Let me be clear: I do not play DK at all, but I am a healer (on 3 separate classes, shaman/priest/paladin) and I am telling you I would rather heal ANY tank but a blood DK.
As far as I can tell, a blood DK is basically just a bad DPS with threat and some extra health, but what is up with their defensive abilities? Every blood DK I encounter is a pain to heal. Their health goes from full to nearly empty constantly. I know it’s not just me, because every other tank class is fairly steady, health-wise.
I guess I have nothing else to add to this.
TLDR: I am a healer who thinks it’s stupidly obvious that blood DKs are way too squishy and need some TLC from Blizz.
2 Likes
Have you tried tracking their RP and Vampiric Blood?
Most people see my HP% and it causes healers to panic - especially when they try to recover my HP and it seems to not move. This is one of the beefs I have with Blood as a tank is that our HP is our prime mitigation - so the damage we take seems worse then other tanks. The problem is that Healers have to really get comfortable with a blood tank otherwise they quickly OOM. The other issues is that Blood Tanks needs to respect the requirement to have a HP pool - due to the fact that Death Strike fills their HP bar faster then many heals are going to - if they depend on healers too much then the healers are going to get quickly exhausted unlike other tanks.
A healer knows that a monk/DH/Warrior who drops to 50% just took a bad hit and needs healing urgently - for a Blood DK that is just another Tuesday and to get back to 75% is going to require rapid collaboration between the BDK and the Healer. If the BDK leaves it up to the healer then the healer is going to spend a good 8-10 seconds just trying to refill the bar. If the Healer leaves the BDK alone - then they need to be aware that they need to use one of their many CD’s to prevent the further drop to 40% or worse.
This is actually one of the reasons why I feel Purgatory should be baseline for BDK - because the healing learning curve is SO drastic for BDK vs all other tanks in the game at the moment.
Also I noticed my guilds prot Paladin got a ilvl upgrade and threat is becomming even harder to keep off him - it makes swaps a nightmare - especially since as a BDK I need to shift resources from recovery (DS properly timed+Marrowrend for BS stacks) to Threat (DS Spam and HS+anything else) Still hoping that 9.1 brings up our threat gen to compensate for our lower damage output - again I wish I just gained more threat for healing so that I could focus more on protecting myself rather then shifting my attention constantly to threat management. If there was anything I would suggest to improve DK survivability it would be to perhaps increase Blood Shield returns and increase the Death Strike Healing window (the time we accrue a stronger Death strike due to prior damage)
3 Likes
BDK just needs some design changes to smooth out their damage taken profile.
I think nerfing death strikes heal and buffing the absorb while also making the absorb be a partial absorb would fix their health pool spikes a great deal. But lots of dks like to see the big heal not just top the healing meters.
That’s how DK are supposed to work. Don’t track their HP. Track their runic power. A DK with RP can basically self heal to near full. It is expected he chunks to like 35-40% and then chunks himself back up as DS can heal 30%+ of their hp in a single hit as its based on damage taken.
If your DK is dying, bad at managing RP, etc, then yes it’s a concern, but a good DK should barely need more than some hots and heals except on tank busters or when things go wrong.
1 Like
I heal with a holy priest and I tank with DH, pally and warrior. Trying the DK tank now (I’m learning). Now that I am tanking as one, when I’m on my priest, I’m not dreading a dk tank in dungeons.
They out-heal me half the time. That’s because I don’t panic if they take a hard hit because they’ll heal up to near full again. So, most of the time, I put a heal over time dot on them.
I am actually glad I don’t have a “main” because playing all the classes in the game (well, almost all) gives me a good perspective of how they all work.
Our survivability is fine, wish we did abit more dmg for threat and to compensate for mobility
alright, reading these responses makes me realize that my lack of knowledge about the DK class is making it harder. I will level a DK and hopefully then I will understand the class mechanics better and therefore heal them better. I know that playing prot pally made me a better healer when I got pally tanks so hopefully it will work for DKs.
1 Like
Exactly what Bezz said. Track Runic Power, not HP. When bdks have low bone shield stacks and low runic power, then you know they about to take beating.
I mean, if you want to make me invincible I’ll take it.
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I can’t speak from Shaman or Paladin perspective, but I know as a priest it is cake, especially with recent buffs to their tankiness. I put Guardian Spirit on them pretty much every pull that they are taking lots of damage and they take care of themselves. Then you can throw prayers of mending on them while focusing on keeping the rest of the group up. Outside of that, I treat them pretty much the same as any other tank. I also wouldn’t worry too much about inducing overhealing from them, they have bloodshield.
I also tend to get the largest oscillations from demon hunters and monks. DKs are more frequent but smaller in magnitude.
If the DK is doing their job correctly they should be out healing you on themselves. But yes as a healer I see this too. Now as a DK tank I dont have this issue but they arent using DS as much as they should and arent rotating CDs. Not doing those 2 things makes for a very rough healing time.