Tank DK with lots of DPS/ looking for tips and Advice

[Jaakl]

Hello fellow undead.

I'm a Blood DK and I want to pull off a lot of DPS on raid while tanking.

Do I need to have DPS gear?
Runeforge Fallen crusader?
Any stats to be mind on SoO at the moment, like a priority (I know that mastery is a must but any other)?
Gems?

Thank you in advance!

[Desert Claw]

The blood tanking guide on this forum should contain information about runeforge/geming/enchants and how you should play.

[Tehterokkar]

If you want DPS without neglecting your survivability at all really, go dodge/parry reforge/gemming. Also Rune of the Fallen Crusader is what you should have anyway.

[CaptainFapin]

My set up for blood DK. I want to get strength and stamina as my main. Then expertise, parry and dodge. But if you want a little bit more DPS find some armor that would take away expertise, dodge or parry and replace with mastery, hit, critical strike?

A tip for tanking. Spam Dark Command and and blood boil while having Blood presence on.

[Cryopathy]

My set up for blood DK. I want to get strength and stamina as my main. Then expertise, parry and dodge. But if you want a little bit more DPS find some armor that would take away expertise, dodge or parry and replace with mastery, hit, critical strike?

A tip for tanking. Spam Dark Command and and blood boil while having Blood presence on.

This is all terrible advice.

OP, get your hit to 7.5% and expertise to 7.5%, get as much Mastery as you need to feel comfortable surviving, then stack Parry > Dodge. Fallen Crusader is fine. Tank as often as you can to maximize Vengeance and Riposte uptime, soak as much magic damage as you can with AMS to provide RP, and make sure you use all your DPS cooldowns.

[Willias]

Hello fellow undead.

I'm a Blood DK and I want to pull off a lot of DPS on raid while tanking.

Do I need to have DPS gear?
Runeforge Fallen crusader?
Any stats to be mind on SoO at the moment, like a priority (I know that mastery is a must but any other)?
Gems?

Thank you in advance!

Get hit to 8%. Get expertise to 8%. Then stack the hell out of parry while focusing on dodge/parry gear.

[Tehterokkar]

Get hit to 7.5%. Get expertise to 7.5%. Then stack the hell out of parry while focusing on dodge/parry gear.

Fixed in bold

[Deleted]

Im just curious too. How close in dps would it be to use parry/dodge gear compared to full dps gear?

[chibichibiko]

Runningman, full dps gear would mean crit instead of dodge/parry. Haste is pretty garbage for damage compared to crit, and it's probably behind dodge/parry for most dk's too (hardcapping expertise is likewise not valued as highly). The gain is pretty weak in my opinion, since you should game the fight to have near 100% riposte uptime anyway, making dodge/parry strong hybrid stats. The gain would be marginal in terms of dps and rather noticable in terms of survivability (you'd also generate less RP, which could mess with your rhythm).

If you're looking for a dps gear choice that actually makes a significant difference without a lot of cost, get skeer's dps trinket, monitor the proc, and refresh your diseases when it's about over. It's like our own UVLS to game and it can be fantastic if it's up at the right times.

[TheTrueAlpha]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...alpha/advanced

That is my armory, and here is a basic guideline of DPS as a Blood DK.

Stat Priority: Hit Cap > Crit > Dodge/Parry > Haste > Mastery.
T5 Talent: Runic Empowerment or Blood Tap - It is really a fight to fight basis on which you should run; personally I prefer Runic Empowerment just because overall it is the highest rune regeneration, but Blood Tap can be really nice especially with the Curse of Hubris for pooling lots of death strikes.
T1 Talent: Roiling Blood on AoE & Plague Leech on single target. Plague Leech is minimal, but it does make a difference.
Glyphs: This is really fight dependent, but I run the core three you see for the majority of the fights. Glyph of Dark Sim & others can be useful at times.

Gear Priority: Just follow your stat priorities, personally I stick with the tank 4 piece for the survivability because of how sketchy tanking can already be with such little survivability stats.

If you have any questions, just post them here or contact me in-game. And for reference for individual glyphs etc, here is a list of my parses: http://www.proraiders.com/player/ind...pec=Blood&r=25

[MagmyGeraith]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...alpha/advanced

That is my armory, and here is a basic guideline of DPS as a Blood DK.

Stat Priority: Hit Cap > Crit > Dodge/Parry > Haste > Mastery.
T5 Talent: Runic Empowerment or Blood Tap - It is really a fight to fight basis on which you should run; personally I prefer Runic Empowerment just because overall it is the highest rune regeneration, but Blood Tap can be really nice especially with the Curse of Hubris for pooling lots of death strikes.
T1 Talent: Roiling Blood on AoE & Plague Leech on single target. Plague Leech is minimal, but it does make a difference.
Glyphs: This is really fight dependent, but I run the core three you see for the majority of the fights. Glyph of Dark Sim & others can be useful at times.

Gear Priority: Just follow your stat priorities, personally I stick with the tank 4 piece for the survivability because of how sketchy tanking can already be with such little survivability stats.

If you have any questions, just post them here or contact me in-game. And for reference for individual glyphs etc, here is a list of my parses: http://www.proraiders.com/player/ind...pec=Blood&r=25

Runic Corruption is better than RE. Unless you constantly have both rune pairs on CD (which is very hard with proper AMS soaking), you're going to be wasting procs. You can't waste procs with RC unless you have zero runes on CD.

Also, 15% Expertise is a very minor DPS increase. Rune Strike can't be dodged or parried. Death Strike can't be parried. The only attacks 15% expertise helps are auto swings and Heart Strike.

Also, while Haste is a dps increase, it's so small with proper AMS soaking.

Focus on Parry->Dodge->Mastery if you want a balanced tank setup after you get 7.5% Hit and Exp. Raw crit will give more DPS, but Parry (with parry haste and SoB procs) and dodge isn't much less.

[TheTrueAlpha]

Runic Corruption is better than RE. Unless you constantly have both rune pairs on CD (which is very hard with proper AMS soaking), you're going to be wasting procs. You can't waste procs with RC unless you have zero runes on CD.

Also, 15% Expertise is a very minor DPS increase. Rune Strike can't be dodged or parried. Death Strike can't be parried. The only attacks 15% expertise helps are auto swings and Heart Strike.

Also, while Haste is a dps increase, it's so small with proper AMS soaking.

Focus on Parry->Dodge->Mastery if you want a balanced tank setup after you get 7.5% Hit and Exp. Raw crit will give more DPS, but Parry (with parry haste and SoB procs) and dodge isn't much less.

I said for PURE dps, and obviously for a balance Dodge/Parry is fine. Also, Runic Corruption is DEFINITELY not better than RE for maximizing Blood DPS. The moment you have 2 death runes you are Death Striking as RE, so you aren't getting a loss of any procs.

[Cryopathy]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...alpha/advanced

That is my armory, and here is a basic guideline of DPS as a Blood DK.

Stat Priority: Hit Cap > Crit > Dodge/Parry > Haste > Mastery.
T5 Talent: Runic Empowerment or Blood Tap - It is really a fight to fight basis on which you should run; personally I prefer Runic Empowerment just because overall it is the highest rune regeneration, but Blood Tap can be really nice especially with the Curse of Hubris for pooling lots of death strikes.
T1 Talent: Roiling Blood on AoE & Plague Leech on single target. Plague Leech is minimal, but it does make a difference.
Glyphs: This is really fight dependent, but I run the core three you see for the majority of the fights. Glyph of Dark Sim & others can be useful at times.

Gear Priority: Just follow your stat priorities, personally I stick with the tank 4 piece for the survivability because of how sketchy tanking can already be with such little survivability stats.

If you have any questions, just post them here or contact me in-game. And for reference for individual glyphs etc, here is a list of my parses: http://www.proraiders.com/player/ind...pec=Blood&r=25

The biggest component of #1 (or close to it) parses isn't stat priority, playing ability, or talent choices. It's being able to tailor the fight strategy such that you maximize tanking uptime. Having consistently high vengeance is more important to tank DPS than anything else. The vast majority of tanks don't have the luxury of being able to tell their guild "hey, I want to rank as high as I can, let me tank Iron Juggernaut for the entire first phase and take all of the stacks of Ignite Armor" for example.

Using both Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell and Glyph of Regenerative Magic together is usually counterproductive. You should only use Glyph of Regenerative Magic in most cases. 100k damage absorbed over the duration of AMS will provide you with 100 RP, so you need to take 100k damage to gain 100 RP with the Glyph of AMS; without the glyph, you need to take 133k damage. Most of the things you'll soak with AMS will do more damage than that, which means you'll cap your RP without the glyph of AMS and be able to benefit from greater CD reduction from Glyph of Regenerative Magic than you would have if you were using both glyphs at the same time. In practice, the amount you need to absorb to cap RP is even less than 100k, because you're rarely sitting at 0 RP, especially while actively tanking. This further supports using solely the Glyph of Regenerative Magic instead of both glyphs together.

Also, you forgot to mention Expertise in your stat priority, but I assume that is an oversight.

[Raikh]

I said for PURE dps, and obviously for a balance Dodge/Parry is fine. Also, Runic Corruption is DEFINITELY not better than RE for maximizing Blood DPS. The moment you have 2 death runes you are Death Striking as RE, so you aren't getting a loss of any procs.

As long as you don't overcap resources waiting is not a dps loss, so RC is no dps loss in comparison to RE in that sense, you could argue about the actual runes you get back, but that also isn't necessarily given. Simply because you can waste RE procs, RC and BT procs are much harder to waste. If you have no fully depleted rune and RE procs, nothing happens, RC still regenerates your runes and as long as you don't get over 12 stacks of BT you don't lose a procc, too.

@topic
DpS Blood dk builds revolve around crit, so either using dps gear or using dodge/parry builds, high dodge parry builds wield more crit than real dps gear, as riposte affects parry and dodge, so as long as riposte is active you kind ahave 1,5 times crit on every item.
Depending on your actual tanking active time and ams soaking availability etc. haste can also be quite good until a certain degree (8-10k, the more you can ams soka/ the more you're actually tanking the lower this "cap" gets). And naturally 7,5% hit and expertise.
Otherwise as already said, fallen crusader on your weapon is important, dps trinkets are also important, especilly thoks tailtip and Skeers bloodsoaked talisman, a more defensive dps trinket would be curse of hubris, its not that good overall but you can combine it with DRW everytime which yields some nice burst.

Rest is pretty much play style, don't sit on resources too much, waste no resources, use SR on 35% and below, you want to spam RS and DS (atleast to the degree of not dying because too low blood shields) and only use your blood runes for SR, blood boil to refrsh dots and on hs only with 2-3 targets steadily otherwise only if you slowly get starved on resources, but keep that one blood rune on cd to not waste rune regen.
If you actually play with RE you want to keep one blood rune all the time, so RE can't proc blood runes, which would be very likely a dps loss.

[TheTrueAlpha]

The biggest component of #1 (or close to it) parses isn't stat priority, playing ability, or talent choices. It's being able to tailor the fight strategy such that you maximize tanking uptime. Having consistently high vengeance is more important to tank DPS than anything else. The vast majority of tanks don't have the luxury of being able to tell their guild "hey, I want to rank as high as I can, let me tank Iron Juggernaut for the entire first phase and take all of the stacks of Ignite Armor" for example.

Using both Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell and Glyph of Regenerative Magic together is usually counterproductive. You should only use Glyph of Regenerative Magic in most cases. 100k damage absorbed over the duration of AMS will provide you with 100 RP, so you need to take 100k damage to gain 100 RP with the Glyph of AMS; without the glyph, you need to take 133k damage. Most of the things you'll soak with AMS will do more damage than that, which means you'll cap your RP without the glyph of AMS and be able to benefit from greater CD reduction from Glyph of Regenerative Magic than you would have if you were using both glyphs at the same time. In practice, the amount you need to absorb to cap RP is even less than 100k, because you're rarely sitting at 0 RP, especially while actively tanking. This further supports using solely the Glyph of Regenerative Magic instead of both glyphs together.

Also, you forgot to mention Expertise in your stat priority, but I assume that is an oversight.

The majority of competitive DPS tanks never drop stacks on Iron Juggernaught. As for other fights, the only fights that come down to accommodation are Immerseus/Sha of Pride/General Nazgrim. Fights like Malkorok are pure DPS checks. And there are principle things that you need to be doing, which is why I linked him parsing, for example: Reapplying diseases on DRW, making sure you're getting your 2 double soul reapers during DRW, etc

- - - Updated - - -

As long as you don't overcap resources waiting is not a dps loss, so RC is no dps loss in comparison to RE in that sense, you could argue about the actual runes you get back, but that also isn't necessarily given. Simply because you can waste RE procs, RC and BT procs are much harder to waste. If you have no fully depleted rune and RE procs, nothing happens, RC still regenerates your runes and as long as you don't get over 12 stacks of BT you don't lose a procc, too.

You realize Runic Corruption is only 27% of a death rune on Rune Strike, the other 13.5% is a blood rune which is a HUGE DPS loss. The reason RE and BT are superior is simply because you get 45% of a death rune from RE and 40% of a death rune from BT. A blood rune is much less damage than a death rune.

[Nillo]

You realize Runic Corruption is only 27% of a death rune on Rune Strike, the other 13.5% is a blood rune which is a HUGE DPS loss. The reason RE and BT are superior is simply because you get 45% of a death rune from RE and 40% of a death rune from BT. A blood rune is much less damage than a death rune.

Still you'll never ever get even close to 45% with RE it's just not doable.
RC might probably not be the best choice now since the patch has made Blood Runes significantly worse (and due to now being rune capped more often they're not even good for RP) but I'll never agree with RE being a good choice - it forces bad gameplay and unless you get really really lucky with 2 procs in a row you will lose more than the ~10% difference it has to BT.

[Reniat]

As nillo said RE is simply an awful choice for blood. If you want further evidence here is the math:

it takes time to dump your rp. at least 1 second per RS. Don't even think in terms of RP, think in terms of seconds. specifically seconds after you dump your FU pairs to dump RP (which you HAVE to do with RE since it only procs on fully depleted runes), which can also be thought of as seconds without an FU pair available.

after 1 second you will have done 1 RS. You have a 45% chance to have 1 F or U rune and a 55% chance to have nothing. meaning you have a 0% chance to have a DS to use.

after 2 seconds you will have done 2 RS. You will have a .45*.45=20.25% chance to an FU pair, and a .45*.55*2=49.5% to have 1 F or U rune, and a .55*.55=30.25% chance to have nothing. This means you have a 20.25% chance to have a DS to use 2 seconds after you dump all your FU pairs a.k.a. 2 seconds where you are guaranteed not to be able to Death Strike unless your other pair is done refreshing.

after 3 seconds you will have done 3 RS. You will have a .45^3=9.1125% chance to have 3 runes back (though any number above 2 runes back doesn't matter since you will have gotten your FU pair, we may as well include it so you can add each of these iterations up to 1 to verify my math if you'd like. if all the possibilities don't add up to 100% then i've done something wrong), and a .45^2*55*3=33.4125% chance to have an FU pair back, a .45*.55^2*3=40.8375% and .55^3=16.6375% chance to have nothing. This means you have a .334125+.091125= 42.525% chance to have a DS to use a full three seconds after dumping all your FU pairs, meaning 3 guaranteed seconds of no DS unless your other pair comes back up.

Remember that you don't always get to wait until your other pair is almost back to death strike unless content is faceroll, and that the base rune regen speed with no haste rating is 7.9365 seconds (not sure how the game rounds internally) WITH full raid buffs.

After 4 seconds you will have done 4 Rune Strikes. You will have a .45^4=~4.1% chance to have 4 back and a .45^3*.55*4=~20.048% to have 3 back (again keeping the values above 2 in here only for thoroughness), a .45^2*.55^2*6=~36.75% chance to have 2 back, a .45*.55^3*4=~29.948% to have an orphaned rune, and a .55^4=~9.151% to have nothing at all. This means you have a .041+.20048+.3675=~60.898% to have a DS to use after 4 seconds of being without without having your recharging pair back.


This means even if you fill every GCD with RS with no delay whatsoever you're statistically going to have to wait a bit under 4 seconds between when you put your FU pairs down and when you get DS again when you use RE. Now, the time it takes to GET the return is about the same for all of them (RE>RC>BT for raw throughtput but all very close. .45vs.405vs.4), but RE is the ONLY one that makes you unable to death strike until you get your return. RC and BT both let you hold on to that pair until you either take damage that requires a DS, or you are about to cap FU pairs. RE doesnt, and forces you to wait until you get your return before you can react with DS again.

So just for a recap there is a:
0% chance you'll have one again before your other pair recharges after 1 second
20.25% chance you'll have one again before your other pair recharges after 2 seconds
42.525% chance you'll have one again before your other pair recharges after 3 seconds
60.898% chance you'll have one again before your other pair recharges after 4 seconds

plus this is all assuming you only use RS for every single gcd until you get return back. Four rune strikes takes 120 rp, so you are also banking on having enough rp generation so that there isn't ANY delay on rune strikes, as well as assuming that you didn't use BB, HS, horn of winter, DnD at any point along the way either. Using ANY other GCD moves increases that time by 1 second per move used, so i hope you weren't planning on using that CS proc on dnd, or dumping that blood rune on soul reaper.

remember that all this time is time you are GUARANTEED not to be able to react to damage unless you are right about to get your other recharging runes back, which is not something you can count on for progression levels of incoming damage. This ALONE makes RE completely non-viable for blood.


@sean
If you just look at the rune return per rune strike (45% vs 40.5% vs 40%) by itself to analyse the t75 options, you're missing a LOT. That's like judging a book by the number of pages. How each one works is very different, and the abstract "how" behind each of them determines how useful they are. As mathed out above, RE is just bad out of principle once you look at HOW it works, not just what it does in terms of DS return. RC is not the best damage right now seeing as how much resource gen we have in 5.4, but BT is pretty much waste-resistant by its very nature. RE you're still taking a pretty significant gamble that you'll never be left with an orphaned rune. Plus you are not considering that you can turn B runes into half death strikes with BT, allowing even more overall death strikes, which is the best dpet and is pretty significant with our current resource gen. Not to mention BT is also amazing for survival, and RE is abysmal for that.