Blood DK is a trainwreck!

Classes Death Knight
1

This topic is intended to point out some of the issues with Blood DK and consider ways to improve it.

Background - I’ve been playing DK since they launched in WotLK. Frost, Blood, Unholy. Many, many hours through a number of expansions. Spare me the L2Play thing, I know how to play it.

Blizzard recently buffed the armor bonus we get from Marrowrend, thank you and it does help, but they still feel squishy to me against tough mobs. I play a number of tank specs. Where is the passive damage reduction that other tanks get? Not in my spell book!

Another big issue is with Death and Decay. It lasts 10 seconds, but the cooldown is 15 seconds. That means 1/3 of the time, your heart strike is not cleaving and it’s not helping to hold aggro on a pack. It also means that Death’s Due (Night Fae ability) buffs/debuffs are pretty much guaranteed to roll off. People say “Crimson Scourge procs”. Those are unreliable. If you wait for those, those buffs are rolling off much of the time.

Protection paladins can keep up their consecration all the time. They get damage reduction for being in it. On my pally alt, Consecration lasts 12 seconds and the cooldown is 4 seconds (in lousy gear). Doesn’t it make sense to be able to keep Death and Decay up all the time?

My suggestion: make the cooldown shorter or the same length as the spell duration for Death and Decay. There are Torghast powers that play off Death and Decay. Not being able to keep it up 100% of the time hurts their value, too. Also, the Phearamones legendary plays off it.

You might suggest using the Death’s Certainty legendary to reduce the cooldown for D&D. Guess what the expert says in the biggest online guide? It’s not worth using, even for Night Fae. The legendary choices are weak.

Why does Crimson Scourge have to proc Death and Decay? Make it proc a free Death Strike if you want it to be powerful. Make it proc a use of Vampiric Blood that adds damage reduction.

Using a Blood DK is a pain most of the time. The “pros” who run it know exactly what kind of damage and when the damage is coming (i.e. raids) and they work around it. The average guy tanking watches his health bar drop way down, scaring the healer, and then tries to get it back up quick (like running in Mythic+).

What happened to plate armor being tough? Standing in Oribos in full plate and my damage reduction sucks. Sure, once you get a Marrowrend hit in then you start to see some alright reduction. Don’t ever let that Bone Shield fall off, or you’re in big trouble.

My suggestion: make Blood mechanically easier to use (fixing the Death & Decay duration or cooldown length), give it more baseline damage reduction so it’s a real tank again, and tone down the healing some.

If we are going toward a kiting meta, then you may even want to put a damage reduction on Vampiric Blood and add more mobility. Make it jump like Vengeance Demon Hunter and Protection Warrior; something.

I want to love Blood DK like I used to, but I can’t. Thank you for your time, this trainwreck can be fixed. That is all.

25 Likes
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Bone storm baseline.
Bone storm buffed: free to cast.
Generates bone shield charges while active. Lasts 12seconds.

Replace bone storm on the talent tree with Transfusion.

14 Likes
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Idk id prefer more consistent tankiness. What youre describing would feel like a “12 second invulnerable” button

3 Likes
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There are lots of options to make Blood better.

Blizz could make Red Thirst be our mastery, then it wouldn’t be a stat we actively avoid. Or make Bone storm base line and have mastery lengthen it’s duration.

They could just buff Our HP by 40% and keep us squishy. Then we would be like old Druids, just a giant punching bag.

They could Buff Our damage so if we have to be slow and squishy we could at least be another DPS. But Blizz said it wanted to move away from tanks doing damage and make us juggle aggro instead. /shrug

They could keep buffing armor, and that’s an easy fix, but still leaves some core problems they should really address. If we must be slow and spikey we should really get a large pro to off set that con.

1 Like
5

Honestly, Transfusion probably just should be baseline at this point.

2 Likes
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That or Bonestorm.
Idc which one, but one of them need to be baseline, and the other can be a talent choice.

I prefer Bonestorm is made baseline so that a Legendary can be made for it.
I like the idea of a Legendary that makes Bonestorm a on/off toggle.

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This is exactly how Legion Started too. Prepare to be OP for the second half of the xpac

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WHAT?! Are you trying to tell me you didn’t enjoy wiping your entire raid every time Cenarius threw his spear?

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Thats what Bone Storm is already, lol.
Now it would also be a way to generate Bone Shield charges when you get cornered in those scenarios where you have no resources to generate Bone Shield, and youre struggling to stay alive, but youre running out of options besides just sitting there with downtime.
I feel like this would eliminate those awkward instances.
It wouldnt make us overpowered by any means, our output would be virtually exactly the same. It may oversimplify M+ tanking, but, oh well. Its not like tanking has ever been complex anyways.

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I’d give BDKs some sort of stagger lasting 5 seconds, giving you time to heal up with DS and less stress on your healer.

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The passive damage reduction was put into Bone Shield.

Heart Strike still cleaves outside of DnD it just doesnt hit as many as if you were in your DnD.

The issue with Blood, and it has been known for years, is in concept its either really good, or not good enough. I dont think there has really been a middle ground to Blood. Its either been “Blood is too strong” or like in Firelands “Rag 1 shot me through a 1m blood shield”.

Blood might be to active in its mitigation without the reward for it.

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A large health pool would be enough to make Blood feel mostly balanced. If they just pumped in enough Stam so you can get hit for 3-4 sec while getting set up then death strike to recover most people would be happy enough.

4 Likes
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We really do need a few things to feel a bit better and comparable to other tanks.
An overall damage increase of at least 10% on all skills would be a pretty good start, but still leave us quite a bit lower than other tanks.

A base vers increase of ~3%, as well as a slightly higher vers modifier would reallllly help overall as well.

Also bumping up DnD to drop a % of damage and make it on a shorter CD to keep it flowing.

I’ll have times the stupid DPS pulls a big group in and my dnd is on that 5 second window so the mobs just run around for a couple seconds while I try to get any form of agro.

1 Like
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Those are all good options, but you really could circumvent those with a 90K hp pool. You’d get crushed often, but would bounce back from proper DS use. Then it would fit with what Blizz seems to want DK to be like. Getting smashed 40K, but then healing back to full in seconds. Just need enough health to not die from two 40K hits. Or they could do all the things you said.

Edit: If DPS pull, then DPS die. It’s their issue. If I pull and lose aggro that’s not cool. But if you pull it (on purpose), it’s your add. Have fun with it.

5 Likes
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I kinda think they should change phearomones from having +8% haste to just lowering DnDs CD to have 100% uptime, and allowing for a maximum of two DnDs to be out at once.

Specifically because of those DPS who intentionally “pull more” while your AoE ranged snap aggro isn’t off CD.

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I feel like as long as the meta is “PULL EVERYTHING GO FAST AAAAA HURRY UP TANK”, DKs are going to be in a prickly spot. I do appreciate the mobility that Swarming Mists + Bonestorm offers, but it only helps so much. I agree with suggestions for more HP, as well. Sometimes I do old content and use my HoA for shoots and giggles, and seeing my HP jump to 65k is wild.

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I’d prefer it if they increased our survival via a few changes:

  • Increased HP pool
  • Increased the % at which Will of the Necropolis engages
  • Buff blood shield/mastery
  • some sort of buff to armor/plate (agree with the OP that wearing plate is a joke)

It would also be nice if Marrowrend was still usable without the target or out of melee range, to just give us boneshield stacks. I think that’d solve some issues.

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I think our mastery is pretty terrible, it really needs to just be redone.

My current thinking is that bone storm should be base line and mastery could increase its power or duration.

Turning red thirst into our mastery would be awesome to reduce out vamp blood cd, but prob OP once you got close to 80% up time.

19

All Deathknight spec are a disaster activision and blizzard dropped the ball for sure i am beyond pissed about it

3 Likes
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I know way too many BDKs who stack mastery/crit even though both are crap for our spec, “for the damage”. Only reason why my mastery is so high is because I’ve given up on high level content on this toon, and RNG loves spitting bad gear at me. I got Bargast’s Leash from a weekend event box, for example.

1 Like