Another thing I wanted to bring up is threat and opening rotation. I know this is bringing in a whole new can of worms that will stir some debate but it needs to be addressed. Threat (atm) is 'improved' and headed in the right direction, but still needs some work.

The above statement is mainly referring to it being more balanced and challenging. On that same token I am sure you all know the IT slam/spam is no more. This is a good thing because it caused a lot of people to rely on it as a crutch and caused even the skilled players who just wanted to see how many TPS they could gain to set up runes to spam it. Both of these aren't the case anymore, which is the main reason on why I'm saying its 'improved'.

However, I'm not a fan of the whole 'vengeance' shit. I would much rather them balance threat values on each of our abilities than to rely on boss dmg intake for threat balancing with dps. In either case, its what we have and what we need to go with.

With all that being said, we'll get down to the current state of the game and I will alter this as hotfixes/changes go active:

With Diseases - RP value in (x)

Opener: from ranged running in IT (10) > PS (20) > DS (40) > HS (50) > *** > HS (60) > ***DRW > BT > HS > ERW > Empty an entire set of runes on HS spam.

***if you got a SoB proc (60), DRW to save a GCD and gain an additional HS with DRW active. Also, save RP until getting DRW out, then spam for RS procs.

Atm that is what I have been going with this cycle for opening threat and it seems to be somewhat viable, but I am sure others have been trying different combinations. The reason I pool RP at the start instead of getting up RS procs is to have DRW active asap. Yes, I'm aware its a def cd, but you have plenty of other options for the first 90secs of a fight to allow it to be used offensively. Yes, I'm also aware that RS is our largest threat ability, but you are only delaying that by 4-5 gcds for a bigger gain in the end. Not having AMS/BT to gain RP sucks shit, but I guess its a fair tradeoff for getting IBF and AMS w/ no RP cost ><.

With the opener out of the way, once you get into the meat of your rotation, its going to be completely situational (ie using DS if you need heal/shield or use HS if you're stable for more threat). Keeping both diseases up buffs your HS dmg immensely and keeps the debuffs active on the boss (attack speed reduc / demo).

I know there have been several posts about relying on others to keep these up for you, and while in some cases, its viable, others it isn't. Its better to get in the habit of learning to manage the more complicated aspect (disease / debuff management) than to get used to spamming DS over and over and over. Each of the hard fights Cata will bring will have their own set of rules, we'll just have to wait and see.

One thing I know that has been mentioned already is the ability to gain a 'free' blood rune by refreshing Blood Plague just before it expires to gain a free BB to apply Scarlet Fever. I really like that mechanic and talent setup and it has a very solid place on fights where you need to ensure demo is active. The timers also line up fairly well with needing to reapply diseases and refresh SF within the same timeframe. You could also drop to 2/3 Epidemic to min/max it within a few seconds closer, but you gain a slight bit of downtime on the debuffs if so as seen below.

SF=30sec uptime
2/3 Epidemic =29 sec disease uptime
3/3 Epidemic =33 sec disease uptime

PS. For all of you who were using the PvP shoulder ench, remember to pick up the new SoH version (22stm/20dodge)

Riggins is still right though, Vengeance won't achieve that because of typical fight mechanics, slow ramp up, randomness and it's fast fall-off.

How many fights does the boss simply stand there and beat on the same tank for 5 minutes? We don't have much Patchwerk or Golemagg these days. Modern fights involve various phases, tank switches, extended casting, etc. Any tank switch or special phase ruins vengeance, simple things like casting a spell and some avoidance streaks seriously hurt it. It ramps up fairly slowly then as well, and this of course means it's not reliable at the most critical time for threat: when you first pick something up.

Either tank threat is balanced around vengeance and all these glaring flaws will cause serious problems or vengeance is pure bonus and we'll just have Festergut type advantages on many fights. Despite what the devs have been saying, at this point I'm thinking the latter situation is more likely.

I'm surprised we're even discussing this here, IMO it's clear, if vengeance is to be a serious scaling mechanic it needs to be more dependable.

Facing this, what basis is there for Mastery>Parry/dodge as a survivability stat?

Using 3/3 SoB right now I'm actually having trouble preventing myself from capping on RP even just running heroics (in mostly 264 gear), which can be considered a blessing meaning you can throw around a lot of Rune Strikes (and I've also been doing Death Coils when I was at 80 RP after just having Rune Striked), but I've personally experienced as bit of a hazard to feverishly try to not cap on RP, whilst keeping up diseases, Bloodboiling, Death Striking, and so forth. That said, I suppose that reforging for haste could allow speccing out of SoB in favour of for example Abomination's Might or Blood-caked Blade, which seems to me like a threat/survival tradeoff.

I'm not saying Vengeance is perfect, or really even good necessarily; I'm just clarifying the intent behind it. Despite it's flaws though, the alternatives are to either recalculate all the threat modifiers on all the tank abilities for every tier, or else let tank damage output scale at the same rate as DPS damage output.

Sorry, the column heading "swing frequency" was probably a little unintuitive. What it means, though is every how many seconds the boss swings. So a swing frequency of 1 means more incoming damage than a swing frequency of 3.

The formula I used for the Death Strike heal was:
Basically it compares the larger of 10% HP and 30% of swings taken within the last 5 seconds (though because I floor it- it actually assumes that you DS immediately before the next swing. That's probably not the best idea, I did the sheet late last night.)

A better formula is probably:
But that wasn't used in the original sheet.

The dodge formula was
Basically your dodge % chance multiplied by the total damage (for a single point of dodge rating).

The mastery formula was
Basically the number of Death Strikes across the fight duration, multiplied by the amount of absorption your mastery gives.

So row 2 says that if a boss is hitting you for 15000 every 3 seconds your average Death Strike will heal for 5000 (because of my faulty assumption that you've only been hit once in the preceding 5 seconds). So if the fight lasts 300 seconds a single point of dodge rating will avoid 331 damage and a single point of mastery rating will absorb 204 damage.

If someone with more mathematical understanding or better excel skills wants to work on these formulas go for it! As I say it was just an attempt at some napkin maths.

The jury is still out for me on this until we get confirmation on whether or not it's intended that effects like VB not increase Blood Shield. However, I have a suspicion that I'm still going to like the VB glyph either way just because it will still increase both RT and DS heals substantially and save healer mana. I think that this is much more likely to be valuable than the health increase.

Hey all,

Couple questions and comments about things I've noticed.

1) I haven't really seen them talked about too much since the patch was released but bloodworms seems to be doing rather well for me. World of logs put mine at around 1.3 million healing during the first 6 icc bosses the only characters that beat this were the healers, shadowpriest and myself. If these are smart heals (which I've heard they are) then it's definitely worth the look.

2) What is the communities feelings on the new hodir enchant. After patch it's currently 22 stam and 20 dodge. Seems to me that it might finally be worth dropping the gladiator enchant and picking up the extra 20 dodge at the cost of 8 stam. Then again 20 dodge rating is about .3% or something tiny so 80 hp or .3% avoidance?

3) I found a nifty little addon called Blood Shield Tracker. It's just 2 bars on your screen, 1 shows the Estimated heal (based on the last 5 seconds of dmg or 10% of your hp) and then once you actually have a blood shield it shows another bar giving you a (xxxx/xxxx) shield remaining.

4) Lastly, improved deathstrike.....is the talent even working all the math from previous pages seem to say it's not yet I still see most DKs with points in the talent.

Yeah, I saw most of the conversation on the first few pages problems were
Bloodworms were all discussed prepatch I thought. Not much after it was released.
Here is my ICC raid from this tuesday
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
Seems that the heal is split pretty evenly...More on me because i'm a tank so my health is usually lower than the others I'd assume.
Totally missed the hodir part
Yeah right now the healing portion of the talent is definitely being applied to 10% hp heals from DS

The glyph is actually pointless with respect to RT and DS heals. Without the glyph pressing VB increases your health by 15% and your healing recieved by 25%, since both RT and DS heal based on your HP they increase by (1.15 * 1.25 = 1.4375) 43.75%.

So, for your own personal healing glyphing VB is actually reducing your ability by 3.75%. Your decision is, +15% health or +15% outside healing increase? While I personally really like the idea of +40% increased healing (that stacks with Guardian Spirit!), for now, until I see how bosses how are in Cata, the +15% health gain is an excellent survivability effect that I don't want to lose.

I've noticed that the engineering glove tinker does not stack with any other enchants. Given its reduction to 250 armor, how does that compare with the alternative 18 stam or even Armsman, given that you can stack the other two with Hyperspeed Accelerators or maybe the rocket for a ranged pickup tool?

I hope this post will clear up some misconceptions we seem to have had about Death Strike.

Death Strike is now a Blood skill and has been revamped - A deadly attack that deals 150% weapon damage (up from 75%) plus 387 (up from 123), healing you for 30% of the damage you have sustained during the preceding 5 sec (minimum of at least 10% of your maximum health). 1 Unholy 1 Frost, 5 yd range, Instant.

In other words: the heal you receive is 30% of your damage taken over the last 5 seconds. If, however, you do not take enough damage in these 5 seconds for this heal to total 10% of your maximum health, the secondary effect will overwrite the primary one and heal you for 10% of your maximum health instead. This means that unless you take a sufficient amount of damage, you will not get a noticable effect from the talent. You do NOT get 10% of your max HP times 1.45 as your smallest heal!

Here is an example:
Let's say you have 100k hp. This means that your Death Strike will heal you for 10k if the damage you took in the prior 5 seconds is smaller than 33,33k. Because 30% of 33.33k equals 10k. This is true without the talent.

Let's take the previous example and now include the 45% extra healing from the talent. Again, you will heal for 10k if the damage taken didn't amount to heal your for more then that. However, with the talent, the damage required to get a 10k heal is smaller then 33.33k. The amount of damage taken required for a 10k heal is only 22.99k because 10k/0.3/1.45 = 22.99k

Now let's go from easy to use numbers to some more realistic numbers. I'm in ICC, I've specced into Improved Death Strike and I'm also being affected by the +30% healing buff. I'm buffed up and sitting at a comfy 83k hp.
In this situation the amount of damage I need to take in the 5 seconds prior to my DS in order to get see the talent affect my heal needs to be larger then 10000/0.3/1.45/1.3 = 17684 (rounded up).
Assuming your don't have the talent you need to take more than 10000/0.3/1.3 = 25641 (rounded down) damage before you start healing for more then 10k.

Conclusion:
If the talent didn't work you would have to take more than 25.64k damage 5 seconds prior to your DS to heal for more then 10k.
If the talent does work you would only have to take more then 17.7k damage 5 seconds prior to your DS to heal for more then 10k.

This means that if anyone who was in ICC with the buff turned on and specced into Improved DS can prove if the talent works or not by finding a time stamped log that shows you taking in between 17.7k and 25.64k damage 5 seconds prior to your DS and healing for more then 10k. Sadly I do not have a time stamped log to post as a definate piece of evidence.

The second option would be to take any time stamped log and to just do the math on it. but since my addons are broken, blizzards log isn't time stamped and the various websites are inaccurate according to previous posters I won't be able to do this.