While I have been soft capping Expertise and Hit since T11 for the aforementioned reasons, gemming Stamina sounds reasonable for this tier. The fact that being able to get 3 consecutive hits instead of 2 before you have to Death Strike would surely compensate for the lower Mastery value. As a bonus, you'd get more out of abilities that scale from max health such as Rune Tap, Death Pact and Lichborne (increased AP from Vengeance), too.

It's worth looking into at the very least and might help bandaid the fact that our EH is insufficient this tier without being able to land those DSes.

The comparison is this. Blocking can be thought of as putting up an absorption shield concurrent with a hit and spending that shield on that same hit. Blood Shield is similar except you get the absorption shield after taking damage, to be applied to the next hit. The fundamental difference is that if that first hit kills you, you never get to see the benefit from your mastery. (You can think of the heal in the same way, as a partial refund in health after the hit. Again, you never get the health back if the hit kills you.)

The other major difference is that Blood Shield is applied in full to the next hit until totally exhausted, and then the following hit will deal full damage. By contrast, blocking is a percentage reduction off of each blocked hit. Instead of full blocking an entire hit and then taking full damage from the next, you can partially mitigate both. Imagine a model where, when you Death Strike, your Blood Shield is divided evenly across the next 3 hits. Or where Death Strike adds to a Blood Shield "bank" and you put X% of your remaining Blood Shield toward each hit. I'm not suggesting either model be implemented, just that they would be more similar to the way blocking works.

It's easy to try to compare simple numbers like amount mitigated through paladin blocking versus amount healed/absorbed by Death Strike/Blood Shield. As long as the mechanics are so disparate (especially in the case of a potentially killing blow) you cannot do such simple comparisons. That's where the current imbalance problem lies.

As for my gear, I'm ilvl 385, balanced gemming for stamina and reforged to hit/exp soft caps, then to mastery, with avoidance lowest priority. I generally use Stoneskin but switch to Swordshattering for H25 Baleroc and Fallen Crusader for H25 Alysrazor. I'm focused exclusively on 25H Firelands content.

I was more confused about your comment of BS helping to recover from a hit as opposed to "mitigating" the next hit. The bloodshield = block is a gross over simplification as bloodshield is more of an effective physical damage health pool while block is actual mitigation however both contribute to effective health.

Taking no damage

Current Health = 220k (about what i run raid buffed and flasked)
DS heal = 15.4k
Blood shield with 140% conversion = 21.56k
Final effective health for next hit = 241.56k

Now that is without taking damage prior to the death strike. It might not be overall the same EH as block but it's still a bigger physical damage hit. If there was a boss that does huge magic damage hits and we didn't have mirror/AMS for it then I'd be a little more worried but as physical damage goes we seem to be spot on. The biggest issue here I think is the fact that we need to spread out our DS to make sure we have a blood shield for each individual hit instead of assuming that the shield will stack and then being without a DS between two successive attacks.

I don't think Stamina will replace Mastery just yet as stamina = health that HAS to be healed up for the next hit where as DS with no damage taken is 21.56k more health per hit that does NOT have to be healed through. This value will significantly go up and become less burst if you maintain a constant DS per hit taken priority vs use it on CD and eat the full eat when you are locked out. There really just shouldn't be a time in which you take a hit without a blood shield up.

edit: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
as a comparison here is an attempt on Rag where both the warrior tank and I have Rag for about the same percentage of the fight, or just about. I think during this attempt he died once and I picked up rag at the start of phase 3 so I sometimes takes more overall magic damage but this is using DS on CD. I've gotten a bit lazy on Rag in recent weeks and don't pop ams/mirror for every trap like I did at first but that would probably bring things more in line with the warrior.

You're talking about things from a 10 man perspective. The difference between 10m and 25m is not small, and definitely impacts how you gear and think and how to approach encounters.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis <-- You're 10m H Shannox from this week.
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis <-- Random 25h Parse roughly the same length

Your average hit is 38k, in 25m its 72-73k. Your arching slash is 47k where 25m is 93k. In 25m I could *barely* eat a single Arching Slash, ~5-6 stack of Jagged Tear, and a melee all at once (roughly 195-200k) without a blood shield up. The comparison in 10m would be going a solid 2 rounds before I even thought about the damage incoming. Yes, the 25m guy *did* get an immo trap which very slightly skews the numbers a bit, but overall not enough to matter considering it's a fairly long parse for the fight.

This gets even more exaggerated on fights like Beth'tilac. It's been said time and time again that *if* the DK has no risk of immediate death from a spike they are able to recuperate and overall take less damage than the other tanks (for this reason I've even seen DKs as the preferred tank in 10m - On our normal 10m rag kills when we run over on time I take *less* damage than our warrior while having more up time on rag and solo tanking both scions and rag - that isn't even factoring in that I heal myself for nearly 60% of my personal healing).

The #1 issue we face in the current tier is that we can easily be spiked to death in 1-2 hits where we *need* that buffer that extra stamina provides in some circumstances. Beth'tilac, as an example, can hit over 270k unmitigated hits in the ~30 range. Obviously you shouldn't be that far in without cooldowns, but it should go without saying that it's a 1 shot if we do. Block tanks can mitigate that to *190k* when they typically run health pools of ~200-210k in ~380 ilvl gear.

In short the main reason DKs are slipping here is because we are falling behind on being able to keep a steady stream of incoming damage and not spiking. We need a smoother damage flow for our mastery to effectively work. One of the primary ways we can do this is by increasing the buffer we have to be hit for in order to die (ie stam stacking). The other option is to run a heavy avoidance setup and pray to the gods of RNG that you don't get that unlucky 2-3 string of hits to kill you. The final way is to time your DSes flawlessly to keep a shield up to smooth out the damage flow. The downside of our mastery and consequently our shield is that all of our shield is absorbed in 1 hit and we are fucked because our rune cooldowns and GCDs do not allow us to effeciently use our DS after each attack.

I kind of like the idea of taking our BS and spreading its total % over the next 3 attacks, but that just turns it in to block. The other options are to reduce rune regen even lower than they currently are, and likely reducing our GCD from a 1.5 to a 1.0-1.2. This impacts PVP pretty bad however.

The other options are increasing our passive reduction (considering we are *way* behind on passive reduction this is the most likely result IMO). We can go back to the 60% armor we had back in WotLK, which would provide another ~10k armor and put is just slightly over where our block friends are (We'd be around 43k unbuffed where they are running around with ~39-40k unbuffed and net us about 6% more reduction). They *could* further increase the passive damage reduction from blood presence, but that would impact magic abilities and we are already strong enough at handling those. They could buff Bone Shield to be a solid passive damage reduction, but this removes a semi-powerful cooldown from us that all other tanks have and just puts us up to par passively with other tanks, so it's a near nerf.

[1] - Double the heals doesn't matter at all when you're spiking to dead in .3s. Plenty of examples similar to this are viewable on a variety of parses. Keeping in mind those are *average* values. There are plenty of times where Arcing can hit >112k and Melee can go up to 90k, even on well geared DKs.

[2] - A 96k Blood shield will last less than 1 melee swing and a Jagged Tear from Shannox (about 1-2s average).

This, again, goes back to what DKs have been saying since T11 - we need more passive mitigation. It is simply not reasonable to think that even with perfect play DKs are in a reasonable spot for 25m H tanking. If you want to look at stats that make us look even worse take a look at Beth'tilac, Alysrazor Hatchlings, and Majordomo H parses (which are very scarce in heroic).

Using Shannox as an example helps to demonstrate how even the first boss of the heroic tier hits hard enough to flatten a dk outright. He has a melee swing every 1.8s and a his Arcing Slashes are 12s apart when he has a spear in his hand. In that particular parse there is 7 separate occasions where if he didn't have a 50k+ BS up he would have died.

Please delete messed up on my data collection.

Am I reading that wrong or are you saying that pallies are taking the most damage? I have no idea how a pally takes 70k melee swings (it just seems very wrong).

	DK	Druid	Paladin	Warrior
Melee	71340.08	56789.31	45504.8	43767.29
Arcing Slash	89345.31	71044.61	89145.46	95339.53
Combined	160685.38	127833.91	134.650.26	139106.81
%	79.56%	100%	94.94%	91.90%

Those are the average numbers over the top 20 DPS parses on WoL (sans druid, because there is a lot of cats that pop into bear and the logs register them as bears).

Jagged Tear is ~12-18k average. These numbers alone though do not say everything and are basically useless because numerous things aren't taken into consideration like avoidance, bear shields, dk shields, cooldowns, etc. but the numbers are pretty telling. Arcing obviously isn't mitigated except by purely 'reduce damage by %', so you have to look at purely melee damage, where we take 25.62% more damage than our druid partners.

To rival a druid we have to have a min BS (@24 mastery) up for 65.42% of melee strikes. Not too bad, just a DS every 2.75s. This doesn't take into consideration that druids also proc shields for ~14.5k every 3.65s on average. This means we have to have have a min BS up 83%+ of the time, which requires a DS every 2.176s. Only then are we comparable on *average* physical damage to a druid, who is still 24.80% behind paladins, who are 3.97% behind warriors.

The discrepancy becomes a lot more clear when you start looking at that. A 6% reduction to physical damage (through an armor buff) would reduce our melee in take by 4280 per strike, putting us at 67059.67, which is reasonable. The better option would be to buff us by 10% armor, which reduces Shannox's strike to 64206.072 and then slightly nerf our mastery from about 6.25% per point to something closer to ~5% (at 20 mastery this would reduce a BS from 17938 to 14350, obviously retaining the strength of higher DS heals from higher damage in take, which would push us to roughly druid levels of mitigation after healing/absorbs).

Bumping our armor from Blood presence up to 60% (WotLK levels) will give us ~6.75% more reduction from armor, still shy of 10%, but workable. We could adjust Bladed Armor from 6% to 10% granting us the extra 4% reduction, but placing a bigger emphasis on spending blood runes.

Honestly numerous options are available, but it really just boils down to the numbers showing we are *significantly* behind block tanks and after the druid buffs we are even behind them.

edit: This is factoring in a dk with 205,000 health and 24 mastery.

He obviously isn't factoring in blocks, which is stupid considering that every pally is hitting the ctc mark and warriors should be by the end of this tier or mid next tier (but still be >97.5% ctc).

You can't block Arcing Slash. Hence the big numbers on Paladins.

Not sure if that was directed at me or not because I did say "Arcing obviously isn't mitigated except by purely 'reduce damage by %', so you have to look at purely melee damage, where we take 25.62% more damage than our druid partners." in my post.

He other poster also said "I have no idea how a pally takes 70k melee swings" and not "90k", which implies he meant the melee hits, not Arcing Slash.

Asphyxialol is it possible to also include selfhealing (sans absorbs) into your chart? Since the healing part of DS is part of our damage "negation". It doesn't help much in those situations where you have to take three hits in a row without runes, but if we're just comparing total damage taken you should definately include the selfhealing of classes.

I figure that would bring us up by a few percent, although I am very unhappy with selfhealing itself. The "Take more damage but heal it back up again" system started to fail as soon as bosses started threeshotting us again and healermana became much less scarce. There's a reason selfhealing was only a nice gimmick in WotLK.