Blood DK, build 15640

New patch is out. Let's look at the new stuff in detail:

Tier 1: Plague Leech, Roiling Blood, Unholy Blight Outbreak, Veteran of the Third War, Glyph of Outbreak

Glyph of Outbreak: Your Outbreak spell no longer has a cooldown, but now costs 40 Runic Power. Replaces Glyph of Blood Boil (+5 yards on BB)
Veteran of the Third War does not reduce Outbreak's CD anymore.

I have no idea what the reasoning here was because we just got our 30 second Outbreak back only recently because having to keep up vital tanking debuffs with the same resources we use for Death Strike was acknowledged as being a stupid choice (maybe not in these words, but GC made a blog about it). And yet, we are back in this situation and most likely the new glyph and new tier 1 talent is to blame for this.

I am also extremely baffled that Glyph of Outbreak replaced one of the few useful glyphs we had, too. Is it really so hard to let DKs have more than like 5 Major Glyphs that you felt the need to remove a glyph that was useful for kiting just to add another? You couldn't have added it as extra glyph? Was there really something wrong with letting Blood kite more easily with Roiling Blood?

With Outbreak back on a 60 sec CD, Roiling Blood loses value because Unholy Blight can be used to apply diseases for free. It would already be bad enough if it stopped there, but no, they added a new talent with Plague Leech (Plague Leech - Spell - World of Warcraft) which let's you consume your diseases in return for gaining a Death Rune. Yes, that's right. A throughput talent in the tier that was all about spreading diseases. This talent just has no reason to exist like this. You cannot simply put a talent that directly increases how many Death Strikes/Scourge Strikes/whatever you can do and pretend you still give us a choice.

So now as Blood I went from having 2 viable choices in Unholy Blight and Roiling Blood into being railroaded into picking not only Plague Leech but also picking up Glyph of Outbreak.
We will just have to apply the first set of diseases with IT/PS since we start at 0 RP but after that we will just trade 40 RP for a Death Rune every 25 seconds (Sound familar? It should, because this what tier 5 is about - not tier 1!)

This is not a fun addition to our rotation either. I have a feeling this was supposed to emulate Cata BT but it sucks. Simple as that. If you want to give us back BT with flavor, don't do it through the talents because it makes it mandatory. And certainly don't do it if you need both a glyph AND a talent to make it work. It goes against everything MoP was set out to do.
Remove this talent if you want Blood to have a choice in tier 1 AND not make Glyph of Outbreak mandatory. Give us back 30 second Outbreak or have Scarlet Fever proc from Blood Boil once more - if this, too, sounds familiar, it is because THIS IS HOW IT WORKS FOR EVERY OTHER TANK! (Thrash, Keg Smash, Thunder Clap, Hammer of the Righteous all apply Weakened Blows; all are AoE and neither cuts into their active mitigation.)

I really have no idea what happened here. How could we go from zero mandatory talents and zero mandatory glyphs to this? Was the whole points of the new talents and glyphs not to give us a choice? Seriously, what happened?


I'll offer a compromise though: If you make Plague Leech baseline and bring back 30 second Outbreak for Blood it would work. But it's still not a fun addition to our rotation (and it still doesn't the issue for DPS specs).

Tier 2: Anti-Magic Zone, Purgatory

Anti-Magic Zone's absorb scaling got significantly nerfed for Blood. It now scales from 4*STR instead of 2*AP which effectively takes Vengeance out of the picture. This is not a bad thing at all because it roughly equalizes absorb values for all 3 specs. It also gained a 106k base absorb before even accounting for the extra absorb amount from the STR scaling so that's pretty sweet.

Icy Grip got replaced Purgatory because apparently even DKs are softies at heart and really needed such a priestly themed ability name. In addition, the 10 second Death Grip reduction got baked into the baseline which is just awesome.
This is basically Cauterize (Cauterize - Spell - World of Warcraft) with a twist. The twist being that it can be better or worse depending on how much overkill damage you took since Cauterize always resets you to the same health % and you will always require the same healing to get back to full health (in MoP, Cauterize will not kill you even if you don't receive a single heal). What this means in practice: (DPS) DKs will still not be able to cheese mechanics like Shadow Priests or Mages can like taking Shadow Orbs on Zon solo or even surviving Impales on H Madness if you use a 1 tank strat.
That said, it will still have some uses and here is what I can think of (keep in mind the ability is still NYI):

- The talent sort of gives you more EH whenever it is not on CD. If we ever run into a boss like Baleroc again who could 2 shot DK tanks due to our low EH it might gives us 1 or 2 more seconds to get in that vital Death Strike and receive some healing without dying. That said, if bosses start hitting that hard again we'll have more pressing matters than to find out which Tier 2 talent would provide the best band-aid until the next patch. :P

- The low maintainance version of speccing it and forgetting about it. It gives your healers another 3 seconds to heal you up before you die from abilities that do not one-shot but can still kill you over time (i.e. Deathwing's AoE aura). In this scenario speccing into LB and AMZ would still have been better because it allowed you to avoid "dying" altogether but as I said, this is the low maintanance version I can imagine some people going for if they just don't want to deal with AMZ or LB (this way is certainly not ideal but from a developer's PoV I can see the merit of a passive talent that is less powerful than the activated abilities). This is also one of the few scenarios where it is better than the Cata Cauterize because your overkill amount will generally be lower.

- I think everyone remembers sub 1% wipes. Purgatory could buy you up to 3 more seconds of DPS time even if you have no chance to survive the debuff at all (I am thinking of something like Chimaeron who had little use for LB/AMZ because the hard part was P2 where DPS mattered and healing didn't work at all; alternatively, you can take another hit from the boss that went into his berserk). I know this might be stretching a bit but the talent is new so I just want to list anything that could possibly be useful.

- You use it as a ghetto damage reduction CD* in conjunction with your other CDs to avoid abilities that hit hard but only once, like Hour of Twilight. For example an ability that hits for 400k magical damage post-CDs and AMS will only absorb 100k damage because you have 200k health. In this case you would survive the burst and require 100k more healing within 3 seconds to survive. Ideally you saved up Runes for a Death Strike to help out with this because Lichborne, the ability that would have synergized very nicely with this method of using Purgatory, is on the same tier and hence not available. That said, Purgatory still synergizes quite nicely with Death Pact since anything under a 50% max health overkill gets negated by comboing both talents.
*it doesn't reduce your damage taken per se, but it allows you to survive abilities that would otherwise kill you

While I could see Purgatory being used in this way for specific situations, it still has the huge drawback of sharing the tier with Lichborne and AMZ. In the scenario above AMZ would probably have been enough to save you and anyone else sharing it with you (if the cap is below 100k at level 90 (it currently is much higher but numbers can change etc) something is seriously wrong with the scaling since a single Death Coil under LB will heal for that much; yeah, AMZ is damage prevention and AoE but still.)
So let's take AMZ out of the picture by assuming the spike damage is completely physical and not affected by armor (still 100k overkill). In that case it would make sense to use it ut this is a pretty contrived scenario to begin with. You might argue that Impale on Madness would fit but chances are we will have enough tank CDs and/or externals to deal with it (and that's ignoring how useful AMZ would be there).

All this said, we still don't even know how exactly Purgatory would work (NYI and all that). Basically, there are three ways I could imagine being implemented:

1) You have 200k health, take 300k damage and now are at 1 health with a 99 999 heal absorb debuff. The next melee swing or AoE aura tick is likely to kill you unless there is a grace period of no damage taken (some bosses do stop attacking you after a special ability/cast but not all)
2) You have 200k health, take 300k damage now are at 200k health with a 300k heal absorb debuff. This protects you from getting killed on the next swing but makes it harder on your healers because they now need to do 300k healing within 3 seconds or you die anyway.
3) You have 200k health, take 300k damage and now are at 100k health with a 200k heal absorb debuff. This is basically the compromise between 1) and 2) and I could see Purgatory just resetting your health to a fixed % like Cauterize does (in this example: 50%).

Personally, I would prefer 3). Also, giving Purgatory a damage reduction on proc like Cheat Death has would increase it's value as well (have it last for 3 seconds or something). You could argue we already have WotN but I am not sure a 25% damage reduction is going to enough to let you survive another swing in most cases.


In summary, Purgatory is not a bad talent by itself. The real problem is that it shares the tier with 2 other really good CDs, one of which is a raid CD. The fact that we cannot bring a raid CD if we skip on AMZ makes picking Purgatory (and to a lesser extent Lichborne) much harder. Baseline AMZ would somewhat solve the issue though *wink wink nudge nudge*.
Either way, this tier is much, much better now that Icy Grip is gone because every talent actually now fits thematically, too.

Tier 3: Death's Advance

Now gives full immunity to snares. As a tank this doesn't change much since it doesn't change the fact it's situational (not saying I will never spec DA but the change "only" made DA better at what it was already doing so it remains as situational as before).

Tier 4: Death Siphon

DSi got it's AP coefficient nerfed which is a damn shame. I get that it it's not supposed to outdamage our primary strikes but it was a fun addition to our rotation when you could replace HS with DSi while healing yourself and still adding more damage. The AP change may or may not have been too hasty since we don't know how much our strikes scale at 90 with the new weapons either.

Tier 5: Blood Tap

It now allows you to stack up to 12 charges which is a step in the right direction because we are now down from 5 RSes to 4 RSes inbetween a second Death Strike. This, however, is still not enough to make BT worth picking over the other choices (see http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/5379-t...nic_Corruption for a more in-depth explanation).
Runic Empowerment didn't see any change either which is disappointing.


Tier 7: Gorefiend's Grasp, Remorseless Winter, Desecrated Ground

All of these talents got their damage component removed. This is a good change because you will now pick these talents based on their utility and not about how much damage they do. That said, I am going to miss Relentless Winter's AoE damage because I was looking forward to using it to pick up new mobs but oh well (Curse you, DPS DKs! :P).
Desecrated Ground also now removes the debuffs it protects you from when initially used but it still doesn't remove snares (which might be unnecessary with the new Death's Advance) which is a shame because snares are much more common in PvE which would have given DGr atleast some PvE use.

You know what's ironic though? These talents got their damage component removed because people would spec them according to what offered the highest DPS and not about which flavor/utility they brought. Now if you go look back at the new addition in Tier 1, do you notice something? Spoiler: It's like all Tier 1 abilities doing different amounts of damage with one being much superior than the rest except replace "damage" with "Death Strikes". I just don't understand how the same people who fixed Tier 7 gave us Plague Leech. I really, really don't.


Misc

Necrotic Strike now increases casting time by 50% in PvE and still only lasts 10 seconds. I am quite worried about this because it become now even more powerful on encounters where it works while still being a pain to keep up as DK. I would really love to see a glyph that increases the debuff at the cost of removing the healing absorb so we can keep up the debuff if necessary in PvE.

Death and Decay damage is still really low (damage got cut in half basically). I know damage isn't tuned and all that but DnD damage is very important for Blood AoE threat. We are still the only tanks that sacrifice mitigation for AoE threat if we have to Blood Boil more than once every 8 seconds. We could usually live with that because DnD made AoE threat a non-issue. However if DnD fails to hold threat on it's own, we will be at a disadvantage compared to the other tanks here. It's not a pressing matter because we aren't level 90 yet but I'd rather we avoid this whole mess outright by fixing it before it becomes a problem.

Death Pact, BS, Raise Ally, Strangulate still on GCD

Please, for the love of consistency, fix this.