So that's why UH is so much better than frost...

[prestilence]

as unholy? because as unholy you should always be unholy presence.

[Vereesa]

Is this a point where we'll want to use Unholy Presence instead of frost?

No it's not. The slightly increased rPPM uptime from UHP doesn't outweigh FP's benefits.

[Frozendekay]

And yes, tank dps doesn't matter. We are at the end of the patch, if you are still relying on the tank dps to down bosses then there is something else wrong aside blood DKs.

By definition being near the end of a content patch means close to the beginning of a new one. Where tank dps matters most. Cos, you know, progression. And this change comes at the same time as new progression.

Anyway, it's only a small nerf for blood. Really, REALLY wish I'd known about this earlier though, been BT for unholy since patch dropped and just main swapped. Oh well.

[Xinia]

Really sucks to be forced to use BT again, and no you cant macro it to DC if you want to actually use it properly.

[Vereesa]

Really sucks to be forced to use BT again, and no you cant macro it to DC if you want to actually use it properly.

Once the bug is fixed, RC and BT will once again be very close in DPS to the point that your personal taste is what should dictate the choice.

[DarthMetatron]

Yes, I am probably overreacting but I feel they have lost all control over our class this expansion. IMO Cata was much better for DKs than MoP. I played all 3 specs on normal and heroic tiers and I didn't feel any less powerful...except when trying to do bloods on HSpine ><

I keep hearing players speak of how "the number tuning hasn't happened yet", and I'm sure that notion came from the devs at some point but to me it just seems like another myth. Can someone point out a recent blue post/twitter that specifies the number tuning hasn't happened yet and is going to happen for 5.4? The last I see of this was after 5.2, if that's what is still being referred to. That's a long time to hold your breath.

It really doesn't make sense that they would tune classes now. Why wait until the last raid tier of an expansion to do number tuning? That should have been priority #1 in 5.0 beta and those numbers could have been projected to a post-T16 world. Not after the expansion is at the end. They are going to have to turn around and re-tune the classes for level 95(?) again in a few months.

I think it is a pipe dream and it feels like we're waiting for something that isn't going to happen (again).



EDIT:
I found the PTR blog that says the class tuning changes are already on the PTR:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/101...y_24-7_24_2013

[Trubo]

Is this a point where we'll want to use Unholy Presence instead of frost?

Probably not since Frost Strike costs 40 RP outside of Frost Presence.

Once the bug is fixed, RC and BT will once again be very close in DPS to the point that your personal taste is what should dictate the choice.

Sure but we're still going to be sitting at the table with Subtlety Rogues and Arms Warriors regardless of which spec we choose.

[Schizoide]

It is a huge deal for Blood, as in all of your trinkets and meta will proc 36% less AT THE VERY LEAST (it's actually more, and even bigger of an impact with stacking trinkets like gaze of the twins and primordius who won't refresh as often.). The RPPM effects currently work at 152% of their intended power for blood (again, at the very least), which you could easily translate into a 40~ ilvl difference for two trinket slots AKA huge. Yes, Blood DKs are pretty much wearing the equivalent of ilvl 580-590 trinkets atm, yet they're still losing to monks/paladins/druids.

My feeling is that the devs don't care about tank DPS remotely as much as you do.

If you can make a strong argument why dropping RPPM chances for 2 trinkets and the DPS metagem will cause blood tanks to be sat on progression, they'd probably listen to that. Can you? (No sarcasm meant, I don't play at that level myself.)

Really sucks to be forced to use BT again, and no you cant macro it to DC if you want to actually use it properly.

This is wrong, for PvE DPS anyway. According to simcraft, macroed BT is a negligible DPS loss.

[Tojara]

Well my logic would dictate if our DPS is already behind some of the other tanks with a huge bug that was artificially increasing our DPS currently, why wouldn't you compensate blood DKs? Even with the bug active using RPPM trinkets and the meta gem we STILL aren't as good from a DPS perspective, yet we are going to be eating a moderately sized damage nerf?

That really doesn't make sense to me at all.

Keep in mind I really think that this bug should be fixed so people can actually model the class properly and we actually know what the fuck is going on, but come on.

Tank DPS might not mean a lot to some people but it DOES fucking matter. When you look at the entire picture of tank balance damage is just as important as survival and on some encounters even more so. Some of you might not care about playing a tank as optimally as others, but playing it to the highest potential isn't just worrying about survival, its a huge a balancing act. It doesn't matter if you're doing 25H progression, 10H progression or you're in a casual guild scraping the bottom of the barrel. You first worry about living and you slowly start changing things to be more DPS oriented if you want to truly contribute the most you can to beating an encounter. This isn't unique to tanks either. Healers make the same decisions with opting for more throughput at the expense of regeneration when they can and so forth.

So no it's complete bullshit for people to say that tank DPS doesn't matter BECAUSE IT DOES. They obviously must care about tank DPS to some degree, because if not they would have never added vengeance or continually (for the most part) kept up on tank damage balance. Why add riposte for warriors and DKs if they don't care about tank DPS?

I'll still be playing my DK regardless but blood DKs should be compensated. Maybe not for the RC change, but for the improved blood presence change. Either adjust base RPPM for blood or increase scaling on some of our abilities. That way people who don't care about their DPS or those that do are going to see an increase. Whether you care about tank DPS or not really doesn't matter, we do less DPS than other tanks. 20% true haste from IBP would be nice too, but they probably don't want to increase SoB procs. Not that it would make us invincible if they decided to go that route though.

[Xinia]

This is wrong, for PvE DPS anyway. According to simcraft, macroed BT is a negligible DPS loss.

No it is not wrong I used BT in first raid Tier and there are often times where a DC is not optimal to use together with BT specialy in real fights with movements.

[Schizoide]

Oh, I absolutely agree it matters and if it was my decision I would compensate Blood. But you don't need to convince me. The devs historically haven't cared about tank DPS except where it was inflated (ie, Alysrazor) or caused the spec to be benched on progression.

@Xinia: Please explain. You might be right, simcraft doesn't sim real fights, but I can't think of anywhere it would make a perceptible difference.

[Skarssen]

Yes, I am probably overreacting but I feel they have lost all control over our class this expansion. IMO Cata was much better for DKs than MoP. I played all 3 specs on normal and heroic tiers and I didn't feel any less powerful...except when trying to do bloods on HSpine ><

I keep hearing players speak of how "the number tuning hasn't happened yet", and I'm sure that notion came from the devs at some point but to me it just seems like another myth. Can someone point out a recent blue post/twitter that specifies the number tuning hasn't happened yet and is going to happen for 5.4? The last I see of this was after 5.2, if that's what is still being referred to. That's a long time to hold your breath.

It really doesn't make sense that they would tune classes now. Why wait until the last raid tier of an expansion to do number tuning? That should have been priority #1 in 5.0 beta and those numbers could have been projected to a post-T16 world. Not after the expansion is at the end. They are going to have to turn around and re-tune the classes for level 95(?) again in a few months.

I think it is a pipe dream and it feels like we're waiting for something that isn't going to happen (again).



EDIT:
I found the PTR blog that says the class tuning changes are already on the PTR:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/101...y_24-7_24_2013

There is already a significant amount of healing changes, and several classes/specs have already received damage output changes (buffs). I have not seen one peep from Blizzard indicating they are going to implement further "damage tuning" at this point. I would love for someone to prove me wrong however....

[Deleted]

And yes, tank dps doesn't matter. We are at the end of the patch, if you are still relying on the tank dps to down bosses then there is something else wrong aside blood DKs.

Look this is just wrong and stupid. I don't understand how you can argue that tank dps is irrelevant. "If you are still relying on tank dps" is such a dumb statement, as there are people who are still progressing. Of course it is possible to kill bosses without those extra numbers from the tank now, but that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. Would you for example raid with 24 out of 25 people just because it is doable? Of course not.

[Vereesa]

There is already a significant amount of healing changes, and several classes/specs have already received damage output changes (buffs). I have not seen one peep from Blizzard indicating they are going to implement further "damage tuning" at this point. I would love for someone to prove me wrong however....

No one replying here is going to prove anything to you, you're simply going to have to give it time. Also keep in mind the Frost 2H buffs went in 10 days prior to 5.2's release.

[Nellise]

Well my logic would dictate if our DPS is already behind some of the other tanks with a huge bug that was artificially increasing our DPS currently, why wouldn't you compensate blood DKs? Even with the bug active using RPPM trinkets and the meta gem we STILL aren't as good from a DPS perspective, yet we are going to be eating a moderately sized damage nerf?

Is this really true that DKs are behind the other tanks in dps using dps gear? I was looking through 10 man heroic logs at Blood dps and it looked like for most fights blood was topping out as high as BM and Prot Pallies and way ahead of Prot Warriors (didn't look at druids). Looking at average Blood dps doesn't work since there's still a lot of Blood players that don't do the full dps thing unlike BM/Pally/Druid. I've seen Blood tanks at around the same level as me (4 heroics down) talking about using 200%+ mastery wondering if that's enough while I'm running 120% in full dps gear.

But I think Blood isn't being compensated because it's not supposed to be balanced around any of these dps rppm things. They want tanks using mostly tank-y gear and I don't believe there's really much in the way of dps rppm stuff in that gear. They're going to be assuming that for balancing for 5.4. Any dps cheesing with dps gear they'll probably not be very concerned with, which I agree with. Blood dps should be balanced assuming tank gear since that's what will allow them in for progression. The DPS gear people are using now in ToT is mostly because we all overgear it at this point.

[Skarssen]

There will undoubtedly be encounters where the tanks aren't in damage of an instant death and overall raid damage absorbs most of the healer mana, and in these situations it would make sense for the tanks to deal as much damage as possible. Of course you aren't going to have your tanks in DPS gear for a fight like Ra-den (at least during progression), but there will be situations where tank damage mitigation takes a backseat to meeting the enrage timer, and tank DPS can make a big difference there.

[Deleted]

As of 2 weeks ago GC confirmed dps tuning for 5.4 was not done in a tweet. Some healing tuning has been implemented and some talent/glyph changes have obviously gone in. Actual DPS tuning (tweaking core abilities) doesn't tend to go in until pretty late into the PTR cycle (read: generally last). There's nothing specific saying anything else is going to be done but common sense would dictate that we're going to see SOMETHING other than general bug fixes or QoL changes like the ghoul energy reduction or death gate.

@Skarssen, like Vereesa said - nobody can really prove you wrong or right. Unless something's specifically stated by a blue then it's all up in the air. I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt they're going to leave all of our specs non-competitive but who knows? 2H frost was dead by the time dragon soul came in but DW and Unholy were still competitive.

*Shrug* Just give it time, I'll be the first to unsub if we're terrible in 5.4.

[Tojara]

I have a lot of high parses on my blood DK, my DK is named Gròmmash and you will likely see me on a few of the encounters in or around the top 10 for blood DK parses.

I wear full DPS gear to achieve what I do with bugged mechanics giving me far higher RPPM uptime than what I should have. Is blood that far behind when you wear full DPS gear with currently bugged rune mechanics? No it's not that far behind, but it's still BEHIND which is the entire point a few others in the thread are trying to get across. When it's fixed we are going to be even farther behind.

I don't think it's too much to ask for some sort of compensation thrown our way so our DPS remains at least competitive with other tanks if we choose to wear DPS gear. If we don't get compensation for it and/or we don't bother with RPPM trinkets/meta (for whatever reason that may be) then we simply have to sit to the side and be complacent with the fact that we aren't going to be able to touch a lot of the other tanks in regards to tank DPS. Everything little thing matter when you're a tank, whether you're doing high end progression or just playing casually. Survival, utility, raid CDs, DPS and HPS produced by a tank are all factored into balance.

We already are more squishy than other tanks for various reasons (this is an entire other subject and I'd rather not get into it) if we choose to wear DPS gear, and even if we wear tank gear we are still squishier than tanks that optimally (in almost every way) are suppose to be going more 'dps oriented' stats. I don't think it's that far of a stretch to assume that we should be able to at least do as much damage if we actually make some of the sacrifices and go with a more traditional DPS setup. Overall it's a massive balance issue for Warriors/DKs compared to the other tanks and it's not something that can fully fix at this stage in the expansion. What they need not do however is to leave us be after this bug is fixed.

I wish this bug had never been in to begin with so that we likely would have had our damage buffed in 5.2. When their own internal testing is skewed because of a bug they didn't know about then they obviously balance around that, which leads me to the assumption that they probably will have to buff both frost and blood to make up for it.

[Trubo]

No one replying here is going to prove anything to you, you're simply going to have to give it time. Also keep in mind the Frost 2H buffs went in 10 days prior to 5.2's release.

The buff was to correspond to losing T14 bonuses. Still, even with those buffs T15 has shown Frost to be one of the weaker melee specs (Arms and Subtlety are about the only things worse).

[Vereesa]

The buff was to correspond to losing T14 bonuses. Still, even with those buffs T15 has shown Frost to be one of the weaker melee specs (Arms and Subtlety are about the only things worse).

That's not at all what my point was and I know fully well know why Frost was issued those buffs. What I was trying to say was that buffs can (and as vmagik pointed out, generally last) come out very far into the PTR cycle and seeing as how we aren't anywhere close to a release date yet, there's nothing to worry about.