I am not BDK expert but I have been playing this one quite a lot this week after dinging 60, I am about to start m+ and normal raid. Although I did enjoy the playstyle and identity of bdk tanking I have one major issue with it. As in the title, it requires too much set up. On pull, assuming I have no bone shield charges, I have to in no particular order: apply blood plague, place down DnD, build up bone shield charges which take several casts, and use heart strike for aoe threat.
That’s way more than any other tank, compare this to my Prot pally where I just have to throw my frisbee and I already have agro on pretty much everything and I started building some resources to spend on mitigation or healing. Or my VDH, I just leap in, use immolation aura and spikes and I am good to go.
But on BDK it feels like I have a lot of busy work to do before I can get to the fun part, and more often than not my priorities contradict with each others. If I have no bone shield then I need to build up charges, but when I am doing that I am not using heart strike, so no aoe damage, so no threat and so dps pull aggro. But if I start with heartstrike then I have no mitigation for several gcd and I get rolled over.
I know you can alleviate the issue with bone shield by trying to keep your charges in between pulls, but you can’t always do that. Sometimes there is too much of a distance between packs, or you need the healer to drink, or someone died and you have to wait for a rez, or you have to wait for kyrian winged ladies to carry you around like a cat.
For solutions I would like a cd that give us like 5 charges of bone shield, and off the gcd. I would also like if blood plague generated more threat as it’s our only easy to use no strings attached aoe.
TLDR: bdk fun, but too much busywork before getting to the fun part. Also busywork might lead to wipe.
The problem is its harder but not rewarding while you don less with VDH or protpally you get more reward while as dk you will strugle hard to not get oneshoted and at same time you have big agrro problem unless you have rouge or hunter even with superstrain lego you dmg is bad
another problem is rune tap needs rune so again it cause you to deal less dmg and get less agro cuase of that sometimes you dont have rune and u cant use it same but as VDH your demone spike scale with your haste while need no resource
overall Blooddk is not a good tank tbh unless you realy enjoy it its not worth
i only start VDH this season and im already doing 17+ while with my dk im strugeling at 15+ 16+ its just how blizzard balance the game go play The meta and be fotm or dont bother to be competetive
The buffs they received weren’t sufficient. BDK have the usual blizz class design problem:
They create a problematic design which then requires either a permanent talent or some borrowed power to bandaid it. The baseline spec design isn’t robust and keeps fighting itself, the player more often than not, even in none extreme situations has to sacrifice too much in order to keep it’s head above water.
Every class should play well on its own first, without talents, legendaries, or any other form of temporary borrowed power.
Exactly. VDH is really good even without Covenant abilities. DK was my main for 10 years so it’s not like the first time I’m tanking on it. Comparing it to my VDH which has exactly the same ilv, it feels like adding 2-3 levels to the keystone in terms of how well I need to play and how much you get punished for a tiny mistake. Outside of niche situations where you can use AMS to cheese boss mechanics like orb soaking on Oryphrion in Spires, VDH does everything better by a solid margin.
Doing burst damage with cooldowns up and then kiting frequently is the current meta, and DK does neither of that well. Yes you can kite with slows and chains, but you have no way of frequently getting distance between yourself and mobs in a pinch. It require so much planning to pull off, on you need much more help from teammates as well.
Blood DK toolkit is mostly built around facetanking damage - you need to hit something to use your mitigation/healing. The problem is that current dungeon design doesn’t let you facetank much at all.
For solutions I would like a cd that give us like 5 charges of bone shield, and off the gcd. I would also like if blood plague generated more threat as it’s our only easy to use no strings attached aoe.
You’re supposed to pop Dancing Rune Weapon for pulls with no Bone Shield. This literally cuts your opener in half. After that just keep it at stacks at 6+ and refresh right before the last mob in the pack dies.
If you’re regularly dropping Bone Shield between packs then that’s on you (or your healer not knowing how to manage their mana). There is literally not a single dungeon, besides maybe parts of Mists and DOS, where you can’t maintain BS between packs and cover the rest with DRW as long as you pull at a decent pace and manage you cooldowns correctly.
I don’t wanna “profile-shame” you, but I can’t find a single dungeon run in your log where you went as tank. All your runs have been as dps. There are several dungeons where you have unnatural long breaks out of your control, like flying between platforms in Spires, or someone died and needs a res. DrW is a 2 minute cooldown and you don’t have it for every pull. Depending how you do the dungeons it’s up for 1/4 or 1/3 pulls. Building and maintaining bone shield outside of that is a legitimate problem. Even if it doesn’t drop of between packs, it takes too much time and resources, which is causing ripple effects with runic power gain and aoe threat.
I tanked plenty M0s during launch, but since I despise pugging with a passion I don’t really tank much and just do weekly M+ with guildies. Also, let’s not forget that the OP is complaining about this stuff while having done a +2 where “just don’t die lol” is a very legitimate recommendation.
From what I’ve done and seen, Spires platforms aren’t an issue. As long as you don’t mess up you should be able to do the entire platform in ~3 pulls opening with DRW or Rune Tap if DRW is on CD, then fly over to the the next platform and have DRW back up for the opener. This might change with key levels / affixes, of course.
Having people die and waiting for resses will screw absolutely everybody that has any sort of buff / resource upkeep, so that’s not just a Blood DK problem (outlaw rogues will want to strangle you IRL if you make them wait and lose good Rolls, Alacrity and Slice and Dice just because somebody didn’t move out of AoE). The only tanks that aren’t really affected by this are the paladin and brewmaster. Everybody else will start bleeding resources fast with any sort of extended downtime.
Sure, DKs get affected twice as badly by downtime because not only do we bleed runic power, but could also lose BS, however that’s just life (and the reason why I don’t pug, especially as a tank).
Can I first congratulate you on having the best name a Tauren tank can have? Gave me a good laugh first thing in the morning. Now Back on topic!
Admittedly, when poo happens in a dungeon, chances are it’s because of player error, not class or level design.
I think where OP and Petergrippin (omg you guys and your names well done, love them) is that when poo does indeed happen, blood dks are punished more compared to other tanks. Paladins for example are just good to go from the first second, build threat and resources really quickly.
I do appreciate that an experienced blood dk, can get the class going and basically never stop, but you can say about any expert player owning their game mechanics about any video game , no?
PS: apparently we’re not allowed to use the word sh*t.
I mean I am not saying “hey guys, I am the best bdk on EU and it’s trash for m+15”. I am just pointing out mechanical design flaws I found while tanking a lot as bdk while leveling and how much busywork it has to do compared to over tanks.
Exactly. Blood DK is already the weakest tank in terms of tuning at the moment and on top of that we get punished more than any other tank for any sort of downtime.
This is just not true. If you’re referring to rage for warriors and druids it slowly depletes out of combat and they get it back much faster. Neither of them require the same amount of time to get things going again either, so they can start doing AoE dmg right away. Druids can just shift into bear form before a pull to gain almost enough rage for ironfur. Not to mention Guardian has more armor baseline than DK has with Bone Shield up. Same goes for Warrior. Demon Hunters don’t need a full resource bar to live. As you already pointed out, downtime between pulls doesn’t matter for Paladin and Monk. So that leaves DKs. We are the only tank that needs to juggle 2 different resources to both live and do damage.
The point still stands. Yes it’s doable if you manage your cooldown rotation perfectly and never let a second go to waste. But this is not required by any other tank, hence the thread by OP.
I never denied that BDKs get hit the hardest by downtime. DKs in general get hit bad by any sort of downtime because every spec has some sort of ability, be it direct upkeep or cooldown reduction that just completely crashes the moment the DK can’t hit stuff.
BDKs are upkeep-based, largely reactive tanks, so losing said upkeep due to downtime obviously hits them the hardest. This is simply a matter of fact and has been a part of the spec for ages now. Blizzard clearly knows that the spec has issues. It looks like they are doing smaller incremental buffs this time around for most balance issues, which is why BDKs got a bunch of extra armor on Bone Shield, and more buffs are likely coming if this won’t be enough.
The one thing that I don’t think will change any time soon is the reliance on pacing and buff/resource upkeep. If somebody doesn’t like this sort of gameplay then they, unfortunately, are better off just rerolling to another tank for the expansion.
The ironic part is that with Bull Rush, Door of Shadows and Wraithwalk this isn’t even accurate anymore.
Paladin’s “BS” is called “SoTR”. That too needs resources to build before you pop it up.
I played insofar DK/ DH/ Paladin and i think the most well rounded tank of the three is Paladin, hands down, for a roadwide list of reasons. Then the DH and very lastly DK, who absolutely needs a full gear of Versa b4 he starts considering pushing keys past 7.
The point is though that Holy Power decays much slower than most other resources and you don’t even need a full bar for SoTR. You could theoretically drop your Shining Light stacks while having to wait, but at the same time you also have the option to prolong them by using SoTR since it doesn’t require a target.
And if you happen to be running Blessed Hammer then you’re actually gaining resources while waiting for resses, drinks or run backs. DKs don’t have such options, unless you count dropping DnD for 10 RP.
I main bdk but lvled up a dh tank alt, went into +12 with friends and we agreed we try to finish it so I get +12 vault. They are all aprox io score as a random +12 pug (900-1100 io)…
It would be nothing special if I didn’t mention that I was tanking on +12 with ilvl 175 on necro/bolst/tyran week with no legendary, enchants, foods, conduits, traits and 3-4 day of class experience…
The goal was to finish only, I expected that I will get totally devastated, that we’ll need to cc split the packs. I was worried about the boss oneshottig me… What happened? We timed the tun w/o wipes at bosses and a single wipe on the trash… Apart from that, I didn’t even teigger the last resort talent. I feel like the spiky dmg was even lower than on 218 main dk. It might be true that we controlled packs good, especially myself with many sigls, but even the tyran boss dmg was easily survivable… Feels really weird… Adding a screenshot: https://imageupload.io/rp2wen450I.i
To me, the issue with Blood DK is indeed the build up and I have an idea similar to Vilindel.
Correct me if I am wrong if the following wouldn’t solve the DK issue, but if they would add a passive that would (e.g.):
grant you 5 stacks of boneshield if you have less than 5 stacks when out of combat.
boneshields can only drop below 5 if you dont refresh them when in combat.
Note: 5 is an arbitrary number, but you get the idea.
In my opinion, this would solve the main problem with DKs.
And yes yes yes of course Bone shield is not a problem if you play the dungeon perfectly. However, any downtime is extremely punishing whether it is due to:
DCs, ressing a dead player, a wipe, kiting/dropping necrotic stacks, certain travelling distances (uncommon, but happens).
Lastly, The dancing rune weapon + marrow rend opener works well on paper… but it basically means your first 3 GCDs wont be generating AOE threat unless you run in with something like swarming mist. Death and decay also doesnt solve the threat issue with split groups, especially involving ranged. What I am saying is that this opener feels too long for some groups when you often need instant AoE threat first.
Would love to see some changes from legion to bfa reverted like the bone shield change from 20% DR to armor and the veteran of the third war getting armor back.
Another thing i would love to see reverted is the talent tightening grasp and eventually a bigger dnd radius. Maybe make blood plague generate some more threat or change the mastery to give at least 100% + mastery %age phys absorb shield of the healing done with death strike.
Slow moving juggernaut is how blizzard described us but so far they only delivered on the slow moving part. When are we going to get the juggernaut part?
There is very low setup to blood DK.
Start by using vampiric blood before pull.
Hit marrowrend + runetap then blood boil.
After that, proceed with your classic rotation.
I like the necrolord covenant because it generates a lot of aggro and gives you a nice amount of boneshield charges.
Vampiric blood before you pull, are you mad? Please explain why I would pop a defensive on a pull. Only reason Id see any1 do this would be if you get 1shotted easily.
Exactly for this.
There will be a nerf to a lot of mobs on next reset. But before it hits live, for a lot of packs in the current set up you need to pop defensive quite early.
Vampiric blood has a very short CD and I find it really nice to have it up when you engage without any boneshield charge. If you already have some on you then don’t bother with vampiric blood on pull.
Now Back on topic!