I’m doubling down on the idea of the spec instead revolving around actually like…being a vampire. Siphoning health from enemies. There’s none of that. Or an aspect of it that like, changes DK’s death grip into the opposite, one that allows you to fly to the enemy instead.
Just SOMETHING inspired. Anything! It’s so conceptually lazy.
After getting to play around with the changes a bit more, my initial reaction is that they feel solid. Uptime on Vampiric Strike feels pretty good and definitely seeing the bloodbeast more often. Gift of the San’layn uptime feels much better, with the frequency of random procs being enough to keep the buff rolling for a while outside of DRW windows.
Still think the tree needs a more unifying element or more robust choice talents. With the move away from Vampiric Blood, the tree is slowly starting to feel a bit more like standard BDK with a few extra buffs to track rather than the “Hero” fantasy it claims to fulfill.
I tend to lean more towards having robust choice nodes. We only get 3 in our tree rather than the more common 4. Outside of the Newly Turned/Vampiric Speed node, the other two don’t really feel great or like much of a choice.
RP gains because what happens outside of burst window is that you’re spending RP excessively on death strike but not as a defensive. Imagine you’re gambling RP, and the result should compensate for the resource spent.
Well it did have a longer/more often up time under vampiric blood which gave a unique feel over the other BDK builds, something that i loved. Never understood why some many people want a standard build and way to play when you can have something unique and do the job just as well.
I didn’t run anything over a 10 except one completely horrendous 11 that wasn’t my fault, but having vampiric blood up every pull really felt good as long as you through the idea of it being a defensive out the window and used it on cooldown no matter what. I miss it already
Agreed. I personally think the tree transforming Vampiric Blood into an empowered state rather than just being a defensive CD was quite interesting, and it worked well as a flavor win. The idea of entering a state where I am healing more, absorbing more, have more health, and, under San’layn, dealing more damage and having heightened resource generation felt good. Payoffs from the tree were the issue, not the core gameplay loop.
Still, I get why they would want to swap over to DRW since that cooldown is one you want to be using on CD anyways, especially since its probably our best opener. I can understand how popping that AND Vampiric Blood on CD could feel like the tree was cutting too heavily into BDK’s defensive pool, even though the CDs on those two spells might as well be non-existent (and a nonissue).
In my ideal world, we’d go back to Vampiric Blood as the catalyst while keeping all the uptime buffs we’ve recently received. I would then fix the interaction between Umbilicus Eternus and Blood Shield to be less of a non-bo, so that having Vampiric blood as the catalyst feels even better.
Yeah I didn’t mind VB being tied to the burst consider the more frequent uptime. My issue is your immediate incentive is to spam Vampiric Strike, but lots of other things require you to not spam Vampiric Strike during a burst window, and on the gameplay level it is not satisfying. I think it would solve it if Vampiric Strike is both an offensive and defensive tool, and it can upkeep Death Strike buff to plague. We already manage a lot buff upkeep, debuff upkeep, and most complex resource management out of any tank.
The problem is that even during that window you cannot satisfyingly focus on burst, there are so many other things you have to do.
Here’s an analogy - assuming the game is balanced, we are required to push more buttons and have more things to manage in order to meet the balancing target. More hoops to jump thru without any meaningful payoff.
Just like Vampiric Strike proc, you are encouraged to spend defensive token (Runic Power) to gamble for offensive proc (Vampiric Strike), but when you win the proc, it doesn’t grant you back those defensive tokens spent. You are risking wipes just to do a bit more damage.
Lower DRW to 30 Sec CD (previously 1 Minute)
Lower Blood Beast Internal CD to 30 seconds (previously 1.5 procs per minute)
That fixes the woeful offense and defensive state of current DK. its no secret that the last time Blood DK was good was in Shadowlands when we have set bonus giving us like 80% uptime on DRW.
i just fixed San’lyn. No worries blizzard. I also probably fixed death bringer too.
I essentially created a different gameplay loop where Vampiric Blood was up every in M+ and up during my taunt phase in raid. Did not run bonestorm (a) cause i hate the button bloat (b) just didn’t need DRW up as often. By using VB that often you still have IBF (which gets a cooldown reduction from the tree), DRW and Licheborne for defensives but really only saved DRW when i know a big pull was coming up and still got some cooldown reduction from tombstone. Granted, i did not run anything over a 10 during this build but never really sweated a pull, even did that huge as 1st pull NW pull on the first pull just to see if i could do it.
The build wasn’t too bad, very similar to when we had that VB based tier set moons ago just had to take runic tap (sigh) but overall i wasn’t missing anything so special that made the build unplayable. If they fixed Umbilicus Eternus it might be damn near OP under sanlayn.
Just make sudden doom epidemics or coils also extend dots during dark transformation and for me San layn is fixed.
The only issue I have with San is this vamp strike vs coil/epidemic during transformation, coil extends your window, but San layn wants you to cast vampiric strike to extend your dots, these synergies are fighting each other.
This is why I am a fan of Vampiric Strike either granting a Boneshield Charge or having heightened healing. Anything to make deviating from our upkeep more worthwhile. I think granting boneshield is the cleanest way to do this, but there are any number of things that could be explored.
Just posting that I want Gift of the San’layn moved back to Vampiric Blood.
That way, when they inevitably use ChatGPT again for their balance patching they have this post as training data ^.^