@ Nev, That's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the extra DS that you might or might not get may or may not save your life and more often than not it will be 'may not'. Outside of pre-nerf Heroic Halfus or Heroic Magmaw (debatable) I haven't seen a boss that pounds you mercilessly and relentlessly that you need every DS you can take, but that damaging abilities are staggered and so using DS timed with staggered bursts are better. I'm going to disagree that spamming DS and only DS is the only way to play a tank, because if you're in literally 0 danger of dying, I rather do more damage, which is what BA allows me to do. Additionally, the only time you're really ever in danger of dying is 1) Unhealable damage or 2) Spike damage.

In case 1 there is nothing you can do to save yourself but in case 2, that is when you need to time your DS and cooldowns in order to mitigate some of that burst. Additionally for spike damage, you're also in danger when you take a large hit, healers don't manage to top you up, and you take another hit, healers don't manage to top you off and then you take a fatal hit (add or subtract more or less sequence repetitions). Extra healing helps here because it allows yourself to be topped off past a critical point (the HP value equal to that of the boss' attack).

The point about Butchery is that it gives you 1 DS every few minutes, and that's what I'm going to take the talent as giving: 1 DS every x minutes. What if a burst doesn't coincide with those x minutes? Fine, you'll DS anyway but the survival benefit is 0 because you have 0% chance of dying. Fine, you'll get a blood shield but healers are healing you anyway and saying that you're reducing that healing is pretty pointless because that's their job.


@Pintofbrew: Butchery adds in 1 DS every 3 minutes assuming you don't RP cap, because Butchery will give you 24 RP per minute, and 72 RP over 3 minutes which is 2 RS; however, you're not guaranteed 2 runes for a DS because 1) it can return a Blood Rune or 2) RE won't proc. In order to have a 100% guaranteed DS (statistically speaking), you'll need 7 minutes (168 RP, 24 x 7) for 5 RS = 150 RP = 2 runes (0.4 runes per RS). I don't like working with decimals when resources are integer-based, so I hope you'll see why I call Butchery a complete RNG talent for survival. Pretty sure it's the tank's job to minimize all RNG while tanking, so taking a static benefit in terms of BA seems to be better than Butchery. Additionally, glyph of DC was not added in the calculation, although it's only 15% of 5k, it's still extra. In addition you can time LB with VB and get even more benefit, but you can't time VB with a completely random DS.

And again, I see the non-zero gains and value for Butchery, but I don't see how it's completely and absolutely better than BA. Also doing more tank DPS adds to raid DPS in general and shortens the fight, meaning less heals have to be cast which means you're taking less healing and the boss is still dying, ie. you're still doing your job. 1 or 2 seconds faster is still 1 or 2 seconds faster.

That is a very good point I missed. Several times these past weeks I've found myself RP starved due to interrupt duty in my 10s, but I wasn't prepaired to go whole-hog and spec Endless Winter.

Absolutely. BA right now is a pointless talent for the tree it's in. The only reason I see to keep it, is because it's a valuable amount of AP for non-Blood specced DKs. Even if Vengenace gave 20% less AP we'd still not need BA to remain competent in TPS. After much thought I decided the only place I can tell a difference is soloing Magtheridon for gold, which obviously is irrelevant to endgame tanking.

Crimson Scourge is not very good choice nowadays because it makes your Blood Boil unrelaible for keeping up Blade Barrier. At least it was so for me. I had CS for a long time and it was fun till I started to loose hit and expertise. There are a lot of situations when you have miss/parry/dodge streaks on Heart strikes and need to refresh barrier here and now. If you have proc at such moment it is another gcd or you need to loose your rune tap/vb for nothing.

That's an unlikely event. Ideally, you should be ensuring BB is up by attempting to use your 2nd B rune 2GCDs before the first one cools. If one HS doesn't land you should BB. The chance that both (1) HS doesn't land and (2) in the mean time CS has procced is quite low, though not impossible. I can't say I've investigated it, however. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll make a Need to Know bar with the BB buff and check to see if CS impedes reapplication.

On a related note, wasn't there a bug with Blade Barrier that caused it to refresh when D runes were used some time ago?

No, I was referring to it refreshing when one non-blood D June was used. I recall reading about it as a curiosity back in mid LK, but thought nothing of it as dumping two B runes never posed an issue, like it appears to now.

I never felt that keeping BB up was really an issue, and so far Crimson Scourge procs are so rare that I don't recall having it proc just when I was about to use Blood Boil (to avoid miss/dodge/parry with HS, as you mention).
I admit, though, that it might happen, and if you're not confortable with it you can use this point elsewhere (I'd say that BA or 1/2 endless winter seem like good choices ^^).

I have on occasion had it drop, but almost exclusively, as far as I recall, these have been technical points. Swapping tanking targets and having to run like a donkey for several seconds, or having to tab in order to perform some other function. Once or twice even I recall seeing both B runes off CD and consciously deciding not to BB while running to a Maloriak add pack specifically so I had enough runes for two HS (for initial agro) and a BT-Pest to spread my outbreak.

Day-later edit:

OK I found out what the Blade Barrier mechanic: Whenever you use an ability that takes RP or any rune, BBar will check to see if both your B are on CD. If they are, it refreshes to 9sec. Not really important if you're maximizing your RE procs by almost never having both B runes on CD, but good to know.

I don't think so seeing as mastery has kind of a "built-in" diminishing returns: The higher your mastery is, the less damage you take from following physical attacks, therefor reducing your nexts DS's heal and shield.

I have a question about this WoL view, because it looks like a perfect way to see if I'm properly using all my cooldowns both at reasonable times, but still quickly after they come back up.

I've looked through the thread but didn't see anybody else asking how to find it, so I I'll ask it myself.


How do you get this buff view to show up in WoL? I've fiddled around with it but wasn't able to find anything more than just % uptimes. Its probably something obvious, but help would be nice.


Thanks,
-DA

Log browsing is a huge part in making yourself a better tank/player. Everyone should be familiar with knowing how to breakdown cd/buff/debuff uptime and such.

As far as the question above: Just make sure you use WoL and select the correct kill/wipe and whichever player/creature/boss that you are inquiring about. Then go to the buffs gained/buffs cast/debuffs gained tab and select the '#' sign to the right of the buff you are interested in seeing the uptime for. That will put the little green bars at the top.

Example is below with those sections highlighted w/ a red circle:



Hope that helps.

The thread has moved off of this topic, but i have a question about the avoidance vs mastery argument. Now i have a dk i am currently gearing for raids and after reading the posts here i had a question about the whole all-one-way discussions when it came to gearing.

That being with how mastery and avoidance work with each other, would it not be better to reach a sort of level where you have good amounts of both stats?

After looking at the way both mastery for dk's and avoidance worked i came to the conclusion that they are not entirely exclusive of each other as it seems to be suggested at in previous posts. Blood Shield only absorbs damage from Physical sources, which only takes up a <40% amount of tank damage from raid bosses in general, and mastery only affects the size of the blood shield, not the amount healed. Avoidance only, normally, works on Physical damage as well. Which means that as a whole, both mastery and avoidance only, normally, work to 'smooth' the periodic physical damage bosses have.

The best way to do this, to me at least, seems to be working those stats together as having high avoidance means bigger blood shield stacking, but smaller overall shield because of smaller blood shield form less damage/lower mastery, while having high mastery means lager shields, but low stacking because low avoidance means your shields are taking more constant damage. My thought is to work the avoidance + rolling shield angle, having good avoidance with good mastery means larger rolling shields that are taking less damage resulting in higher overall shield. Plus having good avoidance means that even if you are not able to maintain a shield due to mechanics or an aggro happy ranged dps, you are not in danger of taking massive damage from having no shield/low avoidance.

It may be that with current gear levels it is not possible to get a reasonable balance, but i thought i would put this idea out there.