You're missing Hebrew's point completely. In a 51/0/20 spec which is currently argued to be the best blood spec with a rotation like Oblit>Oblit>HS>HS>dumpcity (which may be questionable) which is disease free, all of your runes are being used up without the use of deathrunes. Thus, having the DRM talent is useless.

The point of that being, the three points you would have spent in DRM would then be used to pick up the talents that you had otherwise opted out of, meaning specifically for the 51/0/20 spec that you could theoretically get both talents being argued over.

@frmorrison: It's obvious that deadDPS = ODPS. I'm saying bluntly that, unless you yourself make a pseudo-apocalyptic mistake during an encounter, you don't proactively use IBF/AMS to mitigate incoming damage, or it's already a wipe then.....(assuming an even moderately talented raid) there is just no reason you should need access to that amount of health that fast.

Tell that to my raid that lost two achievements because my DRW hit and killed some people.

Yeah, it can be affected by the charge.

Except you can't. If you skip DRM you still have to decide between Bloodworms and Blood Aura/Mark of Blood.

The points you would normally allocate in DRM *must* be spent before you can reach Bloodworms. In fact, they must be spent before you can even get to the fifth tier. This is what clairecakes was noting. All skipping DRM does is make taking Rune Tap (and Imp Rune Tap) easier.

Unless there is another Blood DK in the raid you can't both have 8% healing and Bloodworms at the same time. Blood isn't the premier spec for raiding DKs, and as such it's likely that you are the go to person for providing that aura. This brings it back to the choice Lazareth noted, 1% personal DPS versus significant raid utility.

It's also a little much to say Rune Tap has no place in raids. It's not meant as a tool to top yourself off, but as an emergency, live saving heal. It's irrelevant whether a Heart Strike would do more damage if you don't live to keep DPSing. Obviously, this situation is increasingly rare as more and more guilds put Naxx on farm, but before long progression will continue, and with it the hard situations where healers have to choose between tanks/key roles and you.

I am pretty sure that the rune weapon only benefits from Hysteria if it has already been cast on yourself. I believe this to be true because when you pop Hysteria with your dancing rune weapon already out, you get two buffs of Hysteria on yourself. You suffer the extra 1% damage a second, but you don't gain the extra damage, since enrage effects do not stack.

I am not completely sure if he benefits once he is already out, but I definitely know that you are the one that gets the extra Hysteria buff.

Just thought I would throw this out there. This is something Ghostcrawler just posted recently and proves what some of us suspected, but here's the hard proof.

Source

I wonder how they're planning on making diseases worthwhile.

Some easy things would be making reapplication not interrupt disease ticks. PS hitting harder than a level 5 priest. And most importantly scaling bonuses for diseases for all the strikes.

Or more likely, nerfing strike damage into the ground and adding static bonus damage for diseases so that anyone in blues breaks even and raiders get boned.

Somehow I find the capacity for hope in me, that Blizz learns from it's mistakes.

Any number of things could be done to make this happen.

Bring PS damage up to say 60%

Change static damage gains to % damage gains. (enough to make it worthwhile)

Make Blood Plague increase raid dps or something.

The possibilities are endless, however nerfing to equalize isnt the way it should be done.

hey guys, first time poster just wanted to post some numbers.
"this is all without any enh shammy/frosty dk haste"

im using a non-DRM build with ob ob hs hs

just wanted to know if my numbers i am getting are "on target"


The World of Warcraft Armory

Tri drake obs attempts
Wow Web Stats

Nax 25
Wow Web Stats

ignore PW. offtank overtook MT in agro and killed all the meeelee from the start..


Thaddius 8.3k
Wow Web Stats

with fury buff on third fight, its interesting to see a simple fury buff adds 2k dps.. on that fight

I don't think anyone's too concerned about trash dps in general, let alone with blood. Unholy and frost stomp blood for trash dps all around.

As for the blizzard quote. I see them taking large percents off of Oblit, SS, heart and blood strike, and having them added back in by having diseases up. EG. Heart strike nerfed to 50% weapon damage, but gets 5% weapon damage +110 per disease. That would more strongly force people to use disease with out reducing the damage at all. It would be a typical blizzard way to nerf a play style they don't want to support.

If the strike damage gets nerfed to support greater buffs to diseases then if Blood is to remain at a competitive rate Annihilation needs to be much more available in the frost tree, or favourably Obliterate to no longer remove diseases.

As things stand, a 51/0/20 spec is not breaking the game in terms of damage output compaired to 2h Unholy/Frost or DW, it's just working against Blizzard's intention of DK gameplay and style by ignoring diseases for a better damage output.

Pigeonholing Blood into disease based rotations means they're going to have to be very careful on a spec that many (fairly or unfairly) already seem to denounce as lacking compaired to other trees.

The thing about self healing, especially in frequent intervals, is that we are no where near as efficient at self healing as other classes. If you need more healing beyond what your healers can provide along with seal of light, blood aura, potion, healthstone, bandage, etc. The group you are running with needs to consider changing the balance. Yes, rune tap will alleviate some of the healing required, but are you helping by not dealing damage? Most occasions where a rune tap would save you from death are preventable by better game play anyways. Which also leads to, if you have to rune tap with any frequency, you are probably a burden to your raid. On the flip side, if you do need the healing from rune tap to keep you alive (meaning yes, you are a burden), then yes the argument for rune tap is valid.

I'm sure blizzard will design all future encounters such that we won't need to rune tap every 30 seconds (otherwise, why did they insert a 1 potion per fight cooldown?).

Blood worms provides some passive healing (a plus) and passive damage. Rune tap provides some active healing at the cost of a cooldown. From a dps perspective the decision seems pretty clear to me.

*edit, I keep calling rune tap, blood tap*