Blood Simple - The Day The Music Died - Page 49

dr_AllCOM3 · 09/11/09, 10:19 PM

HS is overpowered with a 281dps weapon. I have one and I did one Ulduar raid with it. On bosses like Mimiron it's devastating with 95% Arp. The nerf is justified, since Frost+Unholy are the more aoe oriented specs and Blood still has very nice burst and single target damage.

Asphyxialol · 09/11/09, 10:34 PM

Originally Posted by Zuu

I have a hard time accepting that Blizzard would ton down the cleave simply because of the advantage when plowing through trivial content. If that were the case, they would have toned down aoe back in Naxx. The approach to these encounters changes significantly on heroic (read, meaningful content).

We have ranged managing the Snowbolds. Incidental aoe from melee won't hit them unless you target them, which isn't as simple as tabbing given how much they jump around in addition to accommodating both them and Gormok being in front and within range of each other. With the huge amount of damage and long interrupt caused by Gormok's Staggering Stomp, having ranged run to melee to be relieved of their Snowbold isn't even an option on heroic.

For the Jormungar, again utilizing a strat that benefits cleave type abilities is fine for normal mode, but on heroic this isn't an option due to the long duration of the poison clouds requiring careful placement (although even on normal and with their large hit box, I'm surprised you can utilize cleave abilities with a 15 yd sweep from the stationary one as you're suggesting).

For Jaraxxus on heroic, I can't possibly see tanking infernals in melee range being an option with how much aoe damage they do. Although you can tank the mistresses in melee range, I don't see the Heart Strike cleave being superior to other forms of melee aoe here.

Our cleave is definitely strong if you're tanking the twin Valkyr together, but again I don't feel that it is superior to the aoe capabilities other melee classes benefit from in this situation. In fact, going over wowmeeters, there are very few (one to two) blood DKs on the top parses (most of which are towards the bottom) for every ToC encounter that benefits from having a cleave type ability. All of them are being topped by warriors and rogues, and while wowmeeters isn't a solid source to base information off of, it is still worth noting.

For Anub'arak, again we definitely benefit, but I don't feel that our Heart Strike is overshadowing other melee aoe capabilities here.

It feels like an unnecessary nerf because it's good when there is an additional mob, however I don't feel that it pulls strongly ahead of other forms of melee aoe once three or four mobs are introduced. Perhaps I am just in denial because, like Orother mentioned, it feels quite weird and unwarranted, it hurts blood tanks, and overall I felt that the Heart Strike cleave made the ability very fun and unique.

As I said, multiple times, those were personal situations, and situations I have found to be true in a more than just a few circumstances. As an example our melee dps is substantially higher than our ranged dps, and we have more of them, so it makes sense for the caster to run into melee when they get a snobold and then we focus them (primarily rogues and myself). Because of how we manage it, one usually dies just as the other one is being ran in, letting me keep a seamless rotation full of cleaves onto Gormok, and we did this on heroic too (it's actually where we came up with the strat, because casters, and primarily healers, weren't getting them killed quickly enough).

For worms, we don't aim for it, but its quite easy to simply stand between them to maximize cleave damage until the cloud is about 5 yards from you, at which point they generally burrow and come up in different spots to begin with. Obviously I only mean to cleave in the opening of the fight (which is when most of my groups damage is done anyways), after the first burrow and swap the ability to cleave is greatly diminished unless you intentionally move them together (and I don't know of any guild that does that). I generally swap to unholy presence to soak incoming damage and improve my movement speed to get back quickly after a sweep.

As for Jaraxxus, I never said we tank them in melee, I said they incidentally receive cleave damage due to their natural teleport into melee, by no means should any legitimate raid comp move them into melee range (albeit, our strat has our rogues on infernals again due to our extreme melee dominance over casters). We intentionally move him towards volcanoes however so that the cleave damage can still effect multiple targets.

In my current gear I don't see cleave being really dominant, especially with our rogues in the group, but I certainly could see it scaling quite a bit out of hand with a higher level item (like Doc said). Blizzard has shown repeatedly in Wrath that they are taking preemptive adjustments to classes in terms of 'nerfs'. They are anticipating the ilvl growth and calculating the damage output based on those, and in that regard our cleave is exceptionally strong in comparison to other classes cleave mechanics (not necessarily AoE, but it varies by the amount of mobs in range as to what kind of AoE you're referring to).

Kaejin · 09/11/09, 10:41 PM

So then what about abilities like Cleave and WW? If it's a problem with one cleave, it would be a problem with any other cleave. And isn't that arguably an issue with Armor Pen as much as it is an issue with cleaves? A warrior would be doing just as well, if not better in that kind of situation because they could both glyph Cleave to hit three targets in addition to using WW.

The fact that they only nerfed Heart Strike rather than all cleave abilities is what doesn't make sense, rather than if cleaves in general got nerfed. It's hard to extrapolate a meaning behind the nerf in this kind of situation.

Decaying · 09/12/09, 2:26 AM

Originally Posted by dr_AllCOM3

HS is overpowered with a 281dps weapon. I have one and I did one Ulduar raid with it. On bosses like Mimiron it's devastating with 95% Arp. The nerf is justified, since Frost+Unholy are the more aoe oriented specs and Blood still has very nice burst and single target damage.

Döc - I was curious to see this in action, so I pulled you up on Worldoflogs.com and was browsing your Algalon kill to get a good idea of what you're hitting for - it lists you as using blood strike not heart strike? Is this a translation issue (from German -> English), or is something else going on? Curious to see some parses with a 281 dps weapon.

Defyapathy · 09/12/09, 2:30 AM

Originally Posted by dr_AllCOM3

HS is overpowered with a 281dps weapon. I have one and I did one Ulduar raid with it. On bosses like Mimiron it's devastating with 95% Arp. The nerf is justified, since Frost+Unholy are the more aoe oriented specs and Blood still has very nice burst and single target damage.

Oh come on now, that's just asinine, you can't say a nerf was justified because a deep blood talent benefits from it heavily with a weapon and gear that a small portion of the population is going to get. A VERY small portion.

Grigori · 09/12/09, 2:57 AM

Originally Posted by Kaejin

So then what about abilities like Cleave and WW? If it's a problem with one cleave, it would be a problem with any other cleave. And isn't that arguably an issue with Armor Pen as much as it is an issue with cleaves? A warrior would be doing just as well, if not better in that kind of situation because they could both glyph Cleave to hit three targets in addition to using WW.

The fact that they only nerfed Heart Strike rather than all cleave abilities is what doesn't make sense, rather than if cleaves in general got nerfed. It's hard to extrapolate a meaning behind the nerf in this kind of situation.

Looking at Ghostcrawler's explanation for the nerf, it appears that they don't as much take issue with characters doing massive multi-target DPS as they do with characters doing massive multi-target DPS without sacrificing single-target DPS on the primary target. Warriors are fine because only Whirlwind cleaves in their single-target rotation and that by itself does not do massive multi-target DPS. In order to do massive multi-target DPS, the Warrior has to sacrifice single-target DPS on the primary target by using Cleave. You can see this design philosophy at work with the PTR multi-target Seal of Command. They don't as much have a problem with massive cleave DPS as they do with massive cleave DPS on your single-target rotation.

That said, I think Blizzard may have lost sight somewhat of why they made Heart Strike hit two targets in the first place: To address a glaring weakness in Blood's multi-target DPS. Personally, I think this HS change causes more problems than it solves. There are any number of better ways to bring about their multi-target philosophy. As an example, they can remove the multi-target component of Heart Strike completely and add "Your Blood Strike now has a 33%/66%/100% chance to strike its target and its two nearest allies" to Might of Mograine. That would make both Blood's 2-target and mass-target AE DPS more reasonable (instead of the multi-target DPS cliff where you go from mind-bogglingly awesome at 2 to pwned-by-the-nerfed-to-the-ground-FoK at 4).

Kaejin · 09/12/09, 3:34 AM

That seems like a rather good solution, actually. Heart Strike's cleave has always been more annoying than anything when CC comes into play, and on Faction Champions it's nearly useless. I would think giving HS an alternate function and making Blood Strike into a cleave for the Blood Tree using the current damage it does would solve many problems as once. If they want to keep things from feeling lame, I'd think making it so hitting Blood Strike doesn't feel like being punished is an important thing as well, in addition to letting us keep our full single target DPS against single targets in CC sensitive situations.

Veritas17 · 09/12/09, 12:21 PM

Forgive me if this is wrong to ask, but the argument about armor pen and gemming - is it finalized then? Should you actually gem for armor pen if you're sorely lacking in it? I personally have around 7500 or more ap when raid buffed so I figured I could actually test out gemming up to 700ish armor pen (I'm sitting at 600 ungemmed right now with my armor pen set on). I currently lack an armor pen trinket so that's why I'm even asking this.

I'm not sure if there has ever been a decent percentage you should aim for with regards armor pen now since the whole 6200 ap raid buffed thing got shot out the window eons ago.

gogolack · 09/12/09, 8:22 PM

Although you can tank the mistresses in melee range, I don't see the Heart Strike cleave being superior to other forms of melee aoe here.

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay

From 25m Heroic Jaraxxus. Obviously its just one example, but its still relevant. Blood DK's dominate this fight.

The change is reasonable. The fights where its really noticible tend to be fights we dominate anyway. Overall this won't change the damage rankings for very many fights.

Grigori · 09/13/09, 6:05 AM

Originally Posted by gogolack

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay

From 25m Heroic Jaraxxus. Obviously its just one example, but its still relevant. Blood DK's dominate this fight.

The change is reasonable. The fights where its really noticible tend to be fights we dominate anyway. Overall this won't change the damage rankings for very many fights.

I don't know about that. You top that parse at 7.5k, but looking at the many WMO Lord Jaraxxus 25 hard mode parses, I think it's a very long stretch to say that Blood DKs dominate this fight. Browsing through the first twenty or so parses on the page, I see Blood DK topping the chart once, and that one is with all his teammates doing very poorly compared to good parses for their classes. I mean, Warriors and Rogues are topping 9k on this fight, and the top Fire Mages are clearly averaging higher than the top Blood DKs here. You will be hard-pressed even to make a case for Blood DK being #1 for this fight, let alone dominatingly so (heck, you will be hard-pressed to make a case for Blood DK being #4 for this fight...forget about the high DPS pures, I saw more Ret Pallies topping 7k while browsing through the parses than I did Blood DKs).

gogolack · 09/13/09, 5:02 PM

I admit I definitely should've done a bit more research on other classes' parsings! Point well made, perhaps the change is a bit unnecessary, I still don't see it as overly significant.

Synaxe · 09/14/09, 9:26 PM

Not sure if it has been mentioned yet in this thread, but with the upcoming changes in 3.2.2 to Mages, and making arcane a more desirable raid spec, are we going to see glyph of Blood Strike replace GoDRW or GoDS?

Khaosknight · 09/14/09, 10:14 PM

Originally Posted by Synaxe

Not sure if it has been mentioned yet in this thread, but with the upcoming changes in 3.2.2 to Mages, and making arcane a more desirable raid spec, are we going to see glyph of Blood Strike replace GoDRW or GoDS?

Since it does not effect Heart Strike damage, and even with the glyph Blood Strike will still not out damage heart strike, I sincerely doubt it.

Algroth · 09/15/09, 1:56 PM

Originally Posted by Zuu

Our cleave is definitely strong if you're tanking the twin Valkyr together, but again I don't feel that it is superior to the aoe capabilities other melee classes benefit from in this situation. In fact, going over wowmeeters, there are very few (one to two) blood DKs on the top parses (most of which are towards the bottom) for every ToC encounter that benefits from having a cleave type ability. All of them are being topped by warriors and rogues, and while wowmeeters isn't a solid source to base information off of, it is still worth noting.

Also keep in mind that the dps is very RNG depending on how the special abilities line up with your current color. Having the extra 1-4k damage on average just from the cleave is still a fairly substantial, and the chance to proc 2 death coils on each swing is also a good bonus. My guild killed Heroic Twins last night using the "tank them in the middle" strat. Here is my parse for reference: WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay

rosedeath · 09/17/09, 7:32 PM

Hello everyone, if this question has been answered somewhere else please tell me.
when talking about being "raid buffed" is it referring to the buff other class can give such as kings and might or buff that proc in a fight suck as FC and abomination's might?
I ask because the when in a fight with abomination and FC proc i gain up too 1k AP if not more bring me close to 7k AP when im 5.7k AP when not in a fight