Thankfully it’s getting a bit better with Dragonflight. Alot of the talent tree’s are looking great for most classes.
I’d just rather unholy go back to a disease based dot class vs builder/spending festering wounds.
As for Frost 2-handed frost DK is viable and that build doesn’t run BoS and does comparable DPS to Dual Wield Frost.
Blood is tank spec. Has been for a very, very long time. And it’s one hell of a single target tank I’ll tell ya.
I was a frost tank - in heroic ICC? Not sure why, but people forget how good it was.
Blood can dps, it’s just suboptimal:
Single target requires stacking armor pen.
Multi-target requires high crit + blood boil spam.
For both, you’d want a hybrid spec — 40/20/0 or 40/0/20ish depending on your particular flavor/preferences. I’d lean blood/unholy.
Blood worms utility isn’t in the extra damage they provide, it’s in their healing.
In all fairness, the healing on blood worms is trash too. But you are correct
Edit: or more accurately, the 3 points Bloodworms takes can’t be justified over the 3 points that you’d have to give up elsewhere
Agreed, it’s a rough value proposition. But, with the bonus healing talents and vampiric, improved blood presence… it synergizes quite well and it becomes a substantial maintenance heal.
me too. I loved frost tanking, and really enjoyed it. Blood DPS felt good until it was nerfed.
Is something I wonder every time I PuG.
Can you explain to me why Frost is not viable as a DPS spec for Mage in WoTLK?
The class was originally designed to be 3 dps AND 3 tank styles. It was part of the hero class identity. You could do any option based on the style of tank or the style of dps you wanted to do. Pretty great IMO and they should’ve kept this philosophy
Yeah, but it didn’t work well. Blood ended up being way easier to heal, so they went with that.
Its niche was being broken and overpowered, but it was still a niche. The cool thing about DK was supposed to be how they could swap from DPS to tank just with a gear and presence change, as opposed to other tank specs who had to go fully into their tanking tree.
I have a hunch that Warrior tears were the reason it was changed, like how Feral Combat became Feral and Guardian. It wasn’t considered fair to other tank-capable classes for DKs to be able to just swap on a whim.
Guess I’m the type that makes your head hurt, cause I tanked H ICC as Frost DW just fine.
Id like to see a small change to Blood Boil as it doesnt out dps Heart Strike til like 5+ mobs. Also something for single target. Id lobe to see Blood DPS a thing again and Frost Tanking also.
Are you sure you’re giving it a fair comparison?
Heart strike is affected by armor reductions.
Blood boil is spell damage and gets 200% as crit damage instead of 150% [Runic Focus].
What are you guys even comparing that blood spec is the tank spec for wrath? Retail? Cata prepatch was when they made blood the tank spec. And for arguments sake, both frost and blood have options to tank or dps. And what does a dk tank use to tank? using frost presence, and to DPS it’s a toss-up between both unholy and blood presence.
You can even look at the trees if you want to distinguish this, but guess what, Blood isn’t one over the other, it’s effectively both depending on how you spec.
Exactly, just small changes to make it competitive with UH without making it meta-min-max-blah blah blah. etc.
Arcane>Fire>Frost as far as single target raid boss fights were concerned. Frost was fine for trash clearing. Fire - even better. But Arcane was the single target way to go. Huge damage single target vs. mediocre of frost and fire. I say mediocre - they were fine overall. But again, there was a larger jump if you switched to Arcane for single target. You also got faster mana regen through evocation cool down.
Does hunter BM get a buff as well then?