Blood Tanking - Actively Mitigating since before it was cool
 

So, apparently, naming your thread "THREAD FOR THE BEST DK SPEC - Mists of Pandaria Edition" was deemed too tacky. Who knew. :kirby:

Welcome to the new Blood DK thread for Mists of Pandaria. This post will hopefully be of help to both experienced and novice Blood DKs alike with a focus on endgame raiding and Challenge modes. Please take the time to read through the whole post because parts of it are based on each other.

Nonetheless, if you only came to check what's change for us going into 5.0, at the bottom of the post.

You can find a Frequently Asked Questions section at the bottom as well.

5.3 changes:
We did not receive any changes whatsoever.

[top] Tanking Philosophy

As tanks we have 5 goals, listed in the order of importance:

1) Survive.
2) Hold aggro.
3) Minimize damage taken and healing required (through self heals, damage reduction CDs and such).
4) Support the raid with CDs (i.e. Anti-Magic Zone, Glyph of Death Coil).
5) Deal as much damage as possible.

While none of these goals are particularly new, I want to take some time to discuss 3) and 5) at detail here because they might be the most controversial.

[top] Total damage taken vs burst damage taken

While minimizing healer attention is generally something to strive for, we need to be reasonable about it. I don't know when it started but people have come to equate "less total damage taken" with being a "good tank" or being "more survivable" when this is not always true: You can take more overall damage than someone and still be the better tank. How? Because it matters when and how quickly you take the damage. Your assigned healer(s) will not heal you any differently if you take slightly more damage per swing and in most cases, they will not even notic

Not convinced on the RC for max DPS. Are you factoring in gaming RE for B runes? Now getting it on a B rune on every proc would be very difficult, as you'd have to time rune dumps when you have an FU pair without letting both FUs go off cycle as well as not capping RP. This would be made easier with the reduced GCD, but still not nearly as easy as RC. You don't need to hit every RE proc on blood rune to make it worth it, however. In fact you only need to get ~18.867% of your RE procs on blood runes to make it equal in damage. Anything above that is just more dmg.

Heres the math proof, since i know many will want to see it:

1 Heart Strike is worth ((11828+(70,000/14)*3.3)*1.7+1482)*1.3*(1-.3209)*1.04 = 45,559.735
1 Death Strike is worth ((11828+(70,000/14)*3.3)*2.35+1464)*(1-.3209)*1.04 = 48,050.53wd
RC is worth 13.5% of a heart strike and 13.5% of a death strike (or 27% of half of a death strike) per rune strike

RC's value per rune strike:
RC = .135*45,559.735 + .135*(48,050.53) = 12,637.4 dmg.

Now we need to calculate the value of B runes per rune strike required to make RE do equal damage:
(B runes)*(45,559.753) + (.45 - (b runes))*(48,050.53/2) = 12,673.4
B runes = .0849
So in order to make them equal, one Rune Strike needs to equal 8.49% of a blood rune.
Since Rune Strike gives 45% of a rune back, and needs to give at least 8.49% of a blood rune, we find that you need .0849/.45 ≈ .18867 ≈ 18.867% of your RE procs need to be on B runes. This is a very manageable number, especially since if you just left it up to RNG you would get ~33% over the course of the whole fight.

You are right about Runic Corruption being slighly worse for a full DPS rotation and I am sure I had that in the post at some point but I must have lost it during copying over.

The reason I still list Runic Corruption as being better is that it helps you do the most DPS while doing your normal tanking rotation (since RC will boost your Blood Rune regen on top of the survival benefits of the FU/D Runes) and not a full out Blood DPS rotation where you use all Death Runes for Heart Strike/Soul Reaper etc. This is simply not feasible while tanking.

I'll edit that caveat in, thanks.

But consider the flexibility that RE would provide. Gaming for B runes and using D runes on HS would provide more DPS than RC, but with a simply play style change you can go back to gaming for F and U runes and have more DS throughput than RC. And remember only 19% of your RE procs need to go to B runes to make RE do more dps than RC, so you don't have to sacrifice every single RE proc to make a difference. Good guide overall though. Not trying to just criticize :)

Still going over some of the talent assessments, but otherwise I agree with everything (maybe not the SSG>SS for EH though. Not enough EH to make it worth it, even if you need EH. I'd rather take the dmg reduction of SS and put an extra stam gem or two to get that EH.)

Also, really glad to see another guide that isn't all about overall dmg taken and actually focuses on reducing spike dmg which is the most threatening and thus the most important.

I'm not sure if I'm misreading this, but is the indication that missed/dodged Death Strikes no longer heal (and thus do not provide a shield)? When I was testing on a dummy last night I found that missed/dodged DSes continue to provide a blood shield (granted it's not boosted by scent of blood). I'm only 88 on the beta currently so I'm not sure if this is something for MoP proper or only at 90 or if I'm just reading too much into the statement.

Death Strike is currently bugged and continues to give the shield on dodges and misses. Here is a lot i threw together proving it. You can see my shield is refreshed at the exact same time stamp as DS is dodged.


World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Yeah, I just did DS tonight which confirmed my dummy testing. Blood shields are still being generated. Is the change to DS+BS supposed to have gone live for the pre-patch or is that supposed to be arriving in MoP proper? I went back to the Beta and tested it and it's the same as on live.

Looking at through the beta build change summaries on MMO-Champ I couldn't find anything indicating that DS was being reverted to the 4.2 state. Granted I haven't been keeping super up to date on the build-to-build changes, but it seems like requiring reforging to Hit/Exp in order to survive is exceptionally punishing towards tanks. Not getting SoB buffed DS is already punishment enough in itself, I find it difficult to believe that they'd actually revert back to 4.2 DS.

I did notice that I was taking a lot more damage (threat generation at the start was very rough) mostly due to being unable to pool/sit on runes; once I got threat, it was a lot easier to plan out incoming damage.

The new Death Strike should have been added to the pre-MoP patch but it seems like they copied the bug over from beta to live. As to how you can tell, the tooltips of the 4.3 Death Strike and the current one are different: The 4.3 tooltip specifically split the healing/absorb bit from the damage and mentioned that the damage would only occur if the strike successfully landed (I couldn't find the old 4.3 tooltip to link to unfortunately). The current version on the other hand links the damage and the healing/absorb together so the Death Strike has to land for the Blood Shield and healing to occur.

As to being exceptionally punishing, I'd disagree with that. Death Strike not healing and shielding us was indeed punishing in T11 and T12 heroics but that was because no other tank had to gear for accuracy and because it was just not feasible to ever hard cap expertise either. Now that every tank cares about accuracy stats (meaning bosses and tank balance will be designed with this in mind) and Death Strike cannot be parried anymore, the new Death Strike is much fairer. Additionally, you want to be spell hit capped anyway for Outbreak not to miss (if you go for the accuracy gearing method, that is) which just happens to be the point where Death Strike will always land, too. And that's just in addition to the greater DPS we will be doing which is and will always be important - more so with the new Vengeance people got to test and play with now.

While we cannot get Death Strike to always land in the 463 heroic dungeon blues yet without sacrificing mastery, it becomes much easier once we start getting a few epics and raid bosses generally won't hit hard enough in normal difficulty for a missed Death Strike or two to be a problem. It only does become a problem once we start getting hit hard - which is conveniently when we start doing hardmodes and should already have good enough gear to get spell hit capped without sacrificing Mastery, so it all works out.

Where I could see a potential problem is in Challenge modes because the bosses in there are +3 level and we are getting downscaled to 463 gear so we won't be able to get Death Strike to always land. That said, I wouldn't expect Challenge mode bosses to hit as hard as normal difficulty raid bosses (even once you count the fact that you only have one healer there who has to split attention with you and the DPS whereas in raids you will have more healers) so it will probably be fine there as well. Correct me if I am wrong though, since I didn't actually run Challenge modes on Beta.


On a different note, let me know if anyone has something more to add for the encounter specific tips and tricks section, either here or via PM.

Thanks!

EDIT:
Beta Class Balance Analysis Pt. II - MMO-Champion BlueTracker

We got a significant health buff, which should give us the highest Stamina scaling of all tanks now.
And what a great change this is for us: It was the perfect way to increase our EH without de-emphasizing the importance of our active mitigation whereas just giving us a flat damage reduction boost would have made Death Striking slightly less important (the less baseline mitigation we have, the more important our active mitigation becomes).
And to be fair, the minimum heal size also got increased with this as well which should help those that cannot/do not want to time their Death Strikes.

I can't search for the bluepost because I'm at work, but there was a confirmation that dps and tanks will not have to "overcap" hit and expertise to still be hitcapped in challenge modes. Those stats probably just won't get scaled down.

Also the buff to DK hp looks really nice, should make healing you guys not so much of a "oh shit he got a big hit" kind of affair :)

Nice buff to EH. I was yesterday in DS and on figths where aren't big aoe healing is needed I done more than holy pala and resto druid. AotD do second me dps on every figths, first was always DS and I choose RC. How much damage do HS 100%-25% and 25%-0%, and how much do SR 100%-25% and 25%-0%. Is there big diffrent?

If you remember this post, theres a pretty good chance that Death Strike always healing/shielding is intentional. If you think about it, we're more dependent on hit/exp than the other tank classes.


Blood needs hit/exp for:

• Resource generation - Landing runic power / rune abilities
• Scent of Blood - Increases the strength of death strike, generates more runic power
• Death Strike - Increases the reliability always procs heal/blood shield

Guardian needs hit/exp for:

• Resource generation - Landing rage generating abilities

Brewmaster needs hit/exp for:

• Resource generation - Landing chi generating abilities
• Blackout Kick - maintaining the shuffle buff always procs shuffle

Prot Pala needs hit/exp for:

• Resource generation - Landing holy power generating abilities
• Shield of the Righteous - Increases the reliability always procs sotr

Prot War needs hit/exp for:

• Resource generation - Landing rage generating abilities

Depending on how the devs are looking at it, they could also categorize Scent of Blood as resource generation. Since it's responsible for the vast majority of our runic power. Looking at it like this, it would be a bit imbalanced if everyone else got guaranteed active mitigation, but Blood didn't.

It's true that the game will not scale down your Hit or Expertise ratings for Challenge modes (for any role, not just tanks). However, the game will still scale down your other stats proportionally to compensate so we don't gain anything from it at best and at worst the game will not differentiate between the other stats and scale down your Mastery as much as your avoidance - just for accuracy you may or may not even have needed.

I expect serious Challenge mode tanks to either reforge beforehand or build a second set just for this with only exact as much Hit and Expertise as they need so the game doesn't remove too much of the other beneficial stats (Mastery, especially).


But, as I said earlier, worrying about accuracy stats for survival might not even be an issue. It is more likely that you will want to be capped for the trash mobs because of the added DPS instead (since Heart Strike is going to be really, really good there).

EDIT:

That's a pretty good list. I always considered our resource generation to be less prone to unlucky boss avoidance simply because our Runes always regenerated and Rune Strike is easy to cap (and if it misses we only lose a small portion of RP).
However with Scent of Blood you are probably right since that gives us yet another source of resource generation which - in addition to Rune Strike/T5 procs - pretty much rivals the resource generation of other tanks.
If that assessment is true, then Death Strike should not be subject to boss avoidance after all. Though, for me, that is only a slight buff until I am geared up enough to gear for accuracy again because I like the reliability of being spell hit capped, of Rune Strike never missing and simply contributing more to DPS.
But nonetheless something to keep an eye out for once Blizzard releases the new patch that fixes the tooltips for the stealth buffed/nerfed abilities.


Are you including Blood Shield into that? Because I hope you aren't. I know WoL counts it as a heal but that would be like counting blocks or the ShotR damage reduction as healing.
(I am just asking because I see people mistake WoL absorbs for proper healing. I actually considered putting that in my FAQ because the inconsistency between how WoL and Recount/Skada track healing is causing quite a few misunderstandings.)

Here's some thoughts from our heroic DS clear last night.

This no-capped vengeance is ridiculous, It has to get nerfed into the ground for 10m raids. After my first 120k trash pull, I knew I was in for a ridiculous night. After taking my first Hour of Twilight on Ultraxion, I had 85k attack power. I had a similar amount near the end of Spine. Wearing full DPS gear has almost no effect on my avoidance stats or my mastery. I have MORE avoidance in DPS gear because Strength is a stronger avoidance stat than Dodge at 85, and will be 90% as good as dodge at 90 right now. For the last 3 fights, I used my tank 4-set, but otherwise, it's completely unnecessary anymore.

Death Strike damage sucks now, I usually break grips while the DPS are on the tendon in Spine with a single DS, this week it took me at least 3-4 hits instead of one. I can't complain one bit, since the healing from Scent of Blood is amazing.

Holy Paladin's Sacred Shield- holy crap- it synergizes so well with Blood. Get yourself a pally healer friend for mists, and send him muffins every week. The offtank and I miscommunicated and he taunted Blackhorn back too early- he died from melee hits from BH and Goriona at 75% and the pally healer and I finished the fight as the only ones alive a full 2 minutes later (first wipe was a 240k heal crit on a Consuming Shroud target that instantly killed 8 people, second- rogue's Leeching poison almost killed a couple people, and people kept randomly dropping in the easy part). Our fury warrior took one for the team and taunted BH when I had no cooldowns available and got 2-shotted, but it gave me enough buffer to pool runes and pop Army for a Death Pact.

Blood Boil now refreshes your diseases to 100% duration on all targets- the Devs did this because they wanted DKs to have a reason to use the free proc on BB instead of D&D. BB now does a LOT more damage- hit for 19k, crit for 35k on Ultrax. It's just crazy for AOE, I pulled 60k dps on Spine and 63k on Yor'sahj, and my diseases did 24% of my damage on Ultraxion, which was about 65k.

World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis
(Logs are messed up right now- didn't record our feral druid at all, recorded all heroic fights as normal, and 3 fights registered as invalid, though recount/skada matched up correctly).

I was including Blood shield, but before 5.0 I can't never get close to healers.