[Lycanmoon]

I have been using this build to tank:
Talent Calculator - WowHead
I use a rotation of IT, PS, Oblit, HS, HS, DRW, BT, Pes, and then spam HS, and Oblit as they come up. I usally crit with the Oblit, and every other HS. The Oblit crits for around 4.5k to 5.6k and theHS hits the primary target for around 4.5k and the secondary target for around 3.8k. Now my gear is a mismatched set of starter tanking and pvp honor gear. I have been doing Os and Naxx this way. (I have no luck on the rolls.)

I have been thing about going to this spec:

Talent Calculator - WowHead
What do you think?

[Bumbuckle]

Remove Oblit from your rotation, since 3.1 Death Strike does more damage if talented, this will also free up a few points in frost.

I haven't played around with Blood Tanking post 3.1, but from what I can gather from the talent calculator, it is difficult to gain enough DPS(and therefore, threat) talents and gain enough utility to fufil your full role as a tank.

However you bringing this up has me eager to make it work. I am particularily interested working out a Hard Mode General Vezax blood spec, ie Continuous Death Strike spam + Rune Tap to remove the strain of the solo tank healer pre-Saronite Amonius.

For the moment Blood seems the worst of the tanking specs available for Tanking, however it may have it's niche in self heals.

[Littlepower]

Wasn't Death Strike supposed to be buffed today with 3.1.3 release or was that something blizz said in a blue and decided not to go with it?

[Satorri]

Well, let's see.

Death Strike is amazing, you do not need Oblit whatsoever. I am a heavy Blood tank, my DS's hit for 2600+ and crit over 6k at times (nummy raid buffs), but they heal for about 7k. The damage threat isn't as heavy as Oblit, but the heals even when they overheal are huge value, and I focus on HS for damage threat otherwise, which does not disappoint.

Death Strike does 75% weapon damage +223 at its base and heals for 5% of the DK's total health for each disease on the target. Imp DS increases that damage by 30% and the heal by 50% with a 6% crit chance buff, so, 97.5% weapon damage plus 290 and heals for 7.5% per disease. Compare to Oblit which at the base does 80% weapon damage plus 467, and is increased by 12.5% per disease. Oblit works well with talents in blood and annihilation makes it pain-free to use, but it requires you to remove 5 pts from Blood and/or Unholy to get it which will likely come from Epidemic and Morbidity, I'd wager. Personal choices all around, but you do not NEED Oblit, for sure, it's not even really anything gained, just a change in the tools you can use effectively.

Blood is anything but the weakest spec. I did the math elsewhere, I forget where, I post liberally, ha. A Blood tank's self-heals can pass the effective mitigation that frost offers with all its heals overhealing 50-70% of their effective heal value. Blood has suffered from a poor image for a long time, but it is not at all deserved these days.

[michah]

it's hard to quantify the healing from ds in defensive terms, but when you use it in such a way that bosses hit you, and you follow that hit with a ds - on fights like vezax and algalon - that kind of defensive ability use substantially increases your effective health in a way that no other tank class can even come close to replicating. it's insane how strong it is. most people attribute dk's strengths to their armor, or to our cooldowns, but being able to throw out 2 self heals every 10 seconds for 8k a piece, and a 15k or so heal every 30 seconds, on demand? i mean you can see yourself taking the hits, if you aggressively apply that self healing, it's nuts the kind of health extension you can create without even relying on other people.

[Lycanmoon]

Thanks for the info I will try the DS insted of Oblit.

[Varucard]

Figured instead of making another blood tank thread, i will post in here.


Been frost for most of my dk tank career, yet i have been reading alot about blood tanks and how they work. I tried it for like 3 days and hated it(mind you i did patchwerk and solo-tanked 10man emalon). My question is how do u maximize its potential? I found my health dipping WAY more than in frost. Was it me or was it just the bosses?

[Vanthus]

Source: Varucard Figured instead of making another blood tank thread, i will post in here. Been frost for most of my dk tank career, yet i have been reading alot about blood tanks and how they work. I tried it for like 3 days and hated it(mind you i did patchwerk and solo-tanked 10man emalon). My question is how do u maximize its potential? I found my health dipping WAY more than in frost. Was it me or was it just the bosses?

That is a pretty open question...what are your frost spec and blood spec you used?
To maximize a blood build is pretty much from maximizing your effective health. The blood tree abilities often scale with the amount of health you have.

[Feanorr]

Source: Varucard I found my health dipping WAY more than in frost

I dont see how you can see a big difference like this. In term of mitigation and avoidance, the difference between a blood tank and a frost tank are very little:
Frost: +3% miss chance, +2% damage mitigation, +3sec of IBF and UA
vs
Blood: +6% stam, WOTN (if you take it) and Vampiric blood.

UA and 3sec IBF vs VB and WOTN, it's hard to compare and less important than before 3.1 so, let forget about it.
It remain +3% miss and +2% mitigation vs +6% stam; it's really not a big difference. And blood have some self heal in top of that but even without it, there are pretty close in term of damage taken.

[Blueduck3285]

I love my Blood tank. I tank things I would have never dreamed of tanking as Frost. As Blood, I can heal myself after Big hits to take some strain off my healers, consistently stringing DS's for DeathRunes, slamming HS like theres no tomorrow, and poping Runetap for those "oh shit" moments, with Mark (cant remember the name off the top of my head, the whole mark the boss so when he hits me it heals me thing) in reserve fallowed by an armor trinket and dodge trinket... There isnt anything I havent been able to tank yet. Funny thing is, the healers in my 10mans say Im the easiest tank to heal because of all the sell healing. I may not have the avoidance and mitigation of Frost or Unholy, but my EH is through the roof.

I personally Opt out of Vampiric Blood. My build is alil more of EH and DPS, so I get most of my defensive stats from gear. Threat isnt an issue, the only issue with Blood DK is an unlucky string of no dodges, parries, or misses. Up side to that, is if I notice I am fail to avoid a couple times in a row, I will DS even if I have Deathrunes, just to keep heals incoming for those weird RNG moments. Ok so I lied, our biggest weakness, which I dont have tooo much trouble with is AoE threat. BB was made better, but still doesnt compare to Frost's HB dunks or Unholy's buzzing UB+Eplague+DnD(with dec, if you so chose).

All in all, Ill never tank as another spec, I just love Blood way too much.

PS Satorri, would you happen to know if Glyphed RT creates extra threat because of the group aspect of the Glyph?

[Satorri]

Flat out, Frost will take less damage than Blood.

To maximize Blood's effectiveness stack health like it's going out of style.

And Ducky my friend, come over here so I can slap you on the wrist for not taking Vamp Blood!!! 1 pt!! HUGE VALUE! Last night I was laughing about it. When I pop Vamp Blood, for 30 seconds I have 54k health and +35% to all incoming heals!


As for the comment that it is hard to quantify the effect of heals, I'd disagree. It's just time consuming. I did an extensive string of posts that I don't remember where it ended up, ha ha. The point was to compare the three trees for how they fair relative to each other and I expressed blood in terms of damage in and heals in ranged on overhealing %'s as a functional counterpoint to that damage. Because I don't want to go digging I'll rephrase it here and use my actual healing values, overhealing %'s, and ability uses from my Uld25 raid last night!

I'll preface this by saying we did everything outside, Assembly, Kologarn, and a few attempts on Auriaya. Of that I shared tanking on Razor, MT'd Ignis, MT'd XT, tanked Steelbreaker, and shared tanking on Kolo. We swapped duties this week on Auri, so I was tanking adds.

For general comparisons, by WWS's metrics (out of 3h20m active raid time):
My damage: 1h03m dps time, 1988 dps
My healing: 35m heal time, 1346 HPS
My incoming damage: 45m dmg taken time, 2834 dtps

In that raid time, my heals I used in the following count, for these values:

• Death Strike = 283 hits, 7219 average value, 67% overheal (little high for me), 71% of my total self-healing
• Imp Leader of the Pack = I'll leave this out since it's not specific to blood, but it's 18% of my self-healing
• Rune Tap = used 33 times, avg 8945 heal, 20% overhealing overall, 10% of my total heals
• Gift of the Naaru = not blood, this is racial, I'll leave it out, but it's 1% of my total heals
• Mark of Blood = this one is harder to measure, I also used it very sparingly. I'll discount it for this.

So, we'll take the damage-in time as the key timeframe at 45 min, meaning I average 1 DS per 9.54 sec. 7219 heal averaging 67% overheal, means that's 252 hps full effective value. Rune Tap I'm using once every 82 sec (1m22s, just over 1/3rd as often as I can), it heals for 8945 and averages only 20% overhealing, which works out to an average of 88 hps. Combining the two elements puts me at 340 hps over the 45 min of damage taken time. Knowing that the net result was 2834 dtps, the heals functionally reduced my incoming damage to 2494 as the healers would see it, or functionally a 12.00% damage reduction.

Napkin math at its finest, but that should give you a sense of the power of well-used self-heals, and I could put Rune Tap to better use I'd imagine.

To look at more specific fights very generally:
Ignis (I was MT remember, 4 corners kiting and usually 1-2 adds up):
My HPS = 1500 (in 3m36s)
My DTPS = 2820 (in 6m31s)

Spread the HPS to the DTPS timeline and that's 829 hps against 2820 dps incoming, 29.40%!! Because it makes me giggle, and puts things in perspective, I did 16.3% of my total incoming heals, I was second for overall heals on myself.

XT (MT again, stand-up fight, no kiting just tanking):
My HPS = 1325 (in 3m54s)
My DTPS = 3692 (in 4m04s)

You can already see the closer time frames, stretch the hps to the dtps time frame and it becomes 1271 hps against 3692 dtps or 34.42%. I did 20.3% of my total healing, from all sources, I was again #2 on total heals on myself.

*it is worth noting on these that it includes Imp Leader of the Pack which accounts for about 15% and 19% of my total heals respectively.

Take-home message:
Blood heals are substantial effective health increasers, but because they are not the least bit passive, they are only as effective as their tank uses them.

[Esch]

Source: Blueduck3285 PS Satorri, would you happen to know if Glyphed RT creates extra threat because of the group aspect of the Glyph?

I would expect it does generate additional threat, though the threat would be split amongst mobs. I've also found that the Glyph effect's range is substantial, somewhere around 50 yards.

[Vlad]

Source: Satorri And Ducky my friend, come over here so I can slap you on the wrist for not taking Vamp Blood!!! 1 pt!! HUGE VALUE! Last night I was laughing about it. When I pop Vamp Blood, for 30 seconds I have 54k health and +35% to all incoming heals!

Damn right, VB is a weaker version of guardian spirit.. except you control it.

[Satorri]

Sorry I forgot to respond about Rune Tap. It does buff the threat. The total healing is used as heal threat, so if it heals full value on all 5 targets thats 22% of your health plus 10% of each of the other 4 people's healths. If you have 3 other tanks in the party...

I loved the glyph, but I use Rune Tap far more personally now and my other major glyphs have trumped it. I used to LOVE it in Naxx because I didn't need as much healing personally and I could heal up other key people. I'd drop the other tank and a few healers in my party on KT and save them from Frost Blasts. =)

And, Vlad, it's a *stronger* version of Guardian Spirit except for the life-save (only 5% less additional healing, 15% more total health, and triple the duration on 2/3rds the CD when VB is glyphed and GS is not), on a shorter CD, that you control, AND they stack.