Blood Tanking and Necrotic - A Tale of Two Friends.

[Synco]

Over the last day and a bit (Since Tuesday reset,) I've been attempting to tank some Mythic Plus dungeons (+7 and higher) with the Raging/Necrotic wombo combo. Let's just say it's been the hardest combo yet (For us) and it's not due to the Raging affix, instead, it's how hard the Necrotic affix is on the Blood Deathknight spec.

What makes Necrotic so hard is that as a Blood Deathknight our class relies heavily on self-healing and "absorbs" through our Mastery: Blood Shield, once you take healing away we become no tankier than a Plate Wearing DPS class with the ability to parry. Now you're probably wondering what a Blood Deathknight like yourself can do to prevent this non-stop healing reduction, well the answer is simply you cannot. You can try and kite the mob (Good luck!) but since you are the slowest moving melee class in the game and got your chains of ice castrated all you can do is pray to some god that your team has some slow for you to kite long enough for your Necrotic stacks to fall off.

Finally, let's talk cooldowns! We have Vampiric Blood (1.5min CD) (remember this is basically useless during Necrotic) which is just an increase to max health by 50% and all healing incoming by 50%, so above 50 stacks of Necrotic it becomes near useless. Then we have our Dancing Rune Weapon (3min CD) that gives us increased chance to parry by 40% for 8 seconds unfortunately we need this for almost every major trash pull but we need it as a main cooldown for boss fights as well, this defensive is more useful than anything we have in our arsenal only because it has nothing to do with healing, we have an increased CHANCE to parry an attack, therefore, reducing the chance to get a Necrotic stack. Last but not least we have Marrowrend and it's beautiful charges of Bone Shield! Bone Shield finally offers us some flat damage reduction but it's only 16% (Non-stacking even though we can stack up to 10 charges of Bone Shield) with Necrotic once again there's nothing we can do to help sustain our health but keep at least 1 charge of Bone Shield up for this slight damage reduction.

All I'm asking is if there is some way or some strategy to tackle this? What do you believe should be changed for our toolkit to handle this affix properly? As well as what is needed to help us compete with Prot Warriors and Paladins in higher levels of Mythic Plus?

Thanks for reading and responding!

- SYNCO

[Snuffleupagus]

Bone Shield needs to be tweaked to lose charges on direct damage only.

[JermStudDog]

Just give it the Death Strike legendary bracers treatment:

Surrounds you with a barrier of whirling bones, reducing all damage you take by 16% and increasing your Haste by 10%. Each damaging attack that deals more than 5% of your maximum health consumes a charge. Lasts 30 sec or until all charges are consumed.

done

[xpire]

wait, people use DRW as a defensive CD?
No but in all seriousness Bone shield does require some QoL changes to reduce the frustration that is losing stacks to dots ticking for 2k every 1 second or just pulsing AOE, and probably a buff back to 20% (or 25% like it was on alpha for a good while)