You have mobility in the form of double charge / heroic leap / intervene, mobility is essential for effective key running and big pulls in particular. Blood DK has no such mobility, Death Advance adds mere 35% speed increase and does not stand even close to warrior’s or any other tank’s mobility kit. As Atlasfallen pointed out, to compensate for this we got grip, the idea is that while warrior charges torwards enemies, blood DK pulls them to him.
You also got balanced offensive utility kit, comprising of mass stun with short CD an excellent AoE interrupt, that locks all casters for 6 seconds and is off global cooldown. We got Gorefiend’s grasp, an inferior version of vDH’s Sigil of Chain, which requires us to sacrifice our already weak survivability or dps to pick. It is so bad that many bDKs often skip it even in coordinated groups.
And finally you got your battle shout, the best raid buff for all melees and hunters. And we got … nothing? Okay, in regards to DPS DKs, you can make an arguement that they’re extremely tanky (prolly the tankiest dps specs in the game) with very good self sustain, so one can reasonably argue that it can be a trade off. But what about blood DK? They’re not compensated in any way. Last season we at least could provide strong personal damage to compensate for lack of raid buff or any unique utility, but this lost our damage and as a “compensation” have been given utility nerfs in return.
I did not demand anything, I gave you an example, and my example is as unreasonable, as your statement that “bDks do not need raid buff”. If you have a clear idea / fix other than raid buff that will make blood DK useful and competitive in terms of utility with other tanks, go ahead and tell us. Vague statements like “no raid buff is needed, something else will work out” are not helpful.
This is exactly the logic Blizzard applied this season and look what happened. In order quote " help DK get an identity without tuning or raid buff" the dev morons removed from us our crucial tool for big pulls & holding threat (Abom Limb) nerfed our AMZ by 72% and called it a “buff” (Looking at you, George Velev) and reduced damage of San’layne signature ability - Blood Beast- by 90% (yes, 90%), basically killing off the ability.
After such horrendous “rework” many players, myself included, simply do not believe in the competence of devs to do any meaningful rework except for providing some flat raid buff. Because with such degenerate logic they used in this patch, the next “logical” step would be to “make Deathstrike more impactful, by giving it 1 min cooldown”.
I agree, people sometimes can’t draw a line between “I need to play this spec better” and “this spec is simply badly designed / undertuned to be worth playing”.
Regarding people saying “bDK dies from oneshots on higher keys”, what they often mean are not technically one shots. Mostly these are synchronized melee swings of multiple enemies, when you’re getting slapped by 8-10 enemies 5-6 million each hit within one global and you were not lucky to parry any of them.
This happens when some of your group mates do a mass stun, or you do a mass grip yourself (another reason why bDKs skip it sometimes), it synchronizes all the melee attacks of the enemies, resulting in you as a blood DK getting oblitirated within one global, sometimes even with defensives being up. Other tanks do not face such problems due to higher mitigation / higher avoidance / stagger of the comibation of those.
I am very skeptical of reholy’s opinions, this guy keeps telling everybody on discord that rune tap is a bad talent, never worth picking. He is a capable bDK ofc, but this and some other statements along just erroded my confidence in him.
I prefer Kyrasis and Rupi, when it comes to seeking advice and inspiration on blood DK’s playstyle.
I think bDK’s playstyle is the reason why many people play this spec in the first place.
I understand why it may seem to many people that vDH’s and bDK’s playstyle are similiar, but if you actually play both of them you will notice that they’re quite different.
1.1. vDH’s self healing generation is largely passive, you get it from doing your normal dps rotation, your damage intake is much smoother and you simply take much less damage. Once you get enough stacks of fraility, you can confidently tank hard hitting mobs even without any cooldowns.
1.2. bDK’s self healing is much more reactive, you have to hoard runic power and use DS reactively as you take damage.
2.1. vDH is in danger usually only on the start of the pull as you gather threat and establish stacks of fraility.
2.2. bDK is in danger all the time, except for maybe during DRW buff.