How do you deal with blood DK?

Hello fellow druid !

Unlike any other tank, the blood DK put me in a bad situation at every run : their health bar doing a roller coaster turn, making me prioritize the healing to them at all time when they probably don’t require it, leading to DPS death when I could have save them if the healing bar of the blood DK wasn’t misleading me

How do you deal with them ?

Thanks !

Blood DK’s will either walk through mobs, or fall on their face. You can’t save them.

The most I will do is a Nature’s swiftness—>regrowth, clear cast regrowth, lifebloom (1 of 2) and toss a rejuv. But I just keep cenarion’s ward on them on CD, and adaptive swarm. But i refuse to freak out when their health drops and focus them. They get healing, but they aren’t my primary target. I focus the dps because blood dks are notorious for making big pulls.

But there are three types of blood dks.

  1. the one that dies in two seconds.
  2. the one that is a yo-yo rollercoaster but never dies and keeps his defensives up (iron bark is useful here too+ward)
  3. The lazy BDK who barely keeps his shield up outside entering combat, and heals 30% of the time and relies on the healer to keep him alive.

1 is never going to work.
2. you can add mitigation like iron bark ,cenarion ward, regrowth/NS regrowth.
3. You have to baby sit them, and they will die most likely.

Interesting. May you categorize other tanks as well?

My experience with blood dk, say what you will, but generally speaking, its impossible to heal BDK.

Look at the runic power bar instead of their healthbars, better yet get a cooldown tracker and watch their cooldowns.

A dk with full RP and half health is better off on pull the a full health dk with no RP or cooldowns. If they dip with enough to deathstrike theyll be fine so as resto just keeping a lifebloom and passive cleave heals on them most of the run should work; then rotating in ironbark when they have cooldown gaps or major tank buster hits since they do have a habit of getting oneshot in higher content. If a pull goes bad(face pulls, missed interrupts ect.) and theyre caught without RP or cooldowns thats when you get worried and can start spamming.

This is all assuming theyre good blood dks. Bad dks are some of the worst to heal and a major drain to mana sonce you cant trust in the RP bar. They will just die.

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This. Runic Power is spent to heal the DK through Death Strike. Low Runic Power = no incoming self heals.

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Really important to track death strikes with a weak aura and cooldowns with omnicd in order to effectively heal DK’s.

Keeping hots rolling pads them perfectly and they heal themselves on spikes of damage with death strikes.

If I see cds available and 2+ death strikes I completely ignore them, and only fully commit to healing them when they’re in trouble and out of everything.

You don’t heal a blood DK. Blood DK heals itself. You can keep a hot on it for posterity sake, but in general, blood DK can handle anything really on its own. Watch the runic power bar, not the health bar.

I meant, imo, your BDK category was spot-on.
I would love to see your categories for other tank classes as well.