I feel like the interactions with Heart Strike is kind of what gives Death and Decay purpose now. Death and Decay use to be a spell that was worth casting on Single target because of the damage it did. Now its worth is determined by other interactions such as Relish in Blood or utility like Grip of the Dead.
Honestly I kind of have the same issue with Ossuary. Why have a conditional cost reduction to Death Strike as a set passive? Why not just reduce the cost of Death Strike to 40 RP?
Blood DK doesn’t feel as good as it use to. I miss the days when you jumped in a pull and felt solid right of the bat because Bone Shield was a free CD not a maintenance buff. Rune Tap doesn’t feel very good to cast because of the low RP return rate and duration.
Personally I think some solutions would be to remove some of the conditional interactions such as Heart Strike X Death and Decay and Bone Shield X Ossuary X Death strike. I also think Rune Tap should give more RP for its usage OR not have a rune cost at all and simply be on a slightly longer recharge. My last suggestion would be to make Marrowrend hit up to 5 targets and give you one additional Bone Shield Charge per extra target hit. This would make Bone Shield scale better in AOE rather then having those less then stellar pulls when you shield drops between and DRW is not back up.
If you’re a Night Fae Death Knight, which I do not recommend, kinda makes Death and Decay worth casting on a single target regardless of the interactions with other abilities. There is a conduit that essentially double its damage as well as having strong soulbinds that synergize with it. Death’s Due seriously needs a rework to be a competitive covenant choice for Death Knights.
There are a lot more things are desired for Blood DKs to be smooth. My issue with Bone Shield maintenance style gameplay is exactly that, it feels like a maintenance. Passives such as Ossuary doesn’t help with my gripes with Blood at all.
Rune Tap, while it doesn’t cost a GCD, its rune cost has got to go.
… and it would be very nice to have at least 5 bone shields when you’re outside of combat as a separate resource mechanic rather than a duration buff that we need to maintain. Much like Soul Shards for Warlocks. Remember Bone Shield?
It’d be nice for Unholy to have Bone Shield back as well. I don’t think it should be exclusive to Blood.
As for HS just hit 5 targets? It would make Heartbreaker a superior choice all around. Not that I’m against this change. I always thought HS was always used to make RP the most efficient way possible.
Removing the rune cost on rune tap would essentially make it a stronger ignore pain. I dunno if free mini shield wall every pack for the first 5-8 abilities is a good thing to balance around? Newer blood dks would flounder hard because it’s weird to say this is your early mitigation (tap) and then you roll into normal mitigation (DS and bone shield).
Rune tap is weird, because If I’m fighting a boss and I know I’m going to get hit hard soon (spikes on 3rd boss of SD), I just pool RP and heal it all back. I don’t even have to hit tap. I do on higher keys, but even then if I time DS right it’s pointless and a waste of a rune if I’m full healing either way.
On trash it definitely smooths the curve, as my EHP goes up quite a bit. 85k hp / .8 is ~106.25k damage to take me to dead meat. The problem is the window that it’s up for is so brief. If I’m taking 40k damage off the initial 2-3 GCDs of trash, that ~8k less in damage is worthwhile. It’s just hard to quantify that when our health is bouncing around because of fallen crusader profs, healers heals, DS heal/shield etc. not to mention it’s absolutely Garbo to pop it with other mitigation like DRW or Swarming Mist because a dodge/parry is 0 damage and unaffected by tap.
Maybe add a rider to give it an additional 0.5 sec for each dodge/parry while active up to an extra 3 seconds or something? Scales into aoe a little better and may save you some damage on another 1 boss swing.
Isn’t a prot warrior more mobile and have a simpler resource? I thought Prot Warriors have abilities that generate threat and rage while using that rage to mitigate damage using Ignore Pain or use Revenge if you really wanna dump Rage. I really don’t know comparing Rune Tap to Ignore Pain is a good one.
We have runes to maintain a buff that makes us tanky: Bone Shield. Without it, you’ll probably flop and I wonder if spending a rune to mitigate the initial damage taken prior usage of Marrowrend is a good practice of a mindset to have.
I also don’t know if it’s fair to compare Blood Dk in terms of resource to other tank specs except for maybe Brewmasters. But that’s a bit far fetched.
We have runes that generate RP, bone shield and now we occasionally use it for 20% DR in RP inefficient manner compared to HS. We have RP for our sustain thanks to DS and Bonestorm, but doesn’t restore runes unlike Frost and Unholy and also have no interactions with Bone Shield which is basically a maintenance damage reduction.
I just think it’d be nice to start off existing Bone Shield instead of needing to Marrowrend something everytime to keep it up especially between pulls and not to worry about spending an extra rune for DR to make it a bit easier for us to maintain our Bone Shields.
Rune tap is in a funny place. It’s really only good to press if you’re under a MS effect, otherwise heart strike is more efficient. But, because it’s off the GCD and it bumps your EH so much, it sometimes feels like the right move. Especially with big incoming tank hits like Iron Spikes or Piercing Barbs, where the extra global for HS might actually be lethal.
I think it could use a little work to make it less niche, but overall I think our survival toolkit is pretty good. The only gripe I have is damage.
I think the interaction would be more how should I put this… attractive? if Death and Decay was giving a decent amount of threat/ damage.
If we are talking about bosses and especially raid when there are tank swaps I think defensively Blood DK is crazy strong due to having periods to pool resources or CDs. In M+ you don’t get that break and making slight mistakes with miss managing runes or RP can put you in very precarious situations. In some situations I feel like I want to pull big because the group has big CDs but if I don’t have say misdirect from a hunter or have DPS like Warriors or DHs who have this snap AOE you find yourself in this odd situation of needing threat, needing Bone Shield up, and needing RP. It isn’t a fun situation to be in but it very realistically can happen if you don’t have DRW on pull or didn’t chain a Bone Shield in form the last pack. Warriors can find themselves in similar situation where they want to cast revenge for threat but need to cast Ignore Pain for survivability. Thankfully for them they don’t have the kind of snowball effect that DK can be subject to when miss managing resources but I guess that is why DKs have so many CDs to help them catch those “OH ****” moment.
TBH several of my “complaints” could be eliminated if they just turned up threat to the level they had prior to BFA.
Personally I wouldn’t mind the low damage as much if our damage wasn’t not only important to our threat but also a fairly large factor in say timing a key or pushing bosses though phases faster. The fact is Tank damage is important heck even healer damage is important if it doesn’t take away from there ability to keep people alive. Right now Blizzard has kind of ignored healer DPS balance and that has to be catching up to them considering how much more some can do with the right set up while providing just as effective healing as others. The same applies to tanks.
The best dps I can pull is 6-7k overall at Ilvl 240 speed running friends through heroics or M0 where I’m doing 1-2 pulls between bosses with super strain.
I’m seeing other tanks average that in my M12-16 runs when I dps as just part of normal rotation at a similar item level.
If we had another aoe button, maybe even something that sacrificed a little bit of survival for damage for a trade off would be awesome. Heck give me a 10-15 RP aoe dump spell that I can use when I’m kiting with grip of the dead. That way I can get into a group, pop defensive and build RP, drop dnd to kite and still maintain threat.
I think a change to Bone Storm would be a solid idea. Have it be a flat cost and duration give it like an 8ish second duration on a 40ish second CD. Another idea is to have the talent Hemostasis also cause that Death Strike to hit a couple more targets for 25% of the damage the primary target took.
In addition to all that I think talents like Mark of Blood and Tombstone just need changes that make them less costly/ more powerful to use or full revamps making them passives or giving them interactions with baseline abilities. For instance Mark of Blood could be applied and refreshed by Death Strike and cause you to rapidly drain HP for the target. For Tombstone have it work like the original Bone Shield spell have give us 5-10 charges on a one minute CD.
Instead one of these spells is a lack luster maintenance buff and the other works counter intuitive to our primary mitigation system.
The mark of blood talent should read, Blood boil places a mark of blood on each target hit. That would be awesome. It’s only a 3% heal not game breaking by any means.
And yeah, some sort of CD to pump a bit more damage would be lovely.
bDKs needs damage, not more self healing or survivability.
Deathstrike should stay ST. It’s our hard hitting st ability but also our main self sustain.
Things like death and decay and blood boil need a dps boost so our aoe threat/dam goes up. Could also boost the consumption talent to make it more appealing.
True BDK does not need more healing. But they have implemented mark of blood a couple times and it’s always a dead talent spot. So if they wanted people to ever even consider using it, they would have to do some thing like that.
On a side note if they did some thing like that, it could open up space for an ability that spent RP for aoe damage, giving you choices between survival and damage depending on what you needed. Lot’s of cool things you can do when you don’t have 50% dead talents.
Edit: On a second side note, DK is still not as survivable as a bear so I’m sure we have some play room with out being op.
The thing is with some of the talents that need attention it is so they will compete with others in that row. For example in row one the value of say heartbreaker or Blooddrinker is both offence and defense. BD is good ST damage and heals you for an ok amount at the cost of a Rune and still generates RP. Heartbeaker is more RP per target hit which means more Death Strikes which make up a decent amount of our damage on AOE due to Hemostasis. Then you look at Tombstone and it works counteractively with your passives to sabotage both your defense and offense even if you play carefully. The only situation it would be worth it is you you were say Necrolord and running Chrismon Rune weapon for an overflow of Bone Shield charges every minute. Even then you need to be constantly tanking for CRW to reduced to a minute so in that case you would be in an multi target situation in which Heartbeaker is just better.
Rapid Decomp and Consumption are both really lack luster to. Consumption was always kind of not great on damage even when it was an artifact ability.
To quick talk about Mark of Blood well honestly nether of those talents can really mess with Will of the Necropolis cuz it is flat damage reduction that you get when you will likely most need it and that is in an emergency. AMS can already soak anything work soaking and as you said Mark of Blood is a minimal amount of throughput healing that you haft to actively maintain.
To be fair I think most specs across the whole game have a couple talent rows that are just awful to the point that the other two don’t even compete with the others. It is annoying because the team refuses to do revamps or big changes during an expansion which has doomed the majority of the specs in to game to suffer in one area or another for the majority of the expansion.
Most of the talents are pretty dead. They would be fun, but can’t compete. Like Will is so pivotal, they could buff every talent in that row by 300% and they still wouldn’t see play. It should be baseline.