Blood DK Warlords of Draenor Patch 6.2 Guide (Long but has TLDR Version)

[Ikrekot]

Ie. Twin Ogron when you look on healing done you will see in table Pol and Phemos. If you mauseover them you will see that each of them do healing by BoS on you.

[grizzlysaurusrex]

With the trinket from Twin Ogron, is it a DPS increase to hold off using DRW until the trinket is off cooldown?

[Troxism]

With the trinket from Twin Ogron, is it a DPS increase to hold off using DRW until the trinket is off cooldown?

DRW is too weak for that to matter.

[brookllyn]

I still don't see why they don't just make tanks equal to DPS if they can max their potential just like a dps, but also have to worry about their life. Not sure why they listen to DPS qq about tanks doing more or the same damage as them. This isn't the old days.... tanks are dps who just get hit. Meatshields don't exist and haven't for many years at this point.

The problem with this is that there would be no point in taking regular melee dps anymore for any competitive guilds. What's the point of taking a ret paladin when you can take a prot pally that has very strong CDs and lose no damage for it? Your raids would consist of: healers, enough warlocks/hunters to take care of ranged mechanics and the rest tanks.

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And my take on the whole stamina vs strength thing is that the only point in which stamina will actually save you is if you are literally going to get one shot if you don't have that extra 20k(Idk how much it is) health. What is the difference of dipping to 30k health instead of 10k health when you are going to deathstrike immediately after the hit anyways? And as trox says, if you are going to get one shot, just use a CD or external and GG why would you ever want stamina? The only place that stamina will ever be useful is in an encounter where you are tanking a boss that is melting your face for such a long period that you do not have enough externals and CDs to go around and can not survive without that extra 20k health. Even then, somehow I doubt a boss like this would make it to live with so much QQ that happens in the forums. The only other boss type I can see is one that can randomly one shot you and the keyword is randomly because you wouldn't be able to use a CD for it without chaining them the entire fight. This boss would also never make it to live and even then, the boss would have to do exactly less than 20k + your max health to make the stamina save you from dying.

I also forgot to mention, in any situation that a stamina flask could be argued, a disc shield(yes an instant cast spell that can and should be used whenever) will always be better and actually prevent the damage from incoming instead of creating a buffer that doesn't actually heal you.

[Troxism]

To head off any questions about PTR notes, basically the big question to answer is if NP > Defile on mass AoE now. Gut feeling says probably still not (as currently NP is a DPS loss over normal diseases for Blood, even counting the fact that BB gives stacks), but 37% is a lot, so that may tip the scales. I'll look into it later, as the patch is still fairly far away.

Edit: Why NP sucks ST: Simply put PL is a huge advantage offensively and even defensively (so no, taking Plaguebearer instead doesn't really make much sense), and if you use NP on ST, you are forced to always PL on the last 1-2 ticks of NP, which limits your flexibility greatly, so is only worth it if NP is MASSIVELY better DPS on ST, which it is extremely unlikely to be. At which point you might run PB/NP, but that isn't likely to be the case.

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The problem with this is that there would be no point in taking regular melee dps anymore for any competitive guilds. What's the point of taking a ret paladin when you can take a prot pally that has very strong CDs and lose no damage for it? Your raids would consist of: healers, enough warlocks/hunters to take care of ranged mechanics and the rest tanks.

To be fair I think the argument being made is not making tanks just do like 60% damage, and more like 75-80% (and this varies, some tanks are there on AoE, or on ST, or whatever, but it's completely all over the place across all tank specs what damage they do relative to DPS in every situation), but yeah it's a difficult situation to solve fairly to all parties. The core problem is tanking is just too basic at a high level (there is just not enough gameplay in surviving ATM as bosses are generally undertuned even for low gear with rare exceptions), meaning DPS literally becomes the only thing you min-max/care about once you reach a certain skill level at tanking. Which leads to this argument being made, because skilled tank players get bored and annoyed that they don't feel like they can actually contribute to the raid as much as other players, because they start feeling like they could be replaced by an average tank and there would be little difference to the raid.

[Deleted]

I get variations of it from DPS and Tank players in guilds of similar level to mine. I've had tanks in guilds around the same rank tell me that 'I don't care about DPS because thats not my job, DPS should do more damage if we aren't making enrage'. I literally can't even understand an attitude like that. It's basically saying 'I want to get carried'. I've had DPS players from guilds tell me I should focus only on staying alive, because 'you don't ever want to die, it hurts progression if you die because you are trying to do damage'. So yes I get these sentiments from all kinds of people, it isn't limited to beginners. It's also why I basically don't give a shit what guild someone is in. I've seen too many bad players get carried (and tanks are by far the most common role this happens in as tank turnover is very very low) in very good guilds to assume anything because someone has a guild tag.

Honestly sick of people listening to people just because they have a guild tag. Especially when said 'top players' are talking about classes they only play as alts, and don't exactly play well. There is a reason I don't write a Protection Paladin/Brewmaster guide; I play them decently, but to write a guide you need to actually be an expert in every respect, not just generally competent. Yet I see too many people offer terrible advice when they have no clue what they are talking about (for all specs). It's literally the reason I wrote this guide months ago: I was sick of seeing terrible advice being thrown about in regards to Blood, and then taken as gospel because 'X player is in a top guild so clearly they know what they are talking about'. I wanted to actually write a guide that explains things as much as possible, where people can say it is correct because they know WHY it is correct to do X.

Thank you.

I've mentioned many times how ridiculous it is to just copy the armoury/advice of players in "Top Guilds" as if they are the top players of their spec.

[Zeybacher]

does anyone have an aktuall sim for the highmaul trinkets? just in terms of dps... btw. u should update the trinket sektion cause crit proccs from tbh/kb giving parry as intended.

overall big thx for the nice thread. thx for it troxism

[Ikrekot]

Troxism mention somewhere about crit giving parry from trinkets. If you need sim of dps trinkets try check dps topic.
Son of a Lich

[Veterok]

Thanks Troxism for the amazing guide!

[Zeybacher]

Troxism mention somewhere about crit giving parry from trinkets. If you need sim of dps trinkets try check dps topic.

i need one with the tank specific trinket´s like Pol´s/Evergaze Arcane Eidolon.. dps for all tank/dps trinket´s for dk tanks.

[Troxism]

i need one with the tank specific trinket´s like Pol´s/Evergaze Arcane Eidolon.. dps for all tank/dps trinket´s for dk tanks.

http://imgur.com/J2sAJV8

This is with a custom APL that doesn't completely suck (although I still think it's shit but w/e), but using my character as a base. This is only wearing 1 or 0 trinkets in each case. Uses default talents/fight time/settings, so nothing special, but honestly it shows exactly why I give the trinket suggestions I do: the dps differences basically don't exist and Pol's/Evergaze have insane utility as replacements for personal/external cds while for example Beating Heart has much less and Bottle has absolutely none (see my huge post on page 24 about why active/strong defensive procs trinkets are insane, and why passive stats/TMI are pointless for survivability).

I don't actually think these results are meaningful in reality for various reasons, but it's what you asked for, so do what you want with this.

[Saiyendra]

Why don't you include Scabbard? It's definitely better than Pillar, at least.

[Troxism]

Why don't you include Scabbard? It's definitely better than Pillar, at least.

He asked for HM only, so I assumed he didn't want to spend the gold on it. Not like it matters much. Also fight duration has a MASSIVE effect on Scabbard, so it's hard to pick an average.

Edit: But, since someone asked... http://imgur.com/dQ8VYKI

While on average Scabbard is total shit for survivability, the fact that it can be used as a CD makes it actually good for that too... except if you are using it you probably are using it for DPS, hence not using it as a defensive CD. So it ends up actually being kind of bad for that.

Either way I would take any sim result with a grain of salt, although at least I am using a non-retarded APL.

[Milocow]

Any boss-specific tips for BRF? (EG : When to AMS, when to pop CDs)

[Saiyendra]

While on average Scabbard is total shit for survivability, the fact that it can be used as a CD makes it actually good for that too... except if you are using it you probably are using it for DPS, hence not using it as a defensive CD. So it ends up actually being kind of bad for that.

Either way I would take any sim result with a grain of salt, although at least I am using a non-retarded APL.

Given this, and what you said in your long post earlier, wouldn't Scabbard + Pol's be the best combination for tanking? With Evergaze Arcane Eidolon you have a chance of getting procs outside of damage-intensive phases.

[Resurgo]

I would think that's more of a personal evaluation:

For instance, I'd like the Evergaze over something like Knight's Badge because the internal cooldown makes it so that it's more likely to be up at the right time vs the longer internal cooldown of the badge. The static stats on the Evergaze are also more useful to me, vs nothing on the Scabbard.

But in the end, it's up to each individual tank what they personally value more of: Survival vs dps and how much of that sliding scale you're able to tip.

[Vaxum]

Either way I would take any sim result with a grain of salt, although at least I am using a non-retarded APL.

Can you post the APL?

[Troxism]

Given this, and what you said in your long post earlier, wouldn't Scabbard + Pol's be the best combination for tanking? With Evergaze Arcane Eidolon you have a chance of getting procs outside of damage-intensive phases.

BA proc is much stronger for survival so Evergaze is actually much stronger as a defensive proc, Scabbard + Pols means you can't line them up ever, which is a DPS loss, and as you can see here the 'normal' DPS is already about the same between Evergaze and Scabbard without that issue. Scabbard isn't really much stronger even in the specific cd cases, and many times you have enough externals that it doesn't matter anyways (ie you don't need another one).

Also danger levels vary in a fight by more then just a binary 'hard/easy', I just simplified it for the post to make it less confusing; there are 'medium' difficulty parts where something like another 376 mastery passively can help a little; parts of the fight where you would normally not use a CD (since there is too much of that part, and you are saving them for the real hard parts). While that may sound contradictory (since I said gearing for survival doesn't make that much difference in that case), the fact is adding a 376 mastery PASSIVELY is pretty huge, and can actually make a small difference in those cases, were as for example swapping 100 crit for 100 mastery on items is a very small difference in comparison, because the crit doesn't exactly have 0 value either.

Good example of the 'medium' is boss + large add on Imperator. Doesn't hit hard enough to really make you use cds, esp since you are saving them, but hits hard enough to be at least a little sketchy in p3 where healers are too busy healing the raid, and some kind of passive survivability can help in that case, IF there is enough of it. And again, +376 Mastery is a hell of a lot more of a difference then swapping around some stats on your gear for 'more survival', going from stats that are like 0.5-0.75 as good as mastery to mastery for example.

Basically it's a DPS loss to run 2 active trinkets (as active trinkets always share a short CD so you can't stack them), and there are some fights where there are enough of the 'medium', slightly sketchy parts where a 376 passive mastery can have more value then a more reliable but weaker 'CD active' vs an amazingly strong defensive proc, even if it's kind of random. However yes, Scabbard beats out Normal trinkets, and is about equal to Heroic ones, however for Mythic I would say they slightly edge it out overall. The other issue with Scabbard and why I don't recommend it; it basically sucks if you don't use it perfectly, while other trinkets have more room for user error, and while everyone loves to think they play perfectly/well, the fact is most people do not play nearly as perfectly in most aspects as they like to think from my experience looking at logs, and absolutely everyone makes mistakes regardless.

Edit: Sorry btw if what I say here sounds a little contradictory, but things are just more complicated ingame then a lot of people like to break them down into via math/simcraft. I try to boil down things as much as possible to be simpler, but sometimes it's just always going to be more complicated then that.

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Can you post the APL?

I don't think it's good enough to post + simcraft has some MAJOR bugs with hps/absorbs atm that make it's results very awkward. I've had cases where it says some stats have negative values (and I mean in cases where negatives don't make sense obviously, for example HPS), even in cases where the boss hits hard enough to drop you below 100% for 99% of the fight. Theres also some DPS bugs with it for Blood, which is why I said I don't actually trust those results very much.

Which means if I post it I get a billion replies about how 'all my shit is wrong' because people don't understand simcraft has some major issues ATM and just randomly start simming shit and get clearly incorrect results if you stop to think about it for 2 seconds. On top of what I said about TMI before and Sims in general for tanks, and yeah.... Even for DPS simming it applies a lot; the knockback on Butcher/time he spends running back is not trivial and actually affects a few things. And simming mass aoe is silly unless you make it like 5-10 seconds only, because it just never lasts more then that in reality.

I've just seen people get mislead too much by improper use of the simcraft tool to really hold a high opinion of it as the 'end all be all' for determining things, so at this point I always fact-check it in actual gameplay whenever I get any kind of result that isn't completely obvious. It's too common bugs in the sim (and there EASILY may be some, it's just hard as fuck to find them in some cases as you really have to dig deep in the results and fact check everything) get unfixed for entire tiers and yet people make assumptions based on them the whole time.

[Patryn]

So with Blackrock Foundry releasing next week is it worth replacing mythic 685 pieces that aren't itemized well (crit/haste) for the heroic 680 pieces that have mastery multistrike?

[Troxism]

So with Blackrock Foundry releasing next week is it worth replacing mythic 685 pieces that aren't itemized well (crit/haste) for the heroic 680 pieces that have mastery multistrike?

Generally yes. But it's pretty close.