I Am Blood DPS

[Judson]

1. I know. The person I quoted was talking about using Blood Presence over Unholy.
2. You can't Rune Strike in Unholy Presence unless you Dodge or Parry.
3. The whole point of this 'DPS as Blood' idea is that he's getting hit by stuff he shouldn't (Blood on Morchok, Twilight on Ultraxion etc etc) in order to get vengeance and do damage. If he was in Blood Presence, he'd overaggro easily.

1. Gotcha, my bad
2. Doh, I forgot about that, have been tanking and havn't gotten to dps since Wrath.
3. I wouldn't be so sure that he would pull agro. He definitely wouldn't pull agro from me, as I would be tanking in my dps gear anyway (in this theoretical normal mode 25man run.) Even with using fire/bad to stack vengeance I can't imagine he would have full vengeance more than the tank. The only way I see him pulling agro is if he finds a way to keep full vengeance, against a tank in normal tank gear. Even then it would take a while to overcome that lead.

Maybe he'll get lucky and find a solid/steady raid group with a prot warrior offtank that will Intervene him every 30 seconds.

[esoterickk]

Blood is not a competitive DPS spec and I'm unsure as to why you're so set on saying it is. If you want to have fun and play it for DPS then go ahead, but don't mislead the rest of the community with your baseless spurts of nonsense.

After lurking on these forums for awhile and having comparing DPS outputs in threads for awhile, I am more confident than ever it competes. It is a strong competition in DPS for it's current ilvl of 390. I have always felt this, and my own theorycraft and pratice has shown it to myself time and again.

Theorycraft =/= you going into LFR or pugs and being within top 5 on DPS meters (which is all the proof you've provided in the entirety of this thread). I don't understand why you're so set on telling people Blood is competitive and drilling into those who say it is not.

Look at the top H Ultrax 25 logs for all three specs (while noting that Blood benefits on this fight due to the damage in-take). Blood top parse is behind Frost by ~5k, and being behind Unholy by ~9k. Not to mention, the Blood top parse was done in full DPS gear including a 416 Gurth while tanking the boss (I know this as it is a guild member and he tanks as Blood in DPS gear regularly). These sort of differences are too large to claim Blood as a competitive spec and this is in top-end heroic gear WITH vengeance from boss melee swings.

It's nice you're enjoying yourself and all, but don't try to mislead others in the process.

[Lysah]

I see blood as top spec on H ultraxion? He's 15% above the next highest blood but hey, it counts. Also, the ~45k the rest of the bloods are plateauing at is equal to frost. Unless you want to tell all DKs they can't raid as frost, I don't see how you can make this point.

The real argument you should be making is any fight EXCEPT H ultaxion, because blood is ridiculously behind the other two in all fights. But then again, frost is severely behind unholy, and no one bats an eyelash if people raid as frost. If you're sticking to "do the best you can always," every single DPS DK in the world needs to be unholy, by this logic.

For that matter, how many DKs are raiding as blood in DPS gear? I highly doubt the people main tanking Morchok are in DPS gear. This is the same problem we ran in to with subtlety and beastmastery - sure, you can say it looks bad on paper, but there actually is no experimental evidence. You can point to world of logs all day long where BM is doing 15k on fights MM is doing 25k on, but does it mean anything? How many people in full heroic gear are raiding as BM to see where the spec ACTUALLY stands? (hint: literally zero, their guilds would never let them "underperform")

[Wih]

For that matter, how many DKs are raiding as blood in DPS gear? I highly doubt the people main tanking Morchok are in DPS gear.

I am.

Although, since I got my 4 piece I've had to start wearing that which is why my 4pt13 is reforged to Expertise. Damage in DS is such a joke on the fights I tank that most fights I don't have to worry about wearing full Tank gear (tho, Blackhorn progression this week, we'll see).

EDIT: Clarifying, this is referring to Heroic DS, not Normal.

[Deleted]

Wow. That certainly was a new.. One.. I guess

[Verain]

You absolutely need to get some youtubes going here- I know you can't afford fraps, but try!

I will say this- expect this to be nerfed. There's very few people in my guild that I would trust to try something like this. A spec that can gain a lot of dps from taking damage, and then self sustains with such alacrity has the potential to trivialize certain fights when stacked, and I can assure you that the viability of pretty much ANY tank spec at damage dealing is an oversight. While I wouldn't really count your Ultraxion numbers, it sounds like you are onto a genuine niche that the game (but not the community) supports. It is obviously not intended, as a tank spec doing viable melee damage in the long term makes melee specs useless, but for now, enjoy blazing new ground.

It is very likely that your best in slot gear will be a mix of anything that doesn't have mastery. As for whether haste or crit is better, you will likely have to puzzle around. I honestly think you will likely gain your best benefit from crit overall, because your mechanic involves getting a stack of vengeance and then unloading before it goes away. To be serious about this, find or create a mod that tracks a vengeance bar, and try to time your biggest hits (death strike, DRW) with the biggest peaks of vengeance that you have over the fight- meanwhile, on fights with sustained damage, such as ultrax, crit might not be the big deal. You'll have to sim to find out. You probably want something to display threat as well- I think you'll get more dps out of using some rune strikes in there, but the threat multiplier is something to be concerned about. Remember that with the extra threat of all tank stances, you should get left in the dust by like 30 seconds into a fight if you are in unholy or frost.

You should also try to figure out which of those is better. While unholy lets you hit faster and gives you more runes, on any fight that features a big blast of vengeance delivering your four alpha strikes (DS DS HS HS) will hit harder in frost... so it might be hard to figure out which is better. It likely depends on your vengeance ability.

[Pope]

Verain, you should check out 10 Blood DKs versus heroic Ragnaros.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UXqG...eature=related

[Lysah]

I am.

Although, since I got my 4 piece I've had to start wearing that which is why my 4pt13 is reforged to Expertise. Damage in DS is such a joke on the fights I tank that most fights I don't have to worry about wearing full Tank gear (tho, Blackhorn progression this week, we'll see).

EDIT: Clarifying, this is referring to Heroic DS, not Normal.

People keep saying this in this thread, and I just have to say nerf DKs ^_^

I'll be brutally honest, I haven't raided since my guild died doing heroic BoT/BWD. I assume tanking heroic mode fights requires tank gear, if so many people insist they do it in DPS gear, then perhaps there's a much larger issue with the death knight class going on =p

[Verain]

To the naysayers- yes, blood should NOT put out good numbers. But there aren't many people trying, so OP could definitely be on to something. Yes, it is a thing Blizzard should fix- no tank spec should ever put out dps-like numbers in general, that defeats the point of having non-tank specs. So it is entirely possible and interesting.

Also remember- Strength is likely your least important stat. I'm not joking! The way pretty much every dps works is this:

(stuff that makes you hit harder) x (stuff that makes you hit more) x (stuff that makes you hit twice as hard sometimes) x (anything else)

So for instance, as a rogue:

The more agility I have, the harder I punch something.
The more haste I have, the more often I can press a punch button, and the faster my auto-punches punch.
The more crit I have, the more often my punches deal double damage.
The more mastery I have, the more some subsection of punches deal damage

Just looking at this, you can see that as you increase the rating on one of these, the values of the others increase. For instance, if some fight had a +30% crit buff going on, then crit would become a lot less valuable compared to the next.
2*2*8*2 = 64
If you could add, say, 4 to one of these numbers:
2*6*8*2 = 272
2*2*12*2 = 96

When you can add to the one you have less of, it's better.

Now, for most dps, these numbers don't swing that wildly, and your reforging can't increase, say, your mastery by a factor of 3. But the fact remains that the numbers DO wiggle, and some of the specs where things started close didn't end that way, and this is a big part of why.

As blood, you will have:

(how hard you hit) * (how often you crit) * (how much faster you swing from haste) * (how often you miss due to lack of hit rating) * (how often you miss due to lack of expertise)

One assumes you can cap expertise and hit pretty well. You don't have mastery. You can get more runes with haste, and you can get double damage with crit (how this maps I don't know). Finally, you can increase how hard you hit with Strength, which increases your AP.

Unlike pretty much everyone else, who is tuned to pick their prime stat, YOUR prime stat spends a lot of the fight artificially inflated- it is capped by stamina, but I doubt you'll spend a fight at full vengeance. So increasing strength doesn't have nearly the priority as it would for others. This should change your gemming strategy, and possibly let you select lower item level gear if that happens to be BIS- you'd need a pretty sophisticated sim to fish it out.

---------- Post added 2012-03-13 at 09:17 PM ----------

"Verain, you should check out 10 Blood DKs versus heroic Ragnaros."
While I saw the thread earlier, I can't watch videos until later today.

"Take you to a single-target boss dummy. I'd run your DPS against mine for 6 minutes."
Remember, his Ultrax damage is inflated by two things- he gains vengeance a lot, especially as the fight wears on, and he gains a shortened cooldown and lengthened duration of Dancing Rune Weapon.

It sounds like a good bit of his damage is gained from taking controlled amounts of damage with pooled FU runes, then death striking immediately, both healing himself and hitting for far more than he would without having taken that damage. I doubt very much a target dummy would help.

I mean, my sub spec does pretty poorly on a target dummy too :P

[Mechanic]

"if you'd prefer a lecture, I've a few very catchy ones prepped. Sin and hellfire. One has lepers"

i do disagree though, i tend to see blood tanks putting out almost as much damage as the dpsers, i'm sure that it'd be very effective when geared correctly

If you're seeing that then the dpsers are bad

[Meeni]

People keep saying this in this thread, and I just have to say nerf DKs ^_^

I'll be brutally honest, I haven't raided since my guild died doing heroic BoT/BWD. I assume tanking heroic mode fights requires tank gear, if so many people insist they do it in DPS gear, then perhaps there's a much larger issue with the death knight class going on =p

Afraid i'm going to push you in a corner to let you say nerf DK's then^^
I'm currently the MT in our 25hc guild and there are 4 fights i use my full tank gear for: yor'sahj (solo-tanking), warmaster blackhorn (for now, pretty sure i can get away with a few DPS pieces with another 5% nerf), spine of DW and madness of DW.

The other 4 fights i can get away with ridiculous amounts of DPS gear, all of the DPS numbers were done on 25HC while tanking the bosses
Morchok: 4 piece tank set/soulshifter vortex hc, everything else is DPS gear. (31k DPS)
Warlord Zon'ozz: 50/50 tank and DPS gear and everything reforged for the hit/exp cap. (42k DPS)
Hagara the Stormbinder: 4 piece tank set/soulshifter vortex hc, everything else is DPS gear. (33K DPS)
Ultraxion: 4 piece tank set (pretty much to help the healers out), everything else is DPS gear. (36k DPS)

[Shadowviper]

Wow, people seems to be getting pretty angry because someone broke the norm and tried something different. I applaud you for trying something different from what the internet or other people say are correct. We need more of this and less of everyone being the same spec or geared. Try some new things. Cataclysm is pretty much over.

[Shiveron]

So much hate in this thread. I personally do this all the time. If you're saying its not viable, you're wrong. As it sits, I have "tanked" as blood dps on heroic morchok, yorsahj, ultraxion, and spine. Sure I may not be pulling the 40k of our shadow priest, but I AM pulling around 30k+ depending on fight, right below our lowest "dps" (resto sham that switches to ele for 2 heal fights). Sure if you're going to try this as a pure DPS role, you're probably not going to be optimal compared to a frost or unholy dk, but if you can learn to do this as a tank, and not get raped in the process you have just become one of the most important people in the raid. The fact that you can pull solid numbers, tank the boss, AND provide a massive 1 minute raidwide healing cooldown means you effectively help as every role in the raid. How many other classes can accomplish this? None.

[Verain]

"How many other classes can accomplish this? None."

Um... you do see that this could be a problem, right?

For the heroic tank who subs in dps gear- before our Blood DK took a break from raiding, he did the same, and to great effect. But the point isn't that you can tank heroics in less gear (in 10% nerfed DS, with healers with a bunch of 410 gear), it's that you are doing that on FARM content. Moving from survival to defense when the survival isn't important is great, but I doubt you are going to be on your first madness kill with five pieces of dps gear on. I also doubt you wore this damage gear when this content was meaningful to your guild.

I think the issue that needs most addressing on tank / dps simultaneity is feral combat. That spec is very important in 10m heroic raiding, allowing for a lot more slack, based on the ability to go cat form whenever you can and put out surprisingly great numbers. Blizzard is fixing (nerfing) this in panda, with the new guardian spec having a much less potent cat form.

It's also worth pointing out that I don't think anyone begrudges (or does anything but cheer) when a blood DK is tanking and is clever enough to put out some big numbers to help get the kill. I think the issue comes about when blood is being used as dps- the OP points out some pretty interesting things about grabbing vengeance without putting himself or the raid in danger, and then turning that into damage. This might be dps level damage, is the point, and that is both interesting (the subject of my previous posts) and at the same time something that can't really be tolerated by Blizzard.

[esoterickk]

I see blood as top spec on H ultraxion? He's 15% above the next highest blood but hey, it counts. Also, the ~45k the rest of the bloods are plateauing at is equal to frost. Unless you want to tell all DKs they can't raid as frost, I don't see how you can make this point.

Not quite sure what you're looking at if you're replying to me (considering post is after):

#1 Blood DK Parse on 25 Heroic Ultraxion: 42642
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...5&e=4526#Lucia

#1 Frost DK Parse on 25 Heroic Ultraxion: 47566
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...&e=6462#Ibanel

#1 Unholy DK Parse on 25 Heroic Ultraxion: 51617
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...&e=4953#Kapaya

~5k behind Frost, ~9k behind Unholy (as said in my previous post).

The real argument you should be making is any fight EXCEPT H ultaxion, because blood is ridiculously behind the other two in all fights. But then again, frost is severely behind unholy, and no one bats an eyelash if people raid as frost. If you're sticking to "do the best you can always," every single DPS DK in the world needs to be unholy, by this logic.

Exactly why I chose Ultraxion. This fight favors Blood most and yet it is still so far behind. Claiming this as competitive is downright wrong, and requires you to be in a sub-par spec to pull sub-par numbers; or be decked out in full heroic gear and be able to tank it at the same time (as our DK does for every fight).

For that matter, how many DKs are raiding as blood in DPS gear? I highly doubt the people main tanking Morchok are in DPS gear. This is the same problem we ran in to with subtlety and beastmastery - sure, you can say it looks bad on paper, but there actually is no experimental evidence. You can point to world of logs all day long where BM is doing 15k on fights MM is doing 25k on, but does it mean anything? How many people in full heroic gear are raiding as BM to see where the spec ACTUALLY stands? (hint: literally zero, their guilds would never let them "underperform")

That's the thing, a lot of the top Blood DK parses are infact in DPS gear. Considering things are nerfed to shit and it's all on farm, it gives them the leeway to do so without hindering the raid. For it to be effective you need to be able to tank the boss in DPS gear and have a raid to handle that; which will come in farm via being able to not-care and do these things.

From a progression stand-point this is horrible though.

If you're Blood and solely DPS'ing, it's shit. You are required to take extra damage in order to build vengeance and pull low numbers.
If you're tanking and going for the extra DPS, you get hit harder. Negating the primary purpose of being a tank via reducing damage as much as possible, just to push a little more damage.

The only time it's viable is if your Healers can handle it and you want to push your Tank's/raid's damage. Claiming Blood as a higher Tank DPS spec is correct. However claiming Blood as a competitive DPS spec soely: no, just no.

[DaNoob2]

I dunno I think blood dps could have a spot in a raid. There is some utility that may make the spec useful. Heroic Morchok for instance is often hard on guild that 3 heal is and putting your plate wearers and a blood dps as soaker on the solo healing side could be pretty handy.

Shockadins have on several occasions been decent also. I wouldn't get too attached to it though, it's not what is intended out of the blood spec and it will likely get broken if it's too good.

[Halym]

If you're actually taking a DPS slot in a raid and using blood as your spec, you're a waste of time, space, and air.

Respec frost or unholy or leave the raid.

[Nillo]

I dunno I think blood dps could have a spot in a raid. There is some utility that may make the spec useful. Heroic Morchok for instance is often hard on guild that 3 heal is and putting your plate wearers and a blood dps as soaker on the solo healing side could be pretty handy.

Still unless you really really really struggle with healing sub rogues and kitties (with bear talents) are way better for that.

[ZeroEdgeir]

While I give props to pulling this off to the OP and few others who have, I can see this being killed come MoP.

And how? One easy fix: Vengeance does not stack unless in Blood Presence. Now, you are a serious threat issue to the raid. I would not be surprised if they did something along these lines for all tanks:

Paladin: Prot Spec + Righteous Fury
Warrior: Prot Spec + Defensive Stance
Druid: Guardian Spec + Bear Form
DKs: Blood Spec + Blood Presence
Monk: Brewmaster Spec + Drunken Monkey Form? (I dunno on that one, but sounds cool!)

[Pikevinge]

Well, I don't see Blood dps as optimal, 6 of the DKs out of the 10 that killed Heroic Ragnaros were blood dps. So OP isn't the only one doing it.