Blood DK Mastery Stacking

[Deleted]

Would you agree that if there are two players of the dps role, and one players is doing more damage than the other, then the player doing more damage is being more effective?

If two players of the tank role are fulfilling their tank responsibilities, and one of them is doing more damage than the other, then the player doing more damage is being more effective.

I would take who's better at mechanics, higher dmg on priority targets, takes less dmg, dies less etc into account.

If you're on Archie Mythic you know how important some of that stuff is. Is our lock going destro for Doomfire dmg worse than our affli lock because he's lower overall dmg?

[theyanger]

Edit: Meh not worth it.

[cujoe]

Where the fuck do you think you are Cujoe? This isn't hippy camp, this is the DK sub forum of MMOC and this shit is real god damn it!

Sorry I'm still new here ;D

And seriously, why do some people in this thread still claim defile is bad? It was never bad at all. Boring? Maybe. But that is less a problem of defile than of the class mechanics. Did BoS gameplay in 6.1 make things more fun? For me, yes. Is 6.2 BoS frustrating? Maybe yes, but only if you are used to 6.1 playstyle. If you see it as a burst CD that also provides quite a bit of healing under certain circumstences, current BoS fulfills this role quite well. You don't need full MS gear and a co-tank who takes every bullshit for you in order to get 20-30s uptime and that is all it needs for BoS to be viable.

So don't get stuck in the past guys and free yourself from the "get as much BoS uptime as possible or you suck at DK" mentality.

[Resurgo]

But what if the tank with less damage take less damage aswell, allowing the healers to focus on other stuff, thus leading to less progress wipes because healers are able to cover mistakes of other people instead of focusing the tank? Who is then the more effective tank?

Thing of it is,
As DK's we have the ability to heal ourselves quite effectively. There's many times and fights where my healers are "complaining" that I'm outhealing even them. So despite the higher damage intake, we heal ourselves to make up for it. To the point that our main healer has specifically mentioned that most of the time, he never even pays attention to me anyways.

Whether geared for Mastery or DPS, we're still able to effectively be self sufficient.

[Deleted]

But what if the tank with less damage take less damage aswell, allowing the healers to focus on other stuff, thus leading to less progress wipes because healers are able to cover mistakes of other people instead of focusing the tank? Who is then the more effective tank?

Also what I prefer to think

- - - Updated - - -

Thing of it is,
As DK's we have the ability to heal ourselves quite effectively. There's many times and fights where my healers are "complaining" that I'm outhealing even them. So despite the higher damage intake, we heal ourselves to make up for it. To the point that our main healer has specifically mentioned that most of the time, he never even pays attention to me anyways.

Whether geared for Mastery or DPS, we're still able to effectively be self sufficient.

Because of certain mechanics. Not all fights lets you survive through healing alone

[Saiyendra]

But what if the tank with less damage take less damage aswell, allowing the healers to focus on other stuff, thus leading to less progress wipes because healers are able to cover mistakes of other people instead of focusing the tank? Who is then the more effective tank?

Uhhhh, you can take more damage overall than another tank and still be more stable, because you took less damage during the parts that matter.

[Saybel]

4th Edit: I don't think you guys realize that absolutely no one cares about tank ranks anymore (just found that link now when I was browsing through) All the good people who actually did manage to do good DPS as a tank while doing their job perfectly either quit/rerolled DPS/joined a top-end guild/doesn't even care because it doesn't matter anymore as it is insanely frustrating to try and dps as tank.

This. We already rode the train, it's over now boys.

[Fenris65535]

What it comes down to is this. Do I trust my healers to keep me alive? In progression content and pugs, ironically enough, the answer is usually no because they're healing people who stand in fire or don't understand mechanics. In farming or really solid group progression the answer is yes. You look at Method or Paragons mythic kills, no one took avoidable damage, which means certain healers were bordering on bored half the time. In that case, if you're dps oriented then you're not causing a drain on them. So if you're in Paragon or Method, or you have a solid guild group that is progressing at a below-bleeding-edge rate, then by all means stack multi and go for BoS. I however, still have to pug a lot, so if I can do 90% of my own healing on Archimonde to free up a healer to try and fix it when the pug hunter dragged 9000 tons of doomfire through the group, that's what I'm going for.

[Resurgo]

Thing is, you don't heal tanks , especially dks on progression. You let them survive themselves (and this isn't an exaggerationg)

The only fight I really expect heals from my healers is Tyrant (our disco spams CoW on me) and Archimonde. If a situation appears that I get so low on hp (happens often on Xul due to green + boss) they throw hots + instants to top me off. That's it really.

^ Exactly this

Because of certain mechanics. Not all fights lets you survive through healing alone

First few pulls of Archimonde, my warrior co-tank hadn't grasped everything that was going on and I was literally tripling his damage intake. There were times I'd have the debuff, Archimonde melee AND the add on me at once because he'd literally explode with all the damage. He still died. As a DK, we're a lot more self sufficient than what you seem to think.

"certain mechanics" is part of every fight. Some DK's are just better able to twist the mechanics around to their advantage. The question becomes whether or not you're doing really stupid things that aren't a help overall to the raid.

[Dracodraco]

Uhhhh, you can take more damage overall than another tank and still be more stable, because you took less damage during the parts that matter.

...So? The scenario here was two DKs that can play. Ill quote it just to make sure you read it:

If two players of the tank role are fulfilling their tank responsibilities, and one of them is doing more damage than the other, then the player doing more damage is being more effective.

We can assume that this means one is breathing and stacking multistrike, and one is defiling and stacking mastery. We can also assume that because they're both "fulfilling" their tank responsibilities, they are not taking extra spike damage and are cooldowning correctly.

Thus we're left with the tradeoff of a tank either using DPS trinkets+Multistrike and breath and taking more overall damage that healers has to be concerned with, or a DK using mitigation trinkets+mastery and defile, and being more self sufficient due to larger shields/self preservation.

Thing of it is,
As DK's we have the ability to heal ourselves quite effectively. There's many times and fights where my healers are "complaining" that I'm outhealing even them. So despite the higher damage intake, we heal ourselves to make up for it. To the point that our main healer has specifically mentioned that most of the time, he never even pays attention to me anyways.

Whether geared for Mastery or DPS, we're still able to effectively be self sufficient.

But giving up mastery makes you less self sufficient, for a trade off that's usually barely 10-15% increase (thus meaning about 4K dps) unless extremely ideal circumstances are met (such as HHC or Xhul, with 2-3 target cleave for the majority of the fight).
You can argue that you might be self sufficient enough as it is, but losing mastery *will* result in lower survivability, and will cause healers to need to focus you more; there's no fights where you don't have external healing on you. If it's worth it or not for an additional 4K dps on most encounters, is up to you. But you may aswell stack mastery, get a fistweaver monk instead of one of your 4 full-time healers, and have him doing 20K dps instead WHILE healing, because they don't need as much healing when you're fully decked in mitigation.

[Resurgo]

...
But giving up mastery makes you less self sufficient, for a trade off that's usually barely 10-15% increase (thus meaning about 4K dps) unless extremely ideal circumstances are met (such as HHC or Xhul, with 2-3 target cleave for the majority of the fight).
You can argue that you might be self sufficient enough as it is, but losing mastery *will* result in lower survivability, and will cause healers to need to focus you more; there's no fights where you don't have external healing on you. If it's worth it or not for an additional 4K dps on most encounters, is up to you. But you may aswell stack mastery, get a fistweaver monk instead of one of your 4 full-time healers, and have him doing 20K dps instead WHILE healing, because they don't need as much healing when you're fully decked in mitigation.

This is where you pretty much need to evaluate what your raid is capable of.

For my raid's purposes, stacking extra mastery and survival stats just results in lots of overhealing.

So, if stacking dps stats nets a 4kdps gain for no change in healing, (going to effective healing vs overhealing) then I'll simply stack dps stats. However, this is (again) dependent on what your raid is capable of.

Stacking Mastery vs DPS stats isn't done in a vacuum. It's also evaluating what the overall is capable of as well.

edit:
Also, if we're speaking strictly about DK's, whether stacking DPS or Mastery, there's very little out there that poses much of a great risk for us. There's no one-shot mechanics, and the two fights I can think of that are dangerous to us are probably just as much so for another tank. Using Archimonde as an example again, even decked out in mostly dps gear, my warrior co-tank just simply had none of the survival I did because of the toolkit we have as DKs.

[AanvilGT]

Quick update. Shacabau with Pwnanza has downed Mythic Archimonde for world 5th. A huge jump for them and huge gratz to them. Right now we don't have a log of the Archimonde kill, but hopefully that will be up soon. Does warcraftlogs embargo the final boss logs? On his armory, he's wearing heroic Reaper's Harvest (perhaps to celebrate), but no way to know if he was actually using it for the kill. In his Mannoroth kill yesterday he was using Blast Furnace together with Anzu's.

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...hacabau/simple

[Murderdoll]

^^They might not have those logs public yet. AFAIK WarcraftLogs doesnt actively restrict them.

[Dracodraco]

This is where you pretty much need to evaluate what your raid is capable of.

For my raid's purposes, stacking extra mastery and survival stats just results in lots of overhealing.

So, if stacking dps stats nets a 4kdps gain for no change in healing, (going to effective healing vs overhealing) then I'll simply stack dps stats. However, this is (again) dependent on what your raid is capable of.

Stacking Mastery vs DPS stats isn't done in a vacuum. It's also evaluating what the overall is capable of as well.

edit:
Also, if we're speaking strictly about DK's, whether stacking DPS or Mastery, there's very little out there that poses much of a great risk for us. There's no one-shot mechanics, and the two fights I can think of that are dangerous to us are probably just as much so for another tank. Using Archimonde as an example again, even decked out in mostly dps gear, my warrior co-tank just simply had none of the survival I did because of the toolkit we have as DKs.

Of course - but the question then becomes, is it *best* to make that trade-off on your DK? If stacking mastery causes a lot of overhealing, there's also the option of having healers throw dots/their few heavy hitting spells (EG, Lava burst for resto shaman) and easily making up the 4K dps that the DK could gain by doing so (if not even more) - the globals saved because your DK doesn't need the extra healing.
Likewise, healers doing this has the option to go fully defensive at a moments notice, mid fight, if the situation warrants it - for example, if a healer dies, or there's periods where healing is a snooze fest (think fel lord - healing outside of the heavy handed phases is largely non-existant, but inside the phases, shit gets rough). A DK stacking multistrike vs mastery doesn't have the option to suddenly go more defensive (apart from popping CDs, of course) like a healer throwing out dots/heavy hitting spells would.

This is all just guesswork and theoretical anyhow though, but it would seem to me that it would make far more sense to have your healers throw out a global on a DoT every 20 seconds to make up for the 4K dps is a better choise than making yourself "squishier" than needed, atleast from a progress PoV.

[falagar112]

Honestly this raiding tier has so very few encounters that are actually dangerous for tanks, that, theoretically you'd be fine with 0 mastery too. You'd do less (over)healing, but you really can be as self reliant as heavy mastery stacking, as long as you play properly, mitigate/external projected hard hitting attacks, and you got the basic healing running (beacon, hots). Because of this, the whole BoS vs Defile discussion is so pointless.

I totally agree with Lazel, RNG does not equal skill. Just because you managed to keep your breath up for 2 minutes straight due to autoattack RNG does not make you a more skilled tank as DK#2 who had unlucky RNG and lost it after 30 seconds.

The skill comes from playing your class to perfection, discounting RNG. Don't die, don't make silly mistakes, position bosses in ways that make your dps do more dps, and be as self reliant as possible. That last part is so important during progression - I cannot really speak for DK anymore having rerolled monk tank for HFC, but as monks are as self reliant (if not more so) as DK tanks are, I think its ok to compare the two. Being self reliant means your healers can focus on keeping that dps alive that managed to stay in fire a second to long, which as we all know, gets people killed on cutting edge progression. If you are in such a high end guild that you do not have people making such mistakes, you drop down a healer and get another dps in.

[Deleted]

Tyrant gloves from cache so strong, above 2k (2.1k even) MS with mastery enchants , much love ;3

Mastery so stronk on Archimonde, boss hits like 350k + zzz.

Melee attack > drop hp > instant DS (250k + absorb next hit) repeat. Unlike other bosses (except tyrant last phase probably) this feels so good. You people should try whoring bos on Archimonde. I can already hear the excuses

''Fking healers of this guild suck, can't even keep up a tank''

:S

Using BoS + Vial since pull 1 without problems, Anzu's covers most of the Boss damage and the only "hard" parts are too long living Tank Adds in p2. When you die to only Boss damage it's because you get two 400k swings without Blood Shield which means you most likely failed.

[falagar112]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...uras&source=23

Damn, so gut man. That 3% uptime. If you actually had any idea how much WuE helps on surviving adds (6 stacks with no problems) and actually makes your raid FOCUS on the boss damage more.

O' wait I'm pro dk I do dips only, faking kill my add on 1 stack plz.

More impressive to see 1 BoS cast in a 6:30+ kill.
If you do go BoS, atleast... actually use the ability to help kill add faster to help out your guilds dps. It's not like it's going to heal you for anything with all that (lol) magic damage flying around on Tyrant.

As for WUE - tbh any tank not using that trinket on tyrant is doing it wrong and is only making it harder on your healers. Unless you are me, and your guild has had a grand total of 0 WUE drops including coining every week - in that case you can whine at the lootgods and pray your healers keep an eye out on you :P

[Deleted]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...uras&source=23

Damn, so gut man. That 3% uptime. If you actually had any idea how much WuE helps on surviving adds (6 stacks with no problems) and actually makes your raid FOCUS on the boss damage more.

O' wait I'm pro dk I do dips only, faking kill my add on 1 stack plz.

Oh no I failed on a pull that must make me the worst player ever. /clap
If you had actually seen the whole fight on Archimonde then you would know that surviving will be your last problem.

[Resurgo]

Of course - but the question then becomes, is it *best* to make that trade-off on your DK? If stacking mastery causes a lot of overhealing, there's also the option of having healers throw dots/their few heavy hitting spells (EG, Lava burst for resto shaman) and easily making up the 4K dps that the DK could gain by doing so (if not even more) - the globals saved because your DK doesn't need the extra healing.
Likewise, healers doing this has the option to go fully defensive at a moments notice, mid fight, if the situation warrants it - for example, if a healer dies, or there's periods where healing is a snooze fest (think fel lord - healing outside of the heavy handed phases is largely non-existant, but inside the phases, shit gets rough). A DK stacking multistrike vs mastery doesn't have the option to suddenly go more defensive (apart from popping CDs, of course) like a healer throwing out dots/heavy hitting spells would.

This is all just guesswork and theoretical anyhow though, but it would seem to me that it would make far more sense to have your healers throw out a global on a DoT every 20 seconds to make up for the 4K dps is a better choise than making yourself "squishier" than needed, atleast from a progress PoV.

I recall back in MoP when Disc healers were super OP. We ran a double disc healer setup which basically meant that the two healers = 1.5 dps, so it trivialized a bunch of content. (though of course, made some fights kind of annoying) I still demolished whatever dps they could muster, combined.

As I said before, it's really a matter of seeing what your raid group is capable of. I'm not one of the hardcore "you must go BoS and Multistrike or else you fail" crowd, because I like being able to see both sides. There's nothing inherently wrong with Mastery stacking, just as there's nothing wrong with stacking Multistrike going for dps. Being a blood DK means your skill and comfort level will allow you to pick and choose.

I believe Troxism alluded to this in one of his posts, which was something along the lines of;
Most of us here on mmo-champ are likely "better" players. The vast majority of tanks (players) likely suck. So tuning raids by Blizzard becomes a hard balance. Due to how few tanks there are (relatively) and how most of them are brain dead and suck, they aren't really able to make raid encounters so difficult for tank survival or else they'd be blocking progression of the whole raid. The tanks that don't suck are left with a rather easy job of survival. It's easy to find another dps. Heck you can carry a bad dps (to a certain extent), but carrying a bad tank?


I'm with falagar112 on this:
Arguing the pros and cons of this is kinda silly. There really isn't a true 'one is superior to the other' argument right now as it stands. There might be a few outliers that will say this is better or not, but in reality, it's in the hands of the player, not the stats/talents/etc.


edit #2:
Regarding Archimonde:
I feel really bad for warrior tanks at the moment. So we've been basically trying to find a tank to fill in a void left by a longtime raider. In the meantime, the potential fill in's lackadaisical attendance has us looking for a new tank. Coincidentally, another old longtime former raider has made a return and is attempting to fill in the tanking spot on a warrior. (that's like 4 months condensed into 3 sentences)
I've watched two warrior tanks with me on this fight and they simply get trucked.
As "squishy" as I might be with a near full multi-strike build, I'm forced to take in nearly 3 times the amount of damage the warriors do because they simply can't take it.

Long story short: However less or more "survivable" we are as Mastery or Multistrike focused, still seems to put us leagues ahead of other tanks depending on the fight.

[Hellkung]

The attitude is unreal. When you're number 1 on whoring because you simply can it's fine, skillfull and the right way to play.

But when you don't because of any reason at all it suddenly doesn't matter, is the sign of a bad player and takes no skill.

Like I know people are afraid to speak up but man the salt is out of this world.

Go ahead and tell me I suck and don't know my class.

FYI, I just think it is an extremely dickish thing to piss on other people's efforts when you're suddenly not n1 anymore. It's the only problem I have and am pointing out because tend to take everything top tier players say as gospel.