Let me know what you think about the current state of Blood Death Knights and what you would like to see in The War Within in the comments below! I genuinely like to see what people's thoughts are, especially for something like this, since it is so subjective. As always, feel free to stop by the discord if you'd like to chat about theorycrafting-related topics or if you want a log review. (discord.gg/qnFAGcgECn) One more recent view I've heard is a concern that the Death Strike Self-Healing loop may be too powerful in its current state. The only way to counter-balance such strong mitigation potential (through healing) is by making the specialization more vulnerable to burst windows, but very often Blood feels either trivially easy to survive (if burst damage is not threatening) or the burst damage feels oppressive to the extent where it is not particularly satisfying (or fair feeling) to have to deal with. The argument is that the gameplay loop may feel more consistent if Blood's overall mitigation was reduced for stronger EHP (Effective Health); making them less self-sufficient, but also less likely to get "one-shot". I think it is a fair argument, though I'm not sure what the best response is for Blood's oppressively strong mitigation scaling, myself. EDIT: "Suppression" in the general talent tree should also have been indicated as a "High Pathing Cost" node location, since it is gated by "Sacrificial Pact", a dead talent, and "March of Darkness", a very situational talent (and one that is mostly used in raid).
The BDK GOAT! Great video, i always learn things in your videos and they help so much. Thank you for making recommendations on the spec cause i know the devs watch your videos and like to think they take your recommendations into consideration, i also 100% agree with them. My goal is to time all 25s and im half way there thanks to your videos. I refuse to jump ship to VDH (their utility is crazy)
Yeah, I have a new position at work that has been taking a bit more of my time than usual, but the work schedule is starting to become more normalized again.
As always - banger stuff. Especially with the recommendations to the devs. LOTs of agreement there. I've always wanted the Jailor's Gavel Weapon On-Use effect as a DK talent. Could make it a group effect. DK's niche would then be 'we have grips + mini-lust'. Personal opinion, but ive really been enjoying -> GG + TG > 20% chance of improved DS + 2/2 RT (for m+). Especially when combo'd with legendary. As an alternative to remove Death's Caress cd, it could keep the 6s cd - just give it a charge system.
Yeah, there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and experiment with new talents like the one you brought up; there are plenty of dead nodes that could substitute out for them. It is very much a creative problem for what should be done with those talent nodes, but some sort of group/raid buff potential, somewhere, would be a breath of fresh air. Gorefiend's is just a very satisfying ability to have and enjoyable to use, so I do think it is unfortunate that it is competing with things like Iron Heart and Heartbreaker; it makes it hard to justify when min/maxing (at least in Mythic+). I'd be all for it being baselined or put in a more accessible location (it could even go in the general class tree if they want). Charges on Death's Caress would also mitigate the annoyance with running out of ranged-threat-generating globals on pull setup, though I just don't see much purpose for the cooldown, at all. I feel like they were worried Death's Caress could fully replace Marrowrend, at first, and the cooldown was meant as a failsafe for that, but, due to the lack of downtime, it has never been worth using it like that, so I don't think there is much harm in removing the cooldown.
This was my first full season tanking M+, and I enjoyed Blood DK when pushing keys with friends. All 3 of us became pretty busy outside of the game, and I was forced to pug a lot more... and I hated it as Blood DK for one reason - lack of support ability to help your team if someone needs it (compared with Prot pally, which I'm planning to play next season). Otherwise, when I was mainly playing with friends it was a lot of fun. Thanks again for your written guide, it was very helpful for me!
Yeah, the lack of group support is especially noticeable in this current dungeon pool, unfortunately (as well as VDH existing in its current state). Some dungeon tuning may have gone a long way towards improving that, but we didn't see much of that this season. In any case, I'm glad I could help!
I am 100 % with you. We absolutely need a bit more Utility and something like a Raid/Group Buff. Maybe making Gorefien's interact with Death's Echo and making Asphyxiate baseline would be enough ultiltywise. Concerning Raid/Group Buff: there are a lot of good ideas from different guys and I can not understand why the devs don't do anything about this problem. Thanks for the video! Great content!
Yeah, there's a lot of things that could potentially be done with utility. I'm not sure if it is healthy for everyone to have AoE CC at the levels that VDH currently has, but there is certainly room for us (and the others) to get a little more than what we currently have (not to mention a Raid/Group buff). As unfortunate as it is, the official stance is that grips are treated as a substitute for a raid buff, though many would argue that it is very sub-par compared to a traditional raid buff (especially in Mythic+).
The minimum that needs to happen is make gore fiend baseline for blood and maybe a choicenode for unholy/frost with AMZ. After that improve the talent that follows gorefiends now and put somewhere on the side of the tree. Everything that is in the main paths should be some form of throughput at is at best related to core abilities (look at prot warrior tree, that one goes in a good direction). And for the love of god, give DK (all specs) more real choice nodes.
Amazing video as always with succinct presentation and narration! I agreed with all your points. Your thoughts in the end are the exact ones I've had myself. My biggest gripe with Blood currently, and Death Knight as a whole, is the lack of utility outside of stops. Blinding Sleet is a nice addition, but it doesn't add that much considering that we aren't picking Gorefiend's Grasp anymore, and there's an over abundance of stops in DF anyhow. I'd have appreciated Blinding Sleet much more if it was added last expansion, but in DF it doesn't stand out considering that every class has access to more CC. In practice, I don't feel like Blood experienced a net gain in utility this expansion. Playing Blood feels worse knowing that Vengeance and Prot Paladin exists, who contribute an insane amount of utility to the group in various forms. Like you said, Vengeance ought to be nerfed a bit, but I also believe Blood should be brought closer to the standards that these two tanks have set in DF. There are things that already exists that would be a welcome addition. Functionality like Spellwarden - the War Mode talent that turns AMS into an external. Vampiric Aura is making a comeback in TWW, which is a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure how strong it will be. I'd also like to see the reliance on D&D to be vastly diminished, if not entirely removed, primarily because it restricts our movement. I'm really tired of it, especially when I'm on Unholy, which is just as dependant on it as Blood is. I love your idea of making the passive effects stick to the Death Knight! Perhaps even add an option to replace D&D altogether with an ability like Swarming Mist (Venthyr covenant ability) that comes with said effects. I'm down for anything that would free us from our circle of containment, and I think there are lots of creative ways to go about it. Regarding the abundance of resources we have available: I kind of miss the rotational downtime we had previously. That said, a reduction in downtime seems to be a consistent theme in this expansion. I'm also flooded with resources on Unholy and Windwalker, which traditionally have had noticeable downtime baked into them.
On your last point, San'layn looks like they may take us even further into extra resource regeneration territory. So, I'm curious to see if they pull back in the baseline trees at all to compensate or if we are just going to have a repeat of how the rotation felt with the S1 DF tier set bonus (with the bonus rune regeneration).
I feel the part with VDH's having so much more ways to carry in keys through their CC. I may not play BDK anymore, but I think as prot warrior I have the same issues in that department as BDK, if not even more so, since we dont have anything similar to a Death Grip or Abom Limb. I personally think that the amount of utility that all the tanks bring to the table should be balanced further in TWW with giving the tanks with less utility (i.w. BDK, Warrior) something that the others (ppal, vdh) maybe not have. #GiveProtWarriorBloodlust :D
Do you think Blood returning to intentional downtime, likely with optional talents, is feasible or desirable? The low APM and measured gameplay is one of the things that drew me to the spec at the start.
I think there is an honest discussion to be had on if the current state of BDK resource economy is too much. It is possible that reducing the death strike mitigation loop in favor of having more passive DR would be healthier for the spec. That would indirectly mean more rotational downtime and the more methodical gameplay. But, if the San'layn preview is any indication, things may continue to speed up.
Personally one thing I'm not a huge fan of is the current gameplay around dancing rune weapon. With the amount of CDR we currently have access to, it feels like pretty weird design to be virtually invincible half of the time, with significantly reduced damage intake and significantly increased resource gen. Because it's such a full package, there's rarely any reason you would want to hold DRW outside of something like smolderon, even when you're not actively tanking the boss, which I feel cheapens the ability to use it as a defensive. This is kind of exacerbated to me by how synergistic the extra RP is with red thirst, where you can pretty comfortably chain vamp blood into a rune weapon into another vamp blood. As a long time blood player, I'm a lot more excited by the idea of keeping myself alive through intelligent use of death strike and careful use of cooldowns, rather than having something powerful up nearly all of the time. One other thing I don't really like is how much rotational pressure there is to keep our RP engine going, and how expensive death grip, chains of ice, and ranged death and decays have become. I feel like when I pushed keys in BFA I had a lot more freedom to be able to help control mobs or to kite as a defensive option, whereas I feel like the correct decision is currently nearly always to be in melee range of something pressing damage buttons because DRW is so powerful, and once you have it up you can easily tank the pack again, and then vamp blood will probably be back up. I really enjoy gameplay where I have some space to make decisions instead of having such a dominant strategy around generating/spending resources. As far as raid tanking, one thing I actually do like is the extent to which blood has become "the solo tank spec" over the last two expansions. I've always played around with solo tanking encounters on blood, but the fact that a blood dk can pretty comfortably take the boss for 95% of an encounter feels like a unique spot to me, because it frees up your other tank to make interesting decisions. In Sanctum, I played blood/protadin and having a second blood player we were enabled to do things like playing a full dps/healing hybrid paladin build on Fatescribe, where the blood was able to take the boss outside of a couple tankbusters and I alternated between ashen hallow burns in the main phase and acting as a healer during the intermission with a fully talented support build. There is no way I could have played that fight without tank talents if blood wasn't such a strong boss tank. This tier, we're starting prog on Fyrakk and the strat is to drop our second tank altogether for another dps. I don't know how this will play out for us, but I'm excited by the possibility. It's rare within WoW that blizzard allows anything truly creative to happen for very long, and having a tank whose primary raid utility seems to be being able to tank unlimited amounts of boss damage seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
Yeah, your cooldown worries will likely expand in TWW, where VB is also being pushed into "use on cooldown" territory in order to maintain the stacking haste buff at 100% uptime for San'layn, though the hero class has probably seen tweaks since the preview. Either way, functioning fine without a defensive cooldown active very much used to be a thing, while nowadays it feels especially dangerous without VB or DRW running. Similarly, the threat of burst damage *does* make utility-casts feel overly dangerous, at times, where rotational downtime used to allow for those GCD's to feel relatively free. So, a lot of these power gains have some adverse effects..
I'm just speculating here, but because the hero talent trees will be new at the start of TWW, I assume they are probably going to go with relatively low-impact tier set bonuses in the first season (for much the same reason that they did so for Dragonflight Season 1). That being said, if the 2-3 month old preview of San'layn is any indication, the hero talents should be pretty impactful on top of the base trees.
Can the fact that a properly played bdk requires no healing considered as group utility? The healer has to focus only on 4 people insted of 5. For the current dungeon set its scales very poorly, but if the incoming dmg on high keys dont get oneshot-y it could mean something, or am i seeing it wrong?
I'd be hesitant to call it "group utility", but I do think it is fair to market that as a group benefit. As you say, the self-sufficiency can be leveraged for either more healer damage or to increase the odds that the healer can keep the remaining group members alive. Granted, it is something that is hard to put a number on and, yes, the current dungeon set doesn't emphasize tank survivability as much as most previous dungeon sets. In any case, you are seeing things correctly.
Any chance you want to release your Talent tree summary as a separate video or just the script as a write up? Understanding the talent tree and what my tradeoffs are if I need to make a change would be super helpful!
Well, when I said I "scrapped it", I was being quite literal. That being said, I do have a written guide that goes into things in some more detail, though the perspective is slightly different than how I would have spoken to it in this video (the written guide is generally more open-minded in presenting things as options and explaining the tradeoffs, while I'd be more inclined to lean more on performance-based data and consider historic representation when talking about things in a retrospective). Though if you had any remaining questions beyond the written guide I'm always available to elaborate either on here, through discord, or wherever.
No worries! You’re a pillar of the community and your log reviews etc have been instrumental to learning BDK (swapped to tank this tier from Resto Druid to play with friends) and hit 3150 on a dad gamer schedule. Thank you so much for what you provide to the BDK community. I’m so thankful I just happened to have a DK leveled when I decided to start tanking 😂
I really think they need to do something with blood for a rework. Doesn't have to be much but there needs to be one. I say this because the spec is just feast or famine. Blood for the entirety of M+ has been either OP or just bad (Generally there is no in between) at least on the high end. This is because you are unkillable until you get one shot in keys. I believe they need to probably reduce the overall healing and give them more base defensive CDs. I generally think that their healing is too strong right now and that they need to lower their healing while also increasing their passive defensiveness. While changing the mitigation and sustainability to this style for BDK would be interesting it completely shifts the idea and thought process behind how they are played. In addition to this it is going to be extremely difficult to find the right balance because if you lower the healing too little but give too much defensiveness they become gods. Otherwise on the other end of the spectrum you are in the current state, where you have so much healing and shielding that you are a god once you are at the start of the pull because of the amount of healing and shielding.
Yeah, right now BDK is probably the strongest mitigation tank (in that they don't need external healing), but the resource situation is to the point where that can only be counterbalanced by making EHP something of a weak point for them so they can be threatened by burst damage. We have seen our overall levels of Mitigation slowly power creep up from what it was in BfA Season 1 to what it is now (with the aberration that was S3/4 SL in-between). I think it is very much worthwhile to discuss if BDK would be in a healthier place if it lost some of its mitigation throughput in favor of more baseline EHP. As things are now, it is very hard to keep it in a balanced state since there is a very thin line between BDK being immortal and BDK having serious one-shot issues.
A interesting thought here is for them to have stronger base durability and then have less healing but higher focus on blood shield. That way they may generate a lot of shields so they are absorbing damage similar to current when high mastery stacking. But then change it so they do much less healing through deathstrike but higher shielding, this way they have similar feel on the side of death strike but their health does not yoyo as much. Instead they focus on maintaining high blood shield amounts and then slowly bring their hp back to full through death strike. Maybe some other gameplay changes could be that they don't want to lose their blood shield, and that shield also gives DR? Not really sure, still a similar problem where you are really weak to start a pull. But then you could make the defensives stronger so you have a better opportunity to start a pull? I like the idea where they still do insane self healing but the old adage of you don't help bdks as a healer becomes less relevant since the idea would be they may get hit hard without the shield but then they deathstrike have a huge shield but only heal for like 30%. So then at that point you see their health slowly go up by themselves or you get healer help to top back up while you have huge shields.
This would make them feel similar to Prot Warriors and ignore pain stacking, however the BDK would still get hit hard by physical damage but instead generate a bigger shield with more damage intake like currently? The goal would be to give healers the opportunity to heal the BDK without it feeling like it is wasted like it is currently. However, the not the situation where the BDK does so little healing that it feels like the healer HAS to heal them to keep them alive, like brewmaster. In addition to this I would want them to have some ability to deal with magic damage beyond them only being able to heal it back via deathstrike. My thoughts here would be that their blood shield they get would be able to maybe absorb 50% of the damage through their blood shield and then the rest would hit their hp directly. This would give them a major weakness to magic but not so weak that they are not able to deal with bosses like that are heavy magic damage like oakheart (Currently very deadly with the breath and grip as mastery stacking does nothing on that boss). in that situation they would be utilizing the AMS in a situation where AMS would have an effective 100% buff to their effective shielding because it would also be absorbing through the blood shield. Now this idea could just be completely overpowered but seems way more interesting than having to have perfect globals and then if you mess up you get one shot.
@@kyrasis9330 This makes sense in regards to the resource situation because we ALWAYS have runic power/runes to spend. Maybe a combination of permanently lowering resource generation and then increasing the power of the active mitigation?
@@jeffrey3837 There will probably always be some amount of friction between self-healing tanks and healers, though more stable health bars will reduce that to some extent. But yeah, a 50% "pass-through" rate on Blood Shield would be incredibly powerful, though it would certainly stabilize things. At the end of the day, any change trying to reorient how overall BDK survivability is functioning would need to have some amount of nerfs to Death Strike mitigation throughput, regardless of how offsetting EHP is being provided.
if they wont nerf vdh prot pala having 7000000 stops, they better add a kick effect to our grips or straight up silence, it would still be weaker than the other 2 lol.
Yeah, that probably doesn't help things. For whatever reason it seems like, more times than not, an M+ season has one tank specialization that has both the highest survivability and highest damage potential at the same time, which is further amplified this season by the AoE CC situation.
i have all tanks except warrior pretty well geared at 486-487 while pushing on vdh. playing any other tank (while i enjoy them more usualy) just feels shit.. idk. Vdh is just crazy and is a miracle to me how the rework with all the sigils especially double silence went tbrough
a good change for bone shatter, would be if hit 1 target, damage be tripled, that ll be helpfull in many ways. bonestorm should get same treatment aoe/ST, gorefind grasp..drastically reduce cd..or via..deathstrikes reduce cd, bonestorm also,should not cost RP,but boneshield stacks, i means, i cannot use it on enrgage..only if got loads of RP, could make it cost 2boneshield per second,and keep it up as long as u can. also antimagic Zone must be dramaticall buffed, is way too low abosb,and bloodhsot stop being a joke,only physical damage, or dont know ,something defensive and offsensive, egv 10% versa.
I did not want to spend too much time on talents in the video, but the RP cost on Bonestorm is actually one of the main issues with that ability, since it puts that ability in a position where it needs to keep the player alive, on its own, with no death strikes to support it (since you no longer have RP), otherwise it is mostly unusable in any challenging content. That being said, making it cost Bone Shield charges over time may cause it to have other issues, 2 bone shield charges per second for 10 seconds would be nearly impossible to counteract with generation (on top of normal bone shield consumption that is happening). At this point, I'd argue that Abomination Limb fills the Pulsing AoE Cooldown slot better than Bonestorm and that it might just be better to scrap Bonestorm completely in favor of a new talent.
![San'layn Hero Talent Analysis - Blood Death Knight [10.2.5]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/FrX8WcVPG74/mqdefault.jpg)
![San'layn Hero Talent Analysis - Blood Death Knight [10.2.5]](/img/tr.png)
![Log and Video Review (Part 1) - Blood Death Knight [10.0]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/usSBicsHEIM/mqdefault.jpg)
![Death's Caress and Downtime - Blood Death Knight [10.0]](/img/n.gif)
Let me know what you think about the current state of Blood Death Knights and what you would like to see in The War Within in the comments below! I genuinely like to see what people's thoughts are, especially for something like this, since it is so subjective.
As always, feel free to stop by the discord if you'd like to chat about theorycrafting-related topics or if you want a log review. (discord.gg/qnFAGcgECn)
One more recent view I've heard is a concern that the Death Strike Self-Healing loop may be too powerful in its current state. The only way to counter-balance such strong mitigation potential (through healing) is by making the specialization more vulnerable to burst windows, but very often Blood feels either trivially easy to survive (if burst damage is not threatening) or the burst damage feels oppressive to the extent where it is not particularly satisfying (or fair feeling) to have to deal with. The argument is that the gameplay loop may feel more consistent if Blood's overall mitigation was reduced for stronger EHP (Effective Health); making them less self-sufficient, but also less likely to get "one-shot". I think it is a fair argument, though I'm not sure what the best response is for Blood's oppressively strong mitigation scaling, myself.
EDIT: "Suppression" in the general talent tree should also have been indicated as a "High Pathing Cost" node location, since it is gated by "Sacrificial Pact", a dead talent, and "March of Darkness", a very situational talent (and one that is mostly used in raid).
Very well thought out :) I will be very honest here - I don’t delve into this amount of theorycrafting - I simply follow what Kyrasis is doing :)))
Having said that your guides and videos has helped me reach Mythic 4/9 and prog on council and 23-s easy timed
The BDK GOAT! Great video, i always learn things in your videos and they help so much. Thank you for making recommendations on the spec cause i know the devs watch your videos and like to think they take your recommendations into consideration, i also 100% agree with them. My goal is to time all 25s and im half way there thanks to your videos. I refuse to jump ship to VDH (their utility is crazy)
I was looking on UA-cam/Discord yesterday(morning) if i missed anything..... but there he is ;P thanks again!
Yeah, I have a new position at work that has been taking a bit more of my time than usual, but the work schedule is starting to become more normalized again.
As always - banger stuff. Especially with the recommendations to the devs. LOTs of agreement there.
I've always wanted the Jailor's Gavel Weapon On-Use effect as a DK talent. Could make it a group effect. DK's niche would then be 'we have grips + mini-lust'.
Personal opinion, but ive really been enjoying -> GG + TG > 20% chance of improved DS + 2/2 RT (for m+). Especially when combo'd with legendary.
As an alternative to remove Death's Caress cd, it could keep the 6s cd - just give it a charge system.
Yeah, there's a lot of potential for someone to come in and experiment with new talents like the one you brought up; there are plenty of dead nodes that could substitute out for them. It is very much a creative problem for what should be done with those talent nodes, but some sort of group/raid buff potential, somewhere, would be a breath of fresh air.
Gorefiend's is just a very satisfying ability to have and enjoyable to use, so I do think it is unfortunate that it is competing with things like Iron Heart and Heartbreaker; it makes it hard to justify when min/maxing (at least in Mythic+). I'd be all for it being baselined or put in a more accessible location (it could even go in the general class tree if they want).
Charges on Death's Caress would also mitigate the annoyance with running out of ranged-threat-generating globals on pull setup, though I just don't see much purpose for the cooldown, at all. I feel like they were worried Death's Caress could fully replace Marrowrend, at first, and the cooldown was meant as a failsafe for that, but, due to the lack of downtime, it has never been worth using it like that, so I don't think there is much harm in removing the cooldown.
This was my first full season tanking M+, and I enjoyed Blood DK when pushing keys with friends. All 3 of us became pretty busy outside of the game, and I was forced to pug a lot more... and I hated it as Blood DK for one reason - lack of support ability to help your team if someone needs it (compared with Prot pally, which I'm planning to play next season). Otherwise, when I was mainly playing with friends it was a lot of fun.
Thanks again for your written guide, it was very helpful for me!
Yeah, the lack of group support is especially noticeable in this current dungeon pool, unfortunately (as well as VDH existing in its current state). Some dungeon tuning may have gone a long way towards improving that, but we didn't see much of that this season.
In any case, I'm glad I could help!
I am 100 % with you. We absolutely need a bit more Utility and something like a Raid/Group Buff. Maybe making Gorefien's interact with Death's Echo and making Asphyxiate baseline would be enough ultiltywise. Concerning Raid/Group Buff: there are a lot of good ideas from different guys and I can not understand why the devs don't do anything about this problem. Thanks for the video! Great content!
Yeah, there's a lot of things that could potentially be done with utility. I'm not sure if it is healthy for everyone to have AoE CC at the levels that VDH currently has, but there is certainly room for us (and the others) to get a little more than what we currently have (not to mention a Raid/Group buff).
As unfortunate as it is, the official stance is that grips are treated as a substitute for a raid buff, though many would argue that it is very sub-par compared to a traditional raid buff (especially in Mythic+).
The minimum that needs to happen is make gore fiend baseline for blood and maybe a choicenode for unholy/frost with AMZ. After that improve the talent that follows gorefiends now and put somewhere on the side of the tree. Everything that is in the main paths should be some form of throughput at is at best related to core abilities (look at prot warrior tree, that one goes in a good direction). And for the love of god, give DK (all specs) more real choice nodes.
Amazing video as always with succinct presentation and narration! I agreed with all your points. Your thoughts in the end are the exact ones I've had myself.
My biggest gripe with Blood currently, and Death Knight as a whole, is the lack of utility outside of stops. Blinding Sleet is a nice addition, but it doesn't add that much considering that we aren't picking Gorefiend's Grasp anymore, and there's an over abundance of stops in DF anyhow. I'd have appreciated Blinding Sleet much more if it was added last expansion, but in DF it doesn't stand out considering that every class has access to more CC. In practice, I don't feel like Blood experienced a net gain in utility this expansion.
Playing Blood feels worse knowing that Vengeance and Prot Paladin exists, who contribute an insane amount of utility to the group in various forms. Like you said, Vengeance ought to be nerfed a bit, but I also believe Blood should be brought closer to the standards that these two tanks have set in DF. There are things that already exists that would be a welcome addition. Functionality like Spellwarden - the War Mode talent that turns AMS into an external. Vampiric Aura is making a comeback in TWW, which is a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure how strong it will be.
I'd also like to see the reliance on D&D to be vastly diminished, if not entirely removed, primarily because it restricts our movement. I'm really tired of it, especially when I'm on Unholy, which is just as dependant on it as Blood is. I love your idea of making the passive effects stick to the Death Knight! Perhaps even add an option to replace D&D altogether with an ability like Swarming Mist (Venthyr covenant ability) that comes with said effects. I'm down for anything that would free us from our circle of containment, and I think there are lots of creative ways to go about it.
Regarding the abundance of resources we have available: I kind of miss the rotational downtime we had previously. That said, a reduction in downtime seems to be a consistent theme in this expansion. I'm also flooded with resources on Unholy and Windwalker, which traditionally have had noticeable downtime baked into them.
On your last point, San'layn looks like they may take us even further into extra resource regeneration territory. So, I'm curious to see if they pull back in the baseline trees at all to compensate or if we are just going to have a repeat of how the rotation felt with the S1 DF tier set bonus (with the bonus rune regeneration).
I feel the part with VDH's having so much more ways to carry in keys through their CC. I may not play BDK anymore, but I think as prot warrior I have the same issues in that department as BDK, if not even more so, since we dont have anything similar to a Death Grip or Abom Limb. I personally think that the amount of utility that all the tanks bring to the table should be balanced further in TWW with giving the tanks with less utility (i.w. BDK, Warrior) something that the others (ppal, vdh) maybe not have. #GiveProtWarriorBloodlust :D
Yeah, it is hard to say what the appropriate level is for tank utility to be balanced around, but there are some large disparities right now.
Do you think Blood returning to intentional downtime, likely with optional talents, is feasible or desirable? The low APM and measured gameplay is one of the things that drew me to the spec at the start.
I think there is an honest discussion to be had on if the current state of BDK resource economy is too much. It is possible that reducing the death strike mitigation loop in favor of having more passive DR would be healthier for the spec. That would indirectly mean more rotational downtime and the more methodical gameplay.
But, if the San'layn preview is any indication, things may continue to speed up.
Personally one thing I'm not a huge fan of is the current gameplay around dancing rune weapon. With the amount of CDR we currently have access to, it feels like pretty weird design to be virtually invincible half of the time, with significantly reduced damage intake and significantly increased resource gen. Because it's such a full package, there's rarely any reason you would want to hold DRW outside of something like smolderon, even when you're not actively tanking the boss, which I feel cheapens the ability to use it as a defensive.
This is kind of exacerbated to me by how synergistic the extra RP is with red thirst, where you can pretty comfortably chain vamp blood into a rune weapon into another vamp blood. As a long time blood player, I'm a lot more excited by the idea of keeping myself alive through intelligent use of death strike and careful use of cooldowns, rather than having something powerful up nearly all of the time.
One other thing I don't really like is how much rotational pressure there is to keep our RP engine going, and how expensive death grip, chains of ice, and ranged death and decays have become. I feel like when I pushed keys in BFA I had a lot more freedom to be able to help control mobs or to kite as a defensive option, whereas I feel like the correct decision is currently nearly always to be in melee range of something pressing damage buttons because DRW is so powerful, and once you have it up you can easily tank the pack again, and then vamp blood will probably be back up. I really enjoy gameplay where I have some space to make decisions instead of having such a dominant strategy around generating/spending resources.
As far as raid tanking, one thing I actually do like is the extent to which blood has become "the solo tank spec" over the last two expansions. I've always played around with solo tanking encounters on blood, but the fact that a blood dk can pretty comfortably take the boss for 95% of an encounter feels like a unique spot to me, because it frees up your other tank to make interesting decisions. In Sanctum, I played blood/protadin and having a second blood player we were enabled to do things like playing a full dps/healing hybrid paladin build on Fatescribe, where the blood was able to take the boss outside of a couple tankbusters and I alternated between ashen hallow burns in the main phase and acting as a healer during the intermission with a fully talented support build. There is no way I could have played that fight without tank talents if blood wasn't such a strong boss tank.
This tier, we're starting prog on Fyrakk and the strat is to drop our second tank altogether for another dps. I don't know how this will play out for us, but I'm excited by the possibility. It's rare within WoW that blizzard allows anything truly creative to happen for very long, and having a tank whose primary raid utility seems to be being able to tank unlimited amounts of boss damage seems like a fair tradeoff to me.
Yeah, your cooldown worries will likely expand in TWW, where VB is also being pushed into "use on cooldown" territory in order to maintain the stacking haste buff at 100% uptime for San'layn, though the hero class has probably seen tweaks since the preview. Either way, functioning fine without a defensive cooldown active very much used to be a thing, while nowadays it feels especially dangerous without VB or DRW running. Similarly, the threat of burst damage *does* make utility-casts feel overly dangerous, at times, where rotational downtime used to allow for those GCD's to feel relatively free. So, a lot of these power gains have some adverse effects..
100 % agree. Give us more utility ! And make that tree a bit more permissiv.
How about a nice Tier Set? Cause those 3 were kinda sad :)
I'm just speculating here, but because the hero talent trees will be new at the start of TWW, I assume they are probably going to go with relatively low-impact tier set bonuses in the first season (for much the same reason that they did so for Dragonflight Season 1).
That being said, if the 2-3 month old preview of San'layn is any indication, the hero talents should be pretty impactful on top of the base trees.
Can the fact that a properly played bdk requires no healing considered as group utility? The healer has to focus only on 4 people insted of 5. For the current dungeon set its scales very poorly, but if the incoming dmg on high keys dont get oneshot-y it could mean something, or am i seeing it wrong?
I'd be hesitant to call it "group utility", but I do think it is fair to market that as a group benefit. As you say, the self-sufficiency can be leveraged for either more healer damage or to increase the odds that the healer can keep the remaining group members alive. Granted, it is something that is hard to put a number on and, yes, the current dungeon set doesn't emphasize tank survivability as much as most previous dungeon sets.
In any case, you are seeing things correctly.
No u cant realy. Alot of the other tanks barely need healing aswell these days
ty ty ty
Any chance you want to release your Talent tree summary as a separate video or just the script as a write up? Understanding the talent tree and what my tradeoffs are if I need to make a change would be super helpful!
Well, when I said I "scrapped it", I was being quite literal. That being said, I do have a written guide that goes into things in some more detail, though the perspective is slightly different than how I would have spoken to it in this video (the written guide is generally more open-minded in presenting things as options and explaining the tradeoffs, while I'd be more inclined to lean more on performance-based data and consider historic representation when talking about things in a retrospective).
Though if you had any remaining questions beyond the written guide I'm always available to elaborate either on here, through discord, or wherever.
No worries! You’re a pillar of the community and your log reviews etc have been instrumental to learning BDK (swapped to tank this tier from Resto Druid to play with friends) and hit 3150 on a dad gamer schedule. Thank you so much for what you provide to the BDK community. I’m so thankful I just happened to have a DK leveled when I decided to start tanking 😂
I really think they need to do something with blood for a rework. Doesn't have to be much but there needs to be one. I say this because the spec is just feast or famine. Blood for the entirety of M+ has been either OP or just bad (Generally there is no in between) at least on the high end. This is because you are unkillable until you get one shot in keys.
I believe they need to probably reduce the overall healing and give them more base defensive CDs. I generally think that their healing is too strong right now and that they need to lower their healing while also increasing their passive defensiveness.
While changing the mitigation and sustainability to this style for BDK would be interesting it completely shifts the idea and thought process behind how they are played. In addition to this it is going to be extremely difficult to find the right balance because if you lower the healing too little but give too much defensiveness they become gods. Otherwise on the other end of the spectrum you are in the current state, where you have so much healing and shielding that you are a god once you are at the start of the pull because of the amount of healing and shielding.
Yeah, right now BDK is probably the strongest mitigation tank (in that they don't need external healing), but the resource situation is to the point where that can only be counterbalanced by making EHP something of a weak point for them so they can be threatened by burst damage.
We have seen our overall levels of Mitigation slowly power creep up from what it was in BfA Season 1 to what it is now (with the aberration that was S3/4 SL in-between). I think it is very much worthwhile to discuss if BDK would be in a healthier place if it lost some of its mitigation throughput in favor of more baseline EHP. As things are now, it is very hard to keep it in a balanced state since there is a very thin line between BDK being immortal and BDK having serious one-shot issues.
A interesting thought here is for them to have stronger base durability and then have less healing but higher focus on blood shield. That way they may generate a lot of shields so they are absorbing damage similar to current when high mastery stacking.
But then change it so they do much less healing through deathstrike but higher shielding, this way they have similar feel on the side of death strike but their health does not yoyo as much. Instead they focus on maintaining high blood shield amounts and then slowly bring their hp back to full through death strike.
Maybe some other gameplay changes could be that they don't want to lose their blood shield, and that shield also gives DR? Not really sure, still a similar problem where you are really weak to start a pull. But then you could make the defensives stronger so you have a better opportunity to start a pull? I like the idea where they still do insane self healing but the old adage of you don't help bdks as a healer becomes less relevant since the idea would be they may get hit hard without the shield but then they deathstrike have a huge shield but only heal for like 30%. So then at that point you see their health slowly go up by themselves or you get healer help to top back up while you have huge shields.
This would make them feel similar to Prot Warriors and ignore pain stacking, however the BDK would still get hit hard by physical damage but instead generate a bigger shield with more damage intake like currently?
The goal would be to give healers the opportunity to heal the BDK without it feeling like it is wasted like it is currently. However, the not the situation where the BDK does so little healing that it feels like the healer HAS to heal them to keep them alive, like brewmaster.
In addition to this I would want them to have some ability to deal with magic damage beyond them only being able to heal it back via deathstrike. My thoughts here would be that their blood shield they get would be able to maybe absorb 50% of the damage through their blood shield and then the rest would hit their hp directly. This would give them a major weakness to magic but not so weak that they are not able to deal with bosses like that are heavy magic damage like oakheart (Currently very deadly with the breath and grip as mastery stacking does nothing on that boss). in that situation they would be utilizing the AMS in a situation where AMS would have an effective 100% buff to their effective shielding because it would also be absorbing through the blood shield.
Now this idea could just be completely overpowered but seems way more interesting than having to have perfect globals and then if you mess up you get one shot.
@@kyrasis9330 This makes sense in regards to the resource situation because we ALWAYS have runic power/runes to spend.
Maybe a combination of permanently lowering resource generation and then increasing the power of the active mitigation?
@@jeffrey3837 There will probably always be some amount of friction between self-healing tanks and healers, though more stable health bars will reduce that to some extent. But yeah, a 50% "pass-through" rate on Blood Shield would be incredibly powerful, though it would certainly stabilize things.
At the end of the day, any change trying to reorient how overall BDK survivability is functioning would need to have some amount of nerfs to Death Strike mitigation throughput, regardless of how offsetting EHP is being provided.
if they wont nerf vdh prot pala having 7000000 stops, they better add a kick effect to our grips or straight up silence, it would still be weaker than the other 2 lol.
i think we would be fine if vdh wouldnt be so rediculous op. Litteraly best dmg, utility and grp buff in the game
Yeah, that probably doesn't help things. For whatever reason it seems like, more times than not, an M+ season has one tank specialization that has both the highest survivability and highest damage potential at the same time, which is further amplified this season by the AoE CC situation.
i have all tanks except warrior pretty well geared at 486-487 while pushing on vdh. playing any other tank (while i enjoy them more usualy) just feels shit.. idk. Vdh is just crazy and is a miracle to me how the rework with all the sigils especially double silence went tbrough
I wish you were a prot paladin so we could get this type of content 😭
a good change for bone shatter, would be if hit 1 target, damage be tripled, that ll be helpfull in many ways. bonestorm should get same treatment aoe/ST, gorefind grasp..drastically reduce cd..or via..deathstrikes reduce cd, bonestorm also,should not cost RP,but boneshield stacks, i means, i cannot use it on enrgage..only if got loads of RP, could make it cost 2boneshield per second,and keep it up as long as u can. also antimagic Zone must be dramaticall buffed, is way too low abosb,and bloodhsot stop being a joke,only physical damage, or dont know ,something defensive and offsensive, egv 10% versa.
I did not want to spend too much time on talents in the video, but the RP cost on Bonestorm is actually one of the main issues with that ability, since it puts that ability in a position where it needs to keep the player alive, on its own, with no death strikes to support it (since you no longer have RP), otherwise it is mostly unusable in any challenging content.
That being said, making it cost Bone Shield charges over time may cause it to have other issues, 2 bone shield charges per second for 10 seconds would be nearly impossible to counteract with generation (on top of normal bone shield consumption that is happening).
At this point, I'd argue that Abomination Limb fills the Pulsing AoE Cooldown slot better than Bonestorm and that it might just be better to scrap Bonestorm completely in favor of a new talent.
@@kyrasis9330 they van make it fix , condym 5 bs for a fix smount 12 seconds if yhey eant be useful