Hello fellow Death Knights,
I thought I would try and get some feedback from the BDK community about a proposed change to how bone shield works. I know a lot of these ‘suggestions’ are a little unrealistic, so I’d like to hear from you guys about what you think (I am prepared for the ridicule).
This is an attempt to address our weakness within the M+ environment when pulling fresh packs, without directly buffing our throughput or survivability in any measurable way.
My suggestion is have have bone shield stacks gravitate towards 3 when out of combat. For example, if you are under 3 stacks, you will generate 1 bone shield charge every 3 seconds, up to 3 stacks. When above 3 stacks (e.g. after leaving combat) you will lose a stack every 3 seconds, stopping at 3 stacks.
In combat, functionally everything else is the same, marrowrend does it’s thing by generating stacks, there is no generation/loss of bone shield stacks due to the proposed 3 second timer, that is strictly an out-of-combat mechanic.
My goal here was to leave bone shield management during combat entirely unchanged, and also not have any survivability buffs outside of the first few melee swings. The intention is to eliminate that very small window on a new pull where we don’t have bone shield stacks up. The decision between snap aoe agro and marrowrend is the main reason here, I know personally I have trouble holding a pack on the opener if I don’t use a combination of blood boil, D&D + HS cleave, if the first GCD I use is marrowrend then I’m playing catch-up on the whole pack for threat. However, that being said, there’s a reasonably good chance that I’m just bad.
Pulling a M+ pack with 0 stacks of bone shield unnecessarily puts the tank + healer on the defensive right away, bone shield is not a short term tanking cooldown with a measurable uptime (for example, warrior shield block, DH demon spikes etc), it is designed to have a 100% uptime throughout the fight, DK’s aren’t tuned to engage mobs without boneshield up, so this proposed change is aimed only at addressing the opening seconds on a new pull.
Would like to hear what you guys think, or if you think this is even a problem that needs to be solved in the first place.