Yesterday Blizzard revealed the tier 13 set bonuses for each class as they will be appearing on the PTR. So let's have a quicklook at the Blood Death Knight ones:
2 Piece
"When an attack drops your health below 35%, one of your Blood Runes will immediately activate and convert into a Death Rune for the next 20 sec. This effect cannot occur more than once every 45 sec"
To me this set bonus is really disappointing, all it really means is that if you have a frost or unholy rune (or rune tap is off cooldown) available when you drop below 35% health you will always be able to use a Death Strike. Unfortunately bar diseases (which are used in pairs anyway) we don't use any abilities in our regular rotation that cost a single frost or unholy rune. With the upcoming changes to outbreak even our diseases won't use runes so I'm left wondering when Blizzard expect us to be taking advantage of this bonus.
Bears, Warriors and Paladins all get bonuses based around damage absorption which (shock horror) actually help them tank and we get this which really doesn't. I seriously hope this doesn't survive the PTR.
4 piece
"Your Vampiric Blood ability also affects all party and raid members for 50% of the effect it has on you"
I love this set bonus! 12% extra healing once a minute for the whole raid is huge in any encounter with high raid damage, glyphed (which with this set bonus it really should be) this increases even further to 20% extra healing. Expect your healing team to want you to co-ordinate with them when this ability is being used, imagine this popped at the same time as tranquility!
Bears, Warriors and paladins get similar 4 piece bonuses that make one of their cooldowns into a raid cooldown which forces us to wonder: Just how much raid damage is there going to be in the Deathwing raid?
Adriaria
The blogged exploits of a casually raiding Blood Death Knight.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Tuesday 13 September 2011
News catch up
Finding time to blog is hard =/ but I am going to be sitting down on my days off and writing over everything else to make sure I'm getting blog posts up. This post is just going to be a bit of a news catch up.
First off the biggest news for DK tanks: Ghostcrawlers Bloody Mitigation dev cooler,
He talks a bit about the different mitigation models the devs considered but I'm not going into that since he didn't announce which model they were going to be using. We did get an early look into some possibilities for DKs in 4.3:
1) Outbreak
Outbreak is going to reduced to a 30 second cooldown for Blood DKs. This means we never have to use up runes to reapply our diseases, which means 1 more Death Strike. Those of us specced into Epidemic had 50% upkeep of diseases with outbreak anyway but this is a nice change, though it does make the talent useless for us.
This is mostly a quality of life change but will probably also see the death of the repeated attempts at disease-less tanking, the debuff and damage from the diseases is certainly worth a GCD for no runes once every 30 seconds.
2) Blade Barrier.
Ghostcrawler briefly highlights the odd situation where the mechanics of Death Strike encourage you to save your runes for the right moments but blade barrier forces us to use them to keep it up. It's changing to something passive (though we don't know what) in 4.3 until they can figure out what to do with it.
This change will make us even more Death Strike centric for the moment but we have no idea how this is going to turn out in the long run.
3) Death Strike.
From 4.3 Death strike will always heal you and always trigger blood shield regardless of if it hits or not. This may very well be a temporary change as Blizz have been going on about wanting tanks to care about hit and expertise again lately as Ghostcrawler acknowledges.
This change means hit and expertise don't matter at all to us at the moment, Reforge it all away!
4) Bone Shield.
Ghostcrawler warns us that this may not happen but I sure hope it does! The idea for bone shield is to make it a 'smart' damage reducer that only triggers a charge when you take a large amount of damage at once.
This would be fantastic as it would make us a little easier to heal, at the moment a mistimed Death Strike at the wrong time can be a nightmare for healers as we take a good chunk more damage then the classes with block. It also gives us a minor saving on runes as we won't need to be hitting bone shield once a minute.
5) Blood Shield.
I'll just quote here: Our idea is to somehow turn Blood Shield into more of a pool that you actively try to build and maintain. A system where you’re able to add to a pool of absorption would provide more granularity, which in turn would be more forgiving of errors or streaks of bad luck.
I envision this as Daniel Whitcomb over at WoW insider does, where instead of taking 1 hit then being depleted your shield would absorb a smaller % of each hit but last longer making it like a block that you need to maintain and top up. This would help make the damage we take less spiky for healers.
So that's the big news for DK tanks. Onto guild news!
Our guild had a slow slow slow slow slow start into Firelands. We were finishing up tier 11 and then we just hit a wall. We tried Beth'tilak for weeks with absolutely zero success, eventually we switched to attempting Shannox who we downed the first week we tried (boy did we feel stupid) and got on farm really easily but we were having problems still.
We just couldn't kill Beth'tilak. The lack of hunter didn't help but I simply cannot explain it we just could not down that boss, we barely even made it to phase 2 and when we did the hits I was taking as a DK were just insane. We had a couple of goes at Lord Rhiolith but couldn't get him down either. Morale was at an all time low despite our casual status.
Then a few weeks ago something clicked. I dunno if people had more gear or if suddenly the fights just made sense, or even if it was the slight nerf to Beth'tilak but something happened. We went in and one shotted Shannox, two shotted Beth'tilak and one shotted Lord Ryolith and even make a start on Baleroc. It was a fantastic night and we now have the three bosses on comfortable farm (though the RNG of Rhyolith likes to mess with us), the mystery continues to perplex me!
Last week we also got our first kill of Baleroc which we had to work very hard for as we seemed to be really pushing the ceiling of what our DPS could put out with all the shard switches. We kept hitting the enrage timer but after an hour of attempting it we managed to eke out that last little bit of DPS we needed putting us 4/7.
Which is why the most recent bit of news upsets me.
Blizzard are Nerfing Tier 12. One of our biggest regrets as a guild that started up in Cataclysm was that we started raiding too late to finish tier 11 before the big round of nerfs hit, we wanted to experience the content as it was. We were determined that we wouldn't repeat that mistake and that we would beat Ragnaros normal mode before 4.3 came out and it was nerfed. Sadly Blizzard aren't waiting until 4.3 but are instead going to gradually nerf the bosses down before it comes out.
I have to say I agreed with the principle of the tier 11 nerfs. I like that when it was no longer current content they made it available to a larger selection of the player base, I like that it is much easier to gear alts through them. It was just unfortunate that we hadn't finished tier 11 when it happened.
As I have said a few times before, we are a casual guild but we most certainly don't want these nerfs. We want to get through the content yes but we also wanted to experience it as it originally was.
Guess we won't have that chance now =/
Adriaria
Edit: We also hit Guild level 25! Guess we have used Mass Resurrection so much already it feels like we've had it ages =p
First off the biggest news for DK tanks: Ghostcrawlers Bloody Mitigation dev cooler,
He talks a bit about the different mitigation models the devs considered but I'm not going into that since he didn't announce which model they were going to be using. We did get an early look into some possibilities for DKs in 4.3:
1) Outbreak
Outbreak is going to reduced to a 30 second cooldown for Blood DKs. This means we never have to use up runes to reapply our diseases, which means 1 more Death Strike. Those of us specced into Epidemic had 50% upkeep of diseases with outbreak anyway but this is a nice change, though it does make the talent useless for us.
This is mostly a quality of life change but will probably also see the death of the repeated attempts at disease-less tanking, the debuff and damage from the diseases is certainly worth a GCD for no runes once every 30 seconds.
2) Blade Barrier.
Ghostcrawler briefly highlights the odd situation where the mechanics of Death Strike encourage you to save your runes for the right moments but blade barrier forces us to use them to keep it up. It's changing to something passive (though we don't know what) in 4.3 until they can figure out what to do with it.
This change will make us even more Death Strike centric for the moment but we have no idea how this is going to turn out in the long run.
3) Death Strike.
From 4.3 Death strike will always heal you and always trigger blood shield regardless of if it hits or not. This may very well be a temporary change as Blizz have been going on about wanting tanks to care about hit and expertise again lately as Ghostcrawler acknowledges.
This change means hit and expertise don't matter at all to us at the moment, Reforge it all away!
4) Bone Shield.
Ghostcrawler warns us that this may not happen but I sure hope it does! The idea for bone shield is to make it a 'smart' damage reducer that only triggers a charge when you take a large amount of damage at once.
This would be fantastic as it would make us a little easier to heal, at the moment a mistimed Death Strike at the wrong time can be a nightmare for healers as we take a good chunk more damage then the classes with block. It also gives us a minor saving on runes as we won't need to be hitting bone shield once a minute.
5) Blood Shield.
I'll just quote here: Our idea is to somehow turn Blood Shield into more of a pool that you actively try to build and maintain. A system where you’re able to add to a pool of absorption would provide more granularity, which in turn would be more forgiving of errors or streaks of bad luck.
I envision this as Daniel Whitcomb over at WoW insider does, where instead of taking 1 hit then being depleted your shield would absorb a smaller % of each hit but last longer making it like a block that you need to maintain and top up. This would help make the damage we take less spiky for healers.
So that's the big news for DK tanks. Onto guild news!
Our guild had a slow slow slow slow slow start into Firelands. We were finishing up tier 11 and then we just hit a wall. We tried Beth'tilak for weeks with absolutely zero success, eventually we switched to attempting Shannox who we downed the first week we tried (boy did we feel stupid) and got on farm really easily but we were having problems still.
We just couldn't kill Beth'tilak. The lack of hunter didn't help but I simply cannot explain it we just could not down that boss, we barely even made it to phase 2 and when we did the hits I was taking as a DK were just insane. We had a couple of goes at Lord Rhiolith but couldn't get him down either. Morale was at an all time low despite our casual status.
Then a few weeks ago something clicked. I dunno if people had more gear or if suddenly the fights just made sense, or even if it was the slight nerf to Beth'tilak but something happened. We went in and one shotted Shannox, two shotted Beth'tilak and one shotted Lord Ryolith and even make a start on Baleroc. It was a fantastic night and we now have the three bosses on comfortable farm (though the RNG of Rhyolith likes to mess with us), the mystery continues to perplex me!
Last week we also got our first kill of Baleroc which we had to work very hard for as we seemed to be really pushing the ceiling of what our DPS could put out with all the shard switches. We kept hitting the enrage timer but after an hour of attempting it we managed to eke out that last little bit of DPS we needed putting us 4/7.
Which is why the most recent bit of news upsets me.
Blizzard are Nerfing Tier 12. One of our biggest regrets as a guild that started up in Cataclysm was that we started raiding too late to finish tier 11 before the big round of nerfs hit, we wanted to experience the content as it was. We were determined that we wouldn't repeat that mistake and that we would beat Ragnaros normal mode before 4.3 came out and it was nerfed. Sadly Blizzard aren't waiting until 4.3 but are instead going to gradually nerf the bosses down before it comes out.
I have to say I agreed with the principle of the tier 11 nerfs. I like that when it was no longer current content they made it available to a larger selection of the player base, I like that it is much easier to gear alts through them. It was just unfortunate that we hadn't finished tier 11 when it happened.
As I have said a few times before, we are a casual guild but we most certainly don't want these nerfs. We want to get through the content yes but we also wanted to experience it as it originally was.
Guess we won't have that chance now =/
Adriaria
Edit: We also hit Guild level 25! Guess we have used Mass Resurrection so much already it feels like we've had it ages =p
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