Right now blood shield gives you a physical damage absorb shield based off how much health you healed(or would heal) from using death strike. The absorb isn’t much unless you took a huge amount of damage before using death strike.
What if you gained the absorb based off overhealing yourself(with any ability and maybe items)? You wouldn’t gain an absorb from overheals from other players healing you. You would gain an absorb for physical damage from a % of overhealing yourself, increasing with mastery(the % of overhealing converted to an absorb), capping at X% of your max health.
There are some issues with this iteration of blood shield I’ve noticed, mainly tanking vs hard hitting bosses. You’ll almost never get an absorb if you can’t overheal yourself. A small change to vampiric blood would be the answer!
While vampiric blood is active, all sources of overhealing(this includes other people healing you) will be converted into blood shield.
The other issue with this iteration of blood shield is it makes blood dks even less reliant on healers if they outgear the content or can massively overheal themselves constantly. This change to blood shield would make them really good as an off tank as they can just build up a huge absorb before tanking the boss and then tank the boss with said huge absorb.
What are your thoughts on this version of blood shield? I haven’t played BFA as much as Legion but I think overhealing has been an issue for blood dks unless they don’t have a ton of gear.
History lesson:
Back in Cataclysm, mastery scaled very differently than it did now. By the end of the expansion, you could have 200% mastery. If you did it right, while you were waiting for the tank swap, your blood shield could be half a million before it was your turn to tank. At the same time, our self healing was nothing to brag about.
In WoD, Blizz, “fixed” that by removing gems on every piece of gear, taking away reforging, redesigning jewelcrafting and adjusting the mastery scaling with the stat squish. But then they introduced Vengeance. As you tanked, everything got stronger as you took damage. Tanks were beating everyone for DPS. After awhile we became un-killable.
In Legion, Blizz “fixed” vengeance to be largely unnoticeable like it is now. Mastery scaling took an even bigger hit. The shift from blood shield to self-healing happened. But we got Artifact weapons with amazing traits. Pretty much every button we pushed healed us. Our self healing really was over-the-top overpowered. Healers were for everyone else. Not for blood DKs.
There even was a mechanic for transferring overhealing to our health pool. Indirectly, this affected blood shield, but not to the Cataclysm levels that we really liked.
Now, all of this is to illustrate that Blizz has a weird relationship with Blood Shield. They know that blood shield can’t be dialed down without self-healing getting dialed up and vice versa.
Now I would love a mechanic that looks at overhealing (because there’s tons of that going around) and affect either our health pool or blood shield. Or, adjust the mastery scaling up a little to make blood shield more effective to help smooth out our damage spikes.
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I would rather have more blood shield and a little less healing. One of blizz’s goals for bfa was to make tanks vulnerable to magic damage which DKs mostly ignore right now. I would think that a larger blood shield would also make us smoother and easier to heal
I feel like Blood should be the self reliant tank so if you have one your raid group could take 1 less healer or w/e Like it was back in Cata and Mop-WoD. but clearly to put them in line with other tanks make them take 100% more magic damage outside of AmS and having Blood shield/healing back to cata levels then remove IBF or incress it’s CD from 3 min too 8.
Mostly I just miss the way blood played in cata pvp. took 6 people to take me down running flags in WsG or 1 very good frost mage. And when that frost mage took me down i did not even get annoyed he was just very good.
But this would mean that I would have to always be at 100% health for it to work. I’m not always at 100% health. At least with the way it is now, I get the shield at 70% health. It’s a little bit of damage reduction on top of my healing.
Sometimes encounters are harder than you expected them to be, or maybe your healer is having a bad day, or your dps aren’t completely focused on the fight and end up standing in the way of damage they could otherwise avoid.
There are lots of reasons why your healer might not focus you as much as you would like. There are lots of reasons I might not sit at 100% for an entire fight. I might not even hit 100% again until the fight ends, and just sit around 50-60%. I’m still comfortable that I’m not going to die. (Thanks healers) but that doesn’t mean I’m topped up.
With the way the shield works now, I still get the damage mitigation regardless of the health pool I currently have.
Add Grievous week to this
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History lesson, vengeance was introduced in Cata. Later in that expansion since it was so powerful it was taken away from player damage done to the tank. In WoD it was removed and replaced by resolve.
Cata had it’s fair share of issues and heard that blood tanks when the tank swap was happening, were getting 1 shot through their blood shield from Rag and there wasn’t much they could do about it unlike other classes.