Downed Magmaw for the first time last night, and after looking at our numbers, I found something sort of peculiar.

I had a Disc priest tank healing me, and on our successful kill, I noticed that my Blood Shield adsorbs and her PW:S absorbs were very similar, around 900k each. Now of course, that could just be the way both abilities worked out, but I'm wondering if anyone knows how our BS and PW:S interact with one another?

Say I have a 15K BS on, along with a 10k PW:S...which is used first? Or do they get used at the same time? So if I get hit for 10K, will it wipe out the PW:S, while also knocking my BS down to 5k absorbs left?

Because if they both get hit at the same time, then it doesn't seem optimal to have a Disc priest tank healing a Blood tank, since our absorb mechanics would effectively overwrite each other.

I'd drop both of the points from Epidemic and move them to Virulence. If you're the only person bringing the -20% Attack Speed debuff from Frost Fever that pulls some more problems to the forefront. Either you can eat the Hit/Stam food or look at Reforging if you're unwilling to sacrifice a few DS per minute to make sure you have FF up on the boss.

This is the issue with how a few of us are choosing to gear. Virulence becomes mandatory if we're required to interrupt. I have yet to find a way to work around this. My goal is to not reforge or gem for hit. Ashkandi has moved to my priority weapon over Wyrmbreaker for this sole reason.

This is actually incorrect. BloodSim does not work the way that you described. BloodSim, like any simulator, duplicates the passage of time and actual events, it just does it more quickly than happens in real life, otherwise simulating 100 eight minute fights would take more than half a day.

When you tell it that the boss is hitting every 2 seconds for 100,000 damage, it is not dealing 50 damage to the tank every millisecond, that would be stupid, and so would I if I called it a simulation and it did that. It is dealing 100,000 damage every 2 seconds. I'm not sure where you got the impression that it was doing anything else.

Ok I appologise for my incorrect understanding it is just that the numbers do not make physical sense on any level to me, that number 1% is what you expect from a simple reduction of the number of DS that happened.
Could you please run this situation, my computer is quite bad and I don't even want to try downloading bloodsim. See if the difference is more natural.

Lets look at another abstract example: The boss hits for 100% damage for 5 seconds then 0 damage for the next 5 seconds after that. So if you DS right at the end of that you get a big heal and shield, however if you miss you will DS 1 GCD later so 1.5/5 = 30% decrease in heal and shield. This happens about 20% of the time with no hit and expertise, so a 6% overall decrease in shields Plus 1% you proved simply from having less DS.
This example is abstract but even if the boss does 200% damage for 5 seconds the 100% for the next 5 that is a 15% decrease per miss.

Off topic, but BloodShieldTracker is pretty good. I like that it turns green for optimal DS shield based on damage taken. Also, the timer and remaining absorb helps you prevent wasting it by doing a DS too soon.

Alright I concede this point. I'll change my maths to what seems to corrispond to these results for a final examination.
The 200% for 5 seconds followed by 100% for 5 seconds situation is not too unlikely equivallent to just spikes in incomming damage. But this leads to a 15% damage reduction per miss, which is a 3% total reduction, but also only happens every second DS(since the other one would be on the lower damage input) -> about 1-2% reduction in shields.
I appologise for the incorrect part of the thread and hope all others reading it will be satisfied, it does appear hit and expertise have a very limited use in the mastery set. I now have reforged all the expertise away from my gear for future use while keeping hit at around 5-6% for spell hit cap for the other uses mentioned.

PS.Thanks that is perfect and exactly the kind of addon I required and thank you for bringing it to my attention. I believe it will help make choosing times to DS a lot easier since watching dodges IMO is impossible. This addon should be moved to the useful addons section of this guide.

For Lugz and others talking about absorbs amount, I'd like to point out that there is an issue with tracking the Blood Shield absorbs. Unlike most of the other absorb mechanisms in the game, Blood Shield does not have combat log events showing what it absorbed. Unfortunately it means that the best you can do is calculate the total absorbs on a player, subtract out all the known absorbs and see what you get. For many addons and loggers, it had lead to incorrect values for BS absorbs. I'm still hoping Blizzard will add in support for BS absorb tracking in the combat logs. PW:S, the new Paladin absorbs, and many others actually work correctly but the BS does not.

In fact, this issue is why some people believe our shields are astronomical on the Chimaeron fight. The absorbs from the Finkle's Mixture are often counted as BS absorbs even if an addon is trying to account for non-BS absorbs.

Communism pointed this out to me just now:
Scarlet Fever - Spell - World of Warcraft
Causes your Blood Plague to afflict enemies with Scarlet Fever, reducing their physical damage dealt by 10% for 30 sec.

That's one way of getting us to care about Blood Plague again.

It's also a really terrible way of doing it. There is nothing wrong with Blood Boil applying Scarlet Fever as it is. As a matter of fact, SF is applied through a useless Blood rune, has a higher chance of landing (only requires ~7% melee hit whereas Plague Strike requires a truckload of expertise AND hit) and is applied through AoE. Such a change would be very unwelcome, that's for sure.

If that change turns out to be real then it pretty much nullifies the QoL buff DKs got with Runic Focus while nerfing survivability even more in situations where you are the debuffer.

EDIT: The change is confirmed, bleh.

EDIT2: The Scarlet Fever change still does not make anyone want to spec into Crimson Scourge (which I assume was the whole reason SF got changed to begin with) so what gives?


On the flipside there is also this:

Now that is pretty amazing.


EDIT3: Glyph of Dark Succor + stacking Blood Shield + any boss fight that requires tank switching = the reason the glyph is definitely not going live as it is.

I'm not sure. You need to swap presences twice (2s), DS, (1.5s), and you lose all your RP for doing so, as well as temporarily slow your rune cooldown by 20%, though I suspect that would be of minimal impact. You'd need a period where either you're not taking damage (including environmental/AE/RST), or the lost damage reduction isn't crucial, and also be okay with having the deficit (8%stam worth) in HP from swapping back to Blood Presence, though as with the rune cooldown that may be of minimal concern.

That seems tough, as well as a heck of a tradeoff.

Well, the GCDs and loss of RP aren't really that much of a big deal because you are going to be constrained by your FU rune cooldowns anyway (as long as you don't get caught in Frost/Unholy Presence while the boss is swinging at you) and 20% max health DSes really sound like a lot. In comparison, Death Pact is a pretty awesome as a cool down and that's "only" 25% max health healing. Granted, you lose some stamina by switching out of Blood Presence but even if you were to use some cautious numbers like 15% max health healing per DS in Frost/Unholy Presence that's still a lot for something on an 8 second cool down.

Also now that we know that Blood Shield can stack it gets even more ridiculous. Imagine a boss like Cho'gall where you aren't always tanking him. You could switch to Unholy Presence (faster rune CDs than Frost Presence) and build up a huge Blood Shield stack, say 6 Death Strikes before you have to taunt. You are now looking at a Blood Shield of around 100% of your max health (for the sake of simplicty I am assuming a 15% effective DS due to the presence switch). This is broken.

And since the Blood Shield stacking is really, really awesome I'd rather see the glyph nerfed a bit so we can keep the stacking of Blood Shield in legitimate scenarios since noone is going to complain about 6x7% max health DS stacks after all. The easiest way to do this would be to lock Blood Shield generation into Blood Presence (i.e. only DSes done in Blood Presence generate a Blood Shield but you wouldn't lose the shield if you switched presences while you already have it up - it just wouldn't refresh/stack until you went back into Blood Presence).

It's a simple change and it would guarantee the stacking Blood Shield making it to live. It would also not change the fact that Glyph of Succor would be a really good choice for encounters where you switch tanks either because it would be foolish not to use the glyph in the intended way of replenishing your health while your healers heal the active tank. Best of both worlds really.