Blood Artifact Traits NEED to make it to BFA

[ro9ue]

When I started tanking as Blood at level 100, I pretty much felt like they ruined the spec. I was able to practically keep myself alive with all previous iterations, but the moving of DS to RP along with some other things made it extremely hard to survive.

But after you start filling out your artifact, that's really when the mechanics start to fall into place. My favorite being the group leech 'Vampiric Aura'. But they absolutely have to carry over how Blood is mechanically with a filled out artifact or the spec is going to be broken as we start questing in BFA.

[Tehr]

I agree. Two of our four one-pointers and three of our four Golden traits are integral to Blood right now.

One-Pointers

Mouth of Hell: An extra weapon during DRW, guarantees 10 stacks of Bone Shield per Marrowrend, 25 RP per Heart Strike, and 3 Blood Plagues and 3 stacks of Haemostasis per Blood Boil.

Without this trait, the Blood opener would feel so shit. The 10 stacks of Bone Shield by itself makes this feel really clean, and since the rest of it synergizes so well with our kit it all comes together really well. It finally makes DRW into an actual offensive/defensive CD.

Rattling Bones: 30% chance to generate an extra Bone Shield charge per Marrowrend.

Honestly isn't that important. Quality-of-life, certainly, but not required.

Blood Feast: Heart Strike has 25% Leech.

Pretty shit trait in terms of tuning. Very low actual throughput, I'm not sure I would actually notice if it were removed.

Vampiric Aura: Consumption grants 20% Leech to you and 4 allies for 15 seconds (33% uptime).

Such a useful CD, I feel legitimately powerful when I use this CD, and I feel like I actually contribute to the group with this. The only bad thing about this trait is that the Leech is counted for the other players' healing rather than the BDKs (unlike Warrior's Leech aura), but that's just my scumbag healing parse talking.


Golden Traits

Souldrinker: 50% of overhealing from Death Strike and Consumption increases your max health, up to an extra 30%.

Finally gives BDK the health pool that it was lacking in the previous tiers of this expansion. Gives a defensive benefit for using Death Strike when not actively tanking (outside of Blood Shield), and allows the BDK to have an impressive health pool when they taunt off their OT. The only way to improve this trait would be to just give BDKs 30% extra health baseline, because right now we're pretty squishy on pull if we get unlucky with parries during DRW.

Skeletal Shattering: Bone Shield has a chance equal to your crit chance to absorb an extra 8% damage.

Pretty low throughput, and although it does technically reduce your damage taken, I wouldn't notice or care if it was removed.

Unending Thirst: While Blood Shield is active, you gain 25% Leech and 25% extra damage to Death Strike.

Super impactful trait, it gives us a great boost to our damage and healing during magic-heavy fights where our Mastery is useless, and when we're not actively tanking. The only problem with this trait is that it encourages overhealing with Death Strike (using 2x Death Strike between boss melee attacks), but I do like that we get to choose between offense and defense with it.

Umbilicus Eternus: When Vampiric Blood expires, you gain a shield worth 5x the total damage dealt by Blood Plague

Such a strong talent, this shield can get gigantic during AoE pulls, and because it's a shield and not a heal it helps immensely with our damage smoothing during high-damage points in AoE. Has great synergies with our Legendary chest, and makes BDK feel great with smart uses of Vampiric Blood.

[Talsar]

To be honest a lot of classes feel like they were gutted with the intent of artifacts filling those gaps plus a bit more, and this is my major concern for the expansions going forward.

[Deleted]

But they absolutely have to carry over how Blood is mechanically with a filled out artifact or the spec is going to be broken as we start questing in BFA.

If you expect all artifact traits to be removed when you replace your weapon, but everything else stays the same, then yes. But like with any other previous expansion, things will be removed, added, nerfed and buffed, so all in all you will be able to do just about the same when the pre-patch hits as you could the day before. And there will be no real difference when you start doing BfA content.

[Tehr]

so all in all you will be able to do just about the same when the pre-patch hits as you could the day before. And there will be no real difference when you start doing BfA content.

That's the hope, but we have absolutely no idea if that is going to be the actual case; for all we know, they won't keep any of the traits. That is why threads like this are important, because they let Blizzard know what we like and dislike, and what BDKs think is integral to the class, so that when prepatch rolls around we're not in a shitty situation because we didn't give feedback.

[Zorish]

That's the hope, but we have absolutely no idea if that is going to be the actual case; for all we know, they won't keep any of the traits. That is why threads like this are important, because they let Blizzard know what we like and dislike, and what BDKs think is integral to the class, so that when prepatch rolls around we're not in a shitty situation because we didn't give feedback.

for what we actually know that they not started alpha beta yet. So everything what you saw in blizzcon not even finished yet.

[vitor210]

When I started tanking as Blood at level 100, I pretty much felt like they ruined the spec. I was able to practically keep myself alive with all previous iterations, but the moving of DS to RP along with some other things made it extremely hard to survive.

But after you start filling out your artifact, that's really when the mechanics start to fall into place. My favorite being the group leech 'Vampiric Aura'. But they absolutely have to carry over how Blood is mechanically with a filled out artifact or the spec is going to be broken as we start questing in BFA.

I get really confused when I read comments like this. Seems like people blindly follow what flavor of the month class/spec some random dude online writes on his website, without actualy playing what people enjoy the most.

My only tank char since begining of legion has been my blood dk and I swear to God I can't understand why people hated it and praised bear druid. Tried to play it and couldn't keep my self alive, the rotations felt awkward and boring. On my blood dk though, I was ALWAYS immortal with the ton of self heal. And now that I recently got my Prydaz legendary, my HP almost NEVER gets below 100%. Just today I solo'd the Broken Shore World Boss for this week so easily, and my health never dropped 100%, and I'm only 930 ilvl without any set gear, not that impressive.

Blood dk is, and always HAS BEEN, a good tank class, despite what some random Joe says on his stream or writes on his "guide" online

[Tehr]

<snip>

Ok three things:
1) He's talking about how the Artifact Traits that you unlock on your weapon make Blood feel good and playable, and that before you unlock them, Blood feels incomplete. I don't think there's even an argument against that, for the points discussed above. I think you are misunderstanding, intentionally or unintentionally, the entire purpose of his post.

2) Blood absolutely sucked throughout the entirety of EN with the exception of Il'gynoth (and that was only because of our utility). Blood was solidly middle-bottom of the pack during ToV, and had quite a few pronounced weaknesses. So no, BDK has not always been a good tank class.

3) Everyone was praising Bears because they could reliably reach armor cap and/or maintain 100% uptime on their incredibly strong magic DR, not to mention their various passive DRs that made them objectively the best tanks by a pretty significant margin once warriors were nerfed in EN. They were, and still are, the absolute kings of mitigation as a tank. So yes, while you can't necessarily keep yourself alive, in any challenging content, Bear absolutely outperformed every other tank for the entire xpac.

[Raiz]

Blood dk is, and always HAS BEEN, a good tank class, despite what some random Joe says on his stream or writes on his "guide" online

You're not necessarily wrong. It applies only for the most majority of the WoW players. I guess your "random joe" forgot to mention that it applies for the cutting edge guilds that strive for mythic first kill. Bears were simply better than DKs for achieving these scenarios. And it's been like this since the beginning of Legion.

That doesn't mean they couldn't tank heroics raids or high mythics dungeons. It's just that Bears are simply better at tanking very difficults contents. Your broken shore's WB is just a fart in the air compared to mythics raids. That's why you're hearing a lot of praises for bears.

The articles you read or the videos you watch are mostly from people who achieved difficults contents. The chances you'd watch a video of an average joe performing a trivial content are slim because, well... Who would want to watch that ? The exceptions are because they're made from famous ppl and whatnot.

I mean, it's like you see most professional football players wearing Nike, and all the stuffs that comes from it. Does that mean you won't be able to play football for fun with your friends without this equipment ?

[ro9ue]

I get really confused when I read comments like this. Seems like people blindly follow what flavor of the month class/spec some random dude online writes on his website, without actualy playing what people enjoy the most.

My only tank char since begining of legion has been my blood dk and I swear to God I can't understand why people hated it and praised bear druid. Tried to play it and couldn't keep my self alive, the rotations felt awkward and boring. On my blood dk though, I was ALWAYS immortal with the ton of self heal. And now that I recently got my Prydaz legendary, my HP almost NEVER gets below 100%. Just today I solo'd the Broken Shore World Boss for this week so easily, and my health never dropped 100%, and I'm only 930 ilvl without any set gear, not that impressive.

Blood dk is, and always HAS BEEN, a good tank class, despite what some random Joe says on his stream or writes on his "guide" online

What? I play the game and this was my experience with it. You're also talking about 930 ilevel. If you read my post you'd see I'm talking about blood DK prior to filling our your artifact weapon. Which is why I made this post, to talk about how empty the spec feels before capping the artifact.

Your post doesn't make any sense and isn't related to the topic in any way.

[msdos]

I'm glad you made this thread, it's been in the back of my mind for weeks now.

Honestly, they could scrap everything and bake in Soul Drinker and that would keep me content. Maybe let Soul Drinker affect Blood Drinker too.

If you ask me, the entire first row of talents should be baked in and replaced with something new. Those aren't choices whatsoever, they never were and Blood Worms was an iconic ability.
I wish they'd give Blood more damage options to toy around with inside of your rotation, maybe a corpse explosion or something here and there. Blood tanking doesn't need to be as mindless as it currently is.

[Deleted]

In this thread people thinking Blood DK rotation won't be overhauled again.

[Sethus]

The Artifact Weapons traits are basically passive spec skills. It's certain they will return in BFA in the form of active/passive skills and/or talents.

[Cosmic Janitor]

The Artifact Weapons traits are basically passive spec skills. It's certain they will return in BFA in the form of active/passive skills and/or talents.

The thing is.. what will they keep baseline, what will they rip out and make us earn again and what will be dropped entirely.

[Philondra]

As usual, I mostly agree with Tehr, although I'm not convinced that Unending Thirst does anything that a flat damage buff wouldn't fix. I also wouldn't be surprised if Umbilicus Eternus went the way of the dodo, because it gains the most value when--surprise!--we vastly overgear content, which we're already by far the best spec at. Vampiric Aura will also likely get the axe because of our incoming 5% leech raid buff.

However, Mouth of Hell and Souldrinker are 100% integral to the way the spec plays now, and they'll have to do quite a bit of jiggering around with the spec if they don't retain these two passives in some form. Honestly, they could just make it so Marrowrend always generates 10 charges with DRW up and I'd be satisfied. Souldrinker was, obviously, something they took away from is in 7.0 and gave back in 7.2, and that was one of the buffs that finally put us back to competitive.

And no, I don't think Blood's rotation will be overhauled. They have already stated that major class changes like we saw in Legion are not on the plate except for a couple specs (Survival and Demonology were called out specifically.)

If I were to make a set of changes to Blood for BfA, I would make Mouth of Hell and Soul Drinker baseline, and replace some chronically underperforming talents like Bloodworms, Mark of Blood, Anti-Magic Barrier, and Will of the Necropolis with some of our legendary abilities. The spec plays just fine as it--simple with ways to express mastery--that we don't really need any major changes.