True, it doesn't fit as well as the other methods and quite frankly, I am not a fan of the 4P theme for the tanks but in the constraints we are given it has to be either free Death Strikes or, as you said, free RP. Personally, I think free Death Strikes would be better in most cases since there is that would benefit all T75 talents the same though I also don't like the whole "Death Strike moar!" aspect of it.

In an ideal world, I would be much happier if something like Bone Shield (and/or CDs) triggered a haste buff but only for our swings: With Scent of Blood, we already have a mechanic in place that gives us more RP and more powerful Death Strikes without having to resort to either extreme of "only" giving RP or "only" giving more DSes.

Or hell, just make 4P double the effectiveness of Scent of Blood while it's up (+20 RP, +40% DS heal).

One thing i can't find in the guide is the value of stamina/health through %-based healing. Vampiric blood, rune tap, blood worms, death pact and even death strike's base heal and fallen crusader procs are all %-based. Adding 100k to your healthpool does have a significant impact on your healing.

Well let's look at the actual effect each one would have, with a 100k health boost, which is about 4800 stam. First, let's look at what you would have to give up in order to gain it. The most obvious place to get more stam is from gemming, and every 240 stam you gem will cost you 320 mastery, before looking at socket bonuses. That means 100k health is worth about 67% more blood shield per death strike heal when looking at gems.

Vamp blood would not change if glyphed, and if unglyphed, would net you 15k extra health during the duration of VB. Rune tap heals for 10% of your health, and is usable every 30 seconds, so assuming it's used on CD, and it doesn't proc, 10k every 30 seconds is an increase of 333 hps. Blood worms are harder to find good info on, but the wowhead comment suggest that, on average, each bloodworm will heal for about 10% of the dk's max health, and have a 10% proc chance on melee, which ends up being a 333 hps boost, same as rune tap,, but aoe. Changes in 5.2 to be taken into account when 5.2 hits. Death pact heals for 50% of your max HP, so another 100k health gives it a sizable 50k boost to the heal. Only useable every 2 minutes, that's a 417 hps boost, but it is all in one go, which makes it sorta nice. Death strike's base heal is 7% of your heal, so 7k more heals per death strike (only when taking less than 35% of your health in the last 5 seconds) is a hps increase of 1263. However, if you're not taking more than 35% of your health every 5 seconds, do you really need the extra hps? Fallen crusader procced 6.7 times per minute for me, and heals 3% of your total health every proc. That's a 300 hps increase again.

Compare all of that to a 67% increase to blood shields. Assuming you have around 600k raid buffed, and are taking less than 35% of your hp every 5 seconds (the benefit only goes up as you take more dmg) that's a hps increase off over 5k. You could make the argument that the extra health nets more bursty healing, which is more likely to save you, but stam overall does very little to increase your healing to dmg taken ratio.

TL;DR
Stam is good until you have enough effective health to survive, enjoy the bonus it provides to self healing, but it's not enough to gear towards it.

I am not sure if it came across well in the guide enough but stamina has more uses than letting you hit the barebones EH treshold. While increasing the value of % based abilities (AMS especially) is a nice perk, it is not the primary reason to gear for higher health than what most of us would consider 'stricly necessary'. It might be less obvious but having a big health pool actually can* increase your Blood Shield size (and this is not about the minimum Blood Shield either). How? By allowing you to deliberately let more damage fall into your Death Strike heal window before you Death Strike. For example, if you are tanking a boss where 3 hits will land you in critical health levels without a moderate amount of external healing then you will generally want to Death Strike after those 3 hits because you cannot be sure if you will have been healed enough to take the 4th hit every single time. A bigger health buffer here can allow you to Death Strike after every 4th hit more comfortably which increases Blood Shield size you will get (remember the number one priority for Death Strike is to use it to prevent your death/stabilize your health; having a big Blood Shield every now and then let's your healers catch up and get you back to full health and repeat this cycle).
Also do keep in mind that I used boss swings in this example to (hopefully) keep it simple enough. In reality, there are more damage sources than just boss swings on most boss encounters like DoTs, raid AoE or even adds so you could replace the example with, say, 3 hits vs 3 hits plus 2 additional AoE ticks and the result would be the same.


*I bet you stopped reading just to see what the asterisk was all about. Go read the rest first and come back later, the caveat is not going anywhere.
Anyway, the reason I said it is not "will" ties back into the portion of the guide about how some people can get away with less health than others. How much you can rely on healing is going to matter quite a bit here once more: If you are always getting healed enough that you can keep delaying the Death Strike for one more swing, then adding more health is not as useful to you as adding mastery in regards of increasing the Blood Shield size. If, however, you cannot or do not want to rely on external healing as much (healers having to move, being a bit slow etc), a bigger health pool will allow you to play it safe while still getting more damage in the heal window.

So keep this in mind before you decide to stack stamina and vice versa.

What do you guys think about blood scaling in 5.2? With 5.1 about to end I'm thinking about rerolling to something else from blood DK, because I don't see how blood will be able to keep up with other tanks in next tier. For example, paladin or warrior seems to scale so much better with ratings then blood DK.

Even in 5.1 there are some fights where DKs can't keep up with other tanks - for example Sha HC or add phase on Empress HC, where physical burst dmg is insane at some points, and there is no chance for DK to heal and absorb as much as tanks with % based dmg reduction can mitigate (like pally with SotR or warrior with shield block up). Best example - trash and dread trash on Sha of Fear heroic. Even in phase one with regular Trash it's 3x ~200k damage, which is ~90% of my hp. Now, with regular boss meele swings it's almost impossible to stack blood shield before it, so we're looking at ~200k absorb tops before the trash. That's still 400k to the face every 6 sec. Dread trash is even better - 6x 200k dmg, and we still can mitigate ~200k of it - that's ~1m to the face if we're really unlucky with avoidance (so even with IBF up, we're looking at ~90% of our hp in one hit, and we won't have IBF up for every dread trash). Now as a comparison, pally can have SotR up for every single trash or dread trash, and mitigate ~65% of dmg with that alone, plus ~50% chance to reduce it by another 30% with block, and then a chance to avoid the attack completely. Similar with warrior Shield Block and Crit Block.

By no means I'm saying that blood DKs are bad - they just seem to scale differently then other tanks. On fights with low to moderate incoming dmg, blood is really strong, as we can absorb close to 100% of incoming damage and pretty much keep blood shield up almost all the time. But as the incoming damage increases, blood seems to fall from strongest tank to the weakest, as we can't handle big spike dmg as well as other classes.

Again, I might be missing something, but to me it seems that in 5.2 blood won't get much stronger - we will get more mastery, but it won't fix the problem of heavy spike dmg on us, and it seems that is what blizz is going for in heroic fights. Even now I can roll with 16k mastery raid buffed if I choose to, but it actually doesn't make a big difference then 14k + a bit more stamina (according to my healers).
And that's what worries me - how can blood keep up to paladins scaling insanely good with mastery (more % reduction - over 70% physical reduction next tier with ~50% avarage uptime during the fight - even more if you consder tank swapping - plus more block plus more self healing) or warriors with both mastery and avoidance (more avoidance - more rage - more absorbs while still keeping 66% uptime on shield block).

What do you guys think? I really like tanking as blood <actively mitigating since before it was cool - hipster style>, but I feel I should reroll if it can benefit my raid team. And looking at the final boss design in current tier, I can assume we will stumble across something like Dread Trash again, and then my raid team will be in a disadvantage because of me being a 'weaker' tank.

Or maybe I am missing something about dks in next tier?

We will get more mastery, but we will also get larger health pools. For blood the majority of our spike dmg mitigation comes from EH, and we do get more of it as gear improves. Granted we've only tested 10N content so far, but there hasn't been a fight that appeared to be to spike heavy for Blood in the ptr tests. If spike damage really becomes an issue we could always just run heavier EH builds.

I'd also like to point out that both of the situations that you mentioned are fine for DKs as long as you are using your abilities correctly.

For example on heroic sha:
thrash is actually relatively painless as long as you put at least 2 death strikes before each one. Dread thrash is equally easy to handle with again 2 DS + glyphed ibf + VB + DRW. Even if you do mess something up or are for some reason caught with your pants down, you still have purgatory and purgatory + void shift is kinda OP for dread thrash if your priest is ready for it. In a way DK is preferred since we can almost completely guarantee survival without externals. Compare this to Monks and druids, who completely rely on avoidance. 99% of the time they avoid enough, but there is still a chance even with savage defense/elusive brew up they could get 1 shot for dread thrash.


Heroic empress:
You will need heavy heals, but the only tank that has it "easy mode" here would be monks with elusive brew due to the DW adds hit tables. DKs are fine here as well, as long as you are putting CDs up while there are three adds on you. Dedicated tank heals + proper tank/external CD use makes this more than do-able as a DK. We may not have it as easy as monks but it's far from not viable, even from a hardcore progression PoV.


The only fight that DKs were truly not viable for this tier was early Gara'jal progression, and that was simply due to the fact that all of our self heal mechanics were nullified by the mechanics of the fight (the voodoo dolls got our heavier damage, but didnt get our heavy self heals)

"Flavor" of the class. It can be harsh at times, but thats just how DKs have to work.

We're special snowflakes thanks to the amount of self healing we do. There has to be "something" that counter balances it. That something is a lack of passive damage reduction. Which means that if our self heals aren't effective, or the attacks are faster than we can self heal/cooldown, we're pretty much done.

Garajal didn't consider active mitigation balance, while making an encounter focused around it (poor fight design).
Shek'zeer was fine (1st and 3rd phase damage is easy to handle), with the exception of not having a DK/Bear tank the Windblade adds.
Sha is half fine, in that you''ll live if you only use cool downs on thrashes. Dancing Rune Weapon is a full fledged cd here. It does mean that you can't rotate them like you want to, and his normal melee will be harder than necessary.

All in all, 3 misses out of 16 bosses isn't that bad. Besides, I'm sure the other tank classes didn't enjoy Lei Shi spamming magic damage.


It's true that paladins and warriors will be more stable. They're the benchmark tanks. If you can't tank a fight with a paladin or warrior, something is seriously wrong. Aside from some mechanics not taking tank balance into consideration, our only problem is that we lack raid utility. Which is "partially" being addressed with the Bloodworms buff. If we had some form of rallying cry ability we'd be good to go.

Bloodworms are lackluster for sure. It's a party healing mechanic, that doesn't work with the party's needs. Trying to heal the tank 20-40 yards away with Blood Burst is pretty meaningless.

It'd be most effective if they tried to heal players in range, but a simple spell that forces them to explode is all it needs. That would also deal with the annoying problem of having Bloodworms out in challenge modes. Since pets/guardians don't get the invisibility buff from the potion, Blood worms are fairly problematic. You can often end up waiting around for Bloodworms to de-spawn, or hoping something kills them before you leave invisibility.

(on the cosmetic side, a minor glyph that turns them into the Blood Beasts from Deathbringer is long past due!)

The tier 15 tanking set bonuses aren't very good, compared with either the tier 14 bonuses, or with the tier 15 bonuses for other tanking classes. (The 2-set bonus reduces the cooldown timer of our weakest cooldown. The 4 set provides resources for an extra half of a death strike per minute.) This is both a frustration and an opportunity.

Looking at the stat itemization, the head and shoulder blood tier pieces are still very good even without the bonus. But there are better off set pieces for the other 3 slots. This means you can pass on token drops for chest, legs, and hands to other members of your raid group. They gain from your sacrifice, at no cost to you.

This made me stop and think, "Why the 4 pc is so lackluster?". In theory, 90 runic power per min should be a decent bonus to our rotation. In reality we often end up over capping runic power. Why is this?

Then it hit me. Anti-Magic Shell. We naturally generate ridiculous amounts of runic power when we ams damage. Provided we can use it on cooldown, it completely out classes the runic power from even Scent of Blood. Almost every encounter has damage to ams, so we always feel a huge surplus of runic power.

This is the reason the 90 runic power from the 4 pc feels bad. We already have runic power from a defensive cd. And it generates far more runic power than this bonus ever will. As long as the encounter has magic damage, there is no real room for the T15 4 pc bonus.

The T15 4p could make Lichborne a more interesting talent. It could let you time every other bone shield with lichbone to dump the RP. It's not amazing but it's something to think about.