blood strike is just meant to make it more useful again. To make our rotations a bit more interesting. When I am playing my Death Knight, it feels like I am only hitting 4 buttons. 5 if you count DnD. A few weeks ago, I created myself a warrior and for now I really enjoy that class because of it's rotation and the way you use you ability's (Shield Slam -> Revenge, Devestate, Filler, Shield Slam). With filler being a choice between 4 ability's. It sounds far more interesting than just Diseases, DS, DS, HS, HS, what I currently feel.

**JackTheLad** · 2012-02-04, 01:28 PM

Heart strike is our aggro/cleave skill i see 0 problem with that. Every tank got one... Besides if you don't like it use BT for further DS usage...

**Mumba** · 2012-02-04, 02:46 PM

Let's go the paladin route and have one attack for bosses and one for adds.

Blood Strike = Crusader's Strike
Heart Strike = Hammer of the Righteous

Sounds decent to me.

**Taronar** · 2012-02-04, 03:58 PM

JackTheLad, I think you did not fully understood the discussed topic here.

----

Mumba. You have got the idea

but I think there should be some an extra flavor to the spell which also makes the rotation more interesting and increase the skill required to play a Death Knight properly.

**Taronar** · 2012-02-07, 11:16 AM

Another idea which came up my mind was to make it a high damage spell but with very low threat. Making it intresting on bosses with tight enrage timers and it will take more attention to see if you have enough threat on your target, thus making the class more intresting to play!

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