What makes a Blood DK skilled?

[Rayaleith]

Was having a conversation with a friend, about DK tanks. We both have the impression that -although it could apply to all classes- especially for blood DKs you can see a REALLY good one needing REALLY less healing. So... What does a REALLY skilled blood DK does and take so much less damage or at least recovers so much better than the average DK?

I've heard stories about Raegwyn for instance that many times during raid (not in progression of course) asks from his healers to let him do his thing. What does this guy do anyway? I mean... This is not rocket science. There are some skills that should be activated in the right time. What is this right time? Is it something that sounds advanced eg. boss swing timer? Is it something else? Opinions?

[Soisoisoi]

The secret is binding Death Strike to Mousewheel up AND down

Honestly most of it is just knowing how to play the class in general and combining that with trusting your raid and understanding how they heal you and vice versa; nothing like a healer who has no idea how DKs work spam healing and overhealing because they panic heal. Oh and doing lots of testing and such for the solo kills.

Mionelol and others though, who knows, they're crazy!

[mercutiouk]

I certainly remember from when I last played timing death strikes to JUST make the refresh, there was a lot of knowing when to pop certain cooldowns that would give you a rune at the right time to have death strike available when you needed it.

So there's 2 bits - timing and lining up death strikes

I wasn't pro by a long way but I could sit on a boss with a pretty impressive blood shield up with a little work.

[Donald Hellscream]

the timing of death strike is pretty much the cornerstone that divides people who time and line up death strikes for maximum heals and bloodshields and people who just use it whenever they can which will often provide overhealing and very weak bloodshields.

[Challenge]

Managing bone shield properly and always having it up for big hits, timing of death strikes, ams usage properly and learning to play proactive even though the spec is reactive in nature.

And the obviously cd management.

[Forgettable]

1. Install addon Blood Shield Tracker.
2. Watch addon
3. Time Death Strikes
4. ???
5. Profit!

[Scorned]

The short answer is hold threat, use Death Strike reactively, use your timers intelligently, and do damage. To break it down:


1) Hold threat. This is the easiest of the tasks but it's generally the most important. Getting people killed because you failed to pick up a fresh add is really bad.

2) Death Strike timing. DS is a self-heal and should be used when you actually need healing, and as such it's important that you monitor your HP at all times. This is where inexperienced Blood tanks usually have the most problems. Poor play involves not using DS when your health dips -- either because you squandered your UF runes when you were at full health, or because you weren't watching your HP and didn't realize you were supposed to DS at that moment. A good rule of thumb is to only use Death Strikes when you're missing significant health (down to the 80-60% HP range), or if you're in danger of being one-shot by an incoming attack (e.g. Nazgrim's Execute), or finally if you're totally capped on runes and not in immediate danger.

3) Timer usage. Blood is particularly vulnerable to getting bursted down if there are no timers active, but thankfully you have the most personal timers among the tanks. Proactive timers like Bone Shield, Anti-magic Shell or Icebound Fortitude should be used when heavy incoming damage is expected, while reactive timers like Death Pact should be used after your health dips. Hybrid timers like Vampiric Blood or 4-piece T16 Dancing Rune Weapon can be used in either capacity. Keep in mind that can draw upon a lot of reserve UF runes through your various timers when you need on-demand Death Strikes: Blood Tap, Plague Leech, Empowered Rune Weapon, and the aforementioned 4-piece T16 bonus. If a DK dies due to lack of healing but didn't use most or all of those timers, he made a mistake.

4) DPS. The importance of this can range from completely superfluous to absolutely critical, depending on your group's size, gear and the specific encounter. This is influenced most by your choice of gearing and your use of abilities like Soul Reaper, Death and Decay (Crimson Scourge procs), smart usage of Army of the Dead and frequent use of Dancing Rune Weapon and AMS, all while gaming Vengeance. I don't often recommend sacrificing significant levels of survivability for DPS gains, but there are definitely things that can be done to maximize damage without putting yourself or others at risk.


Additional notes:
CC is a thing. Stunning/interrupting your targets will improve survivability while Grip/Grasp to stack mobs can facilitate both survivability and DPS. Use them.

I'm not a big fan of Blood Shield Tracker, simply because it can encourage reckless play. See, if you really wanted to maximize the size of your shields, the ideal playstyle would be to allow yourself to drop to very low HP% before you use Death Strike. This would also succeed in giving your healers a heart attack. It's generally much safer to use Death Strike immediately after you dip to moderate health, rather than waiting until you reach a critical value. If your healers are constantly paranoid that you're one hit away from dying, they're going to watch you like a hawk at the expense of the rest of the raid. One of your goals as a tank should be to minimize the number of "triage moments" that healers encounter, where they need to choose whether to heal the tank or someone else in the raid. If a DPS dies and a healer could have saved him had he not been spamming the tank, then that death is partially your fault.

I recommend a Skada plugin called Skada for Tanks. It adds a criteria called Required Healing, which quantifies a value for how self-sufficient you are as a tank. Most raids I produce about 50-60% of the total healing I receive, and the vast majority of outside healing that I do receive is in the form of "maintenance heals" that don't require much reaction to apply -- things like Beacon of Light, Lifebloom, Earth Shield, Chain Heal, Atonement, etc. The less that healers have to react to tank damage, the more they can react to raid damage.

[Stacie]

Perfect gaming of runes and knowledge of fight. The aim is to know when you are doing to take damage and know what ability is next or what you can save for the heavy damage moments. Allot of DK's will go all out just game runes and roll with the damage as it comes.

[Anium]

I was once standing next to a training dummy while a blood dk was wielding away at it. Suddenly, one of his little blood worms exploded, hit me, and healed me for more than 1.5 million life. I just, i just don't know. I don't pve anymore, so please take this with a grain of salt, but that shit right there seems ridic. I imagine they have equally powerful stuff in their arsenal.

Cool story right?

[Deleted]

I was once standing next to a training dummy while a blood dk was wielding away at it. Suddenly, one of his little blood worms exploded, hit me, and healed me for more than 1.5 million life. I just, i just don't know. I don't pve anymore, so please take this with a grain of salt, but that shit right there seems ridic. I imagine they have equally powerful stuff in their arsenal.

Cool story right?

Blood Worms have seperate heal for DK and seperate heal for other friendly targets in AOE which is then split between them. This way DK always benefits himself at full while also being good healing for melees. During SoO i did ~120k HPS as dk numerous times.

[Scorned]

Bloodworms are capable of some incredibly high numbers, refilling the health bars of an entire raid in an instant. The problem is that they're completely random and don't fire too often, so they aren't nearly as useful as you might otherwise think. They're extremely unreliable and seldom save people from actually dying. Most fights see them at over 90% overheal.

They're also being removed for WoD. RIP.

[Deleted]

Bloodworms are capable of some incredibly high numbers, refilling the health bars of an entire raid in an instant. The problem is that they're completely random and don't fire too often, so they aren't nearly as useful as you might otherwise think. They're extremely unreliable and seldom save people from actually dying. Most fights see them at over 90% overheal.

They're also being removed for WoD. RIP.

That is exactly the reason why they are getting removed. They are completely unpredictable, but if luck is on your side, you could even surpass your healers on healing done.
They could have changed them to be a cd (spawn 3-4 of them at once, and after a few seconds heal for a huge amount), which is something many blood dks asked from the devs. But, since they are reducing stackable raid utility, what would be better than to remove a cd that doesn't even exist yet?

[Deleted]

I have been looking at some of my logs just now and am wondering: For Spoils HC (still progress for my guild, the log data is from 22 tries), I have 50% self-heal, 5% from the bloodworms and 45% from the healer (a priest). I have 22% uptime of my blood shield (this seems weird) and 51.3% overheal from my deathstrikes. (250% raidbuffed Mastery, 40% avoidance)

Are these numbers completely off? I do think that I am spamming DS too much but on the same time, I want to use my GCDs for as many DS as possible.

Edit: I just had a look at the log from the week before, where I had more avoidance and less mastery (200% mastery, 45-50% avoidance) and the numbers are a bit different:

56% selfheal
4% bloodworms
62% Bloodshield uptime
42% Deathstrike Overheal

Weird, especially because my healer said during the tries on the week before, that I was more difficult to heal....but it seems that I should have been easier to heal....maybe my healer is not yet comfortable with healing a dk?

[Deleted]

Weird, especially because my healer said during the tries on the week before, that I was more difficult to heal....but it seems that I should have been easier to heal....maybe my healer is not yet comfortable with healing a dk?

The reason for that is how our mastery works: blood shield absorbs a static amount of damage, and doesn't reduce the damage we take by a percentage. That way, while blood shield is up, you do take no damage at all, but while it's down you take more damage than every other tank.
This is why dks are said to be "spiky"
Avoidance, on the other hand, reduces the damage overall by a percentage (varied by rng), making incoming damage smoother

So while you might actually take more damage overall with a avoidance-build, it will be smoother, which is easier to heal.

[Deleted]

So while you might actually take more damage overall with a avoidance-build, it will be smoother, which is easier to heal.

True, but the healer said that I was more difficult to heal while my gear was focussed on avoidance, not mastery. I guess the difference is with avoidance, my health bar drops more often but to a lesser amount where my health bar, with mastery, drops less often but when it drops, it drops to a larger degree. So if a healer is used to a mastery DK, they might "panic" with an avoidance DK since they will see a health drop more often?

[Deleted]

True, but the healer said that I was more difficult to heal while my gear was focussed on avoidance, not mastery. I guess the difference is with avoidance, my health bar drops more often but to a lesser amount where my health bar, with mastery, drops less often but when it drops, it drops to a larger degree. So if a healer is used to a mastery DK, they might "panic" with an avoidance DK since they will see a health drop more often?

Oh, apparently I read that wrong. In that case I have no idea what's wrong with your heal.
With avoidance your health drops less often (hence the 62% blood shield uptime), which is understandable since on spoils you tank multiple mobs at the same time, which is where avoidance shines. So unless there were some external influences (other co-healers, dps taking more damage, etc) I don't see why you should be more difficult to heal.
Like litterally, there is no way. in an aoe-situation, avoidance increases your blood shield MORE than mastery (through SoB) in addition to being able to avoid hits completely. Plus you do more damage.

[CausalXXLinkXx]

know when to death strike.

[Hellkung]

Take everything with a grain of salt as what I write down is just my opinion.

I think the skill in playing a DK doesn't come from just knowing when to use Death Strike, it used to be and it still is on hard-hitting bosses but if you care the least about your DPS (especially relevant in 10 man) then DS timing is really nonexistent in my opinion, it's more like delaying your DS.

When you overgear content, DK's get pretty ridiculous as well. I remember doing at the very least 60% of my healing on most bosses but that's not impressive in itself as Paladins heal as much as us nowadays or even more with how absurdly Eternal Flame scales with Vengeance.

We're still the most self-sufficient tank class and if you know your way around it, you don't really need a healer watching you. I remember my healers telling me several times how they would just ignore me for the most part.

Also, shotgunning runes for maximum DPS works extremely well with the current, generally advised avoidance build. Even in TOT with haste it worked well as you might not have had gigantic Blood Shields on you everytime you timed your DS (which is not required for every boss attack, you want it for boss specials, like after a Nazgrim Execute) but you were constantly shielding yourself with smaller shields with in the end did amount to about the same level of damage mitigation.

Now, avoidance gives resources through Scent of Blood, stronger but not smoother mitigation than mastery, DPS through the crit from Riposte and it also buffs your shields as your SOB stacks which you might not care about stack much faster.

We also have a lot of "oh shit" CD's, knowing when to use them is key.

[ThatZal]

Perfect gaming of runes and knowledge of fight.

Made an account just to affirm this point:
The DK resource system is deceptively deep. It works (more or less) if you faceroll, but deeper play allows for some remarkable manipulations. A DK gaming their rune regen will have significantly more DeathStrikes per minute than one playing the rune/rp system "straight" (which also translates into smaller gaps between Blood Shields).

[Glurp]

Nothing DK specific makes a Blood DK skilled, there is barely such thing as a skilled Blood DK. What you're looking for is a skilled tank.