Blood DK Mastery Stacking

[Khiyone]

You've no idea what you are on about

I do agree that the second part is kind of an exaggeration but really - there's no reason to gear for mastery.

[Deleted]

as some readers of this forum might be under the impression that all blood dks should be focusing on their dps.

this line just proves that you most likely made this thread after being made fun of for sucking ass with BoS

[Saiyendra]

Why don't you have your legendary ring yet Lazel?

[Cersee]

And not everybody gears their tank and not every blood dk has 3.1k MS.

Its more than 3.1k. He never logs out in real gear. Saw at least 2 mythic socketed pieces go through the activity feed, and im not really paying that much attention.

[Veiled Shadow]

Bos doesn't really require skill to use I'm afraid.

It requires more skill than Defile and runs roughshod over your DS timing. What's your point? Would you use BoS on every fight if you had 3k+ MS?

[Saiyendra]

Point is, go praise a guy as much as you want on farm, but on progress, when nobody cares about ranks but plays to kill the boss, it's one of the most stupid things one can do.

I don't really understand this logic. Progress is the best avenue for display of your skill, and doing more DPS is certainly helping your raid. Obviously padding and such isn't really desirable on progress, but if you use BoS on say, Gruul, how is that not helping to kill the boss?

[Resurgo]

I think we're all forgetting something here:

No matter whether we think BoS is more skillful than Defile, or BoS is equal to, or not worth it. Whether we think Mastery stacking is > than Multistrike, etc and so on;
None of that matters more than having a quality group with you. If you threw Troxism in random_heroic_pug_group001, he wouldn't be able to carry that group to an Archimonde kill no matter how skillful he is.

Completing content is no more an indicator of how good a DK is than whether or not that DK runs Defile or BoS.

[Veiled Shadow]

No I wouldn't, lol. What skill does it require, bashing your buttons?

Well, yes. It is bashing buttons, but that's likely to get you killed on Xhul'horac. Defile by contrast is a completely passive talent.

And why wouldn't you?

[Deleted]

seems theres some group of dks that think specing into BoS instantly makes them more skilled than others, pretty funny

[Veiled Shadow]

Because I dislike RNG in my gameplay and I wouldn't play it untill farm. RNG on progress= Kill yourself.

Same reason most of the bosses I was using HA in SoO despite the fact DP + 4 pc 3 BoG Cheese with glyph of WoG was really strong.

Get it yet?

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Also kinda funny that you're telling me 'you're going to die on Xul as if Xul is too hard on tanks. I tanked green + boss without any externals running defile, we had around 5 wipes I think and I never failed/wiped the raid.

Nice example.

Yes, but choosing to not take the optimal talent doesn't mean that it isn't optimal.

I just typed something random, picking a hard boss wasn't in my mind. As others have said the only "hard" bosses are Tyrant (because the mechanics of the fight work against DKs, boss is not hard intrinsically) and Archimonde.

seems theres some group of dks that think specing into BoS instantly makes them more skilled than others, pretty funny

No one is saying this; please read more carefully. Personal skill is obviously independent of your talent choice.

[AanvilGT]

Completing content is a very strong indicator of how good a tank is, possibly the best simple indicator we have available to us. But this isn't meant as a post about who is the best dk. It is meant to start a discussion about the relative merits of stacking mastery when facing content that is challenging. Mastery is the best survival stat (that we can meaningfully stack). Multistrike is the best dps stat, but pure shit for survival and facing CD locking at current gear levels. The primary purpose of stacking multistrike is to enable BoS.

For the sake of argument, let's adopt the premise offered by another commenter that only Tyrant, Mannoroth and Archimonde are challenging. Right now, we have a single parse of a blood dk killing Tyrant using BoS, which is Lucille, a very skilled blood dk who literally didn't bother to cast BoS a second time after the pull and was using double mastery trinkets. Every other parse used Defile. Even so, reviewing the logs of top parses only takes you so far. You also need to go and look at all of the wipes that lead up to those kills while they were progression content. If you do that, you will see that blood dks are getting killed on these fights. They are not easy, and tank survival is not trivial. On the other hand, when you take the average dps over the course of 20-40 attempts, you find that the dps gains from BoS are not nearly what they were in 6.1, and are on many pulls marginal to non-existent unless you are imbalancing the tank assignments to support it. That brings me back to my original post. It appears that the dks who have had the most success on the hardest content have focused on mastery instead of multistrike. That doesn't make them right. But it is meaningful anecdotal evidence.

[Dracodraco]

Going for pure mastery is not a bad opinion, besides, Tuuxx was going for Mastery + Versa on Tyrant and like I stated earlier with neck, bracer etc from BRF. Also if you go BoS on Tyrant just quit game, trying to dps on that boss is like taking 10 stacks on Siegecrafter first week progression when you can kill shredder without problems with 3. REDUNDANT.

Dpsing as a tank this expansion (EXCEPT FOR PRE-NERF) doesn't matter. Good for you if you are using 50 different kind of gear to do 3k more dps and require externals , nobody cares.

What I mean with pre nerf is like Prot palas in HM, Bdks in BRF.

Bdks on imperator before bloodboil nerf aswell, don't forget!

[Veiled Shadow]

@Lazel No one was talking about Trox so I don't know why you went out of your way to make a post about that. I haven't studied logs but as I recall he was using Vial at the start of the tier before getting better trinkets.

Anyways, I still don't see why you would ever gear for mastery on anything but possibly two bosses this tier.

@Anvil There are a handful of parses on Velhari at the moment. And no, progress is a very poor measure of how good someone is. To use a fairly sensitive example, Treckie has been more progressed than Lazel, and yet. . .

[AanvilGT]

I'm not sure I follow your example. Are you saying that Treckie is better or worse than Lazel? Their progress is basically identical, while Treckie has arguably better "rankings" on warcraftlogs. Off the top of my head, I believe those positions were reversed in Highmaul. Should I assume your position is that tanks should be evaluated by their rankings on warcraftlogs? Should it be their dps logs or their tank survivability rankings? hahahahah, I kid of course. Maybe we can take all of their logs and see who died the most during the relevant portion of fights? Nobody is going to do that anytime soon and it still might be the fault of your healers or your co-tank. No, your choices are progress or rankings. If you're saying progress is a very poor measure, then you must mean that rankings are a better measure. I would argue that they are both equally bad measures and yet equally good. They are, after all, the only ones we have.

To use another sports metaphore, winning the Super Bowl this year doesn't prove that Tom Brady is the best quarterback in the NFL. But it does make him a successful quarterback, and we can safely assume that the Patriots are evaluating his performance internally and have determined that he is better than any of the alternatives they might have.

[cujoe]

The problem here is that people tend to have such strong opinions about BoS. There are popular guys like Jello who say "play BoS or play another class" and of course other people with strong opinions like Lazel say the opposite. And because other people like to follow people with strong opinions there seems to be no middle ground in that matter.

Imo in HFC the choice between BoS and defile depends a lot on the fight and your gear. Let's be realistic, Trox can play BoS on every fight because 1) he has the gear (and skill) for it and 2) his co-tank is a former DK who knows exactly what he has to do in order to support Trox when BoS is up. In his situation BoS seems to be the most optimal choice.

But for the average (or below average) Joe like me the situation is very different. Even though I can get quite a bit of MS for my ilvl (around 3k with suboptimal trinkets) I really have a hard time to make BoS clearly better than defile on nearly any fight. The dps difference for me is marginal and usually doesn't justify the hassle I and my co-tank have to go through in order to maximize my petty dps gain.

That said I see no problem switching talents per fight. Nobody (except a few loud people) says you have to play BoS or defile on every encounter. Even if you don't have too much MS on gear and tend to stack mastery BoS can be still as good as defile on some fights. And even in situations where BoS would clearly be better than defile the difference is usally small enough for most people so that it would be totally OK to use defile just because you don't like the RNG of BoS.

We can actually be glad that we now have a real choice between 2 of our lvl 100 talents and both are very viable (or even optimal) on certain fights.

[Count Zero]

I switched to a Mastery focus on my DK alt because I feel a lot safer with it when I'm pugging. I do get to tank with people I know sometimes - and when I mostly did that I felt comfortable being Multi focused.

But alternating between the two, I'd really rather just stick with Mast since I'm just not building two gear sets on my alt. I'm almost too cheap to put good enchants on her one set of gear as it is, haha ...

But at any rate, I don't see the value in a one-size-fits-all approach. Not every group is the same, and the best results anyone is going to get - for anything - is a mix of their own playstyle and the strengths/weaknesses of their team.

[Tojara]

I don't think it really matters all that much, there are certainly several encounters where defile is really good on, or the encounter is far too much of a hassle to coerce your co-tank into doing a lot of really stupid things.

Personally I just save mastery gear that doesn't have multistrike on it for encounters that aren't BoS friendly when I run defile.

[Deleted]

Bos doesn't really require skill to use I'm afraid.

Never implied it did, but with your logic people can't possibly suck at something if said thing doesn't require skill, right?

[Kronik85]

We can actually be glad that we now have a real choice between 2 of our lvl 100 talents and both are very viable (or even optimal) on certain fights.

You fucking crazy? Be glad!? BE GLAD!!!? Honestly where do you get off with these well balanced opinions of yours? When 2 talents are reasonably close in performance and both have merit the only decent thing to do is argue in circles and tell the other guy with the other opinion that they are doing it wrong, they are bad and they should feel bad.

Where the fuck do you think you are Cujoe? This isn't hippy camp, this is the DK sub forum of MMOC and this shit is real god damn it!

[Raiju]

You fucking crazy? Be glad!? BE GLAD!!!? Honestly where do you get off with these well balanced opinions of yours? When 2 talents are reasonably close in performance and both have merit the only decent thing to do is argue in circles and tell the other guy with the other opinion that they are doing it wrong, they are bad and they should feel bad.

Where the fuck do you think you are Cujoe? This isn't hippy camp, this is the DK sub forum of MMOC and this shit is real god damn it!

I mean is it really a choice or the lack of a meaningful choice?

Is it that you are in control, or your choices just don't matter and aren't going to have huge effect...?

Time to stack haste, imo.