Blizzard, i beg you to take a look at blood DK

Classes Death Knight
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Hello

I know this is not the first, nor the last thread about the state of Blood DK’s, and it probably won’t help with another one, but i simply need to vent.

I basically only play wow to push Mythic+, it’s the most fun i’ve had in wow (or any other game) in years.
I also really, really enjoy playing blood DK.
However, i’m becoming slightly depressed over the fact that i spend 99% of my time trying to get invites rather than pushing keys and having fun, despite a decent Rio score and sufficient ilvl.
People more or less auto-decline Blood DK’s simply because we’re not a top tier tank, and quite frankly it’s true - we bring nothing to the group.

It’s a shame that the player base relies so heavily on the meta, or what tier classes are. What most people don’t understand is that tier rankings only become important in content where you’ve plateaued in mastering your class, and the only way to improve your performance is to play another class with more potential to squeeze out.
If you play well, it matters little if your class is low tier or high tier until very, very high end content.

I beg you to take a good look at DK’s to improve them in a way that they become more attractive. They do not need buffs to become S-tier, but just a little something that incentivizes people to invite us.

Points/arguments i am aware of:

-Just play another tank and accept that blood is bad.
That is a solution, however i really enjoy blood and would love to continue playing it. I shouldn’t have to completely reroll and gear another tank just to enjoy the content. I wouldn’t complain it we are talking 20-25 keys where timers are so tight you need to play the meta to beat it, but i literally cannot get groups for 13-16 keys.

-Just get yourself a consistent M+ team to play with so you never have to bother finding pugs.
Also a good solution, but the same problem kind of persists. No one is gonna invest getting to know and synchronize with someone playing blood if they know that eventually the entire team will be hampered by the tank.
I would rather get a DH from the start, and not be screwed once you enter high key territory.

-All classes go through cycles over patches, expansions and time. The class that was meta/top tier in BFA may now be low tier which gives room for the classes that were previously “bad”.
That is fine, but there are degrees in hell. All fine if blood became a bit worse in Shadowlands to give room for other tanks, but we’re literally garbage compared to other tanks.

-Blood DK’s are supposed to be a slow moving juggernauts, what they lack in mobility they make up for in mitigation and sef-healing.
This strength literally only works in lower/easier content. I can pull an entire heroic instance and survive with only self-healing, but in keys starting at as low as +10 (depending on gear) tanks need to kite, and kiting is something we are notoriously bad at.

Suggestion from the top of my mind:
In order to buff us/make us more viable while still keeping our style and core gameplay, perhaps add some sort of mitigation rotation, or rework rune tap.
Make us rely on getting our rotation very right to maintain mitigation and healing.
Punish us for playing bad.
This will raise the skillcap for sure, but at the same time make us more viable as facetanks rather than giving us more kiting mechanics.
The kiting meta is kinda boring in my opinion.

I hope i am not being whiny, i’m just a bid sad and frustrated that i cannot enjoy the content i love without having to spend 5x the time the key takes to find a group.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

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I think that is something that you might want to see applied to dps and healers but not tanks.
To me the fesign here is that what you lack in mobility you have in controls. Meaning that a blood DK can hard slow an entire group quite well when using right its dnd. And a blood DK can also grab an entire group away from him with chains of ice and gorfiend’s grasp.

It’s clearly not the easiest of tools to master but it is efficient. Except on the week with the anti-cc aura mobs in mm+ T.T
I’ve cried so much during that week.

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on topic, I’m with you, something has to be done to educate the community so that people are less tempted to follow metas that doesn’t concern their level of play.

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The problem is with tanking overall.
Raid vs M+ tanking
Just as a comparison, in raids tanks stay at the boss and take the beating. We need to rotate our cd’s or active mitigation to have it under control.
How blizz designed m+ tanking? you keep aggro and run away, thats not the fantasy how tanking should look like and definatly how roles are defined in such content.
Blood DK Changes
When it comes to fantasy of the blood DK, we should be more of a vampiric style tank, which means we could place a debuff on the target to constantly leech health and a +magic dmg debuff on the target. So what DH’s can do that too? That would restrict blizz of forcing ppl to play certain classes just because blizz cant design tanks or classes. This would mean our self healing from death strike is reduced. Instead it should add a +% dmg reduction in form of a blood shield. This would prevent ping pongs on our healthbar. Bone shield is also weird due to absolut numbers. With the above description to the blood shield, bone shield could give us parry. Every time we parry 1 bone would be removed. This could help us in aoe fights. In that case the Dancing Rune Weapon would be a pure dps CD.

I know this is only a suggestion but it would change the mindset in M+ of pure kiting tanks into a more tankier mindset. Ofc sometimes tanks should step a bit away to clear stacks or rest a bit, but who had this awesome idea of tanks in M+ who are constantly away from the group of mobs? In that case bring a hunter or lock instaed of a tank.
Blizz, change your mindset on tanks in m+.

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You’re absolutely right. Single grip and massgrip are huge strengths and part of the reason why i love playing DK.
Problem is that it is not enough to warrant taking a DK over any other tank.
Druids can push, monks can circle.

It’s very rare for a grip to have any huge, meaningful effect - mostly it’s just a slight quality of life improvement ability.

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Well, right now BDK is only slightly better than prot warrior and that’s about it. Guardians druid is pretty insane right now and don’t even start with Vengeance…

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The sad truth is Blood DK has been bottom tier after Legion. Sure it’s nice to have grip(s) for M+, but other than that we bring nothing special. Even combat res is hard to utilize know because I desperately need that 30 runic power to not die.

This has been my main since Wrath and I had to bump it down to alt status for the sake of my team and my own sanity. I’ve even contemplated on just quitting it alltogether and play my Guardian druid instead as a “main alt”. I still love the playstyle and class fantasy of the DK, but playing VDH with the same gear is just 2-3 free keystone levels added to whatever level you’re currently doing. The core design of Blood doesn’t fit into the meta. Small numerical tuning like the pathetic armor buff to Bone shield (~4% dmg reduction) is barely noticable.

  • Our damage is mediocre
  • We require way too many different abilities to set up our damage and mitigation. In the meantime, threat becomes an issue unless you have hunter, rogue or very well behaved DPSers in the group.
  • We take more scary/spiky damage than any other tank, making most healers dislike us.
  • We really don’t bring anything special outside of grip. AMZ is nice in theory but with the constant movement required for M+ you can almost never utilize it. Only place where it’s consistently nice to have is last boss in Plaguefall.

I honestly think that the person who is in charge of designing and tuning DKs in general have no idea how the class actually works or what it’s supposed to do well.

The sad truth is that there is absolutely no reason whatsover to bring a Blood DK to M+ over another tank, unless they are your friend.

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Vent away brother… Vent away! :joy: I think we’re going to need a DK anonymous soon.

Back on topic, I think you’re right in complaining here, and something has to change to make BDKs fit the playstyle, since you know, asking bliz to reconsider how they design dungeons and raids to fit BDKs better is probably a hugely unrealistic ask.

There’s a few posts in this forum asking and suggesting similar things to you, go be engaged in said posts too. Maybe if enough DKs show up here and are vocal about issues we’ll get a bit more notice… Or maybe I’m oddly hopeful for somebody who’s meant to main an emotionally void avatar of death… xD

&

Yes & yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been banging on about on my post as well. We’ve got some cool utility, AMS, DA, grips but it mostly serves us as opposed to the group. Skilldoux here is probably going to tell me off again but I maintain that we don’t really have an ability/utility that make others go “thank Ion we’ve got a DK, it makes this thing so much more pleasant” like warlocks or shamans do. Yeah we got AMZ now which is nice but not wow awesome.

As for blood specific improvements I’m not sure what the best solution is. If we start receiving huge buffs then it will probably end up making us too op in most content. I remember somebody suggesting removing the rune cost of rune tap, maybe add a bit of a larger CD. Just something to help solve our resource tradeoff that always makes us frantically juggle between threat generating dps or simply surviving.

I maintain that the baseline toolkit of BDKs needs to be revisited. It’s such an odd system that even devs are struggling to come up with interesting / creative borrowed powers to add on top. In BFA nobody really liked the blood specific azerite traits and I read that now nobody is particularly excited about blood specific conduits and legendries. To me, this is an indication that something is a bit wrong in the foundation of the spec.

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Yeah there are tons of things I would put on my wishlist for Blood, but realistically even a few things would help a lot

  • Marrowrend gives 4 charges of boneshield. Buff the damage as well. Currently it does less damage than auto-attacks, which is kinda sad for an ability that according to it’s tooltip “smashes the target”. They could actually buff it by 50% and it still wouldn’t be more than a ~4% overall dps gain.
  • Ossuary requires you to just have boneshield active, instead of 5+ stacks. Or just remove the damn thing and make Death strike cost 40RP.
  • Rune Tap cost removed. Increase CD by 5-10sec. We are currently forced to spec Blood Tap and just sit on at least 1 charge for emergency Rune Taps.
  • Mastery also increases Blood Plague damage/leech? Would help a tiny bit with sustain/threat on the move. With current mastery levels it would be a net dps increase of around 3% depending on content, so no chance it would make us OP.
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*Blizzard I beg you to take a look at the Death Knight class

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In my team we have Blood DK, im playing as a healer in this team and i need to say that HOLY CRAP, healing Blood DK is IMO the most hardest compare to any other tanks.

We are runing 15+ keys, and im pretty sure mythics 18 is max what we will do, since he simply getting hits for 60% of his HP. Whats does that mean ? As healer i cant DPS, bcuz he cant kit properly, so i need to spam healing on him constantly.Perma watching his energy, if he can heal or not, tons of Weakauras that will help me to control what Blood Dk is doing.

No gonna lie, our Blood DK is very good player, but it dosent change the fact that Blood DK is the most weakest tank, he need to most help from everything, he is capped to some level of mythics, bcuz later dmg is to high for him to survive, when you need to pull 2-3 pack, and he cant stand 1,5 pack.

Sad story but true. Give him more armor, and more toolkit to kite.

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These are some of the reasons I stopped playing Blood DK for my main team and went with Demon Hunter instead. At any keystone level you can replace a the DK tank with a DH and add 2-3 levels to your groups potential. Blood DK is the tank I’ve played the most and the amount of planning and micromanaging I have to do compared to Demon Hunter, and still get worse results are insane.

And it’s not just me, but my entire group needs to help way more. I’ve always played with the same healer so he is used to the constant spiking of my health. I asked him and he was kind enough to say that I’m free to play whichever tank I want, but there was no denying it’s much easier for him when I play Demon Hunter, or even Guardian Druid. In BfA or Legion this was barely a topic when I played different tanks.

Right now Blood DK is just a liability in a group, unless you are outgearing the content.

If they don’t want to make drastic changes, at least buff our armor and maybe stamina a bit, so we won’t give our healer a small heart attack every time we get hit…

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Bruh , i fully support you on this. I got blood dk and most of the time i am creating my own groups due to the fact no one want to invite bdk. Top boyo it’s that flying circus show dh…dunno why but i hate in my guts that batman-show-like. Protection w,Blood Dk are left behind.

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I am sorry to say this guys but it would be needed a lot of rework on the spec before it reaches the current metas… Imagine, I am doing 14, 15s with blood 218 that I main since MoP… A DAY ago I decided to level up a dh… I dinged and in the same day I timed +12 with the 175 ilvl, bo traits, no conduits and no legendaries and far from the skill cap… (other 4 members were 900-1100, with an average dmg for +12, so ut was far from a boost, also you can’t really get boosted as a tank). I didn’t trigger last resort even once and we didn’t have a single death… That is just the indicator how classes are not balanced… Much better mobility, more armour and more dmg. It’s sad cuz I have to watch my fav spec being neglected as that but sometimes you need to adapt…

A screenshot of the run: https://imageupload.io/rp2wen450I.i

Best regards, fellow dk

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