I like vampiric vibes & playstyle of San’layn hero talents, but right now it is in a terrible condition due to botched tuning / unfixed glitches & neglect from developer team.
here are the most egregious issues:
Vampiric strike (“empowered” version of Heartstrike) does less damage than Heartstrike.
Gift of San’layn uptime for blood is abysmal 12%, compared to 58% uptime of this same talent for unholy.
As a result of the sloppy, worthless rework for DnD intended for unholy (which failed miserably becausee even unholy don’t play San’layn or DnD) you butchered Desecrate talent for blood, it was a both fun & powerful talent that created a satisfying playstyle.
I will you remind you !!! your changes were announced for unholy ONLY, but instead you applied them to Blood DK as well and we lost damage, got more boring, unsatisfying playstyle and a freaking dead talent that noone will ever pick.
As a result of direct 80-90% nerf to Blood Beast in S3 of TWW, followed by 70% nerf to DRW (to which Blood Beast is tied), Blood Beast was turned, from a powerful, fun talent it was in in S1 and S2 of TWW into a DEAD TALENT.
Just did Magister Terrace 19 today, a dungeon with a lot of big pulls, Blood Beast did 0.70% of my overall damage, what a sad, terrible joke. On last boss Blood Beast did 0.29%, even “better”.
Apart from Blood Beast & Desecrate, a talent you murdered with 12.0.5 patch, we have long standing dead talents that have next to zero impact on gameplay:
5.1. Bloody Fortitude (a minor, redundant buff to an already minor defensive with HUGE cooldown)
5.2. Vampiric Aura (4% leech for 12 seconds to 5 group memembers with 2 min cooldown, absolute joke).
5.3. Vampiric Speed (20% movement increase for 12 seconds for you allies is redundant, as a BDK you’re already slowest member of the group).
5.4. Transfusion (this talent is designed for unholy with pet’s 100% uptime, due to how DRW works, this talent is utter trash for BDK, it almost never works during DRW windows, because by the time you get vampiric strike proc and use it, DRW proc is gone or is about to be gone).
Can’t wait for the current dev of BDK to get fired / displaced so that hopefully someone more caring and competent can come and mend our neglected spec and our even more neglected hero talents.
As a San’layn enjoyer myself, I too find it annoying and agree to most of the points brought up.
Just a quick correction though, Vampiric Strike does less Raw damage than Heart Strike, this is true. Remember though that Vampiric Strike also does damage based on your Blood Plagues and detonate an additional roughly double value from that per press. So saying VS does less damage than HS being technically true, the damage from pressing the button is a lot more from pressing VS [HS sitting at roughly 6k damage raw, while VS sits at 5.5k raw + ~4-5k detonation damage. So 6k vs ~10k].
Funnily enough, this is the same issue many warriors brought up about Thunderclap vs the empowered ability version Thunderblast. Where clap did more raw damage per press, yet Thunderblast also called down a lightning that made it do more damage per press.
It is (bad) unclear design, but not a ‘gameplay’ problem.
All the rest though? Yeah, especially blood beast is dire. Desecrate is just so bad, a gigantic nerf from what it was. While I can get removing the “burst” element of it, I don’t get why they at the same time removed the damage amp element of it.
I dont hope the current dev gets fired. I hope the persons involved get more time to actually work on BDK and iterate and fix things to fit their vision. I doubt they want things to feel clunky and bad. More likely is that they are simply not given the time to fix or care about things, being put to other tasks (like looking to the next expansion) deemed more important. As BDK is one of those specs they very easily neglect for whatever reason. Hero spec problems within that? Yeah. I wont hold my breath for good changes.
If I count “Infliction of Sorrow” talent as part of of Vampiric Strike, I can say that it does more damage, yeah But why would I? It basically detonates the deseases via separate talent, while at its core it is weaker than the spell it is supposed to empower.
Unholy’s Vampiric Strike does both higher raw damage + detonates deseases on top of that, they don’t have the ugly tuning blood has.
This just shows how much blood is neglected compared to unholy and many other specs.
I don’t know mate, I see other specs like unholy & hunters getting a lot more attention or specs like holy pala getting much healthier tuning and I can’t justify what they have been doing to BDK since S3 of TWW, especially since they have so much feedback which they do not respond to. Therefore I do not have any hopes for the current dev’s competence.
3 weeks ago or so they claimed that their next tuning will be focused of fixing hero talents balance / perfomance, I had been hoping they would do at least something to San’layn - nothing.
Look at their tuning announcement last Friday, plenty of specs got hero talents adjustment, San’layn again nothing, despite the escalating trend of last 4 weeks of people playing San’layn less and less.
I simply cannot find any reasonable justification for their neglect of our spec / hero talents except for bias & their traditional neglect of tanking specs because “the manager told us to focus on more popular specs”, and obviously tank specs are the least popular because most people are too stressed / afraid to play tanking specs.
Playing BDK this Season is already trolling but playing San Layn is just insanity. Most neglected Spec in WoW history. They buffed all hero talents that were underperforming but didnt buff the by far worst hero talent this season. Gj Blizzard