Blood Death Knight vs. Dragon Soul.
When the Lich King's control of his death knights was broken, his former champions sought revenge for the horrors committed under his command. After their vengeance was won, the death knights found themselves without a cause and without a home. One by one they trickled into the land of the living in search of a new purpose.
Table of Contents:
-Intro
-Talents
-Glyphs
-Stats
-Gems
-Spells & Cooldowns
-Discussion
-Conclusion
[Intro]
Blood Death Knights are definitely the best tanks of patch 4.3. This guide will tell you absolutely everything you need to know. If there’s anything else, please feel free to include a comment or ask me in-game.
[Talents]
http://imgur.com/N7hMSJN
There are many spec choices, such as AOE and single target agro and the dps dk. I have tested each of the specs and I can tell you that the following spec is my favorite, and the most effective in dragon soul in my opinion.
[Glyphs]
http://imgur.com/tj3zJy4
Prime:
-Death strike
-Heart strike
-Rune strike (single agro)
-Death and Decay (AOE agro)
Major:
-AMS
-Rune Tap
-Vampiric Blood
Minor: (take whatever the **** you want)
-Blood tap
-Horn of winter
-Resilient Grip
[Stats]
Your main concern is basically this.
“I AM BL00D I AM NEED VERY MASTERY GOOD DEATH STRIKE SPAM HAHA!”
This kind of sums up an *****ic way of playing blood, but not quite.
Your stat priority should look something like this:
Mastery>Dodge=Parry>Haste>Hit>Expertise>Crit
[Gems]
Meta: Austere Shadowspirit Diamond
81 stamina and 2% armor value
Epic:
Yellow: Fractured Lightstone
Red: (orange) Fine lava Coral
Blue: (Green) Puissant elven peridot
Blue:
Yellow: Fractured Amberjewel
Red: (orange) Fine Ember Topaz
Blue: (green) Puissant Dream Emrald
Only use an orange or green gem in a red or blue socket if the socket bonus is at least 20 mastery. Anything other than that is ****. Gem pure mastery otherwise.
[Spells and Cooldowns]
Ok we’re down to the fun part now. Are you tired of being a death-strike-spamming noob and always dying? Are you tired of not having enough runes for a death strike when you’re down to 10-20% health? Tune in for some great tips and tricks.
What should be on your main action bar is the following:
Death strike – Heart strike – Rune strike – Pestilence – Death and Decay – Outbreak – Rune Tap – Raise Dead – Death Pact.
What you should avoid is applying diseases using Scourge strike and Icy Touch. Wasting our precious runes on stupid diseases???? Aint nobody got time for dat!
Most blood dk’s tend to drop their blood shield at crucial points of the fight, which leaves them in trouble with panicking healers. You don’t wanna be that guy, so you use your runes and cooldowns wisely!
A good rotation to keep runes regenerating and runic power flowing is the following.:
Death Strike> Heart Strike>Rune Strike>Blood boil (if proc from talent)>Death Strike > repeat lol
With the [Crimson Scourge] Talent, you have a chance to have your next blood boil cost no runes. This is a great way to keep runes regenerating. It’s also a great method of saving resources when AOE-ing. However, blood boil should only be used in single target fights WHEN IT PROCS.
There’s a big list of cooldowns for blood dks, so here they are with a little on what they do:
-Outbreak: Applies diseases on a target for ~30 seconds
-Army of the Dead: Summons a **** load of little ghouls to do some damage. In addition, you take less damage while channeling equal to your dodge+parry.
-Dancing Rune Weapon: Gives 20% extra parry for a few seconds and works as a mirror image. Use it to increase dps or to gain some ctc on multiple add fights.
-Vampiric Blood: (Glyphed) no longer increases max health, but increases healing taken by 40%. Counts as a raid healing cd if you got 4set t13
-Icebound Fortitude: Reduces all damage taken by 50% for 10 sec.
-Horn of Winter: Increases str and agi for 3 mins (glyphed) and generates rp.
-Empower Rune Weapon: Regenerates all your runes immediately. Best used if all runes are completely depleted.
-Bone Shield: a 6-charge shield that increases damage dealt and reduces damage taken. Have a 100% uptime on it for a good time ;)
-Anti Magic Shell: Absorbs 75% of magic damage for 7 seconds(Glyphed) opieop!
-Mind Freeze: your basic interrupt.
-Strangulate: your basic silence.
-Blood tap: converts a blood rune to a death rune. Works best with 2set t13.
-Rune Tap: a self heal for 10% max health. Also heals raid for 5% if glyphed.
-Raise Dead: summons a ghoul for a minute to fight with you
-Death pact: kills your summoned ghoul to heal you for 40% health
-Dark simulacrum: places a ward on the enemy that allows you to unleash a duplicate of the spell the target used mana on. Basically a spell steal!
[Discussion]
After gearing and reforging and speccing and gemming and reading your spell book, you wanna know how a blood death knight works, dontcha? Well listen up close.
Unlike protection paladins and warriors, Blood death knights rely heavily on active mitigation instead of passive mitigation. What does this mean? It means that blood dks are not supposed to stop incoming damage. Our mastery doesn’t add to CTC, but it gives us the glorious beef shield! What does this beef shield do? Death strike knows. Death strike heals you for a minimum of 7% of your max health, or 20% of the damage you have taken over the last 5 seconds. What your mastery does is it takes the death strike heal and places a shield on you using a scaling percentage. The optimum amount of mastery to have is 32 points around 4400 rating, which gives each death strike heal a 200% beef shield.
Tier 13 gear is ****ing great for blood dks for 3 reasons:
1) Every piece except the helmet has mastery
2) The 2set bonus gives a death rune if we take high damage
3) The 4set bonus gives the whole raid 50% vamp blood effect(20% healing)
How is all this stuff good? Well, tier 13 makes mastery stacking a hella lot easier. If you have 4set, you should have 32 mastery with no trinkets.
Also, the 2set bonus gives a death rune in the place of a blood rune. If you use blood tap here (generate a death rune in the place of a depeleted blood rune) you have yourself a death strike! Since the damage you took was high, you should stack an amazing beef shield.
The 4set bonus really should be considered a healing cooldown. It is the cooldown healers ask for when they’re all out of cooldowns, and death knights should call it once used. What does it do? Oh it only increases the raids healing income by 20% if glyphed lol no big deal. This is kind of equivilant to a holydin’s avenging wrath.
[Conclusion]
BLOOD DK OPIEOP! Delete that feral bear piece of **** and make a blood dk!
Blood dks are the strongest tanks in 4.3, AND they have the highest damage output among all other tanks. So prot warriors and paladins 10k dps can suck my 30k’s ballsack! I hope you enjoyed this guide, please comment below any points that I missed or anything additional you would like to know. Thanks!
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Member
Blood Death Knight vs. Dragon Soul: a 4.3.4 guide
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Member
wow great guide :D
but I don't think 4set alone will give u 32 mastery... and feral druids are good so smd! btw what trinkets do u use and which ones are bis
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Member
I have found that it is much more beneficial to prioritize haste over Dodge=Parry. Reason to this is because why would we want to waste stats on something that stops incoming attacks when we have a blood shield that absorbs it. With haste it means faster rune regeneration, so more death strikes, more heals, more shield and more damage. In a 7/8 HC DS (back when spine was bugged lel) my healers where saying how the damage was less spikey as haste>ctc and allowed them to not blow as much mana on those 'crucial moments with no blood shield' coz lol I never went a second without blood shield up. As Dodge and parry is just a % chance it's too unreliable, your out of runes and now a huge hit is coming at you, if you don't dodge/parry that then oh **** buttons have to be hit.
Just my 2cents
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Member
And how is this different from mine?
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Member
im sorry if you think i stole this from you lol?? i wrote this for an old guild (Core) and thought why not publish it
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Member
No I mean there isn't much difference in this to what there is in mine except from a different spec, which is weird at that :/
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Member
ok thenn...
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Member
Yet you see so many stam stacked blood DK tanks.... it is like they came fresh off the WotLK train and crashed into cata. Seen one BiS DK tank with 268k health. I think someone in my guild seen him with kings and priest buff and it was close to 290k. So any thoughts on this style of game play? Also no... I am not one of them stam stacked tanks.
I am Mastery stacked, but have switched to frost dps... I sometimes miss tanking, but I also do not miss the stress that goes with it lol. Being DPS you can almost be brain dead... and I kind of enjoy it in a way.
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Member
You see there are many builds for the blood death knight. Blizz just put it out there and let people have the freedom. I've seen full dodge blood dks, full stamina, full mastery, and haste after 150% mastery. Each of these builds seem to work fine if you make it work for yourself, but this guide discusses only the build I use and find most appropriate for dragon soul.
As for the full stamina topic, I believe it could work after getting at least 150% mastery on the blood shield, and using 2 soulfrinkers then becomes viable as they heal for 10k or so per proc. I have seen 350k blood dks with 2 soul drinkers. Not many, just like 2 or so. Surprisingly enough, it works. I just feel like it makes the play style more Druidic whereas you heal the damage, and not mitigate it.
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Member
As someone that has been on both sides, healer and tank, i totally despise Stam stacking Tanks from -any- class
You dont take less dmg, you dont avoid it, you dont make it easier for the healer to keep you alive (or the raid) you are just, basically, less likely to get 1-shot from full health, and that's all it's to it, besides that, it's painful for the healer to see the tank eating huge chunks of dmg and then having to top those 300k HP again
Also, stamina stacking can be "virtually" achieved by well-placed Death-strikes ~, i can be a 200k HP DK, and properly land X ammount of Deathstrikes that can add up to a +100k Blood Shield that will mitigate the dmg i want it to mitigate, and for Magic Dmg, there's AMS (and Magic Attacks are pretty "predictable" on Dragon Soul~ and Cata Raids in general)
As for Dodge-Parry oriented DKs, i'll put it simple: Blood Shield is a -RELIABLE- form of mitigation, you bring it up when you want to, you mitigate the hits you want to mitigate (implying you actually know how to manage your runes), Dodge and Parry are RNG based, totally uncontrollable, so Master > Dodge=Parry
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Member
I could not agree more about the stamina part, but one does feel mighty with an insanely large health pool (until they realize how ****ty it is).
As for dodge and parry, they share deminishing returns, so you pretty much need them to be around 18% in bis normal gear (mastery+parry/dodge on each piece). However, blood shield actually revolves around taking damage, not avoiding it. This is the argument that haste stacking blood dks are going after.
Put it this way: more haste = more runes = more death strikes.
Lacking dodge and parry in a raid as a haste dk could stack up a much larger blood shield if played and managed well.
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Member
What are your caps for these stats: Mastery>Dodge=Parry>Haste>Hit>Expertise>Crit ?
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Member
How about asking on my actual guide instead of one which isnt good or indepth? I explain it all over there.
http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?325589
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