Blood Death Knight 5.2 (78 replies to this topic)

This thread is for comments about our Blood Death Knight guide for Patch 5.2.

You mention that you should summon a ghoul in advance to heal up more quickly through Death Pact, This is in fact not needed as both abilities are off the global cooldown so it'll take just as long and require the same input from you if you just macro them together.

Wake, on 29 August 2012 - 08:17 AM, said:

Thanks for this. I've updated the wording, and added a macro. The changes should show up shortly.

I think you might need to add some information regarding stats, as it's a bit vague. For example, instead of just saying dodge and parry are the next stats behind Mastery (more on that below) but also how to balance them with the new DR calculations, which has changed significantly since cata. We now need to make our parry% = 3.588*Dodge% - 10.97588 (or - 14.97588 if you are NOT using Swordshattering).

As far as hit/exp, you should mention that hit/exp capping is viable and that if you do choose to go for hit/exp caps then you need to prioritize stam (until comfortable EH levels)>mastery>hit(to 7.50%)=exp(to 7.50%)>parry=dodge

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Unholy Blight is only going to be optimal in situations where you aren't pulling faster than 1.5 minutes, which is rare. Even low dps 5 man pulls are roughly 40-60 seconds, meaning you won't have UB up for every other pack at best (unless you group is SUPER slow, e.g. afk). As far as adds in raids go, rarely are adds going to all come together in a 10 second window. Rolling blood allows for much more flexible disease spreading as far as when the adds are coming, and that will generally outweigh the 1/n death strikes gained from UB. (where n is the number of trash pulls in a 90 second time frame. will be around 2-4 depending on trash and party dps)

Purgatory:

Purgatory is risky, and not usually recommended for normal raid tanking. It is much safer to use cooldowns like lichborne to prevent the death in the first place. In a true hardmode progression scenario full hits can wreck a tank, and if RNG puts a full hit like that next to another source of random damage it could easily be a death. This is what purgatory would be good for in progression. In order to pull this off you'll need to make sure your healers know what spells they'd use so that you as a team will have a better chance at surviving the melee hit directly after a purgatory proc. Your healers should pick the heal they can do the most with in ~1 gcd. There are things you can do to help them, such as using Vampiric Blood as SOON as you get purgatory proc and doing whatever you can do throw out a Death Strike, be it dumping your Blood Tap stacks, or hitting Empower Runic Weapon, anything. If you've got any cooldowns that aren't already being saved for another mechanic in the fight, this would be the time to use them.

Just some stuff to think about

EDIT: rephrased viable to optimal in the UB section, since they are both viable for most situations.

Edited by Reniat, 30 August 2012 - 06:44 AM.

Ok, let me give another point of view. ¿what if we pass from death runes and profit from runic power? Let's see:

Tier 1: I chose Rolling blood. Blood boil procs very frequently. You just apply your diseases and use blood boil and don't worry about them anymore in the pull. Just use heart strike and death strike, and rune strike when you go out of runes. Use Blood boil any time it procs.

Tier 2:I also like purgatory. It gives healers and yourself a few more seconds to heal you. Anyway, I think it's better than the other two.

Tier 3: I use chilblains. As a disease, you can spread it with blood boil (if you chose rolling blood) so in a situation where some mob has been aggroed by other player or someone pulled another group, you just get closer and slow and aggro them with blood boil. Thus you have more time to raise your aggro and the other  players to escape.

Tier 4 (here's the big difference): Try conversion. If you're just using rune strike to regenerate runes and rarely use death coil, you'll have a lot of runic power most of the time. Death pact does heal you a lot but you have summon your minion and use the spell, and cooldown is quite big. With conversion, you just activate or deactivate it when you need it, and forget about it. It keeps healing you as long as you have runic power, which you can generate very quickly.

Tier 5: You want to save as much runic power as possible, so you need to generate runes instantly with rune strike to continue with heart strike/ death strike. try runic empowerment.

Tier 6: Optional. I would choose Desecrated ground, as I don't have Lichborne.

This talent configuration gives importance to both runes and runic power, so you don't depend on runes exclusively to heal. Try it and tell me.

Reniat, on 30 August 2012 - 03:58 AM, said:

Thank you, Reniat, very much! This post was excellent and very insightful. I'm sorry that I took so long to reply - I was sure that I had.

I've reworded the talent sections based on what you said, your points were very good.

Regarding the stats, I have, for now, recommended getting twice as much parry chance as dodge chance. This might not be the most precise mathematical result in every situation, but it is a simple and accurate answer that most readers will be able to understand follow.

Flesh, on 01 September 2012 - 12:01 PM, said:

To be quite honest, you should not be speccing as so. You are wasting runic power for a passive hot that you might not need and doesn't have the burst heal like death pact does. While doing this you are wasting runic power that can be used to proc your rune talent that you chose for the 5th tier therefore getting less overall death strikes and less healing. You shouldn't ever need chillblains in 5.0.4 with maybe the exception of H deathwing. Other than that the passive movement speed and increased movement speed on CD will beat it out because it provides much more utility.

There is just my 2 cents.

Tehstool, on 03 September 2012 - 10:05 AM, said:

But have you tried? I really don't need so much power for tier 5. just one or two strikes and runes proc, and I have a lot of runic power left after that. And you don't activate conversion all time. just when you see your life falling, so you will have runic power enough for rune strike most of the time.Death strikes now can accumulate power, so less death strikes means more powerfull ones, not really less overall healing. It's a matter of preferences. Anyway I grant you that you won't lack death strikes. About burst healing, try a level 5 death strike when you receive a big impact, or try vampiric blood + conversion + rune tap you'll see your life raising in a couple of seconds, and probably will deactivate conversion. It's really a matter of changing rotation preferences.

Vlad, on 03 September 2012 - 09:22 AM, said:

Since making the comments here I made a couple macros for my guide that will tell you how much parry % you have based on how much dodge% you currently have. Many users don't really wanna do math, but it doesn't take much effort to copy/paste and click a button. You're more than welcome to put it up here. (it even accounts for gnomes lame base strength )

With Swordshattering:

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Without Swordshattering:

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@Flesh

The reason that wouldn't be recommended is that healing over time is kinda wasted from tanks. Even if you ignore the massive amounts of overheal that would ensue with max use of conversion, we really don't want consistent healing in small quantities. All tanks (dks included) don't really worry about overall damage/healing taken unless mana becomes a problem, and rather focus on burst damage since that is much more likely to kill you. Conversion does little to nothing for burst damage intake, but death pact+purgatory can take a burst death and turn it into a not death(?).

Basically if you are only looking at overall healing or overall damage taken you are ignore the more threatening form of damage, which is burst damage. Sustained damage rarely kills tanks, but a full hit timed with a DoT can wreck a tank during progression, and conversion won't do anything to prevent that.

Reniat, on 05 September 2012 - 11:45 AM, said:

What you say is quite valid, but obviously we have different points of view about DK tanking. From my point of view, DPS tanking is for warriors, and group support tanking is for paladins. Dk is a matter of self healing. It is aggroing and survival (and healing is also aggroing). Also if you heal yourself, healers have more mana. I've been tanking like this very good results during the last week.
For burst healing, as I said, you have death strike with 5 charges, and it also enhances you with a good shield, which gives you time to activate conversion and replenish your life in case healers don't have mana. You don't need death pact with a 5 charged death strike, which is quite faster. Also, you can activate and deactivate conversion any time you want, so you're not really overhealing.

Flesh, on 08 September 2012 - 10:24 PM, said:

I know no one will be able to convince you that there is a superior spec to your but as I said and explained it in my earlier post, you will indeed get healing with the build i suggested. Conversion isn't as powerful as you think it is. You also have to factor in what I said and factor in the absorption shield granted from your death strike. You also didn't understand the above poster he said "All tanks (dks included) don't really worry about overall damage/healing taken unless mana becomes a problem, and rather focus on burst damage since that is much more likely to kill you."
What this mans is that you thought he was talking about dealing damage but he was talking about taking damage. Conversion falls short on a lot of the DS fights and a hot that costs you burst healing and diminishes your active mitigation just wouldn't help on those fights. Now if it was a passive hot with no repercussions whatsoever and had 100% uptime then yeah I'd end up taking that over death pact, but sadly conversion is just not cost effective enough, generally I experience that I won't have enough runic power to sustain it to equal the heal of a death pact. In approximately 16 seconds you will heal as much as a death pact heals. So taking that and adding the runic power cost, that comes out to 10 runic power + 10 runic power a second = 170. 1 rune strike is 30 RP. 170 / 30 = 5.66666666667. RE and RC both have a 45% chance to trigger which is approximately every 2.2 (repeating) rune strikes. 5.66666666667 / 2.222222222 = 2.55. So 2.55 procs of the RC or RE. I'll just say 2 for demonstration purposes. So with those 2 procs that'll yield you with a free death strike (provided you get an unholy or frost rune) with RE which would give you at least 36960 (with a 264k health pool) healing with approximately a 73920 physical (200% mastery) damage absorption shield so if you add the two  36960 + 73920 = 110880 so a total of 110880 gained (minimum, you will be taking damage throughout the fight making your death strike heal more then subsequently grant you a bigger shield) from just not taking conversion and you still have the death pact heal. With RC you have the increased rune regeneration for ~4 seconds (scales with haste and a blood dk's haste isn't that high) which would calculate into something of the same matter, however I feel that I started to ramble a bit there but I could go on and on. I'll leave you with this.

edit: Forgot to do blood tap, but it should equate to about the same. 5.66666666667 rune strikes * 2 (charges granted from blood tap)  = 11.3333333333. But since you cant get a decimal value of rune strikes I will round down because of how this mechanic works. 5 * 2 = 10.

Blood tap costs 5 charges so with blood tap you will get another free death strike. So, the same calculations apply.


TL;DR death pact > conversion

Edited by Tehstool, 11 September 2012 - 03:26 PM.

There's no one-handed weapon list, as well as the guide missing enchants for one-handed weapons.

DW tanking is still not recommended. We still base all our damage from our main hand, so using 2 1h is the same (apart from raw stats) as using a single 1 hand in place of a single 2 hand. To put this in perspective, as far as our damage calculations are concerned DW ilvl 416 souldrinkers would be roughly the same as using an ilvl 346 2h weapon. Take into account that DW souldrinkers would have more raw stats, but you still come up far shorter than even a 378 2h weapon.

Firebert, on 12 September 2012 - 12:17 AM, said:

They are not "missing". We have opted not to include any one-handed weapons in the gear list, or any one-handed weapon enchants (or runeforges), because dual-wielding as a Blood Death Knight is simply not viable.

The main issue is that you lose out a ton of threat and DPS, and you gain nothing at all in return. The loss comes from the fact that your damaging abilities only take into account the damage of your main-hand weapon, which is significantly lower for a one-handed weapon than for a two-handed one.

Unless Blizzard operates a change, allowing attacks to benefit from both the main and the off-hand damage, in the same way that it does for Frost Death Knights, then dual-wield tanking will never be viable.

Tehstool, on 10 September 2012 - 05:34 PM, said:

Your numbers are good but you mistook the approach. Who's talking about using conversion for burst healing? I spoke about using conversion to help replenish your health after using a 5 charged death strike, while the shield remains, although you can also use it in situations of sustained heavy damage.
With the rotation you use, it is impossible to get a 5 charged death strike, as you'll spam it all the time.
My rotation is diseases, spam heart strike and blood boil when procs. You seldom use a death strike (at the begining of the rotation or when no burst damage is expected) to get some death runes and rune strike when no runes available, so you can keep using heart strike. Thus, when receiving burst damage, you can use a 5 charged death strike which gives you burst healing and a great shield, and then you apply conversion to replenish life while the shield is up, but the burst healing is a fully charged death stirke.
How often can you use death pact? 2 minutes CD. if receive burst damage after using it you're dead
On the other hand, in less than a minute you'll have another 5 charges for your death strike, and if you're using this for burst healing, conversion is more useful than death pact, as you can use it a lot more often and in many different situations.

What you are not considering Flesh, is that burst damage doesn't wait for you to have 5 stacks. The most common burst damage is a full hit, which is when we are hit without a blood shield up (so it's not absorbed at all) and it is neither dodged or parried. This means we are getting hit for the full amount of damage by the boss. Blood DKs take more full hits than any other tank, and since we have the lowest armor and dmg reduction (only 10% from blood presence compared to 15% for paladins and 25% for warriors ect.) we not only take more full hits but they hit harder. This means any melee attack hits us without a blood shield up is most likely going to be a full hit (since we usually have <50% avoidance), and will hit very hard.

Now lets say there is a fight like ragnaros where you have a DoT on the tank as well as the tank being meleed. Let's say just for example. a full hit from a boss was 50% of his health (easily doable in hardmode progression) and a dot that ticks for 30% of his health. If a full hit lands at the same time as a dot it would be 80% of your health in a fraction of a second, and you've got only 20% health left to take the next boss melee swing. If you don't death strike right now, you will likely die. Regardless of how many stacks you have at that moment.

The point is you can't plan for burst damage. It just happens out of nowhere (unless it's like impale or something) and you've got to be able to react to it. If you hit a death strike with 5 stacks, that shield will be gone in a couple of melee hits. Then you're going to wait with no shield until you get 5 again? That's asking for trouble. Conversion will do nothing for this either, since you will be at full health already from the healers after a large death strike. Then you get bursted, and conversion is still not doing anything for you because it would take 17 seconds for it even heal just half of your HP. You healers would have already had to get you back up from the burst without the help of death strike years before you even got 2 ticks of healing off from conversion. This also means you're just making your healers work harder, since they have to react to the burst damage quicker since you are not reacting with death strike.

I get what you're trying to do, and it might work in some places. But increasing our self heals through the methods you provided just won't be much use in a real raid situation. Even if you don't die because of it, your healers will absolutely hate healing you since even though you're super mana efficient (and we already are) you will be bursting heavily.

Man, you keep saying it won't work in real raid situations and I'm using it in DS in real raid situation and it works. You just have to be careful when you're using death strike, that's all! As I said, you use it rarely. when starting the rotation and in situations when burst damage is not expected. I know it comes out of nowhere, but there are moments when you are sure it will not appear, and there's where you can use death strike. if you do so, you'll have it available when needed, and quite more often than death pact.

Edited by Flesh, 15 September 2012 - 11:09 AM.

You can't base something's viability on 35% nerfed content. That's like saying something was viable because it worked in LFR once. Take the nerf off, go back to pre-bis gear, and then see how your healers like healing you through bursts without the help of death strike. Surviving content does not make what you did optimal. You could (and many do) go into dragon soul with full dps gear on just for the lols since at 35% you can pretty much do anything you want and it won't kill you. If you really want to prove your system works, take the nerf off and log your raids and post the log so we can see what kind of burst damage you are taking and how often and more importantly, what your healers are doing after each burst.

I'll be honest I don't understand how this is supposed to make you easier to heal or have a better chance of surviving compared to the normal time-tested way of optimizing death strike. You say you are death striking "rarely" and not after burst damage so that you have it when you need it most, but after burst damage IS when you need it most. When ARE you using death strike? When you are taking minimal damage or already have a shield up?

Edited by Reniat, 15 September 2012 - 12:50 PM.