[Archived] Blood Death Knight 5.4

[Guest Aethereal]

I would argue that Gorefeinds Grip is the best T6 talent choice for tanking, especially in encounters where a lot of caster adds are spawned. The pulling of those adds to one location and interrupting all their casts at the same time is very convenient.

The other two talents don't do that much for tanking; Desecreted grounds has almost no uses because most of those abilities are not used on tanks and thus not relevant. Remorselss Winter which stuns the adds in 8 range (very short) has no uses at all either because there's lots of other classes that can do this in a way more reliable way.

[Guest Bizzaro]

Guide says you can use 3 of the +480 Stam gems from Jewelcrafting. Typo! =D

[Vlad 411]

Just a heads up, but in later endgame content (I'm currently 6/13 heroic) another alternative for maximum DPS output and better healing is actually going to a hit/exp to 7.5% > haste > mastery. You get smaller blood shields, but they have a much better uptime with improved rune generation. I am pulling 130k+ dps, and on heavy healing fights I am able to pull close to 100k hps. Currently my haste in raid is 35% and my blood shields are ~150%. To make sure you fully understand tho, this is a VERY gear dependant build and i would not suggest it until you have the health and skill to utilize the build. This is, in my opinion, the best current DK tank build for heroic content due to enrage timers and the total reduction in damage taken from better shield uptime giving you less "spikey" damge that so many people associate with DKs and vastly improving your damage output. On a single fight like Iron Qon on heroic DPS numbers with this build can easily reach 180k DPS.

Moderator's note - double post removed.

Well, while you may have a point that Haste is a good stat, the consensus among all top-end raiders, as well as all theorycrafters (that I know of) is that Mastery is pretty much the best stat, regardless of the level at which you are raiding. So, I really can't justify putting anything other than that in the guide right now :)

Thank you, though.

I would argue that Gorefeinds Grip is the best T6 talent choice for tanking, especially in encounters where a lot of caster adds are spawned. The pulling of those adds to one location and interrupting all their casts at the same time is very convenient.

The other two talents don't do that much for tanking; Desecreted grounds has almost no uses because most of those abilities are not used on tanks and thus not relevant. Remorselss Winter which stuns the adds in 8 range (very short) has no uses at all either because there's lots of other classes that can do this in a way more reliable way.

While I do not agree that Gorefiend's Grasp is the best talent, I do agree that the section in question could provide a bit more details about the usefulness of each of the talents, so I'm going to be expanding it. Thank you!

Guide says you can use 3 of the +480 Stam gems from Jewelcrafting. Typo! =D

That was a typo indeed! Thank you, it's being fixed right now.

[Storm 426]

Well, while you may have a point that Haste is a good stat, the consensus among all top-end raiders, as well as all theorycrafters (that I know of) is that Mastery is pretty much the best stat, regardless of the level at which you are raiding. So, I really can't justify putting anything other than that in the guide right now

Thank you, though.

I think it all depends on what you're trying to do. There's no doubt that mastery is best at minimizing damage taken per second, and if you can use most of your death strikes immediately after taking a hit then your damage won't be spiky either.

But if we only look at it from the perspective of damage taken then why would anyone bother with hit/exp? The only thing hit/exp contributes to survivability is more scent of blood procs. From a purely survivability standpoint the extra rune regen you could gain from 5-10% haste is at worst equal to hit/exp and at best it is probably slightly better. Since 10% more haste = 10% more auto attacks = 10% more scent of bloods which basically makes up for most of what you would lose by not being hit/exp capped.

I wouldn't go as far as to recommend reforging out of mastery to get more haste, but my priority so far at 5/13H has been Mastery > Haste > Hit/Exp > Parry > Dodge

It's also worth noting that I raid 10 man where tanks take considerably less damage compared to 25m. I can see where a 25m tank would have less room to trade survivability for extra dps. The best DK tank on Stormrage gems pure stam in everything, and reforges to mastery, and he still has top 10 ranks on over 20 fights. I'd argue he's the best tank dps in the world, and he somehow does it by stam stacking.

Edited May 14, 2013 by Storm

[Guest Jesucide]

Your "without swordshattering" macro is wrong. compared it to 7 other sources. yours is the only one that is different.

[Vlad 411]

Your "without swordshattering" macro is wrong. compared it to 7 other sources. yours is the only one that is different.

It would be helpful if you explained in what way this macro is wrong, or if posted one of your "7 other sources" for comparison. As it stands, this macro seems to be working fine for us.

[miacenth 0]

Used to you had to have max hit and expertise to be able to get agro. Is that not the case anymore? Mr Robot want me to reforge into mastery which give me little hit and exp. If anyone can help explain it to me my email is [email protected]

[Guest Dastorian]

what is the best race for a DK on the alliance side please some one help me I am not finding anything here

[Guest Legnaros]

It is important to note with the Hand of Protection macro you don't need to sacrifice a keybind for one cancelaura, simply add it to a frequently used ability like Rune Strike, so that anytime you would be under the effect of the ability it will immediately wipe it. Thinking about times you truly need HoP there's only Horridon so far, where you can negate tank swaps with hand of Protection. There really isn't a time as a dps DK or a Blood DK where you truly need the full effect of HoP and would need the full duration, so removing it immediately is the only option. The macro would look something like this

#showtooltip

/cancelaura Hand of Protection<----this line string goes first before your abilities, it doesn't require a global to remove but it's always nice to prioritize it.

/cast Ability, where ability if your personal preference to what you want to tie the cancelaura to.

Another macro I've found use as an offtank during heavy damage, is glyphing Death Coil, and using this for tank saves.

#showtooltip

/cast [@targettarget] Death Coil

This way if you're offtanking Death Coil will always go to the tank, you can always use a focus condition instead, I just prefer target of target.

Some more that I use that are just cleanliness macros so I'm not using too many keybinds

Heart Strike/Blood Boil modifier

#showtooltip

/cast [nomod] Heart Strike; [mod:shift] Blood Boil

Same thing for Death Strike/Death and Decay

/cast [nomod] Death Strike; [mod:shift] Death and Decay

Now be forewarned, when using both at once you won't notice your Crimson Scourge Procs, I notice them because of TellMeWhen triggers, so if you don't want to take the time to setup TellMeWhen or MSBT to trigger notifications, then just use one or none. Other than that, Happy Hunt...err dk'ing?

Legnaros-US Stormreaver

[Guest Legnaros]

And asking about best races alliance or horde, just go with what their racials have, and what current weapons are in endgame raiding.

So for instance our BiS weaps are axes in 1h and 2h slot categories iirc, I could be wrong on DW, but 2h is def an axe or sword. Either way.

Worgens get at base a 1% to crit, which in current gear, is a more valuable stat than it's been in Cataclysm. In terms of stat priority at least for 2h, it's higher than mastery, so I would go with a worgen for that alone, what also puts a worgen ahead of all others is Darkflight. They get a free, non resource sprint. To people who don't know much about dps, they may think it's purely pvp, however sprint is huge when you factor in how much damage you lose by running to a target(to me it's what makes goblins so ideal with rocket jump). There's a lot of math but I'll leave it at

You lose dmg by not attacking, Worgens minimize the downtime of damage on targets by giving us an extra spring(assuming you're already grabbing Death's Advance. Coupled with their 1% to crit, it's an easy choice above the other ones, which are negligible dps increases

Draenei=1% hit, sounds awesome? Except a lot of the DK gear has boatloads of hit and if you're me you're forging every item you have out of it.

Human-Weapon specializations, more expertise, while ideal still refers to previous too much hit argument, not to mention that's the ONLY direct dps gain.

Night Elf-Worthless

Other classes-worthless.

And as for Horde, it all comes down to the same factors, there's a very tight race between Orc, Goblin, and Troll. Troll you say?? BLASPHEMY, well, first you get Berserking, in addition Throne of Thunder has beast bosses, so that's 5% more damage you're doing than the entire raid on those fights, not to mention world bosses are mostly beasts, so who DOESNT wanna be that guy beasting...beast bosses? It's all very close, Orcs get an obvious edge as Unholy due to Command, and they're always a fan favorite even without that benefit(if you aren't unholy Command doesn't boost your pets because your Ghoul is a Guardian,not a pet), because axes are our endgame, and Blood Fury is awesome. However, I play Goblin because of the multiple other benefits, seeing as you can't sim out a dps increase from Rocket Jump despite it closing gaps faster than a sprint, and it's attack speed instead of a haste increase.

TL;DR Alliance=Worgen

Horde=Goblin, orc, troll, if tanking fulltime Tauren.

[Guest Zerothehêro]

And asking about best races alliance or horde, just go with what their racials have, and what current weapons are in endgame raiding.

So for instance our BiS weaps are axes in 1h and 2h slot categories iirc, I could be wrong on DW, but 2h is def an axe or sword. Either way.

Worgens get at base a 1% to crit, which in current gear, is a more valuable stat than it's been in Cataclysm. In terms of stat priority at least for 2h, it's higher than mastery, so I would go with a worgen for that alone, what also puts a worgen ahead of all others is Darkflight. They get a free, non resource sprint. To people who don't know much about dps, they may think it's purely pvp, however sprint is huge when you factor in how much damage you lose by running to a target(to me it's what makes goblins so ideal with rocket jump). There's a lot of math but I'll leave it at

You lose dmg by not attacking, Worgens minimize the downtime of damage on targets by giving us an extra spring(assuming you're already grabbing Death's Advance. Coupled with their 1% to crit, it's an easy choice above the other ones, which are negligible dps increases

Draenei=1% hit, sounds awesome? Except a lot of the DK gear has boatloads of hit and if you're me you're forging every item you have out of it.

Human-Weapon specializations, more expertise, while ideal still refers to previous too much hit argument, not to mention that's the ONLY direct dps gain.

Night Elf-Worthless

Other classes-worthless.

And as for Horde, it all comes down to the same factors, there's a very tight race between Orc, Goblin, and Troll. Troll you say?? BLASPHEMY, well, first you get Berserking, in addition Throne of Thunder has beast bosses, so that's 5% more damage you're doing than the entire raid on those fights, not to mention world bosses are mostly beasts, so who DOESNT wanna be that guy beasting...beast bosses? It's all very close, Orcs get an obvious edge as Unholy due to Command, and they're always a fan favorite even without that benefit(if you aren't unholy Command doesn't boost your pets because your Ghoul is a Guardian,not a pet), because axes are our endgame, and Blood Fury is awesome. However, I play Goblin because of the multiple other benefits, seeing as you can't sim out a dps increase from Rocket Jump despite it closing gaps faster than a sprint, and it's attack speed instead of a haste increase.

TL;DR Alliance=Worgen

Horde=Goblin, orc, troll, if tanking fulltime Tauren.

This is wrong. Night Elf gives Quickness which increases your chance to Dodge melee & ranged attacks by 2%

TL;DR Alliance = Night elf

[Storm 426]

Definitely Night Elf for tanking. that 2% dodge will also give you 1% crit in 5.4

[Guest pimpjuice]

hi ive been playing a blood dk since they came out and i was wondering why most sites like this when it comes to surviveability never mention the fact that deathstrikes sheild is stacking up to the top health of the dk it would seem more prudent to slow down the usage of deathstrike the sheild is on for 10 seconds i use a 7 second rotation with deathstrike maximising the shield and effectively creating a sheild that never drops and after ( depending on your mastery and health) 5-6 hits i have a sheild on my char of somewhere aroud 800 k that is always renewing.

[Durner 0]

The minor glyph part says that "There are no interesting or relevant Minor Glyphs." I have to disagree.

 

I went through the minor glyphs when this one caught my eye "Glyph of the Long Winter - the effects of your horn of winter now lasts 1 hour." Well, it isn't a major thing, but I think it's worthy of adding there? At least there's a chance it'll improve your performance in a situation where you've forgot to cast the horn of winter for 5 minutes. And after all, there are no disadvantages in having this as a minor glyph.

 

There's also another minor glyph which I think is worthy of mentioning "Glyph of Resilient Grip - When your Death grip ability fails because its target is immune, its cooldown is reset." Again, this is not a game changer but surely it's better to have such glyph instead of not having it at all? It's after all free and will, again, permanently make your Death Grip this much better without any disadvantages. 

 

These two minor glyphs should in my humble opinion be added to the minor glyph list.

 

Edit: And it remained unclear to me that what are the hit and exp caps for blood DK if you're trying to cap them instead of dodge and parry?

Edited September 16, 2013 by Durner

[Shamphoo 1]

can i get some more advice on the mastery > hit/exp >  haste build pls?

Like can you really ignore parry/dodge fully, or you need to take tanking gear but reforge to haste after mastery and hit/exp cap?

or do you need a certain amount of haste to make it worthfull? stuff like that :)

[Shamphoo 1]

can i get some more advice on the mastery > hit/exp >  haste build pls?

Like can you really ignore parry/dodge fully, or you need to take tanking gear but reforge to haste after mastery and hit/exp cap?

or do you need a certain amount of haste to make it worthfull? stuff like that

Someone still alive? ^^

[SlippyCheeze 2]

G'day.  The current "Single Target Rotation" portion of the Blood DK guide doesn't mention Soul Reaper at all.

 

It does show up down in the "Optional Read: Mastering..." section, where it is briefly mentioned as an ability that "should be used when the target is below 35% health."

 

I was confused by this, since it seemed to do a large amount of damage in my testing, and had the same resource consumption as Heart Strike did.  (Usually, getting one off in the execute phase on a 2.5 to 3 million HP critter put it in my top 5 damage sources for the fight.)

 

I started a discussion about this, and the consensus seems to be that it should substitute in for Heart Strike in the single target rotation when it is available.

 

I think it would be good to update the guide to reflect that.  (I am also not sure when it is better in the multi-target rotation, but my quick math suggests that it is always going to do more damage overall than Heart Strike would even if it hit three characters at my 535 LFR-and-crafted ilvl.)

[Guest Miers]

Where is Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon? can be helpful for snap threat if your tank partner has a tendency to pull back aggro after a taunt...

[Storm 426]

Glyph of DRW can be helpful if you're having serious threat issues but for 99% of Dks just using non glyphed DRW provides a rather large threat boost

[Guest Guest]

I've Found that death siphon is a very useful threat generator

[Theharbinger 1]

I would like to point out that the damage oriented priority should reflect the change riposte brings in. The damage increase provided by the increased crit chance is much higher than what haste provides and avoidance stats are not as much of a loss of mitigation as haste is. Another point to make is that with dodge and parry you are also increasing your runic power generation allowing for more rune regeneration with whatever tier 5 talent you chose. IMO damage priority should be parry2.5x>dodge>7.5%hit&expertise>mastery

[Karsteck 5]

 

I think it would be good to update the guide to reflect that.  (I am also not sure when it is better in the multi-target rotation, but my quick math suggests that it is always going to do more damage overall than Heart Strike would even if it hit three characters at my 535 LFR-and-crafted ilvl.)

 

 Single target section seems to be updated now.  SR has a shorter CD than your rune recharge time, so you can't use it on CD indefinitely without sometimes giving up death strikes for it.  (i.e. by spending a death rune on it, or having RE proc a blood rune because you spent your last blood rune, or even just giving up death strikes by speccing runic corruption.)

 

 For multi-target, yeah I think SR hits hard enough to beat a 3-target heart strike.  I think with enough targets, blood boil will do more damage than SR.  I haven't done the math, and the SR haste buff if the target dies before the 5-sec SR debuff expires is really good.  Rune regen and swing speed (even more scent of blood).  If you're the tank with agro on most of the adds, you're already flooded with runic power and 5-stack scent of blood, to the point where you can only gain more death strikes by having your runes regen faster.  You could already fill all your GCDs with death strike and rune strike (i.e. leaving 2 unspent blood runes).  So sniping a SR haste buff to convert a blood rune into future death strikes is most valuable when you're only tanking a single target, so you're not getting a lot of dodges/parries.

[Karsteck 5]

Some background on my DK experience: I've tanked stuff on my DK for most of Cata, and all of MoP.  By the end of Cata, I regularly tanked DS10H for alt runs, and sometimes DS25H for our GDKP run.  I had a mostly full set of heroic gear by the end of Cata, and used it to solo Patchwerk 25 at lvl85, with the 5.0 mechanics / talents (e.g. conversion for sustained self heals while soloing).  But no MoP enchants/gear, since this was before we could level.  (I run death pact for everything now, though).  Soloing patch25 at 85 in H DS gear is still probably one of the hardest things I've done on my DK, as far as managing DS and chaining survival CDs.  So much hateful strike dmg, since it was tuned for 3 tanks.  I've also done tank proving grounds up to wave 25 as blood.  I need to go back and finish up to wave 30 for the achieve, but I need to find some time when I feel like it and I'm not tired or anything.  Nothing like wasting a 30 minute attempt due to getting sloppy.

 

 I tanked my MoP alt run on my DK from early T14 up until I had to start tanking my main raid on my best-geared tank, for heroic ToT progression (eventually got 6/13H).  I solo-tanked most of our H durumu kills.  Now our old tanks are back, so in theory I'm DPS, but I still end up having to tank the main raid pretty often for our H SoO progression (currently 5/14H).  Having switched mains in ToT when we dropped from 25man to 10man, I stuck with the DK, since I'm often the only strength DPS.  So it works out well for loot balance.

 

 I've read the blood DK guide on elitistjerks, and try to manage my runes so I'm ready to death strike if I spike low, and not spend all my runes on min-heal death strikes.  I don't have as much experience as I'd like on legit hard content, where bosses smash through your blood shields.  Most of the bosses I tank are more like soloing, where I'm ready to death strike again before my blood shield breaks.

 

I would like to point out that the damage oriented priority should reflect the change riposte brings in. The damage increase provided by the increased crit chance is much higher than what haste provides and avoidance stats are not as much of a loss of mitigation as haste is. Another point to make is that with dodge and parry you are also increasing your runic power generation allowing for more rune regeneration with whatever tier 5 talent you chose. IMO damage priority should be parry2.5x>dodge>7.5%hit&expertise>mastery

 

 Yeah, haste these days is probably the least useful stat for blood.  It has some survival benefit, unlike crit, but it's very marginal.  Even single-target, blood is GCD locked unless you get a long streak of no scent of blood procs.  (I run blood tap, so I don't have feast/famine RNG problems with runic empowerment or runic corruption.)  I also run a full mastery setup, although I've been shifting to gemming avoidance in the last couple pieces of gear I picked up.

 

 (unbuffed stats: hit/exp cap, 11.8% (6230) dodge, 33.3% (5028) parry, 209% (15287) mastery.)  The ideal-parry-for-my-dodge macro says ideal parry is 21.04%, so I still have significantly more parry than the amount that would give me the max possible dodge+parry.  However, parry-haste might have gone away for bosses ages ago, but my understanding is that when a player parries, that still speeds up their next swing.  So by parrying a lot, you gain more white hits (more dmg, more scent of blood).  No idea how important this effect is, so I still mostly balance dodge&parry.  (i.e. I go for dodge everywhere possible, because str already gives so much more parry than I can balance.)

 

 Since I'm main spec DPS now (although I've been tanking again for most of the last month as one or the other of the main tanks are out for various reasons), some of my gear is DPS gear, but still an upgrade just from str/stam.  I play DW frost, so at least it's reforged/gemmed for mastery.  So I have 1.6% (678) haste, 5.68% (3407) crit).  For trinkets, I wear Thok's tail tip (amp trinket gives about the same amount of mastery as a 530ilvl mastery trinket, and great DPS, esp. since riposte means I crit a lot, so the +8% crit dmg is great), and since I don't have any SoO tank trinkets, Skeer's (str with stacking crit proc).  Most of my gems are still mastery, but I did reforge out of some mastery into dodge/parry.  Thok's is a semi-legit tank trinket, Skeer's only survival benefit is the parry from str.  I would swap it out on a fight where survival was an issue, and there wasn't enough magic damage that I was already absorbing almost all the physical damage with bigger-than-minimum blood shields.  (e.g. 10H iron juggernaut hits the tanks quite hard, but enough of it is magic damage that 250% mastery raid buffed is easily "enough".  More mastery wouldn't reduce my dmg taken, because I keep a blood shield up pretty much permanently.  10H Sha of Pride is like this even without any consistent magic dmg on the tanks, he's just a really weak-hitting boss.  I wear the dps legendary cloak for 10H Norushen and Sha.  Garrosh 10N hits hard, though, def. want the tank legendary for the spikes there.  Esp. spikes while healers have to move from descrated weapon, or heal the raid.

 

Filling all your GCDs while tanking just one boss, as I said, depends a bit on scent of blood and free blood-boil/dnd procs, and sometimes you even have to fill a GCD with horn of winter.  With a heavy avoidance setup, you'd have an even easier time filling all your GCDs.  Usually only ever need horn to fill a GCD when the other tank has the boss and I'm not tanking anything.  But  a lot of the time you can barely spend all the RP you get without capping runes, blood charges, or RP (i.e. GCD locked).  I would absolutely gear for avoidance, not haste, after hit/exp and max mastery.  As I was saying earlier, many bosses have enough magic damage that you can have "enough" mastery, and not take any significant amount of physical damage.  This is the main reason I've been starting to go for a bit of avoidance, as a way to get more tank-dps, and also more scent of blood stacks for each death strike.  There are a lot of fights with adds floating around to give you extra scent of blood stacks while you tank them.

 

 The other DK tank in my guild has been running a full-avoidance build for a while now.  He also runs runic empowerment, and isn't very careful about refreshing his blood shields before they fall off, so it's hard to tell whether he's really gaining survivability with his build compared to what I do.  I think I'm good at taking literally zero physical damage on bosses that don't hit me hard enough to break my blood shields, because I definitely have more experience with that than with bosses that break through a decent-size blood shield in one hit.  Some of that experience comes from soloing old content.  Your bone shield won't lose charges from anything except magic damage, if you absorb all incoming physical damage.  (yes, this does happen on some 10H bosses in SoO.)  That near-100% bone shield uptime makes it significantly easier to keep blood shields rolling, of course.

 

He says that instead of having more mastery, he's more likely to have a 5-stack of scent of blood for most death strikes, so they're actually healing about as much.  More of it as actual heal, less of it as a shield.  This sounds good in theory, and healers don't complain.  Keep in mind that an avoided attack doesn't put a dent in your blood shield, so avoidance actually makes your active mitigation work better.  (note the comments in the EJ blood DK guide, that if you death strike when you don't need to, after an avoidance streak, and get a min-size blood shield, then you've just screwed yourself for when you do get hit, and don't have runes to do a big-heal death strike after you do get hit.  Avoidance can't hurt you unless you don't pay attention to your HP and blood-shield-tracker DS heal predictor.)  Lower mastery probably hurts most when using some back-to-back death strikes when using empower runeweapon as a defensive CD, or 4T16 runes gained from DRW.

 

 Also note that the phase1 adds on H immerseus melee for shadow damage.  We put our bear on them, because you can dodge the swings, but DK mastery is totally worthless.  If our bear isn't there, I take the boss while our avoidance-DK takes the adds, even though he has the fallen protectors trinket that helps a ton taking a 2nd corrosive blast.  I just purgatory through it if AMS + Icebound isn't enough.  (BTW, I run purgatory for H immerseus as frost, too.  Only fight where I really feel like purgatory is a better choice than lichborne, except when you're worried you'll miss a CD or miss reacting to getting low while raid leading or otherwise distracted.)

 

 15k mastery rating feels like a good place for me; I could probably run less, but I still think when the going gets tough, I'd rather have a solid amount of mastery than high avoidance.  I think putting some of your stat budget into avoidance makes sense.  I haven't done the math, though; possibly avoidance has increasing returns, and if you're going to go some avoidance, it would be even better to go all-out avoidance.  This would probably depend a lot on exactly how hard the boss hits.  If you can get enough mastery to keep a blood shield up full-time (i.e. with min-heal death strikes, or on a boss that does some magic damage), you're going to be really easy to heal anyway.

 

 

 So, this massive post I just typed could probably use a final check for editing mistakes, but it's getting late.  Hopefully I didn't repeat myself or leave any big discontinuities.

 

 As far as gearing options, I'd suggest that none of the options should mention haste or crit, except as DPS stats.  Only against a boss that doesn't melee at all would I want a haste set.  (e.g. lei shi, the water guy in T14 that only casts spray).  The options I'd give players are:

 

* Accuracy-capped mastery: hit/exp cap > mastery > dodge/parry 

 

* (probably leave this out) Full mastery: mastery > hit/exp caps > dodge/parry.

(Only relevant at low gear levels.  Above maybe ilvl500 or so, depending on how much gear without mastery or an accuracy stat (i.e. dodge/parry gear, or crit/haste gear shoehorned into a tank set), you can gem full mastery, and reforge into mastery on every piece that doesn't already have it, and still get to hit/exp caps by reforging out of dodge/parry)

 

 (Possibly better survival than accuracy-capped, but missed death strikes don't consume or benefit from scent of blood stacks.  Avoided attacks other than death strike will help fill the empty GCDs you might have with lower gear levels having much less dodge/parry scent of blood generation, because you get to spend a 2nd GCD trying to do the same attack over again.  If you find you're GCD locked much of the time, you should cap hit/exp.)

 

* Balanced mastery & avoidance: hit/exp cap > mastery/dodge/parry (get some of each).

 Not sure how to recommend what kind of balance, maybe mastery rating >= 1.5x (dodge rating + parry rating).  That's about what I'm currently running, but a lot of my parry is from str.  Any choice of ratio here is probably fine.  Dip a toe in with mastery >= 2x (dodge+parry rating).  Possibly it would be better to state the rule in terms of mastery % >= some function of avoidance %, rather than rating, to account for str->parry conversion, but avoidance has DR while mastery doesn't.

 

* Full avoidance (max DPS without serious survival penalty): hit/exp > dodge/parry > mastery

 

* tank-DPS: hit/exp (possibly 15% for max DPS, but prob. 7.5% is good) > crit > dodge/parry > haste > mastery.  dodge/parry are worth zero if you aren't tanking something at least often enough to get riposte up.  And in that case, haste > crit up to the point where you're GCD locked.

 

 Also, I didn't mention this earlier, but glyph of outbreak is almost a no-brainer with the amounts of RP generation dodge/parry give you these days.  I ran it most of the time in T15, because if I ever did need to outbreak more than 1/min, I'd rather just spend 40RP.  With it only costing 30RP now, and scent of blood from dodge/parry, the only reason not to run it would be the glyph slot.  On the pull, prepot  -> deathstrike.  If scent of blood didn't proc and give you another 10, then heart strike.  Then  outbreak.  So it's a bit clunky on a pull with no RP, but it's really great for throwing diseases on something too far away to roiling blood pestilence to.  E.g. thok.  Or for putting up diseases on multiple adds in quick succession on immerseus split phase.  Or spoils, you don't have to get annoyed when all your mobs die before you open another crate, taking your diseases with them.  If you ever wanted to go all out for a single-target fight, and grab plague leach instead of roiling blood, you could use it on CD and outbreak to get diseases back up.  Although it's more of a survival increase than a DPS increase now, as using it costs a GCD that does no damage, and another GCD to get diseases up.  Anyway, glyphed outbreak FTW.  Spending 2 GCDs and 2 runes to get diseases up is horrible.  If you only need to outbreak once on a fight, oh well, the glyph didn't hurt you very much at all.  Although usually I outbreak once right after my first DS on the pull, then spend some runes, then DRW and outbreak again while it's up.  If I get DRW lag and my DRW-diseases don't appear on the target (grr, stupid DRW), then I usually outbreak a 2nd time (so that's 3 in the first 10 secs of the fight).  Usually I just try to remember not to outbreak until a couple GCDs after DRW, but I do still sometimes jump the gun.  Esp. if my stacking-crit trinket is near max stacks just when DRW comes off cooldown.  (66% crit on my diseases is pretty good.  I avoid using free BB procs if I have super-buffed diseases with a lot of duration left).

[Guest Hatez]

I have a question, in the blood tap guide, it says leave an Unholy/Frost rune up at all times. I do that just fine but I have a question regarding Blood Tap. When I do a double Blood Tap sometimes it changes the Blood Rune into a Death Rune, I don't like that so what I have done to fix that is always have a Blood, Unholy, and Frost rune active, and just shuffle by using my Blood Rune before the next one resets and use my UH/FR runes before they reset. Once I hit 10 Blood Tap charges I will Death Strike and then use both, then use them again when my UH/FR are about to come off cooldown. The question I have, is it a problem to leave one blood rune active at all times? I also like being able to save it for Rune Tap should I ever need it. It helps me regenerate my runes really well and not have to worry about accidentally turning a Blood Rune into a Death Rune and mess with my rotation. What do you all think?

[Guest Snowcrashdk]

Any reason why Parry & Dodge don't show up in two of the three 10 man stat weight guides? Did I miss a memo?