There hasn't been much discussion regarding the possible integration of D&D into regular use on single target fights boss fights, particularly those with little to no movement. I might be missing something but it appears D&D has been accepted as AoE only but I haven't read any supporting argument for this.
For example, by taking 2/2 Improved Blood Tap I'm able to sync my D&D cooldown with that of Blood Tap and power D&D strictly from death runes, leaving my FU runes untouched for Death Strike. Furthermore, picking the D&D glyph means you gain a 50% uptime of D&D for any given fight. A lesser but still noteworthy point is that popping a glyphed DRW at the start of one of these D&D's provides a significant amount of threat over the duration.
From my initial use of this setup I've noticed only positives, the drawback of Blood Tap always being on cooldown is perhaps the only real con I've noticed so far.
It's also worth considering that you can use that Blood Tap to gerrymander in a Death Strike a bit faster if you get a floating F/U Rune from RE, but I'm not sure how much that will actually matter in the face of what you're proposing. However, if the extra threat that you're getting with your process isn't actually necessary, then it would be more beneficial to use it for Death Strikes the majority of the time.
This reminds me that I need to put an option into BloodSim for not using Blood Tap at all. Thanks.
I cannot see any merit in DW tanking when you consider the immense threat loss from all strikes. The minor extra benefits of rune power are not going to offset it. Blizzard should remove the one-hander runeforge to put a nail in its coffin.
According to Lichloathe Bloodsim ( World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta - (English) Forums -> Blood DK - Powered by the tears of Sunflowers ), playing in a DW config is not that bad.
You lose "only" ~4% threat for a gain of : -1% damage taken, +3% dmg absorbed and +3% heal. Eventhough you can clearly argue it's not worth it, I wouldn't say there's any merit. While playing in HM and facing a boss who might crush you, and that make your healers sweat like they never did, it's sure is worth considering losing some threat. Especially as you can begin the fight with a 2H to build a quite solid threat and switch before things get hardcore ^^
(However, this sim is from a previous build, but i don't see any major changes on the DK mechaning that render it obsolete)
But I agree : blizz should remove the 1H Runeforge and change scent of blood. There would be no questions left ^^
I havent seen any mention so far in the thread about Runeforge choice.
Whilst 4% armor and 2% stamina from the altered Stoneskin Gargoyle is pretty much awesome for the EH-favoring WotLK style, I've been pondering Swordshattering. 4% undiminished parry on top of raidbuffed avoidance of maybe 40-45% or so is quite sizable - over time this is likely to average out at a 6-7% physical damage reduction, which is far more than the 2% reduction or so that armor offers.
Likewise, even Fallen Crusader might be preferable over Stoneskin for the 3% heal in an environment where healer mana is more important than pure EH.
Anyone coming to the same conclusion? Right now it seems that Swordshattering is the -vastly- superior tanking enchant given how much damage that 4% undimished will reduce.
The problem with SS Runeforge, is that (as always), parry is avoidance, and avoidance is random.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "Nah ! Avoidance is useless, only EH matters", but I think that SS and Spellshattering runeforges are not to be forgotten, but are situational.
Ya, I don't want to get into an "EH vs Avoidance" type debate, it's clear that at endgame in Wrath, EH is king due to reliability. But I think it's worth reconsidering the values of those enchants now.
Some sims with my current 264-ish gear have Swordshattering being a monster 5% less damage taken total compared to using Stoneskin. -IF- the Cataclysm model of tanks not being two-shot holds true, and healer mana is more of a concern, I'd honestly see Swordshattering being the enchant of choice for most fights simply because it means overall a lot less damage taken.
Stoneskin would be relegated to the fights where a big physical burst, perhaps when stunned, can put a tank in danger. The maexxnas and LK-soulreapers of Cata. But it feels that Swordshattering will be the go-to enchant of choice for overall mitigation and Stoneskin/Spellshatter would be the rarely-used situational ones for specific encounters where a period of immense burst is part of the mechanic.
4.0.3a patch tomorrow, nothing mentioned about fixing Rune Strike or our rune 20% increased rune regeneration. Does anyone know when this is going to be fixed? Death Strike is becoming slightly less valuable as well, may increased the levels of dodge and parry we are using as a 'soft cap'.
From Blue Posts:
Death Knight (Forums / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)
* Death Pact now heals for 25% of maximum health, down from 40%.
* Death Strike now heals for 25% of damage taken in the last 5 seconds, down from 30%, and will heal for a minimum of 7% of maximum health, down from 10%. The tooltip may not yet be updated to reflect this change.
* Icebound Fortitude now provides 20% damage reduction, down from 30% (now 50%, down from 60% when talented), and has a 3-minute cooldown, up from 2 minutes.
Blood
* Rune Tap now heals for 10% of maximum health, down from 15%. The tooltip may not yet be updated to reflect this change.
Glyphs
* Glyph of Rune Tap now heals for 5% of maximum health, down from 10%.
Bug Fixes
* Frost Fever critical strikes now apply the correct amount of bonus damage.
According to Lichloathe Bloodsim ( World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta - (English) Forums -> Blood DK - Powered by the tears of Sunflowers ), playing in a DW config is not that bad.
You lose "only" ~4% threat for a gain of : -1% damage taken, +3% dmg absorbed and +3% heal. Eventhough you can clearly argue it's not worth it, I wouldn't say there's any merit. While playing in HM and facing a boss who might crush you, and that make your healers sweat like they never did, it's sure is worth considering losing some threat. Especially as you can begin the fight with a 2H to build a quite solid threat and switch before things get hardcore ^^
(However, this sim is from a previous build, but i don't see any major changes on the DK mechaning that render it obsolete)
Those are outdated numbers, yes. The major change was that I ran the simulations with more realistic stats (Health, avoidance etc) provided by Zarko.
Results:
Settings in BloodSim are taken from Zarko's excellent thread on tank stats at Tier 11 (World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> What we look like after one tier of raiding) and damage based on wielding 372 weapons.
- 175,685 health, 32.36% avoidance, 46841 armor, 21 mastery
- Boss hits every 2.4 seconds for 110k-120k unmitigated damage
- 100 eight minute fights
Difference in switching from 2H to DW:
- 7.9% less damage dealt
- 9.8% less threat
- 0.1% less damage taken
- 0.7% less damage absorbed
- 1.1% more healed
With those stats I can see no reason, at all, to ever Dual Wield if it results in equal stats. That's the major caveat. All of the simulations I run assume equal stats (except DW uses 3/3 SoB) between both specs. As yet, no one has been able to give me stat data on a properly gemmed and reforged DW tank setup (recognizing the 3% hit from Nerves that no longer needs to be on gear). It's possible that the tradeoff might be worth it in those circumstances, but I have insufficient data to run the numbers for it.
Death Strike is becoming slightly less valuable as well, may increased the levels of dodge and parry we are using as a 'soft cap'.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but Death Strike isn't becoming less valuable. The 10%->7% was just to bring it in line with all the other healing reductions that happened because of the Health scaling bump. The 30%-25% needed to happen because we really do massacre other tanks in damage compensation potential. Zarko's numbers show us only being in line with Paladins/Druids/Warriors when Death Strike has 100% over-heal. And anyway, it's not much of an actual effect.
From the numbers I ran:
...average of 50 six minute fights with exactly the same stats (from Zarko). We:
- Take 9% more damage
- Absorb 20% less
- Heal for 21.7% less
- Clip Blood Shield 50% less (from 9->6)
- Hit the minimum heal 100% less (from 30->15)
Settings in BloodSim are taken from Zarko's excellent thread on tank stats at Tier 11 (World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> What we look like after one tier of raiding) and damage based on wielding 372 weapons.
- 175,685 health, 32.36% avoidance, 46841 armor, 21 mastery
- Boss hits every 2.4 seconds for 110k-120k unmitigated damage
- 100 eight minute fights
Difference in switching from 2H to DW:
- 7.9% less damage dealt
- 9.8% less threat
- 0.1% less damage taken
- 0.7% less damage absorbed
- 1.1% more healed
I'm kinda surprised that your results state that DW heals more and takes less damage, but does also absorb less.
I can't figure out how that could happen aside from clipping errors. I'm not familiar with BloodSim, so I don't know if it takes care of clipping errors by itself or if it just uses DS whenever possible.
I'm just asking because that's something that can be fixed by adjusting your playstyle otherwise.
The less damage taken and less damage absorbed are probably both a result of having more avoidance. You take slightly less damage and leave slightly more of your Blood Shield unused.
I'm kinda surprised that your results state that DW heals more and takes less damage, but does also absorb less.
I can't figure out how that could happen aside from clipping errors. I'm not familiar with BloodSim, so I don't know if it takes care of clipping errors by itself or if it just uses DS whenever possible.
I'm just asking because that's something that can be fixed by adjusting your playstyle otherwise.
The important part to note from that post is that those numbers were run assuming exactly equal stats and that the only change was 3/3 Scent of Blood and DW instead of 2H. I have no stats at all on what someone dual-wielding with intelligent stat distribution looks like so I can't run those numbers.
BloodSim itself, from what I've seen, has about a 2% margin of variance just as a result of RNG, so that's my first guess for an explanation. It does very basic clipping prevention in that it will avoid using Death Strike back to back, but not much more than that. The inherent limitations of the Rune system mostly take care of this, though. It does include in the report the number of clips but not the total amount that was clipped. I'll have to add that.
Now that the RS change and rune regeneration is live does this mean using deseases is viable again.
I understand why diseasless was more viable prior to these changes but i can't help but feel that if we go deseasless and remove the talents that benefit diseases then we are wasting more talent points. The typical diseasless build will spec into frost, but surely the points placed in frost are complely wasted.
Icy reach, you dont use icy touch & chains of ice is situational at best.
Runic Power Mastery. With the RS change surely we will not be sitting above 100rp often enough, so again the 3 points here are wasted.
Nerves of cold steel. Some tests have shown that from a survivability point of view DW is fractionally better, but TPS wise it is worse.
I guess i used to enjoy the old rotation, and i know we should be looking to the future. The increase rune regeneration means i can get the same amount of DS hits in as previously when it was a 10s regen if i go full diseases. I know technically the 8s regen means i can get even more DS hits with diseasless but the waste points haunt me.
No. The benefits of running without Diseases are entirely independant of Improved Blood Presence and on-demand Rune Strike. You do it because it gives you more Death Strikes. It still gives you more Death Strikes with 8.3s Rune recharges.
This is hands down the best spec to go with during progression when survival is key (ie nearly every heroic Cata fight). The 2 pts into Epidemic are needed and useful on too many fights to ignore them for a 'diseaseless build'. There are plenty of times where the raid switches off to another target or and you need maximum uptime on attack speed reduc.
Feel free to toss those 2 pts and the 2 pts in Abombs might around, but I am a fan of not forcing other people to provide debuffs/attention/gcds/etc I can apply - especially since there are no other major options for those handful of pts (4). Blood Caked blade is pointless in Cata (see this thread about why: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta - (English) Forums -> Vengeance and why it's broken) and the only other option would be Crimson Scourge. At that point I'd rather have 2% str (parry gain) and a redundancy in the event a 10% ap raid buff died than a CS proc. However, I could see a case being made for the free blood rune every 30 secs for demo application. That just comes down to personal preference I guess.
Picking up Lichborne was somewhat awkward and clunky feeling to me at the start, but once you get into a habit of working it into your cd rotation it feels a lot more fluid. Here is just a quick snippet from a night of doing beta and how much DC was healing for (from a week or so ago - a day or two before the 5% DS nerf):
Ensure that you have both DC glyphs for maximum efficiency (as seen in the spec link). Glyph choices are mostly mandatory, but some are optional. If you choose to drop HS glyph instead of DS, by all means do so. I just made the DS glyph drop because outside of pooling RP for Lichborne I'm constantly dumping RP w/ Runestrikes so I'm not going to have a fully loaded Deathstrike with max runic. Also, it will benefit you to macro the heal into a keybind:
/tar Riggnaros
/cast Death Coil
***Edit for a new and improved macro! that will allow you to not drop your target:
/cast [@player] Death Coil
Thats a pretty primitive macro, and I'm not sure if there is a way to have it cast on yourself w/o dropping your target. Either way, it gets the job done and you can get off about 6 Death Coils during the Lichborne timeframe every 2min if you pool up to 130 before starting (ie you know you're going to be using it when *insert CD here* falls. pool RP then just spam your key binded macro). Thats 6 or so heals for about 30k+ each GCD. Huge. The reason its only 6 is because you will need to fit in another gcd for rp gain once during this timeframe to get the last DC off.
I really hope they don't modify the ability because its a really needed cooldown tbh especially w/ the nerfs to IBF / RT / Death Pact / DS and such. Also, its a cd thats a bit more on the 'not faceroll' end of the spectrum. What I mean by that is that its not something you can just pop and forget out it. It's something you have to plan for, then manage the entire 10 seconds of its uptime. It has a really good fit and doesn't need to be made easier or nerfed in efficiency.
Here is an exert of how it would look when adding it to your list of options:
Quick notes I'm sure ppl will ask about:
Yes DC is modified by + healing effects.
Yes DC is modified by your AP (yes that includes Vengeance)
I typed this post up pretty quick and tried to do a few quick checks to make sure it's good to go, but I may have some mistakes above. If someone notices something, has any questions, or disputes any of this information, please just let me know. Thanks and enjoy your Turkey holiday
PS. On a different note. Rocket boots are now 'Rocket Boosts". This means they will have to be attached to your belt instead of boots. This is a slight 'nerf' to Eng, but nothing too gamebreaking. It basically forces the tank to pick between the 20k absorb or Rocket boots if they choose to go Eng for Cata. I personally will just be carrying around mats (very cheap requirements) and swapping them out depending on what the fight would better require. Edited my 'professions' post to reflect as well.
For anyone wondering why their armor went down, apparently blood presence went from 60% armor to 30% (GM told me so)
Which is most definitely a bug. Bear armor went way up in the same patch (they have something crazy like 72%ish damage reduction right now) so someone must have typo'd a value somewhere.
I do think the intent was to nerf DK armor a bit and buff Druid armor but as I said, the values are completely off.
And to add yet another Lichborne macro alternative:
#showtooltip
/startattack
/cast [target=mouseover, exists, help] Death Coil; Death Coil
Heals friendly targets if you mouse over them, including your ghoul and obviously yourself during LB, and uses DC as usual against hostile targets.
For anyone wondering why their armor went down, apparently blood presence went from 60% armor to 30% (GM told me so)
Originally Posted by Liar
Which is most definitely a bug. Bear armor went way up in the same patch (they have something crazy like 72%ish damage reduction right now) so someone must have typo'd a value somewhere.
I do think the intent was to nerf DK armor a bit and buff Druid armor but as I said, the values are completely off.
Hmm, I didn't catch this in any patch notes (did I miss something?). As you can see below, thats quite a huge drop off in armor and I'm fairly certain there arent in differences in the gear other than a reforge on my wpn. Tooltip still says 60% for Blood Pres on live 4.0.3a as well.
How much Physical Damage Reduction did you lose? Any idea?
I'm down to 25829 Armor for 62.90% Damage Reduction, can't remember exactly how much I was pre-Patch though, but someone else says they raised the Damage Reduction Armor provides or something.
Still, nearly a 50% Armor nerf? Odd. Especially when Bears got theirs super-buffed apparently.
How much Physical Damage Reduction did you lose? Any idea?
I'm down to 25829 Armor for 62.90% Damage Reduction, can't remember exactly how much I was pre-Patch though, but someone else says they raised the Damage Reduction Armor provides or something.
Still, nearly a 50% Armor nerf? Odd. Especially when Bears got theirs super-buffed apparently.
Don't have an exact value for the pre 4.0.3a dmg reduc. I try and randomly tank screenshots of my char stats to reference things like this, but I didn't have one of the actual tooltip value ><
I posted a link on the Bug report forum to see if there is a response or something I missed.
My DK is sitting at 29k armor (66.5% mitigation) in worse gear than Riggins' DK (probably about on a par with his druid). I haven't, however, changed out of blood presence since the patch (and I'm not going to until it is fixed). Reports in the thread posted above suggest that the reduction happens on changing presence.
Edit: This appears to be deliberate. I'm still not switching presences.
Edit: This appears to be deliberate. I'm still not switching presences.
That's one way of trying to make DKs take more damage than the other tanks to compensate for their self healing but it does seem to be overnerfed by a bit. 30% additional armor is really low even with the above average DK damage reduction modifiers. Unfortunately that also cements Stoneskin Gargoyle as the rune weapon enchant people will use; I was looking forward to atleast give Sword Shattering a try.
The blog is also saying something about Death Strike healing 20% of the damage instead of the current 25% it should be. Is this yet another hotfixed thing?
You don't have to use a fancy macro to Death Coil yourself with Lichborne up. Just use the self-cast modifier when you press your Death Coil hotkey. Default should be Alt.
11/22/10, 4:46 AM
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