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  1. #41
    Yeah.. even with the best possible scenario (509 ilvl weapon) it only takes 103.5k to make BB do more single target damage, making heart strike pretty much pointless.

    You technically should be watching your AP to see where you're at while not taking much damage (such as a tank swap) in order to maximize dps, but this is maximizing your damage in a time when you will be doing diddly squat for damage anyway since if you had vengeance enough to do decent damage you would probably be using Blood Boil.

  2. #42
    Deleted
    Dk blood+vengeance need a nerf . Yesterday i Did FL HC and DS HC with my alt dk blood Lampadìna, my dps gear sucks is like 392 ilvl but in blood spec i Did 170k on Baleroc and 62k on Ultraxion HC (100k burst with heroism) lol

  3. #43
    Deleted
    I accidentally forgot to change from dps to tank gear last time I tanked Ultraxion 10m heroic. I only noticed it after the fight because I didn't fall low on health during the whole fight. I could literally spam Death Strike because of the huge amount of haste on my dps gear. It was a really fun way of tanking, but I'm guessing it won't be a viable play style at lvl 90.

  4. #44
    You are correct. tanking in full DPS gear may work at 35% nerf, but it won't work as well at 0%

  5. #45
    After healing through Cata on my Priest and due to several changes in our ten man raidteam I will be tanking in Pandaria. I have some experience with it but not that much. I tried warrior and druid tanking aswell, I didn't like tanking as warrior and eventhough the druid seems a good alternative I want to tank on my DK. I have quite a lot experience PVP on my DK, I did a lot of random BG's and some arena, and also in BG's I did flagcarrying as blood. I did the bulk of my tanking as frost in WOTLK, so I am frantically picking it up for MOP. What I am failing to get working is to have a death strike ready to counter heavy damage. I tried both runic empowerment and bloodtap and I have an addon to show my runes more clearly, but I cant get a FU rune pair available when I need it. Bloodtap gives me a deathrune but when both my frost and unholy runes are depleted I still can't death strike, same goes for runic empowerment. Do you have tips what to do to have a garanteed death strike available when you need it most?

  6. #46
    In your situation, if you're using BT, only hit BT when you have enough charges for two Death runes, not one. RE you'll just have to wait for your second proc - this is the downside to RE.

  7. #47
    @drubibu If you find yourself frequently not having a DS available when you need it, you are probably using DS too much and non-optimally. If you save it for bursts you shouldn't generally be starved for FU pairs. Also don't be afraid to hold on to BT stacks. While you don't want to waste stacks if you can avoid it, you shouldn't use death strikes in bad places just to keep from capping stacks.

    Beyond timing death strike better you can work to minimize the burst in the first place with proper cooldown usage. Are you making sure you have good uptime on bone shield? Are you using a cooldown like IBF or VB when you know you won't have a death strike in a while? A BIG part of death knight tanking is making sure we are using our cooldowns optimally in addition to just our death strikes, and when done right the two will work together. If you have a death strike in your back pocket either through 10 or more stacks of BT or just an FU pair handy, don't use a cooldown (unless of course there is a stomp/focused assault/devastate type mechanic obviously) and save them for when you know you won't have a DS ready for 5-6 seconds. Use it preemptively, not after bursts. Stuff like IBF, bone shield and unglyphed VB should be used before you burst to minimize the impact. They each have 10 or more second durations, so you can easily fill any DS gap with any one of them.

    finally if you find you are still bursting way to often and don't have enough cooldowns/death strikes, get more stamina. Effective health is the best way to passively minimize the threat from burst damage. In writing this I realized I didn't include the CD use information I just gave you in the guide itself. Thanks for indirectly bringing that to my attention.

  8. #48
    Thanks for the quick replies. I haven't been tanking raids other than LFR so there haven't been any stressfull situations where cooldown management was critical. But your point is well taken and I should pay more attention to cooldowns in combination with rune-management. So if I was to anticipate big incoming damage that I want to counter with 1 or 2 death strikes I will build up a stack of Blood Tap, and wait for the incoming damage. I will experiment with that strategy, but I wonder, will that give you a lot of idle time? I mean while saving your BT stack for DS and with no bloodrunes available you are basically not able to do much. There is no 'filler spell' other than RS and if your runic power is low you cannot do much else. Maybe it is my mindset of "always be casting" that is hindering me. This maybe more of a dps rule of thumb, as a healer there are also situations where it is better to not cast aswell. So thanks again for all the help, I will be trying it out.

  9. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by Reniat View Post
    Hit and Expertise
    Even with the change to Scent of Blood in mists, there is no value of hit/exp that we HAVE to have, and for that matter we don't strictly need any either. Instead of trying to add hit/exp into the blood stat priority (which is already inherently subjective due to there not being a specific amount of EH we need) i'm going to quick run down the benefits of Hit/exp.

    With more hit/exp you will have a chance at more SoB stacks, so in a way you're basically choosing between one RNG and another. in general the dmg reduction from hit/exp capping is around 2%. This makes hit/exp capping a net loss in dmg reduction after factoring in the loss of other stats. Hit/exp also provide stability in the form of less missed Death Strikes. While it's rare that a missed Death Strike results in a death, it is still dangerous and minimizing the risk definitely has value. A larger factor is DPS, and hit/exp capping is a very significant dps increase. If your healers are not running into mana issues and you need more raid dps, definitely consider getting some hit/exp.
    I wanted to comment on your section talking about Death Strike and Hit/Expertise. You mentioned that a missed Death Strike could result in a Death, but on live servers right now when I am attacking the MoP boss level training dummy, my Death Strike misses and dodges both proc the heal and Blood Shield (there are no parries as the ability can't be parried). I'm not sure if this has changed since you wrote the guide, but I think it needs to be mentioned. This would seem to lower the value of hit/expertise as survival stats even further.

    Here's a screenshot of my Death Strike miss healing me and proccing Blood Shield. http://i.imgur.com/F3VS2.jpg

  10. #50
    I am aware that death strike is still healing/shielding on misses and dodges, and am operating under the assumption that it is a mistake. Given that it's been a month of 5.0 and it's still behaving this way I'm beginning to think this is intended, but am REALLY confused by it if it is. not making it guaranteed made the non-parryable change make so much sense, so why they are just keeping the band aid on is beyond me. My plan is to wait until right before mop hits, and if it hasn't been hotfixed by then I will update the guide while I wait for servers to go live (yay guildies wanting to server first making me tank from midnight PST to whenever they feel like they don't need me anymore...).

    I still appreciate the heads up.

  11. #51
    There is a chance that it isn't a mistake because they went through changed a few tank abilities to always work when they missed the attack that procs it. Can't remember off the top of my head what they were though.

    I think the carrot on the stick to make us stack hit and expertise is the vengeance change and how much damage tanks can possibly contribute now. The bandaid was done before the new vengeance model. So now instead of forcing us to get hit and expertise to make our active mitigation work, we have the option of getting it to bring more damage to the table.
    The more of my behavior you accept, the less you will have to forgive.

  12. #52
    will update guide with hit/exp adjustments and other tweaks sometime today. still recovering from server first sleep deprivation.

    EDIT: Updated to reflect the fact that DS always healing is intended, as well as some other minor tweaks.
    Last edited by Reniat; 2012-09-27 at 09:52 AM.

  13. #53
    Deleted
    Sorry noob question here, that probably is so obvious that it isn't mentioned.

    When I pull a trash pack with outbreak on cooldown, do I apply my diseases by using PS and IT, or do I wait for outbreak cd/skip the diseases? Asking this since the guide does not mention PS or IT which made me wondering.

  14. #54
    Quote Originally Posted by kamakirigege View Post
    Sorry noob question here, that probably is so obvious that it isn't mentioned.

    When I pull a trash pack with outbreak on cooldown, do I apply my diseases by using PS and IT, or do I wait for outbreak cd/skip the diseases? Asking this since the guide does not mention PS or IT which made me wondering.
    That's entirely up to you and your healer (and to a lesser extent, your DPS).

    If it's quite a large pack, I'd spread at least Blood Plague. And if you can't maintain AoE aggro from your DPS, Frost Fever might be important too. I always keep both disease up; it's fun seeing 100k DPS on certain trash packs! It's not too much of a pain if you manage your runes right before a pack is finished with (Outbreak on cooldown? Save a U/F combo).

  15. #55
    Mechagnome Pandorox's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Wih View Post
    Reniat - you aren't taking Outbreak into account. UB is used instead of Outbreak when it is on CD for application of diseases (or vice versa, with Outbreak + Pest in replacement of UB). So, it should be 3 times in 1 minute, not 2 times in 90 seconds.
    Proc'd Blood Boil refreshes all the dots on your target. It shouldn't fall of in the first place

  16. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by Sevii View Post
    Proc'd Blood Boil refreshes all the dots on your target. It shouldn't fall of in the first place
    Any target with diseases already on it, yes. Not on targets without diseases, such as if it's another separate pack of mobs, or streaming adds (though for streaming adds, Rolling Blood would probably be the superior choice).

  17. #57
    I've been using both UB and RB so far, and still haven't found one to be absolutely superior to another outside of chain pulling (where RB is clearly better). Currently RB is better simply because UB is bugged, but that's another thread.

  18. #58
    Mechagnome Tekloth's Avatar
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    UB is actually quite useful on Gara'jal the Spiritbinder if your dps has some trouble with the spirit realm adds.
    What I did to help them was pop UB and just run all around the place spreading diseases on the adds, there's no reason not to do this because the add that you have to kill to get out has so little hp, that it shouldn't take more than 10 seconds out of the 30 you have to kill it. Also take into account that staying in the spirit realm for the maximum time allowed will get you stacks from Spiritual Innervation which increases your mastery (as blood) if you can get your healers to heal you downstairs as well.

  19. #59
    That's what I did this week and it was pretty successful. When i get around to writing that "dk specific encounter guide" for MV then i'll include that. As far as a timeline for that section goes, maybe after midterms?

  20. #60
    The Patient Sygil's Avatar
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    Hi, I'm having trouble with my rotation. If I have 1B 1F 1U, HoW on cd and not enough RP to use RS, do I just autoattack and wait for runes? (Using Runic empowerment).

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