I know a lot of people are playing Deathbringer with blood, but I recently started trying San’Layn running keys and it’s been a lot of fun. It seems to be doing more self healing than DB and the damage isn’t that much worse imo. What is so bad about it that people aren’t playing it?
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Major issues for blood especially were lack of Vampiric Strike proc rate and damage outside of the major CD window, and that window being tied to a defensive ability, Vampiric Blood. Being forced to use a major defensive utility for damage is bad.
Proc rate and damage of Vampiric Strike have both been buffed as of yesterday.
Blood queen window is being changed to apply when you use Dancing Runic Weapon as well in a future patch or hotfix.
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Optimal play requires using Vamp Blood rotationally, which isn’t a good thing.
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DK can self heal if they aren’t getting one-shot. Opting out of Rune-carved Plates really hurts your ability to push high keys.
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You didn’t read the patch notes. It’s tied to rune weapon now.
Idk if it’ll help but I thought I saw them changing the vampiric blood to dancing rune weapon. Not sure if that’ll help anything. But just throwing that out there.
The question was why weren’t people playing it. I answered the question. The change hasn’t happened, and who knows if it will suddenly be good. Right now, it isn’t. Maybe you should try reading the question.
I understand having to play around vampiric blood kind of sucks, but honestly it seems like you get a lot of uptime out of it. Every death strike reduces the CD by around 10 seconds so it’s almost always available each pull. Idk really doesn’t seem too bad
It’s more important at the upper levels, where having a defensive cd tied into a rotation is bad. You can play anything at lower levels.
So part of the issue is that it’s tied to using a defensive rotationally. This is not a good thing for Blood (or any tank really, for that matter) when you get to a certain point.
The other half of the issue is just even when using VB entirely rotationally, Deathbringer is still more durable and provides more damage in general. Some of it is a tuning issue, some of it is a design issue. San’layn was absolutely 1000% busted in beta, and they’re probably better off almost entirely reworking the tree into a different idea than continuing forward with the current iteration. Swapping the trigger to DRW would only partially solve its issues, imo.
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San’layn needs to be redesigned from the ground up for Blood. It’s just fundamentally worse in every way to Deathbringer.
Less damage, extremely clunky. Even changing the Gift to be tied to DRW is bad at it’s core. DRW is still a solid defensive in and of itself giving us the 35% parry.
You can’t force a tank to use cooldowns rotationally to benefit from their already lack luster hero talents. Unless it gets redesigned it likely won’t even come close to Deathbringer.
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I like playing it in both pve and pvp. Its fun and I enjoy the theme. I’m not really a sweatlord though.
Here I’ve answered this a couple of times so I’m just gonna copy the breakdown here.
Deathbringer is the Tankier tree by far. 7.5% physical and magical DR, the reapers mark explosion reduces enemy damage dealt to us by 5%, Executioner gives us a reason to hit marrowrend contributing to having a higher bone count, we get a faster tick rate on blood plague which means get double healing from our disease and we have reduced CD on both Lichborne and Raise Dead which our general tree gives each a minor defensive benefit.
Then concerning the recent “buff” changing it to be reliant on DRW instead of VB:
It would have been good earlier, now it kinda takes away the only thing San’layn had going for it. That being the ability to keep Essence of the Blood Queen up nearly permanently. At the beginning of the beta test we had things that would extend the duration of both VB and EotBQ. We dont have the extender anymore and we can reduce DRWs CD but we can’t use DRW frequently enough to prevent the buff from falling off.
With this change we can keep up EotBQ for the first minute of a pull, if we have DRW, BS, and TS all off CD. Then it falls off and to get it back to max stacks we have to dedicate 7 GCDs to VS to get it back to max stacks. So half of all your button presses during DRW need to be VS to hit cap stacks. And you need to keep Coag up so that’s most of your GCDs for the entire duration of DRW on just stacking and maintaining buffs. And this gets you 7% haste for 20s after DRW ends. A lot of effort to go through for 7% haste.
Meanwhile Deathbringer gets most of its rewards passively for just playing BDK optimally with just 1 more button added to your rotation.
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considering Rune-carved Plates is one of the biggest sources of passive mit in the class, and vblood is very available as a cooldown, usually every pull, nah, I don’t think you’re correct at all. Even with San tied to a defensive, you still use vBlood as a defensive, but that’s not what matters. bDK lives and dies on passive bulk, because you can usually handle your healthbar if you don’t dip below 0, but the moment you start to dip below 0, you’re just dead. You cannot opt out of Deathbringer and expect to push keys, and that supersedes your point by a mile.
If you wana be snarky, at least be correct with your assertions. Sanlayn can do all the damage and lifesteal in the world, and it’d still get splattered in harsh conditions, where Deathbringer would live. We don’t exactly need more self healing, the bonuses Sanlayn brings to blood aren’t a relevant aspect to bDK mitigation as incoming damage climbs.
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Is reading something you typically have trouble with?
All of that drivel to make the same point I already made about using vamp blood rotationally being bad… The amount of dumb on these forums never ceases to amaze.
@Parsalian it is common for tanks to use their defensives in a rotation, especially in an m+ setting. You’re calling people dumb and illiterate and all around being antagonistic, when your general point is founded in ignorance to begin with. An experienced BDK in an m+ will be using vamp blood within 10 seconds of it coming off cooldown, regardless of what hero talent they chose. Sitting on defensives is why beginner tanks die in m+.
Changing it to procing off of Rune Weapon which has way lower uptime is a massive negative change. It takes away any real skill involved with the talent because you cant reduce the cooldown of Rune Weapon outside of Tombstone and Bonestorm which is rotational. It being tied to Vamp blood which is reduced on RP spending (which directionally scales with haste) creates a sort of feedback loop with haste that Rune Weapon does not allow. Rune weapon has a 25-30% uptime while Vamp Blood can easily get over 45% uptime with haste stacking currently in Mythic Plus. If they do go through with this change they need to massively buff the tree AGAIN to compete with DeathBringer in any real content.
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No, it isn’t. You use defensive cd’s when you need them. You will not find a single high level tank that will agree with you.
Thanks for proving you’re a terrible player.
Want proof? Please go post this in the blood channel on discord. I would thoroughly enjoy watching you get laughed out of the discord.
I ended season 3 dragonflight on Prot pali with 3270 io. I ended season 4 (before pre patch where everyone’s damage doubled) on bdk with 3050, with the limiting factor not being my survivability, but how hard healing was on bosses that tier.
I am, objectively, a tank main in the top 1% of the entire player base when it comes to m+. I don’t need to confer with a hivemind at the recommendation of an ignorant internet troll when I’ve successfully timed 26s and a 27 in S3, and progged a few 28s. I will, however, point out that if you tried to hold vampiric blood at any reasonable key level and tank a pack naked for more than a few seconds, you’d pop like a balloon, but probably blame the healer because you have no idea what you’re doing.
It’s not even really about being a sweatlord for most people, it’s just that Deathbringer is more cohesively built AND is more effective. 
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