there's plenty of room for discussion here. First, why not WoN? Well, I'm doubtful as to the usefulness of the move, seems kind of situational to me, also, it requires the loss of MoG which to my mind is too big a sacrifice, even if your tps was not an issue at all I still think its a much better talnet for 3 points.
I also spent quite a lot of time debating whether to get imp runetap over spell deflection and to be honest I'm still debating the point, I prefer moves i have control over and being able to pop a heal for 20% twice a minute is a dam nice thing. On the other hand deflection provides some much needed magic mitigation, but no longer has any synergy with blade barrier. (though it seems to have been buffed to compensate, at least I'm pretty sure it used to be 30%)
Those are about the only issues i have with the distribution of blood talent points, it's the unholy tree in my opinion that has the most interesting choices. I went for ravenous dead because ap is the most consistent way to improve threat generation (and because i just love the idea of having 11% str in total from talents). I skipped epidemic because now that our diseases last longer anyway i find that it works fine in my rotations and I could think of better places to spend the points. I spent my remaining points into what i thought would provide the best threat down as far as the obligatory ub.
BcB seemed fairly crap so i skipped it in favor outbreak, seeing as ps will no longer suck come 3.1 it seemed like a solid choice for some extra single target threat, it seemed to me to be a superior choice to Vs because Vs is crit reliant whereas outbreak was just a flat damage increase.
I also picked up MoG, granted its pretty much useless for a tank i suppose, but I justified it to myself seeing as you can macro the ghoul stun and use the ghoul to leap/stun your target at the click of a button and also, well, i didn't see anywhere else worth putting it.
I went for necrosis, didn't put much thought into it, just seemed like the thing to do, considering what else was on offer.
I'd like any input you got, constructive, nonconstructive, any kind of input at all as long as it's making a point. Long time reader, first time poster, so have mercy.
I have to apologize in advance for the conciseness of my post as I am leaving work shortly and have to make this quick.
1) Don't need UB next patch, BB is going to burn all the aoe threat you need. Also Your RP will more than likely going out the window as fast as you can get it if you're AoE and have RS macro'd to everything.
2)WotN is not situational. With the change to that talent decreasing incoming damage not only under but at 35% as well, seriously, its a "save your ass ever 15 seconds" needed 3 points.
Your choices of no imp rune tap is odd. With blood spec I sit at 42k buffed hp and I'm still not max hp for itemization. The rune tap gives me about 8.3k hp back every single minute. Hardly a trivial 4 points of survivability.
Overall I have not disected it fully but, your build looks to be built better for an offtank. I have read through a lot of your post and if I missed you saying it was purely for that then I am at fault. I do not believe you did. As a threat generation spec it does not look bad, though, as a tank, your ghoul is not priority, thus, get rid of MoG as well. along with outbreak, the points there would be better spent in Blood Gorged(its worth more than the added dmg to Scourge strike in outbreak).
I'll get back to it later. Not a bad build, just some mid-placed points I think.
EDIT: Also, trade MoG for Hysteria, the one point is worth someone else absolutely destroying stuff for you when you throw up bloodlust. Easy- macro it to a target you plan to use it on. It is quite the damage boost.
1) Don't need UB next patch, BB is going to burn all the aoe threat you need. Also Your RP will more than likely going out the window as fast as you can get it if you're AoE and have RS macro'd to everything.
I think I read that UB will be counted as a disease but I haven't heard much about it recently, if it is counted then it is necessary. I mean UB is also guaranteed extra AE threat for 20 seconds and at the cost of no runes too.
I'd like to add that BB is doing triple to quadruple damage, I'm doing an average of 275 BB damage live and 800-1000 on the PTR with up to 2k critical hits if I have two diseases up.
2)WotN is not situational. With the change to that talent decreasing incoming damage not only under but at 35% as well, seriously, its a "save your ass ever 15 seconds" needed 3 points.
WotN will not save you every 15 seconds unless you are actually dying every 15 seconds which means you aren't geared for the fight, unless its a situational fight like 3D.
This is just my opinion.
Last edited by Griefknight : 03/14/09 at 12:48 AM.
There are very few progression first kills that end perfectly. That said, I will take the 15 second cooldown save my ass talent.
There shouldn't be much discussion about the potential of WotN if you keep up with the tank tests on the PTR. WotN was borderline overpowered in those tests saving the DKs behind many times. Cutting 4.5k off a 30k hit is something I'll take every time. This is what incurred the 15second manditory cooldown.
Last edited by Warstehgnome : 03/14/09 at 1:20 AM.
I spent my remaining points into what i thought would provide the best threat down as far as the obligatory ub.
I wouldn't call UB obligatory. If anything, I have questions about it's viability in blood tanking builds. I mean, if you think about it it's really a 11 or 13 point investment. Necrosis is good, but it's much worse than blood gorged. Ravenous Dead is only going to up your strength by 30-40 points, that's not going to have a huge impact on your TPS. Outbreak is nice for taunt during the very beginning of the fight, but after that it's not terribly useful - especially if you use pestilence to refresh your diseases. Also, improved Icy Touch provides roughly the same benefit and provides a little extra mitigation to boot.
The point is, in order to get UB you end up spending 12 points in unholy that are better off elsewhere. Don't get me wrong, it is a nice source of AoE threat, but it comes at a pretty big cost to your single target threat.
First, why not WoN? Well, I'm doubtful as to the usefulness of the move, seems kind of situational to me, also, it requires the loss of MoG which to my mind is too big a sacrifice, even if your tps was not an issue at all I still think its a much better talnet for 3 points.
While I don't think WotN is a must have talent, I'm not sold on MoG either. If you're not taking subversion, then you probably have around 15% crit. Also it only effects the bonus damage, not the total critical strike damage. That works out to be a 15% chance to increase the damage of those abilities by 22.5% So on average its only going to boost the affected abilities by around 4%. It seems to me to be more of a DPS talent.
Originally Posted by Griefknight
I think I read that UB will be counted as a disease but I haven't heard much about it recently, if it is counted then it is necessary. I mean UB is also guaranteed extra AE threat for 20 seconds and at the cost of no runes too.
I think this is unlikely, at least in the near future. They've been working hard to rebalance the way diseases interact with abilities, and an extra disease would require retooling all the disease based attacks. I doubt they'd throw such a big monkey wrench into the mix this late in the game.
Originally Posted by Griefknight
WotN will not save you every 15 seconds unless you are actually dying every 15 seconds which means you aren't geared for the fight, unless its a situational fight like 3D.
While I agree that it wont save you every 15 seconds, there are many fights in Ulduar where it will be very useful. Hodir being the most obvious example.
I think I read that UB will be counted as a disease but I haven't heard much about it recently, if it is counted then it is necessary. I mean UB is also guaranteed extra AE threat for 20 seconds and at the cost of no runes too.
You probably remember from beta where it was a 4th disease for Unholy, but like Noorm said it's extremly unlikely that it will be one again
While I don't think WotN is a must have talent, I'm not sold on MoG either. If you're not taking subversion, then you probably have around 15% crit. Also it only effects the bonus damage, not the total critical strike damage. That works out to be a 15% chance to increase the damage of those abilities by 22.5% So on average its only going to boost the affected abilities by around 4%. It seems to me to be more of a DPS talent.
While I agree with you on Unholy Blight, I think you're underestimating the power of MoG for tank builds. 15% crit is a very low estimate for melee crit raid buffed in a 25-man raid. You are getting 5% crit from Leader of the Pack, 3% from Heart of the Crusader, ~3.5% from improved Strength of Earth and Blessing of Kings in addition 5% from Dark Conviction, your base crit chance, and any crit you get from your weapon (~0-3%) Raid buffed as a blood spec right now I would have 22.5% crit before Subversion or the extra 6% crit for Death Strike before calculating any crit from weapon. I'm using Betrayer right now, which gives an extra 3% or so. If you mostly do 10-mans and can't rely on having all those buffs, the value of the talent decreases of course.
Assuming 23% crit for Heart Strike and 29% for Death Strike, MoG is a 8.4% damage increase for HS and a 10% damage increase for Death Strike. Assuming 30% HS threat and 15% DS threat, MoG would still be a 1,34% threat increase per talent point. This will increase further if you take Subversion or are using a weapon with crit or agility.
Subversion is also not as bad as you might think, even though Blood is full of good TPS talents. Sudden Doom is probably among the weakest of them all, but it'll require more testing to see whether Sudden Doom or Subversion is a bigger threat increase. The build I'm looking at right now is 54/5/7 with 5 points left to spend between Subversion, Scent of Blood and Sudden Doom.
EDIT: You also can't just divide the 22.5% damage increase to get the damage increase at 15% crit like you did. Think of it this way:
Without MoM at 15% crit you are doing 100% extra damage with 15% of your attacks, or 115% damage of your average total hit
With MoM at 15% crit you are doing 145% extra damage with 15% of your attacks, or 121.75% damage of your average total hit. The damage increase of MoM at 15% crit is therefore 5.8% and not 4% like you calculated.
Calculating the damage increase of criticals can be a little confusing. If it makes it any clearer, you calculated the damage increase to your critical hits at 15% crit. But at 15% crit your criticals make up more than 15% of your total damage..
Really acclimation comes down to the same justification of spell deflection, that is it only worth it in certain fights which it is entirely tailored for.
The fact is, with talents like this, it is almost impossible to implement them well. Either the talents are too worth it and we will see huge #s of resistance in certain scenarious. This will lead to them dumping our talents in the trash like they have with Lichborne. Conversely we have this outlook on them, where they are almost never taken except for a few spell-damage heavy fights.
As death knights we just don't have the ability to justify taking something for 3 points which can be better spent elsewhere which give us moderate improvement constantly.
This is precisely the reason I get so frustrated about Blizzard constantly sidestepping the question of threat. I do not have any problems holding aggro as MT in my guild, but I also spend a significant number of points in talents intended to increase damage and hence threat. Even as a blood tank, I find that most DK's avoid talents such as spell deflection in favor of talents that improve threat. If our threat was brought up to the level of the other tanks I think we might see more people willing to throw points into talents that are only useful in certain encounters but quite clearly strictly tanking talents, such as spell deflection.
I'm thinking I may be missing something "basic" but I'm trying to figure out why so many of these builds linked aren't getting Imp Icy Touch? I've never heard about it not affecting bosses and that's another 6% reduced attack speed, which is huge. I know warriors can take care of it with thunderclap if they're prot but I don't think that sort of thing should be left up to a second tank. Is there some simple reason so many of you guys aren't planning to pick this up even for your blood builds?
I'm thinking I may be missing something "basic" but I'm trying to figure out why so many of these builds linked aren't getting Imp Icy Touch? I've never heard about it not affecting bosses and that's another 6% reduced attack speed, which is huge. I know warriors can take care of it with thunderclap if they're prot but I don't think that sort of thing should be left up to a second tank. Is there some simple reason so many of you guys aren't planning to pick this up even for your blood builds?
The only real time not getting Improved Icy Touch is OK is for a 3D or 'situational' build. There is a simple rule for new tanks, get the talents and gear you will use everyday before going for the ones you will use on occasion. This basically means get Improved Icy Touch before Spell Deflection or before Improved Rune Tap (examples). The people who aren't going at least 8 points into Frost are either building a situational spec or don't know the simple rules of tanking.
53/8/10 DS Build : This will most likely be my build when 3.1 is released and the only reason I'm not going for IRT or SD is because my dual-spec is going to be a 3.1 version of the current 3D spec for fights that may require them.
Grief, about that build, I'm a bit contrived on the usefulness of blood gorged against something that will let you heart strike 4 times in a rotation like Death Rune Mastery.
I also have to point out you left out a bit more raid utility in hysteria(not that it is manditory at all). Along with this no Rune or Imp Rune tap. Believe me when I say, when you're blood, you have a lot of health. We are going to have even more in Uld gear. When we hit rune tap, its a % so it only becomes more worthy as our health increases.
Though, of course this is all preference, rune tap is definitely a powerful tool when used correctly. Though I do think that unless death strike starts inflating its damage a lot more(mine was hitting for 1300-2300 on the dummy yesterday) then I think Death Rune Mastery is more or less needed to increase your chance to Heart Strike.
Also, I was on the ptr yesterday and was in a blood spec, normal full tanking spec as well, no blood gorged, no crazy UH talents, just the normal stuff with death strike involved.
I put up 2k dps on the dummy with no debuffs but my own and no buffs but my own. It was quite a sight since I can't get over 1600 without rune strike on live with a comprable OB spec(admittedly I don't have the sigil). I also did not have the death strike glyph.
I tried the same thing with the new more or less standard frost build and had around 1700 even with using Howling blast and hitting multiple targets whenever it was up.
The only real time not getting Improved Icy Touch is OK is for a 3D or 'situational' build. There is a simple rule for new tanks, get the talents and gear you will use everyday before going for the ones you will use on occasion. This basically means get Improved Icy Touch before Spell Deflection or before Improved Rune Tap (examples). The people who aren't going at least 8 points into Frost are either building a situational spec or don't know the simple rules of tanking.
Improved Icy Touch is necessary talent to take if and only if you either don't have a dps who is applying the improved buff as part of their dps rotations, or the fight mechanic has dps focusing on a target different from the one you are tanking. It's odd that you would take Sartharion as an example of a fight where you don't need it, as it is the only fight in T7 content where you actually do want to have it, since the raid is focusing on other targets. Reducing his melee damage is still important as the tank.
I haven't familiarized myself very well with most Ulduar encounters yet. If a lot of encounters there have fight mechanics that prevent you from relying on another person applying the debuff without a big personal loss (I'd count a warrior thunder clapping), then it is a must have talent. Otherwise it's just a waste of talent points you'll only rarely benefit from, and could use for better talents. I wouldn't personally want to rely on another tank to apply it though. Dps death knights and feral druids are the obvious choices.
Grief, about that build, I'm a bit contrived on the usefulness of blood gorged against something that will let you heart strike 4 times in a rotation like Death Rune Mastery.
The HSx4 rotation is inferior to DS or OB x2 unless you are at 8% hit and 26+ exp and even then it still may be inferior, myself and a few others have tested this.
I also have to point out you left out a bit more raid utility in hysteria(not that it is manditory at all). Along with this no Rune or Imp Rune tap. Believe me when I say, when you're blood, you have a lot of health. We are going to have even more in Ulduar gear. When we hit rune tap, its a % so it only becomes more worthy as our health increases.
I'm current at 34,624 HP unbuffed and I am healed for 6925 HP every 30 seconds, this results in 230 HPS. I realize these numbers can only increase but I honestly don't know what to do drop to take IRT. I think that IRT is an amazing talent but I'll only pick it up if my healers can't keep me up on burst bosses in Ulduar.
Though, of course this is all preference, rune tap is definitely a powerful tool when used correctly. Though I do think that unless death strike starts inflating its damage a lot more(mine was hitting for 1300-2300 on the dummy yesterday) then I think Death Rune Mastery is more or less needed to increase your chance to Heart Strike.
There simply isn't enough points to get all these talents so I'm going with the ones I feel are most necessary for tanking.
I'm going to do some more testing, but from what it looks like based on what you guys are saying, its not worth it to pick up DRM and swap out death strikes for HS's when death runes are up. Additionally, based on numbers I've heard about blood boil, that will be acceptable AE threat, although it would be much more interesting with DRM.
Rotation I used on PTR with this is: IT>PS>DS>HSx2>DC>DSx2>HSx2>DC, the rotation has no spots waiting for runes to come up for any longer than maybe a half a second here or there, unless you are out of RP for the DCs. Didn't get any TPS numbers for it yet, but DSs were critting for high 3ks on the ebon lord dummies, HS crits in the low-mid 3ks. BB hitting for about 1k with diseases up.
Thanks for pointing that out, in a 25 man setting the talent looks much better.
Originally Posted by urotas
The build I'm looking at right now is 54/5/7 with 5 points left to spend between Subversion, Scent of Blood and Sudden Doom.
Yeah, I'm trying to decode between Subversion, Scent of Blood, and Sudden Doom as well.
I noticed that both you and Griefknight posted builds that include epidemic. In light of the longer durations on diseases and the fact that they can be refreshed with a single blood rune, I wondering if the extra 6 seconds is really worth it.
I noticed that both you and Griefknight posted builds that include epidemic. In light of the longer durations on diseases and the fact that they can be refreshed with a single blood rune, I wondering if the extra 6 seconds is really worth it.
I would imagine that the longer you can keep your diseases up, the more threat you'll be able to generate with other, more powerful abilities. Sure you can refresh with 1 rune, but with epidemic, you can use those extra 6 seconds to do higher threat abilities.
I would imagine that the longer you can keep your diseases up, the more threat you'll be able to generate with other, more powerful abilities. Sure you can refresh with 1 rune, but with epidemic, you can use those extra 6 seconds to do higher threat abilities.
Untrue. What this will boil down to is if IT-PS is more threat than a single DS/HSx2. And we won't be able to make our answer 100% positive until the patch goes live, with all the current changes in the PTR - we can assume what will be higher but still, won't be 100%.
And, iirc, Pestilance refreshing the main targets diseases is a glyph. So, a 1 rune refresh may not be optimal even for that, then.
(Lots of fun that we shouldn't argue about until closer to 3.1 going Live and they stop tweaking/doing major overhauls to our class.)
Regarding IRT - It's a very nice ability for the points we spend but with our current Blood talents, I don't see any open points to take it, much like Grief has stated. We do know that healing is going to be much more difficult and mana regen is taking a huge nerf. It may be asked for us to take IRT.
There is a spare 2 points. I'm highly debating the probability of going DW as Blood. The strikes will hit less but we should, in theory, be able to RS more. And with Scent of Blood + Healers ticking additional RP, we should be able to hit maximum amount of RS. (Pot shoot.)
Untrue. What this will boil down to is if IT-PS is more threat than a single DS/HSx2. And we won't be able to make our answer 100% positive until the patch goes live, with all the current changes in the PTR - we can assume what will be higher but still, won't be 100%.
IT-PS vs HSx2 yes, but vs DS/OB theres a difference in GCDs that has to be considered, which may or may not have a cost associated with it depending on what else you could do with that 1 GCD discrepancy.
Regarding IRT - It's a very nice ability for the points we spend but with our current Blood talents, I don't see any open points to take it, much like Grief has stated. We do know that healing is going to be much more difficult and mana regen is taking a huge nerf. It may be asked for us to take IRT.
First, I'd expect that the two points you left to spare in the non-IRT build would be placed in Rune Tap and Epidemic. From there the obvious talent to swap points is Spell Deflection. While it's now 15/30/45% mitigation, we've lost 10% parry chance at the same time. Aside from Sartharion-esque situations I'd expect IRT to be better.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity.
It certainly seems like there is great possibility that Blood could be a great new tree to DW with.
If things remain as they are, and SoB remains 100% proc and then with strikes getting a % bonus instead of flat bonuses for diseases it seems that even with the smaller strikes they will get just the same bonus in damage.
This is quite the interesting time and with 3.1 coming close I am sure SoB will either be nerfed or become less attractive for dual weild. It is just insane for it to happen 100% of the time and have DW burn through that RP sooooo fast.
We would all spec dual-weild, wonder wtf we were doing and then have out of control threat. Well at least the threat we have had during the BoSanc era.
So it seems an awful lot of you are planning blood builds come 3.1, did I miss some sort of consensus regarding the changes that's causing blood to be the premier tanking build or something? I've been frost ever since I started tanking and always found it to fit my playstyle best; I believe it when I hear that people have had just as much success tanking as blood or unholy if the playstyle is varied, but I haven't seen anything regarding the ptr changes that makes me understand why blood would be necessarily better than frost or unholy. I don't want to step on anyone's toes by saying frost still looks best in my eyes because I know I'm biased due to my playstyle, but I'm curious why the sudden influx of blood builds that you guys are linking.
Did I miss the memo? Are most of the DK's tanking the ptr content speccing blood or is it just excitement from existing blood tanks regarding buffs to their favorite spec? With UA looking better than before and imp frost presence also looking nice, I was still planning on sticking with frost (and mourning the death of lichborne while I'm at it). I'm a bit saddened that howling blast is a 10s cd but the overall threat should be about the same from what I've heard, and it adds a little spice into the rotation I suppose.
So I was testing Hodir on the PTR, and since frozen blows is no longer reflectable, it seems the way to go about it is to pop a cooldown type ability each time he gains the buff. Does anyone else see Blizzard pushing tanking towards being able to survive otherwise impossible to mitigate abilities with several cooldowns, and the classes that can do this the most often (DKs) having the largest advantage? For say, a warrior or paladin, you need to bring priests and paladins to pop the extra cooldowns needed to bridge the gaps between longer than 1 minute cooldowns, it seems.
Does this seem like poor design, making it so tanks NEED cooldown abilities for the tank to survive a given boss's abilities, while at the same time giving some tanks more cooldowns more frequently than others?
From a frost tank point of vue i was wondering if it was still worthing putting 3 points in rime .
Since HB cd has been increased to 10 sec i won't benefit as much as before from the rime proc .
I was wondering if i should put those points in something more usefull like maybe the new scent of blood or annhilation (i usually don't use obliterate) or virulence .
Maybe it could be interesting that we could use HB even if it's on cd with the proc.
I was wondering if i should put those points in something more usefull like maybe the new scent of blood or annhilation (i usually don't use obliterate) or virulence.
What kind of weird spec/rotation do you have if you don't use obliterate?
If you're already frost specced, just keep the points in rime, spec into annihilation and start using obliterate.
We have not had a memo put out about blood tanking at all, we are simply blood tanks whom are very excited to see blizzard acknowledge some serious concerns blood has had since we became 80 tanks.
Frost is all well and good, but the hefty hefty stat increase you get with blood, along with the higher damage(in most situations) on the PTR is going to result in higher tps #s. Along with the new standard rotation of IT>PS>DS>HSx2>RP then DSx2>HSx2>RP which will free up some of our GCDs that are at the moment completely screwed up if we miss a HS in a 4xHS rotation(one which I use atm and thank god I have a ton of hit/exp gear).
I was frost for a month or so and liked it a lot, though I switched to blood and once I got used to the playstyle, it is just better for survivabilty. I have so many cooldowns atm I just can not die.
A 6.5k heal every 30 seconds, a Guardian's Spirit + Last Stand button(VB), Mark of Blood which is nice on physical bosses, two dodge trinkets, along with Lichborne. Blood's survivability just can not be beaten at the moment for effective health.
Hopefully they do entirely reform lichborne to at least a shade of its old state, as blood I won't miss it terribly, but it certainly does help!
03/14/09, 12:03 AM
