As expected, the new PTR notes confirm a nerf to the Dark Succor Glyph, bringing its heal down to 15% instead of the 20% previous.

Other notes include buffs to damage for Heart Strike (175% weapon damage base with 15% per disease) and Imp DS talents now improve DS damage by up to 90%. (source)

Can anyone suggest a reason for these changes in strikes? I do not believe that DK tank DPS is in need of a buff, so I would suggest that these changes are threat related and in future we could see changes to the threat bonus of RS.

EDIT: Or of course these could be PVP related changes to allow for Blood to be a more viable PVP spec - but what would the consequences be for tanking in PVE?

I would guess that said strike-buffs are meant to address the relative disparity between BloodDPS and that of say, Feral tanks. Mitigation/relative effectiveness aside, we're a bit low on the DPS (between 8-9k myself) compared to strong paladins or ferals hanging out at 10-12. Plus, Blood PvP in battlegrounds is fairly effective.

I'm glad to see flat strike-increases.


I'd like to point out, regarding the "Hit-- should I cap it properly?"-debate somewhere earlier in the thread that I've found it to be largely dependent on if youre in a 25m or a 10m setting. For 25's, you can nearly disregard hit. Any interrupt duty can be covered and with virulence changes and unmissable taunts, youre essentially set. In 10s, its not always possible to have said coverage on interrupts (Halfus heroic springs to mind) and ultimately a missed interrupt can mean a lot of work for your raid, thus you probably should be making any reasonable effort to bring your hit rating up to cap.

Rolling blood shields leaves me with some concerns about fight specific mechanics it could break very easily. The one that springs to mind foremost being Magmaw. Although admittedly you'll be running with the minimum self healing for the most part(7% max health), this leaves you in a situation where you're free to stack up Blood Shield up until Mangle is incoming, at which point you just taunt Magmaw off the main tank and watch your stacked Blood Shield trivialize the entire fight by absorbing a pretty huge portion of the Mangle. Then after the impale the Mt just picks up Magmaw again and you go back to stacking up your blood shield.

Admittedly this wouldn't completely absorb Mangle, but that's still a pretty significant impact on the burst healing needed for the encounter.

Can someone on the PTR confirm if and how the Death Coil damage nerf affects the healing from Death Coil during Lichborne? According to WoWhead DC heals for 3.5 as much as it does damage so that could be yet another nerf for the Lichborne spec.

Regarding mastery vs avoidance.
Regarding BloodSim, it's important that readers of EJ understand the limitations of simulations.
In the last few days I've seen a few people stating 'conclusions seen on EJ' as a result of reading the sim results.

BloodSim has a few limitations at the moment in any evaluation of mastery vs avoidance, and they are quoted above. Also, BloodSim is not likely to simulate player skill to exploit DS to its fullest potential, for example timing back-to-back DS by using blood tap/ERW during a period of heavy damage in 4.0.6 stacking shields.

I like BloodSim, and I want it to be continually developed.
I also love Rawr Tank.

However, we should be careful about stating conclusions like "mastery is better than avoidance" on the basis of a simulation, and careful about our language.

I'm not going to change OP to make any statement about mastery being better than avoidance until it's conclusive and corroborated (for example if real-world agreed with Rawr and Bloodsim, or if the maths was simply undeniable).

In terms of the relationship between avoidance and mastery, there was a great discussion (starting over here) which led to this summary conclusion:

1. Avoidance decreases average damage taken, so
2. Avoidance results in smaller blood shields. But,
3. Avoidance effectively increases the pre-avoidance incoming damage you can take before the shield is used up,
4. The effect of avoidance in 1. is balanced out by the effect in 3., so
5. Avoidance has no net effect on the effectiveness of mastery.


I agree with this that stacking stamina (as we did in WotLK) is illogical. I have not seen any compelling arguments to support stamina stacking.

Regarding 4.0.6

I agree.
I see two spec philosophies: one is for survival as its primary concern, the other is for effective interrupts as equal priority.

Here, Tyds is talking about improving Hand of Doom in order to strengthen his spec towards the goal of interrupting. Makes sense.
I think the OP should probably include an interrupt-oriented spec, but am unsure which of the varieties to use. There could be a spec with Endless Winter, for example like this. I don't know if there is an ideal spec, but I would like update OP to match if there's any compelling agreement.

On a personal note, regarding the scarlet fever from plague strike, I don't mind it. I never liked blood boil to apply it. It's a simple way for Blizzard to re-emphasise both diseases and I'll no longer need to incongruently use an AOE spell on a single-target to debuff them.

I'm confused as to why you'd feel this way. While I agree that in 5mans I've tentatively had to hold back on occasion, as the BB would break a CC, there's no situation I can come up with that favours debuff application via PS versus BB. I am assuming, of course, that spell-hit is not an issue because as of next patch it won't be.

BB has several advantages over PS in addition to it not costing half a DS. Firstly, as it's AOE it's effectively ranged. Add appears, you taunt, IT, and BB before it's within melee range. One DS and then RS spam to force a F rune to proc, giving you back your lost DS. Not to mention you can debuff multiple adds at the same time, and will not be held hostage to Expertise. What other tank needs expertise to function? All need hit, to my knowledge, but Expertise is something that effectively never caps; even in our best-geared scenaria we'll be risking the BP debuff falling off every minute.

It isn't helpful that we have to expend numerous GCDs to deal with AoE debuffing. Thunderclap is a hi-aoe threat and debuff spell, it works beautifully. BB used to be the same, but now AoE tanking will become inelegant and cumbersome. Ideal damage-mitigation would be IT/PS (or Outbreak if you have it) then Pest. That's 3 GCDs spent and 0 AoE threat generated. And even then, it's AoE-debuffing 3 seconds into the fight. It's not a life-changing issue, it is however a step back in QoL and elegant design.

I second the idea of the old Pestilence glyph, it'd certainly take the pressure off having to "waste" a DS on disease-reapplication, which is counter-intuitive. Making HS extend the diseases will also breath life into a currently useless "signature" ability. It also conveniently would extend the diseases on any adds it hits. This comes accross as a very elegant solution. Very well thought-out.

Hiya Pint, it was a personal observation rather than one about pure and best technique that I'd put into an OP or necessarily expect people to agree with.

I've always had cognitive dissonance about using an AOE ability on a single-target to apply the debuff. Also, I liked the idea of our classic two diseases applying all our required debuffs, and therefore the use of IT and PS or Outbreak, and not introducing a third ability for a third debuff.

Also, if explaining tanking technique to a new player, I found blood boil applying the tank debuff to confuse a few people.

The biggest problem with tying SC with PS for me is losing a death strike. Normally, I don't worry about the 20% FF because I have a feral applying it. This means I can ignore diseases outside of Outbreak and simply do BB every so often to keep up SC. Now I will have to use PS for the debuff when outbreak is on cooldown. This loses me a death strike which in turn loses me a blood shield. That then reduces the value of mastery.

I can see Blizzard is trying to make it so we apply diseases and that's fine, but combine that with the death strike nerf and mastery is going to fall well behind avoidance.

"Well behind"? You're losing one Death Strike every minute. That's hardly the huge nerf you think it is.

It's easy to say "just one" and that would be easy if we did a lot of Death Strikes. But how many do we do in a minute? Five or six. Losing one DS a minute is a large portion of the total. Again, even if you say it's just one, then consider that right now avoidance and mastery are more or less worth the same in terms of overall survivability, then take one DS away a minute because of the SC change. Then make the shields weaker because of the DS nerf.

So yes, mastery will be "well behind" avoidance.

Yeah, that's the spec I'd use in 4.0.6 for interrupt duty as well. Endless Winter is just too good to pass up on considering the alternatives.

And I have to agree with Mild Confusion. The fact that we lose 1 DS per minute and DS is getting nerfed on top of that hardly makes up for stacking Blood Shields since the times you would get stacked Blood Shields are rare if you DS properly - unless you are going to use 2 DS in a row after a big burst which might make sense in some scenarios.