Not happy to be excluded from the high end mythic + as a blood DK. Out of the top 20 tanks, 18 of them are Vengeance Demon Hunters, 1 Brewmaster Monk, and 1 Guardian Druid.
Are there any plans to help balance tanks that are not mobile? Adding mobs that hinder kiting would be a nice change. Buffing our damage/survivability would also be a good trade-off to low mobility.
This is why I recently changed. The class/spec is not (in my opinion) designed for a Kite-centric meta. Honestly, AMZ is not a big enough reason to chance a BDK when so much of the success/failure is on the tanks ability to move.
Get nightfae then run in grab threat , pop deaths due with slow , soul shape and run your butt far away like a scared little tank . It’s really fun TANKING .
Do you find any issues with threat when kiting? Would imagine Elysian Decree makes this not an issue.
I wonder if they added a skittish affix but based on tank distance to the mob.
i think Venthyr was a red herring, and Night Fae is actually the correct way to go as Blood.
I think, at least for some people venthyr was the ultimate compromise if you wanted to play all 3 specs. Also how would you ever play night fae as a dk. That should be bannable.
Blood DK damage is just unreasonably low to begin (see all the AP values) without going full Deathstrike damage gimmick mode which requires too much setup on-pull and doesn’t help with AoE threat or mitigation. Also Heart Strike has a target hardcap instead of a softcap which makes it even harder to hold threat. The majority of Blood DK’s damage is auto-attacks and Blood Boil which is frankly unacceptable.
Door of Shadows needs to scale with GCD reduction and baseline remove roots. Even if it was a 30-second cooldown its still unviable for combat in its current state. Venthyr soulbinds in general got shafted horribly throughout beta to the point you wouldn’t even notice a difference if they were disabled. Draven’s starting node is the only one with some kind of unique function, but there’s no “real-world” application for it since dying is not desirable and if everyone is dead the mob evades and reset health before you detonate.
If they just Buff DK HP by a lot ( 40-60%) they could leave every thing else the same and it would play no differently, but give DK’s enough staying power to actually use DS to it’s fullest. Even in higher level M+ you would have 3-4 sec before entering danger zones, and that’s enough time for a dk to react.
im just putting this out there.
My average ST DPS is 2700-2900.(without Prideful buff)
My average DPS at the end of a M+ is generally 3400-3600.
40-45% of my damage is Death Strike.
Is this bad relative to other tanks?
I am a tank so i dont get the oppurtunity to see how other tanks are performing in M+
Considering i played my Pally the other day and felt immortal while pulling 4k-5k on bosses, yes extremely bad. One of the things dk was good at self healing got completely overshadowed by DH and Pally. If you were to make a comparison Blood DK is like playing DDR on the highest setting while every other take is on normal.
I mean anyone who doesn’t wanna play boring BoS basically. 2 Obliterate hits+KM looks pretty good. Considering most M+ I do on frost i’m topping dps or 2nd i’d say its ok. Other than that playing Night fae when i swap to blood if i ever feels so Bad cause like you said NF blood/unholy feels so bad.
Some really great ideas here. There was another idea in another thread that suggested adding a 1-2% movement speed per bone shield. Of course the problem in m+ is that our bone shields drop too quickly.
Really hoping Blizz is planning a buff or rework soon to address our kiting and low damage issues. M+ feels really really bad.
At what key will kiting be required? Is it just when there are bad affixes or is it just the way it goes?
Thinking of getting back into blood tanking myself.
I think we can face tank fine up to KSM (15) assuming decent gear. However, we will be very stressful on the healer and we pull packs much slower. Making a mistake will be much tougher to recover from. Necrotic weeks really do require kiting. I’ve personally not enjoyed m+ this season.
Im finding that i have to start kitting at +10 telly in with door of shadows with general draven’s mitigation, using swaming mists and blood boild, then generate 6 stacks of bone shield and drop dnd. Then run forest run whilst using chains of ice where i can
These seem like very solid suggestions. Some of them I like more than others though.
Like this one, doing this will make Blood Boil not really worth casting. I was thinking about this would be great with Crimson Scourge but ehhh… I mean, the first thing you do is apply DoTs anyway.
I’m more of a fan of making Blooddrinker baseline that costs RP instead of a Rune, removing its CD and just drains all targets affected by Blood Plague in range. This would make Blood DK do damage from the distance while he is moving.
Death Strike hitting extra targets while sitting in Death and Decay sounds very nifty for Blood to have. Every spec has at least an ability that costs a rune and 2 runes, Marrowrend happens to be one of them. Removing Marrowrend will render Blood have more trouble generating RP from the lack of GCDs.
Death’s Due should also include Marrowrend and Festering Strike to hit an additional target to be honest. 
I think you’re underestimating how powerful damage reductions are, this is an on-demand damage reduction. There was a reason it was once considered over Will of the Necropolis. Turning it into a bootleg Death Strike would make the damage redox very missed.
Other than those changes above, good suggestions! I really like the idea of Dark Succor on Death Strike. It baffles me that why Blood doesn’t have it. .-.
“Developers’ note: We’ve noticed tanks in Mythic Keystone Dungeons feeling pressured to spend more time running away and less time actually tanking than we’d like. In an effort to address this, we’re dialing back the tank damage of a number of dungeon denizens who’ve proven to be particularly painful.”
Seems that Blizzard is aware of the issue but I don’t think this will address the problem. Kiting offers a 100% damage reduction to the tank. I really hope there is more changes planned for patch 9.1.
Think the simplest and an effective fix for Blood DKs is to increase their health pool, maybe by 10% across all levels. It would be a passive buff to Death Strike, Vampiric Blood, Bonestorm, Runes of Sanguination/Stoneskin/Fallen Crusader, and some conduits like Blood Bond and Meat shield. Plus it would give BDK its thematic uniqueness amongst other tanks and more true to what we saw in previous expansions with them having massive health pools sucking the life out of everything around them.
I just want to know why Blood doesnt have Transfusion, but Unholy and Frost do.
Where is that note?
Found it: