With the huge increase in stats on T9 compared to T8, it's likely that avoidance would have gotten out of hand, like it did transitioning from BT to SWP. In my relatively bad gear, I hit 57% avoidance before DR when raid buffed. That could easily jump up to 65% in T9 before the nerfs. IMO it's important to keep in mind that encounters will be tuned to the same stats they expect us to have, not the ones we were expecting to have.

Relevant discussion would be around whether it will be worth it to gem/gear for parry more now rather than dodge. My char sheet dodge is about 5% above my parry, but IDK if all of that is affected by DR. What are the baselines for each? 5% plus any percent based buffs from talents or runeforging?

Well if Parry is going to be equal with dodge in terms of cost I see more benefit in stacking it a little higher. I only say this because built in we have an advantage of adding strength to gain threat and parry.

Before the patch parry was too expensive and its DR made it less attractive. Now I do not know what the magic number is for a "advisable cap" where the DR makes it unrealistic to stack parry but I remember it being in the 30%ish range(From memory sorry if I am WAY off)

Getting that number would be helpful but having the stats for the next tier gear would help even further. As you stated Blizz has an idea of where they want to take the classes, they usually itemize gear in accordance to that vision.


____Added Late____

Rune of SS is not subject to DR so 34%ish with that rune.(last I checked)

My point was more geared towards the fact that our parry might be that high with gear, not gemming for parry(Still bad).

I'm recopying to the PTR to get a better sense of Live::PTR, but from my first--ungemmed, unenchanted, etc-copy, TOTAL avoidance remained roughly constant, but dodge dropped, parry went up. I'd suspect that for us, the loss, if any, will be small. (1% or less) I suspect that some loss is also intended, as we know they consider tank avoidance to be "an issue".


TLDR: Yeah, the parry boost almost did cover it from what I saw, but I'm gonna check.


Edit: Yep, to confirm, I checked my most recent copy charpane against my current, and the pre-diminishing changes just about cancel each other out. It's probably slightly more of a loss than the ~.1% or so that I'm seeing on the paper doll given the DR curve on parry, but it's close enough that this feels like they're not trying to hit us (and other plate tanks) with it in specific, more reining in avoidance in general, plus aiming it heavily at druids.

Pretty sure that's targeting characters which aren't stacking agi. Meaning that since they had to recalibrate the amount of dodge with 0 agi, priests might have slightly more dodge chance than they do currentyl, or something along those lines. I'm pretty sure it's not saying "If you've been stacking agi you probably won't notice a change, even though the conversion rate has been reduced by 15%."

Cleaning up this thread sure was fun!

Fucking DKs.

Here's a basic blood DK tank build.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

People have different opinions on 3/3 Subversion, Runetap+3/3 Imp Runetap, 2/2 Abom Might, and Hysteria. I like taking them for their utilities. IMO Imp Icy Touch should be fit into all tanking build unless you can be sure the boss will get debuffed full time... e.g. Steelbreaker tank. Or... XT if we don't have any feral DPS or Frost DK.

From that basic blood tank build there are 2 options:
DRM
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Basically lets you convert your FU runes used in Death Strike into Heart Strike.
Rotation: IT PS DS HS HS // DS HSx4
IT+PS, 2 DS, 6 HS per rotation (10 GCD rune)

Morbidity
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
Gets you 15 sec DnD to make AoE tanking easier, plus it buffs your DC by 15%.
Rotation: IT PS DS HS HS // DSx2 HSx2
IT+PS, 3 DS, 4 HS per rotation (9 GCD rune)

Numbers from IC HM last Wednesday (might be inflated a bit due to overwhelming power, not by much).
average HS: 2348, crits for 5962
average DS: 3302, crits for 6400 - this is with DS glyph, subtract 25% if you're not using it (2642 hit/5120 crit)
average DC: 1958, crits for 2720 without morbidity/dark death
average IT: 1242
average PS: 1400

1 HS = 0.71 DS with DS glyph, 1 HS = 0.89 DS without DS glyph
So no contest... if we want to maximize TPS, going DRM route will definitely give us more. DRM rotation is a lot tighter though. A typical 18 second rotation on average only has 12 GCD... so 10 GCD rune rotation has little room for errors/lag. Ideally most of your RP will go towards RS, and you only DC when all your runes are on CD.

Doing a calc to compare [Glyph of Death Strike] to [Glyph of Disease].

Since the DRM path only DS twice per 20 secs, your threat gain is 'only' 50% of your DS damage. What if we drop [Glyph of Death Strike] in favor of [Glyph of Disease].

Your rotation will now become a priority system.
1) Apply IT+PS
2) Use DS to convert FU runes into 2 Blood Runes (since 2 * 0.89 >>>> 1)
3) Use Pestilence when diseases are at < 2 secs remaining
4) Spam Heart Strikes and Rune Strike
5) DC only when all your runes are down (unlikely with our current gear i.e. need expertise hard capped)

It will look like this:
IT PS DS HS HS // DS HSx4 ==> on first pull (10 GCD rune)
Pest HS DS DS // HSx6 ==> rest of the fight (10 GCD rune)

Calculate the damage difference if we make a switch to [Glyph of Disease].
- Losing IT+PS = 2642
- Gaining HS = 2348

Losing like 200 dmg per rotation, which is ~10 DPS. If we consider disease clipping it might actually increase the DPS, and consequently the TPS. It will also make AoE tanking much easier, no longer do we need to reapply diseases when we can just refresh it with pestilence everytime it's almost off. I am gonna go replace my DS glyph with Disease glyph.

Holy balls walls of text.


oh and,

lmao.

You neglected to attempt to model DS's fairly unpredictable/variable healing threat. In most situations, it's not going to change the numbers drastically (especially on a fight with 3+ adds), but it's noteworthy when you're making a comparison with numbers this specific.

For this particular swap (and numbers):
- Losing Half a DS = 1320

So you're losing slightly over 1600 dmg per rotation. I too am tempted by the convenience of the glyph, but its definitely not going to increase your single target TPS.

Also, you can usually tab around to refresh diseases on AoE pulls. Glyph of Disease might save you a couple Blood runes/GCDs over a prolonged period of AoE, but it's less than 1 of each per 20 secs.

Recently switched to Blood tanking and still working out the kinks.

Has anyone done a comparison between using Glyphs of Rune Strike and Blood Strike.

Going DRM route - since the "snare" debuf is usually on the boss in one way or another, would it not make sence to increase 6 gcds out of 10 by 20% (using BS instead of HS) and loosing 10% crit on RS?

The "snares" do not count for the blood glyph on bosses.

The blood glyph doesn't work on bosses? I always thought it did. Torment the Weak for Mages certainly works and it's also activated on snares.

Torment of the Weak is a different case. It is activated by attack speed snares and movement speed snares, while the Blood Strike glyph is only activated by movement speed snares. Although there are a few exceptions (such as the Frostfire Bolt debuff), most movement speed snares cannot be applied to bosses. Regardless, even if you can rely on one of the few boss-applicable debuffs to activate the glyph in your raid, Heart Strike is still (slightly) superior damage wise for a Blood spec, so it makes no sense to sacrifice a glyph for what is, in the best case scenario, a dps loss.