Thoughts on Tanking and Blood going into Legion (LONG)

[Boneshatter]

I'm guessing the change to Marrowrend will make it be a low or no resource cost ability with a cooldown and/or charges. Similar to how a bear's frenzied regen will work in Legion. Having a low/no resource cost attack on a 6 or 8 second cooldown does technically add to the rotation even if its only a little bit.

[Deleted]

One which most DKs seem familiar with, sadly.

nah, expect the worst and you won't be disappointed. I truly feel sorry for anyone that plays a DK and expects there to be any legitimately good changes at this point, I cba even writing feedback at this point because I know 100% it will not be read.

[Shaddam IV]

Well, that kind of attitude won't make any difference, for sure.
There is part of the community that "cba with writing feedback", and preferrs to either complain in public or privately about certain things, rather than be constructive and make suggestions.
With "cba" attitude do expect things to change for the best.

[Murderdoll]

nah, expect the worst and you won't be disappointed. I truly feel sorry for anyone that plays a DK and expects there to be any legitimately good changes at this point, I cba even writing feedback at this point because I know 100% it will not be read.

Thats the wrong attitude.

Put the feedback forward so you can gloat and say I told you so later.

[AanvilGT]

Thank you Troxism.

I personally have never liked bone shield. I could make arguments about it being unreliable and ineffective against packs or dots, but honestly I just hate the animation. I desperately want a glyph that changes the animation.

[Baddok21]

The Sad part was i believe Celestalon purposely posted in Troxism thread just to make sure it would be seen and spark debate, which i applaud him for doing. its arguably the best spec/class write up provided on any spec in the last 4 Betas/Alphas ever. and even then these so called Alpha testers still leave the thread barren of discussion.

2950 views and only 22 replies

what really are these guys doing...

such a shame really

If blizzard said "well it seems DKs are pretty OK with changes and the direction the specs have gone" i could not fault them for that conclusion.
maybe we are the minority and most people are fine with the class/specs.

meanwhile Warriors make 5 page threads discussing a single talent of one spec.

the CBA is real

[Zorish]

Don't forget that you can write on alpha forums only if you flagged for test. and more - you must have US wow account

upd:
and sadly most people don't like to read "wall of text" even if it's constructive. Most of this views can be from people who read post-opened link-saw size-closed

[Shaddam IV]

The Sad part was i believe Celestalon purposely posted in Troxism thread just to make sure it would be seen and spark debate, which i applaud him for doing. its arguably the best spec/class write up provided on any spec in the last 4 Betas/Alphas ever. and even then these so called Alpha testers still leave the thread barren of discussion.

2950 views and only 22 replies

what really are these guys doing...

such a shame really

If blizzard said "well it seems DKs are pretty OK with changes and the direction the specs have gone" i could not fault them for that conclusion.
maybe we are the minority and most people are fine with the class/specs.

meanwhile Warriors make 5 page threads discussing a single talent of one spec.

the CBA is real

Heroic class with "legendarily" elitist attitude

[Aezral]

I'm so pleased this expansion there is finally a thread for discussing tanking and blood.

[Troxism]

As the discussion in the last few posts hints at vaguely, the reality is it would almost be better if I posted nothing, but that is a complicated topic. As for Celestalon, well there are a lot of possible motives.

[ikewu83]

Hi troxism, thank you for your hardwork and my thoughts on tanking, I care about dps more than survival.

First, I believe the decent way for improve tank dps side which blizzard always advocates, is to bring some mechanism similar to vengeance, for example, gain energy when being hit by boss, which will forbid the all tank team if largely increase tank basic attack.

Second, stop bring survival benefit for tier set, which may be insane at some point, and bring dps benefit to tier set, just like Prot Pally 4T18, it works very well^_^

[Murderdoll]

As the discussion in the last few posts hints at vaguely, the reality is it would almost be better if I posted nothing, but that is a complicated topic. As for Celestalon, well there are a lot of possible motives.

I dont think that at all.

For better or worse, the current iteration of Blood is sub standard. In fact, going forward, the tanking model in general leaves much to be desired.

For better or worse, someone needed to take the time and actually put forward the facts and and feelings about how we as tanks look at the current and future model of our role.

If they hamfist an ill thought out fix in there for the sake of using a new ability, we know where we stand. We have a clear indicator of what to expect throughout Legion and many will take that as their cue to pile into the lifeboats.

[cujoe]

I wonder how they will balance guardian druids with the upcoming tank meta. In a world where healer HPS now matters for tank survival, the drastically increased HPS that druids gain from their mastery will be really strong in addition to being big meat shields.

Regarding the balance between blood strike and marrow rend I think a good way to make sure we don't neglect our bone shield charges for more death strikes would be if blood shield would buff our damage and healing while active. That way you won't mindlessly spam either blood strike or marrow rend depending on what nets more damage or survival but you would try to maximize bone shield uptime and blood and death strike usage.

[CptAwesome]

I wonder how they will balance guardian druids with the upcoming tank meta. In a world where healer HPS now matters for tank survival, the drastically increased HPS that druids gain from their mastery will be really strong in addition to being big meat shields.

Regarding the balance between blood strike and marrow rend I think a good way to make sure we don't neglect our bone shield charges for more death strikes would be if blood shield would buff our damage and healing while active. That way you won't mindlessly spam either blood strike or marrow rend depending on what nets more damage or survival but you would try to maximize bone shield uptime and blood and death strike usage.

If they want us to balance them they should just massively increase the damage marrowrend does to a point where you would use blood/heart strike for survival and marrowrend for dps. Weaker players could just turtle up and survive while better ones would be weaving in as much damage as they could.

This would be a decent core principle but it doesn't fix the issues with the rotation's speed and the low GCD usage. I'm glad they have said they are working on it though, I guess we'll see what the next build brings. Just hoping they don't do some bullshit like throwing in death coil as a free filler ability and calling it a day.

[Threalon]

Thank you for putting this together, Troxism. I read through the document and found myself agreeing to every point you made. I also listened to the Training Dummies discussion you had with Llarold and Magdalena.

I started playing WoW during ToT but only really started raiding during SoO. My DK hit 90 the day Flex came out. I instantly fell in love with tanking and the immediate feedback to the question "am I doing this correctly?", and found that burst damage, predictable or not, was one of the most fun and rewarding challenges I had to face as a new raider and a blood dk. It was scary, in a good way, and was the single most important thing that taught me how to call for externals, map my own personals, and explore damage intake for myself and the entire raid. I had to become increasingly more involved and invested in my class as I progressed through the later bosses and harder difficulties if I wanted to survive. Three months later I am solo tanking 10H bosses, then through 25H farm in a pretty good progression guild where I learned even more about snapshotting, vengeance whoring, and riposte uptime.

What I'm trying to say is that dealing with burst damage forced me to become competent beyond taunting at X stacks and is honestly necessary for any "new" or aspiring tank to deal with. It made me think about the encounter as more than taunt swaps and positioning, and it reinforced personal responsibility (which is something all mythic raiders should have). There may have been other factors, but the satisfaction of surviving an encounter and killing bosses back then is what I attribute most to my rather speedy transformation from pleb grill huntard rare pet collector to shining breathknight in mythic HFC. The tanking experience on alpha makes me sad, and is so boring I refused to tank for my groups after a dozen or so goes because I would rather be doing something else.

I apologize if I reiterated too many points, it has been a while since I read through the entire thread here, but figured I could chime in from a more casual perspective. It isn't just the towering mythic bleeding edge tanks that appreciate burst, shoutout to us little guys too.

[Zorish]

https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/sta...88768200675329

bears - next build... and our is "future builds"... blizzards like what the hell (sorry but jealous)

[Deleted]

bears - next build... and our is "future builds"... blizzards like what the hell (sorry but jealous)

Someone has to come first. Most tankingspeccs have problems. I case of bears it is AE, in case of warriors it is a host auf pruning-releated things. As long as they take a look at DKs before it is to late (which it would be in 3-4 months) I wouldn't worry too much.

[Raiju]

Someone has to come first. Most tankingspeccs have problems. I case of bears it is AE, in case of warriors it is a host auf pruning-releated things. As long as they take a look at DKs before it is to late (which it would be in 3-4 months) I wouldn't worry too much.

Obviously there's bias - but I'd argue a class that has core rotation problems (that include aoe flaws) is a little more severe than just aoe flaws.

[CptAwesome]

Obviously there's bias - but I'd argue a class that has core rotation problems (that include aoe flaws) is a little more severe than just aoe flaws.

Right, and perhaps that means it takes longer to fix?

[Raugnaut]

I wonder how they will balance guardian druids with the upcoming tank meta. In a world where healer HPS now matters for tank survival, the drastically increased HPS that druids gain from their mastery will be really strong in addition to being big meat shields.

Regarding the balance between blood strike and marrow rend I think a good way to make sure we don't neglect our bone shield charges for more death strikes would be if blood shield would buff our damage and healing while active. That way you won't mindlessly spam either blood strike or marrow rend depending on what nets more damage or survival but you would try to maximize bone shield uptime and blood and death strike usage.

The increased health and healing increase at the same rate, so for all heals EXCEPT %health based heals,, they will restore the exact same % of a druids health as it would any other tank.