These things really have no chance of happening because bonus armor values have gone down significantly with the ratings changes. Just compare Heart of Thunder - Item - World of Warcraft with Unidentifiable Organ - Item - World of Warcraft.

It is an actual change. The current Death Strike heals for 29% of the damage received talented whereas the PTR version would drop down to 21.75%.

EDIT: Was wrong about the current DS % (it's 20% before talents, not 25%). It is still a nerf from live to PTR though. Thanks Lich.

My only extra thought (based on pure theory) is that while this strategy maximizes the size of the blood shield it also prevents pre-shielding which would have lowered the hit you took (in a purely physical environment). As you say, the significance of all of this is debatable. Either way I don't see raising armor or avoidance lowering the shield so much that gaining one reduces our total survivability. I might download bloodsim after work and have a play, see if I can get some actual numbers to go with the theory.

[quote=Liar;1833756]These things really have no chance of happening because bonus armor values have gone down significantly with the ratings changes. Just compare Heart of Thunder - Item - World of Warcraft with Unidentifiable Organ - Item - World of Warcraft.

Yeah that's true...unlike hps which have skyrocketed, armor bonuses did NOT scale that way.

Using chicken-scratch math it appears that it's moot though since the numbers are so tiny to begin with...and it looks like they are nerfing our shield size...so after that it would be even more meaningless. Ah well...

They removed the DS healing reduction from the official notes, so the debate of Mastery vs. Avoidance rages on..

I'm rarely sitting at over 60RP, and the change of Lichborne self-healing makes me reconsider the use of Blood Parasites.

That's funny, I was thinking the exact oposite. After the first half-minute I find that while I can RS there's little need to. You rarely need more than one or two LB-DC. My raiding experience in cata is however extremely lacking, so I'll take your word for it.


On a lighter note, I was considering the change to Crimson Scourge:

Crimson Scourge has been redesigned slightly. Instead of a 50/100% chance to make the next Blood Boil free when Plague Strike is used on a target with Blood Plague, the talent now gives a 5/10% chance to provide a free Blood Boil when the death knight lands any melee attack on a Blood Plagued target.

Provided we side-line the discussion of whether or not it's worth spending the points over another talent, here's my view: When diseases are applied by Outbreak, this turns into a possible free BB, which reminds slightly of the HB-FF refresh that Frost DPS currently has. When diseases run low, however, I do not consider reapplying BP, I only ever reapply FF and then fish for a F rune refresh with some RS spam, in order to get back the half-DS I wasted on FF reapplication. Outside of Outbreak I'd never have BP on my target.

The talent is definitely more interesting, but still debateably useless. It's design is also favoring dualweilding, which can only encourage idiotic "but I'm aoe tanking" excuses to dualweild.

This makes the Lichborne Spec solely a fear-breaker, without the refund from the glyph is it even worth speccing into Lichborne?

At moderate 160k HP, GoDD and full Vengeance, Death Coil will heal you for about 33k. In the duration of Lichborne (10s) you can cast 3 from a full bar of RP/RPM (which is how you should be using it anyway, even before the Glyph is nerfed), spend 2 GCDs getting 30 more RP, and then cast a 4th. You are healing yourself for a total of 82% of your HP, and 21% of your HP for each GCD that you spend. That's twice what you get from Rune Tap and it's on a 30 second cooldown.

You tell me if it's still worth it.


In addition, here are some preliminary numbers on the same Avoidance vs Mastery test I ran earlier, but with the nerf to Death Strike:

	Damage Taken	Base Delta	Comparison
Baseline	6719582	0.00%
100 Mastery	6770155	-0.75%	100.864%
100 Dodge	6712141	0.11%
200 Mastery	6653650	0.98%	99.818%
200 Dodge	6665810	0.80%
300 Mastery	6613276	1.58%	100.140%
300 Dodge	6604013	1.72%
400 Mastery	6677894	0.62%	101.252%
400 Dodge	6595323	1.85%
500 Mastery	6544218	2.61%	100.512%
450 Dodge 450 Parry	6510885	3.11%

The two are still pretty close, however, avoidance does start to pull ahead. I'm currently running comparisons with the Dragon Breath happening to see what effect that has, numbers will be up shortly.

While you may not need to RS for threat the chance to activate a sleeper rune and get a faster DS is worth it. I don't think the glyph change is going to affect the LB subspec. By the time I get two death coil's off the healer's heals helped me to get to 100% again.

It's not going to work as an 'O shit' button because you'll need to keep ~80 runic power ready. I use it when I know big damage is coming and it will just help the healer's a bit. If you can predict high damage then you can stockpile the neccesary runic power.

Crimson Scourge is and still will be a shitty talent. Noone cares about Blood runes. Heart Strike damage is so hilariously low in damage contribution that you might as well use every Blood rune for Blood Boil and not lose much DPS.
If Crimson Scourge gave us a chance to reset the Outbreak timer when meleeing a target with Scarlet Fever up and maybe reset Blade Barrier to full? Yeah, I'd take that. But nothing else will do because ironically Blood DKs couldn't care less about Blood runes.

The Lichborne nerf means there will be yet another factor that distinguishes a good from a bad DK - again. The difference between good and bad tanks for DKs is already quite big, much bigger than for other tank classes so I hope this is taken into consideration while Blizz is rebalancing DKs. Don't get me wrong, this is exactly why I play a DK because I like the active play style and having the feeling that what I do actually matters just standing in front of a boss and doing some sort of DPS rotation since all the survivability is passive anyway (i.e. like how I felt with my Warrior on most WotLK bosses where kiting, stunning and interrupting was not possible).

My 2 floater points in Blood have been moved out of Blood Parasites for a while now as well. They just aren't worth it for 10 man (maybe they are for 25, but considering it only hits melee on most bosses I am dubious). Heck, even Hand of Blood is better for raiding than Blood Parasites and especially Crimson Scourge because there are some bosses I can interrupt from range. I was kind of hoping Virulence to be taken down to only 2 talents point or being baked in completely in this patch to help with interrupts but it doesn't look like that's happening.

Above poster - The DS nerf was data-mined from the PTR. It's semi-official at this point, I would assume it's going in to place with every thing else.

So, a few things I've noticed here in this last page:

- People saying using healing on LB/DC bug is wasted RP and wasted Rune usage:
No, it's not. Some times it's nice to lighten your healers load especially if they are moving to a fight mechanic, you're out of range, and you know if they move towards you it could cause an abrupt wipe. Also, if you're THAT close to losing threat - you need to really figure out what you're doing wrong because after the first 10 seconds, no one should come close to you. It's an "Ace in the Hole" but since it's being fixed - there's no need for anyone to bring it up from here on out. It's a moot point and doesn't belong here since we're looking towards the future of DK tanking.

- I do agree Crimson Scourge is still a shitty talent. It's not really worth speccing in to it unless you're some one that loves the BB animation, I guess.