Blood DK now getting an additional 6.5% Damage on all abilities

Classes Death Knight
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It is common knowledge that the Damage output from Blood DK has been very low and this was acknowledged by Blizzard and in the last patch they increased all Blood DK ability Damage by a flat 8%.

In addition to this they have now added another flat 6.5% that is to be added as of the 27th of June per this post - Class Tuning Incoming – June 27

So as of right now that will be a flat 14.5% increase to all Blood DK abilities. However, at the moment Blood DK’s Damage is averaging out to be around 30% lower than any of the other tanks when compared. This change means that Blood DK is going to be 15% lower in damage than the other tanks which is still a significant difference overall.

While it can be appreciated that they are trying to improve the damage for Blood DK’s and many would be thinking: ‘Well if we are 30% lower why not just increase all ability damage by something closer that number like 25%’. The problem with that is that it will actually make Blood DK significantly better than any other tank and the reason for this is because of the self sustainability and healing that is connected to their damage overall.

The question will be what is the percentage increase that provides the right balance in terms of damage for Blood DK’s when compared to other tanks and doesn’t tip the scales the other way making Blood too good. We have seen this in the past when Blood becomes superior to other tanks if their damage throughput is a lot higher or even par with other tanks.

If Blood does end up having its damage increased to be on par with the other tanks it will very likely come at significant cost in terms of healing and self sustainability in some way. For example if they increased ability damage by a factor of 25% then they might reduce healing and self sustainability by a factor of 10-15% to balance things. However, that isn’t easy to do either and would almost be a full resign of abilities and talents and their interactions, modifiers and overall numbers.

Will they increase the damage modifier more and if so by how much and at what point is it the tipping point of being too much?

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Self sustainability should not be a factor when discussing tank dps balance. Also the reason BDK has been op in the past was because of borrowed power being extremely broken, most notably s3/s4 of SL tier set. We also lack the utility of other tanks ie. no group buffs, can’t heal the group (amz is considered niche at this point due to its limitations). If anything, blizzard needs to chill with the aura buffs and instead increase our ST (that’s the biggest difference between us and other tanks right now), rework our dead talents (which may lead to an indirect buff), give us at least either practical group healing or some kind of group buff (like motw, shout. etc.)

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I totally agree with the borrowed power perspective however, supposedly some of those aspects were baked in or added in a reduced capacity to the Blood DK toolkit in some way. However, it was done very poorly with fairly problematic design problems as a whole for Blood DK when compared to how it was handled and done for other classes.

Self Sustainability is a factor that can’t be directly ignored fully either for example you could have a Mythic Plus situation where a Blood DK can become a tank that actually doesn’t ever require a healer while the other tanks would; you’d would likely end up with groups preferring to run Blood DK and four DPS for various keys etc. I am not saying this would happen but, it is not impossible either and it is definitely something that they most definitely would be factoring in.

I honestly would like to see them increase the damage that DK’s Diseases do overall to make them a lot more impactful. Maybe something like Blood Plague becomes a Nasty Ebola type Bleed effect that Leeches a percentage of the damage as Health for the DK. In addition it has a damage modifier that decreases by the number of targets effected at the same time. This means that it would do the most damage when it was only effecting one Single Target and provide the best performance returns in terms of the Leeching Health as well etc.

The point you make about the Talent trees is an issue that sadly is not just an issue for Blood DK but is also an issue for Unholy and even Frost. The whole redesign of the DK Talent Trees and even their baseline Abilities has been handled very poorly. There are too many talents and even abilities that are no longer viable or provide anything meaningful for the DK as a whole and it has been this way for a very long time. In some cases it was because a particular talent or ability was nerfed previously in some capacity that was relevant at the time but, even though in the current game state what was done is now irrelevant and should have been removed they aren’t and remain in place.

In addition to all that DK’s have actually had a lot of the various elements they had as part of their toolkits removed because they were deemed to be overpowered or problematic at the time only, to see various other classes over the years obtain those exact same abilities as part of their toolkit. However, even though these classes get these new elements to their toolkits DK’s never had their version of the same thing returned to them. This has meant that overall the DK’s Toolkit has significantly diminished overtime while many other classes have seen their toolkit increase significantly.

A good question to ask if what is the Shared with other classes and the various Unique Toolkit things that each class brings that aren’t personal only benefits and are baseline. If you expand this into talents it becomes a whole other can or worms.
For example

DK brings - Death Grip and Raise Ally (Battle Resurrection)

Paladin brings - Holy Spells (that include healing ones), Divine Shield, Redemption (Resurrection out of combat), Intercession (Battle Resurrection), and Blessing of Protection

Monk brings - Paralysis (Crowd Control), Monk Spells (that include healing ones), and Resuscitate (Out of Combat Resurrection)

Etc.
Straight away you can see a potential problem appearing the DK bring Death Grip and the only baseline thing that can provide some utility but it is not anything that is required. In terms of the battle rez there are many other classes that now have a version of this and they provide more utility and benefits,
It is very clear that the DK needs more beneficial utility to assist them in being a choice that doesn’t actually reduce the utility that would be provided with any other class. In essence it makes the DK less desirable as a whole due to the lack of utility.

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just get sarah that did the rework on paladins to look on dks and we will be gods and solo raids for the next 2 years.

on a serious note, ya we need a group buff other than just fix on bad talents just like other classes had …

An easy one, can be done in less than 5 minutes is to give back our dk presence and we will have a group buff

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1.08*1.065=1.1502

Seems like a 15% buff overall

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