Phase 1+2 Initial Blood Death Knight Feedback
Here are my impressions on Phase 1&2 Blood Death Knight changes after straightforward mechanical/bug testing and doing some preliminary modeling/analysis on the current state of the spec on alpha.
Initial Post Requested Feedback for Apex Talents
While the rest of this post goes into more depth on all changes, I want to quickly address the high level questions asked in the original post:
- How gameplay-impacting, exciting, and fantasy forward is your Apex Talent to you? While, as a long-term Blood player, Iâm a little fatigued from Dancing Rune Weapon-related bonuses, Dance of Midnight does check the boxes for class fantasy and being impactful (though not in the way of actually changing gameplay rotation significantly on its own). Iâm not sure if Iâd label the effects âexcitingâ, but âmildly interestingâ might be more aligned with my feelings on them.
- Are your Apex Talents and new Hero Talents meeting the approachability goals laid out in our Combat for Everyone in Midnight article? The Apex talents are certainly not overly complex; even if the parry-based proc ends up being something we react to, it is a simply enough effect to track. The new Deathbringer talents are perhaps a little too simple to the point where two of them look like at least partial placeholders (the Permafrost one is more bogged down by blood-specific tuning concerns for that talent). The new Sanâlayn talents are also mostly straightforward, though I may have non-complexity-related reservations about Infliction of Sorrow as explaned in the remainder of the post.
- Are there cases you would consider not selecting your Apex talent? At current tuning, the rank 4 of Dance of Midnight is strong enough on its own (while boosting the value of rank 1, 2, and 3 in the process) to make skipping the Apex talents a bad idea in all situations. So, no.
- Does the Apex talent disproportionally favor a particular talent build or Hero Talent tree? Yes, Dance of Midnight is extremely favorable to Sanâlayn, which is disproportionately strong during Dancing Rune Weapon and has perks (Infliction of Sorrow) that are triggering during Dance of Midnight procs that would normally only occur once per manual Dancing Rune Weapon cast. It also single-handedly provides a significant increase to the value of haste as a secondary stat.
The remainder of this post is more generalized feedback on Blood and the full list of changes.
Identified Alpha Bug List (So Far)
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Soul Rupture is affected by spec aura/coag/brittle (it probably shouldnât be, since this is double dipping).
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The Blood is Life double dips on Versatility damage multipliers.
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The Blood is Life double dips on Incite Terror damage multipliers.
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The Blood is Life with Pact of the Sanâlayn does not appear to count shadow damage contributions from Consumption
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Bloodied Bladeâs 10% Strength buff only multiplies base strength (not strength from items or other sources) (the stacking strength buff works properly).
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Bloodied Blade procs that result in a Vampiric Strike generate RP (the damage amp and it not costing a rune are working fine).
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Vampiric Strike as cast by Dancing Rune Weapons appear to always hit up to 5 targets even when Death and Decay is not active.
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Tightening Grasp wonât silence in an AoE if Gorefiendâs is used on a silence-immune target.
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Unholy Bond gives Rune of Sanguination an additional 20% damage multiplier on Death Strike on top of all other advertised effects.
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Incite Terror does not appear to give 300% extra benefit to Vampiric Strikes cast by Dancing Rune Weapon
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initial Reaperâs Mark hit has no DRW interaction
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The DRW unit associated with Everlasting Bond expires 2 seconds too early for unknown reasons (in other words, one of the two despawns early)
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Visceral Strength no longer states that it gives Blood Boil Bone Shield generation on 2+ targets, but it still does.
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Sanguinary Burst is not affected by the spec aura
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If the Boiling Point buff expires naturally the echo happens 3 seconds later
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Marrowrends that spawn Dance of Midnight DRW units will not gain duplicate Bone Shield generation from pre-existing Dance of Midnight DRW units.
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Infliction of Sorrow only affects the player Blood Plague copy, while Consumption affects copies from DRWs as well.
High Mythic+ Blood Tuning (Mitigation and Effective Health)
Blood Death Knights historically have high effective mitigation (including self-healing) at the cost of lower effective health, since their mitigation is heavily based on self-healing and you need to take the damage before you can heal it. This results in a tank specialization that is more challenged by one-shots than other tanks, at least when it comes to Mythic+ content where enemy damage done is mostly consistent. In raid settings, the overabundance of defensive cooldowns for Blood Death Knight has generally enough to cover for this weakness, since raid is often only challenging tanks for partial combat windows. In order to make Blood Death Knight survivability less lopsided (where they do disproportionately well against lower damage intake and struggle to deal with consistently high damage intake), trading mitigation for effective health is a change that, in concept, many players with higher Mythic+ experience on Blood Death Knights support. Because, as of right now, the focus in higher key levels strongly shifts to juggling defensive uptime buffs in a way to prevent the player from instantly dying, since there are limits to how much raw Death Strike healing can help against the growing threat of instant death, especially after Blood Shield generation was reigned in after Dragonflight. Pruning some defensive abilities, such as Lichborne (which was never overly impactful), Rune Tap (a strong defensive cooldown option with skill expression, but one that disproportionately benefited raid survivability over M+), and the weakened parry effect of Dancing Rune Weapon (never the most reliable, but reasonably effective against a high volume of incoming melee attacks nonetheless), will technically be hurting Blood Death Knights in their capacity to survive burst damage deaths, but, if Bloodâs baseline is tuned high enough to compensate for this, it could create a healthier gameplay loop where tanking trash pulls with no defensive cooldown up is not instant death in higher M+ (the armor bonus we are being given so far is non-trivial and seemingly equivalent to a 15% DR effect being active all the time). Overall survivability is a combination of our mitigation and effective health, so the net impact on our survivability is hard to determine at this time given the significant buff in baseline EHP from armor vs. the loss of effectiveness for DS healing and defensive cooldowns (and, as of the current alpha phase, no way to really stress test this in-game relative to other tanks).
It is worth pointing out that The War Within attempted to take Blood Death Knights in a similar direction with regards to survivability tuning at the start of that expansion (though seemingly for the sake of nerfing BDK survivability in raid relative to other tanks at the time), though (A) the armor buff was not nearly as sizable in comparison to the amount of Death Strike healing that was lost in TWW S1 and (B) Death Strike healing was nerfed in non-traditional ways at the time that caused some weird secondary effects:
- The removal of Death Strike healing âdouble dippingâ on damage taken events effectively removed haste scaling on Death Strike healing, significantly weakening the stat defensively (offset to some extent only for Sanâlayn as a high performing pure damage stat).
- The âdouble dippingâ change indirectly nerfed Blood Shield coverage in Mythic+, so their base health bar had less support from blood shielding when dealing with high damage intake (this was never 100% reliable, but Dragonflight did allow you to bad your health bar with a lot more shielding).
- While the stated intention of the lower Blood Shield caps was not to cap Blood Shield generation while actively tanking, we saw exactly this occur in the second half of The War Within in higher Mythic+ dungeons (particularly with Vampiric Blood up since the Blood Shield cap was not adjusted by Vampiric Blood health) when it was/is possible for Blood Shield generated from a single Death Strike (with no pre-existing Blood Shield) to be capped by the unadjusted 50% Health Blood Shield cap, further limiting effective Death Strike mitigation and Blood Shield shielding protection in these circumstances. It can be argued that removing âdouble dippingâ, alone, was enough to fix any concerns of unhealthily large off-tank Blood Shield pooling, assuming that was even a main contributor to Blood Death Knightâs superior raid tank survivability pre-TWW (a hard question to immediately answer, though going off of death statistics it looks like Blood Death Knights no longer have a competitive advantage in raid tank survivability anymore in any case). So, if we are looking to improve BDK high M+ prospects, making tweaks to some of the Blood Shield cap changes, at a minimum, might be worth consideration to remove overcap potential. Though, yes, the 27% base Death Strike nerf should lower the current incident rate of Blood Shield capping while being the active tank to some extent (even after accounting for the second rank of Gloom Ward).
There is certainly a segment of the BDK population that never liked the prospects of haste being disproportionately weakened at the start of TWW S1 from those changes, since, for one reason or another, people seem to be drawn to that secondary stat in a way that canât be explained by performance alone. Iâm not personally invested in that preference, but I figured Iâd at least point out its existence. Granted, Dance of Midnight provides a new non-trivial haste-scaling mechanic at this time.
The Simplification of Bone Shield and Threat
Targeting Tombstone and Bonestorm is an effective way to make resource management much easier with Bone Shield, to the point where, in many situations, it isnât much of an active consideration at all (particularly for Deathbringer). Not only did these abilities make Bone Shield a more involved resource to manage, but they also had some non-intuitive usage conditions that were heavily based on talent interactions. âRamp timeâ certainly wouldnât have been a chief complaint, since those cooldowns were more about speeding up our next cooldown window than ramping into our initial one, but they were âtacked-onâ abilities for the rotation and they werenât insanely interesting on their own. Though the two immediate effects of this is that we lose a significant amount of cast-based uptime on Dancing Rune Weapon (which is offset by the apex talent at the moment), and Shattering Bone was a talent that greatly reduced Blood Death Knightâs issues with uncapped AoE threat generation.
That said, whether intentional or not, the removal of Shattering Bone might not actually cause uncapped AoE threat generation to be an issue because, back in Season 2 of Shadowlands, there was another solution to threat issues in the form of Night Fae (particularly their conduit Withering Ground that eventually increased Death and Decay damage by up to 150%). The 130% damage increase to Death and Decay damage for all Death Knight specializations mirrors this conduit effect, so maybe threat will still be in a decent place (Though it should be noted that the target capped nature of Sanâlaynâs reliable upfront damage makes it much more vulnerable to threat issues). With the removal of yet another Death and Decay synergy effect (Shattering Bone), the damage increase also helps to ensure Death and Decay doesnât get de-emphasized too much in the rotation.
Sanâlayn Awkwardness
Leaving off from the Bone Shield discussion point, Sanâlayn started to gain some (marginal) incentives to start using 2+ target Blood Boils and (failing that) Deathâs Caress over Marrowrend at the end of the War Within (in part due to the increased focus on Heart Strike/Vampiric Strike-related benefits, especially during Dancing Rune Weapon), making Bone Shield generation a little more convoluted if the player was trying to extract as much value as humanly possible, though the tooltip removal of the Blood Boil Bone Shield generation (even though it still occurs in-game) might mean that part of it is eventually going away in a future build. The exact state of Deathâs Caress over Marrowrend in alpha is unknown at this time, though the ideal state is probably to remove cases where Deathâs Caress is superior to use in melee situations outside of a bottomed-out resource state. It wouldnât surprise me if Deathâs Caress use remained a (marginal) gain all-around for both damage and net RP generation for Sanâlayn in the current build since the shift of Sanâlayn from being more Blood Beast focused to caring a lot more about Vampiric Strikes and Infliction of Sorrow are still in play.
Speaking of Infliction of Sorrow (and while this is very subjective), Iâd say Infliction of Sorrow is an awkward source of damage that doesnât feel particularly fulfilling even relative to the TWW S1/S2 RPPM Blood Beast procs:
- Infliction of Sorrow is very rotationally sensitive, especially during Dancing Rune Weapon, to the point where rotational disruptions or errors are disproportionately penalized.
- It cares very much about having pre-ramped on Blood Queen stacks that are constantly maintained.
- (no longer an issue) It used to care about being meleed enough for sufficient Dancing Rune Weapon cooldown reduction.
- On 6+ targets your Blood Plague extension targets and the 5 targets you ultimately consume Blood Plague off of are constantly shuffling, so it has a lot of jank under these circumstances in particular.
Whatever the future of Sanâlayn is, there are potentially more engaging aspects to pursue than emphasizing Infliction of Sorrow in its current form. For better or worse Sanâlayn has a much more âfragileâ gameplay loop than Deathbringer.
Further Pruning
Soul Reaper is a talent that provides marginal-to-moderate single target damage gains at the cost of making the rotation more complicated in a way that isnât overly satisfying. I donât think it will be missed by most people; even those who were proficient in its use and who like skill expression talents probably wouldnât miss it (just because of how clunky it always felt).
Blood Tap was a talent that lost its place once Blood Death Knight reached a certain level of resource generation. In a world where Blood Death Knight already has no rotational downtime, you are not gaining additional Heart Strikes from nothing, but are, instead gaining Heart Strikes at the cost of Blood Boil casts (a much smaller benefit). With the current state of things, Blood Tap is a good candidate for pruning and also in line with removing Bone Shield consumption-related effects.
Blooddrinker originally had a niche as a single target damage increasing talent, but stopped performing that role well starting in late shadowlands and never really reclaimed that specialty (any other specific niche) since then. The RP generation and single target damage reduction perks added in TWW did not manage to help it gain traction and it is a good candidate for removal, though it did have some uniqueness in being one of Bloodâs few ranged abilities.
Rune Tap was one of the few lost abilities that actually had a lot of value in harder content and had skill expression, though, if pruning defensives is the name of the game, then it is understandable why this was targeted over more core and iconic defensive cooldowns.
Sacrificial Pact never felt like a good use of Runic Power or cast time even before talking about the loss of the ghoul and the long cooldown. It was a good target for pruning and, even with aggressive re-tuning would have still been a clunky ability even though the ability has thematic roots in a Warcraft 3 ability.
Heartrend, Ossified Vitriol, and the removed portion of Reinforced Bone were all very marginal and not too engaging.
Future Potential Pruning Targets: It is worth mentioning that near-zero-impact talents like Leeching Strike and Blood Feast survived the initial prune, though, given that we already have a NYI node in the talent tree, it could just be a case of not enough meaningful replacement options being immediately on-hand. Relish in Blood and Perseverance of the Ebon Blade are not quite as worthless as the first two mentioned talents, though thay have also been rather lackluster talents that now have little pathing value (since we can get Rapid Decomposition without them now). If not for a redesign, there would have been another talent to add to this list that also would have reduced potential button bloatâŚ
The Reimagining of Consumption
Consumption has had a long history of being a relatively lackluster ability that was more defined by tacked-on secondary effects than anything inherent with the base skill itself. For the longest time its damage on cast was lackluster and its healing barely moved the playerâs health bar. In Legion, it saw its first rise to relevance as a powerful healing cooldown when it gave your entire group 20% leech for 15 seconds⌠which was later removed for obvious reasons. More recently, the fact that it gave 2 runes was the main highlight of the ability, since this resulted in it being one of the largest resource generating talents in the tree.
In Midnight, there appears to be a reimagining of changing Consumption from a glorified Blood Tap and into a slow windup powerful slam that deals heavy damage with some defensive perks. I think this concept for Consumption has a lot of potential to differentiate it from other abilities in the kit, while also giving it a good feel. That being said, I do think there are two weak aspects to it. (A) I donât see much reason for this to be an empowered ability with clunky spellqueuing over a standard ability with a longer than normal cast time (a 2.5s cast that can also have the 30% snare effect if desired, for example), since there is not much argument to send it at less than stage 3 at the moment outside of freak circumstances, and (B) the awkward damage reduction effect doesnât really help offset the loss of defensive tempo when using this ability. If you want to give this a heavy hitting and snappy feeling not just offensively, but also defensively, you could, for example, just have it generate a %HP absorb shield (we just removed Tombstone, we can certainly just steal that effect since it isnât really being used anywhere else). Other ways to make this less defensively awkward exist, but a shield effect wouldnât be adding resource bloat, at least.
In any case, this talent is extremely competitive in its current form for pure damage reasons.
The Awkward Return of Abomination Limb
There was a community sentiment surrounding the removal of Abomination Limb for Blood in particular that was different from Unholy/Frost considerations; several people liked how its pulsing damage helped to consolidate threat on pull setup in M+ even in situations where the grips had only minor grouping value. While it is understandable why we might not want Blood to have two concrete AoE grip options that the dps specs donât have by making this a choice node with Gorefiendâs, it should be noted that removing the pulsing damage reduces a lot of the reason why this was an appealing ability on Blood in M+ in the first place, especially when it is competing with the lower cooldown and added silence of a buffed Gorefiendâs Grasp. Outside of very specific situations where having grips over time or longer range of the Abomination Limb grips are seen as significant enough advantages (both of which are generally raid-specific circumstances, if they show up at all), there seems to be little reason to take this version of Abomination Limb over Gorefiendâs Grasp.
Blood Mist and Swarming Mist
Before the Season 3 and 4 tier set rose to prominence in Shadowlands, Season 1 Mythic+ on Blood Death Knight was dominated by Venthyr largely on the back of how useful Swarming Mist was relative to the other covenant abilities (in addition to relatively strong soulbinds); even in Season 2 when Night Fae started to rise as an option that provided a lot more damage for an acceptable survivability cost, Venthyr remained a competitive option before its lack of synergy with the final tier set forever hurt its prospects for the rest of the expansion. That being said, the damage of Swarming Mist, while helpful for AoE threat generation on a one minute cooldown, was never its main selling point. Instead, the main selling point was the impact that its very high runic power generation had on the playerâs survivability back during a time where resources (and defensive uptime) were much more constrained. The War Within Season 1 made it so Death Strike canât heal from the same damage event more than once and, in doing so, it has drastically reduced the defensive value associated with Swarming/Blood mist RP generation since it no longer results in any increase in raw Death Strike healing throughput. Without that defensive impact, the ability is not going to be nearly as impactful as it once was and there is a very real question if it becomes a meaningful choice over competing talent buckets (Purgatory/Umbilicus Eternus/Dance of Midnight/Bloodshot) in actual Mythic+ situations (in raid you can shave off defensive options and make room for it if you are not being sufficiently threatened by the poss). The prospects of Blood Mist and Sanguinary Burst as competitive talents are not helped by Plague Infusion, which only provides more Blood Plague charges (generally the first thing to fall out of the rotation when resources are plentiful, making it a zero-impact talent in a lot of cases). FurthermoreâŚ
There is also the question of whether or not it is ideal to tie the effect to Dancing Rune Weapon. It reduces button bloat, yes, but we are strengthening an already strong cooldown window (albeit it is weaker than it once was defensively). From a damage perspective, more Death Strikes from the RP generation might accomplish more damage during Dancing Rune Weapon, but, even then, that was never the main benefit of this ability. PlusâŚ
The Creep of Dancing Rune Weapon Effects
Particularly with Sanâlayn, itself, which has a large number of enhancements to the Dancing Rune Weapon window that have only been more emphasized with the tier set from TWW Season 3, adding Blood Mist into the mix only seems to be escalating power concentration into Dancing Rune Weapon (though, yes, bonus Heart Strike RP generation during DRW has been nerfed and the given parry rate has almost been cut in half).
I understand that tying offensive abilities to purely defensive cooldowns is not a situation that is too appealing for many people, but making Dancing Rune Weapon the universal solution to what to add new effects to as our only offensive cooldown is starting to feel like it might be a little excessive. Sanâlayn, alone, already places a massive emphasis on it. Not to mentionâŚ
Apex Talent DRW Enhancement
The Apex talents adds further benefit to Dancing Rune Weapon in the form of further damage enhancements (amplifying heart strike and a flat damage increase), damage reduction, resource generation, and making Dancing Rune Weapon a random proc in addition to the baseline defensive cooldown cast (to the point where, at the moment, most uptime comes from the Apex talent and not the normal ability cast).
This adds complications to hero class balance for obvious reasons in any case, but, putting those tuning issues aside, we are just adding a lot of focus to DRW (and it should be said that the random procs trigger both Gift of the Sanâlayn and Infliction of Sorrow). On top of that, shifting most of DRW uptime into a random proc effect is a stylistic choice that Iâm somewhat skeptical of at a minimum, even if it isnât as strong defensively.
That said, the talent does appear strong enough in the current iteration (for what it is worth) for the Apex talent to not be skipped as long as you can put the full 4 points into it.
Other One-Off New Blood Talents and Talent Dynamics
Deadly Reach - 3 target Death Strike cleave all the time is very strong in situations where multi-target damage is desired, even for Deathbringer. As a mid-tree talent, it is hard to justify passing it up in multi-target content. It is certainly a noticeable talent in any case. It also greatly amplifies the marginal power of Hemostasis.
Lifeblood - Recycles some of the lost baseline Death Strike healing, except without a direct tie-in to Blood Shield. Respectable impact, but to the point where it is skippable for more aggressive builds (particularly raid-oriented builds, but even in something more survivability centric like M+ the amount of healing provided very well might not be enough to make the cut unless it ends up being needed for pathing).
Boiling Point - Blood Boil is generally only used over other abilities for Blood Plague application and very specific circumstances; this adds one more proc-based circumstance to prioritize a Blood Boil cast over, at least, Heart Strike. A solid damage talent that is situationally hurt by its talent tree position if the player decides against the AoE grip choice node (and no one is considering pathing through Leeching Strike).
Old and New Blood Talent Dynamics
From the Raid perspective at the end of The War Within, players often play the max damage talent build with deviations based on how hard the encounter is. First, you will generally see everyone play with Purgatory in any context remotely considering raid success, while some of the more impactful survivability talents (Red Thirst/Foul Bulwark/Rune Tap/Voracious) gain consideration on encounters that have more obvious kill potential on the tank (it should be noted that the damage sacrifices start off as quite minimal when picking up a lot of these talents, and some are better suited towards burst considerations vs. steady incoming damage). Builds going more defensive than all of these options are rare, with a recent (outlier) example being Mythic Broodtwister having people go talent builds that would be more at home in Mythic+.
In the Alpha tree from a raid perspective, Purgatory, Foul Bulwark, and Red Thirst would remain the first-line survivability options to explore in the situation of threatening bosses, with Lifeblood maybeeeee taking the role Voracious had before (new Voracious is effectively hard-locked due to pathing into Coagulapathy since Blood Feast is a non-starter, even if you have no intention of getting the other talents in that column, but Lifebloodâs appeal is worse than old Voracious as a standalone talent). So the raid talent dynamics with regards to damage vs. survivability considerations have not changed too significantly, except that some of the damage-specific options are more conditional (Deadly Reach not doing anything in a pure single target encounter, for example). AoE grip is now also much more accessible by default, since max damage oriented raid builds would be interested in Boiling Point in some capacity (which is not true of current builds).
From a Mythic+ perspective at the end of The War Within, players are generally utilizing hybrid offensive/defensive builds that tend to lean a little more offensive for Sanâlayn (due to increased Heart Strike and Death Strike talent synergies) relative to Deathbringer. As such, the more powerful defensive talents that were left out of more aggressive raid builds (Purgatory/Foul Bulwark/Red Thirst/Voracious/Rune Tap) became talents that were always or mostly picked. Deathbringer picks up most end-tier talents except Bloodshot, which it has very poor synergy with, while Sanâlayn has a bit more decision making with regard to Sanguine Ground vs. Bloodshot vs. Umbilicus Eternus since Bloodshot has a significantly higher power level on Sanâlayn relative to Deathbringer. As such, Deathbringerâs decision-making mostly boils down to allotting talent points between a number of more ambiguous mid-tree options (Heartbreaker/Consumption/Rune Tap/Bloodied Blade/Iron Heart/Gorefiendâs Grasp). Sanâlaynâs mid-tree options are a little more constrained due to having interest in Improved Heart Strike even in M+, so, even after forfeiting Rapid Decomposition to pick up more of these synergistic talents, it is often deciding, in addition to its late tier talent choices, if it wants to drop mid-tree talent points in Improved Vampiric Blood to leverage for Gorefiendâs Grasp and/or Hemostasis (a talent that benefits from its higher base Death Strike damage).
In the Alpha tree from a Mythic+ perspective, Deathbringer doesnât have to make too many hard choices at the moment. It is now able to pick up all of the talents before that it was previously pulled between without any additional tradeoff (Gorefiendâs included). While competitive Deathbringer in The War Within were not seriously considering giving up Sanguine Ground, Purgatory, or Umbilicus Eternus for Bloodshot before, Midnight simply allows us to take all four and the Blood Mist line does not seemingly provide competitive enough damage benefits (while its defensive benefits are seemingly trivial with the previous Death Strike nerfs). Even if TWW Deathbringer doesnât get much out of Bloodshot in Mythic+, Deathâs Reach and better pathing makes it suitably appealing in Midnight. While Improved Vampiric Blood was an obvious choice over Improved Heart Strike for Deathbringer before in M+ content, Dance of Midnight and Bloodied Blade noticeably put their thumb on the scale here to make Improved Heart Strike look strong enough to the point where Deathbringer might just take both in M+ and Deathbringer would be conflicted on which one to drop to include other talent points (which was not true previously). Part of this is due to the fact that the method of pathing around Improved Heart Strike (Relish in Blood) is not an appealing talent point investment. In this context of allocating the final few talent points, Lifeblood doesnât seem strongly positioned to compete with remaining points unless it ends up gating a strong NYI talent or if the player strongly believes that Gorefiendâs adds less value than Lifeblood. Boiling Point is a consideration over talent points in Improved Vampiric Blood. Sanâlayn has an identical talent decision-making dynamic, even if its marginal talent values are somewhat different. All in all, the talent flexibility in M+ appears to be very low in this talent tree iteration for what it is worth.
Just a small note about the Phase 2 Bloodshot and Consumption talent movement; it doesnât change any pathing implications at all with current tuning, you have a strong incentive to take Bloodshot/Iron Heart/Consumption in all cases.
Phase 2 Class Talent Tree Reorganization
The Phase 1 trees had the obvious problem of having too many talent points but not enough useful ways to spend it to the point where you basically were able to get all talent points you cared about. Phase 2 appears to try and change that by making Unholy Momentum and Gloom Ward 2 rank nodes (both effects that blood, at the very least, is interested in, and this change adds some much needed talent point constraints that were needed to make any decision-making in the tree meaningful). That said, this comes at the tradeoff of making Deathâs Reach, a very nice quality of life talent for Blood, hard to justify since it cannot be acquired in addition to Asphyxiate (which will mostly limit its usage exclusively to Death Grip-oriented raid encounters where Asphyxiate has not value); this makes enfeeble harder to justify as well, since Blood Bonds is of questionable value for Blood. As for the other new talents, Permafrost, even with a 100%+ enhancement from Deathbringer, is still a hard sell in situations where multiple utility options can be successfully utilized (a fixed amount of healing has lower relative value for Blood vs. Frost and Unholy, which applies to the Death Pact talents, as well). Death Notes has potential, particularly when playing Sanâlayn, but is going to be hard to predictively evaluate.
And, maybe it is just me, if we (understandably) donât want to make Death Pact a good defensive ability because DKs (as a class, but mostly the dps specs) already have solid survivability, maybe it should just be pruned like the other defensives? It isnât even being used all that much in rated battlegrounds, which should be significantly more favorable to an ability like this than PvE situations.
Short Note about Secondary Stats
The main secondary stat effects from preliminary modeling appear to be as follows:
- Critical Strike gains damage-wise to a small extent since parry slowing Bone Shield consumption is no longer a negative.
- Versatility and Mastery remain the strongest defensive stats as the only two stats significantly affecting Death Strike healing mitigation, but the Death Strike healing nerfs have slightly narrowed their lead.
- Hasteâs defensive value is still low after its Death Strike healing scaling was effectively removed in TWW S1, but it gains significantly in the damage department by scaling Dance of Midnight Dancing Rune Weapon procs. This is especially true of Sanâlayn given the synergies with Gift of the Sanâlayn and Infliction of Sorrow currently in-game.
Overall defensive dynamics still look similar with Vers and Mastery providing the most defensive value via Death Strike mitigation and/or damage reduction effects, with Critical Strike looking more effective than Haste in the back. For damage, Critical Strike seemingly has a more noticeable advantage over other stats for Deathbringer now; Haste is seemingly reasonably competitive for damage with Deathbringer, but it has an insane damage advantage over all other stats with Sanâlayn. Haste value is obviously going to be highly sensitive to the final tuning of Dance of Midnight in any case.
