My rant on Crazy Blood DK Changes after Testing Mythic+ on Beta this week... 

It's still wild to me that they decided to change how deathstrike works after over a decade

I LOOOOOOOOOOVE KITING AS A TANK, when i select my tank alt on the character selection screen and hit "enter world" the first thing that comes to mind is, oh boy i cannot wait to aggro a trash pack, do a 180 and run away!!!!! TWW S1 HYPE

Exactly why blizzard needs to stop catering or designing the game around the top 1%

Casuals and midcore players are the ones who are gonna feel these nerfs the most. The people who play this game seriously are gonna figure out a way to make it work because they enjoy theory crafting and pushing their limits in the game. These nerfs are gonna result in more failed keys at lower levels, people being even more toxic towards the healers than they already are etc...

The fact that they want Death Strike to be more on par with other mitigations i can sort of understand, but this nerf is a bit too much, considering that with Death Strike, you have to eat the damage first, and then react in time to heal up again.. I have to admit that with this change i think i may main my bear instead in TWW - cause what's really the point of playing a DK if its just more stressful than any other tank, but yet you can't actually fully selfsustain anyway ? I'm personally having a hard time seeing the point

Never understood the vitriol for tanks lol I’m just happy the fuckin key gets at least timed

good point on blizzard continuing with their idea. I'm in the group "it's not great, but we can manage", but if blizz continues, it might get worse, fast bone shield was portrayed in the post as not significant change. I guess the author of said post never had to tank with blood shield on high fortified, where 100% of your HP/shield can be gone in a single global interesting that ~85% of healing is the predicted number from Acherus discord server, down from ~95%. There are some people with strong opinions, but generally, their theorycrafting is on point bone shield increase is about 3% DR, again going by Acherus info. you can do the math yourself, it's negligible increase. IMO bone shield should be increased to about twice of the current value, or more worst consequence of these change overall I think will be the fact that there will be less tanks. You said on stream "don't believe in tank shortage", but the reality is, less players will play tank. It's a good thing for tank mains, bad thing for dps waiting in queue. Skill floor just went up. Personally, I will still be playing bdk because I like the playstyle. Unless blizz decides to nuke bdk playstyle to oblivion by removing the core conceps, which might be not that far fetched, going by recent changed and their "idea".

Might be a long comment but I have a few things to say about these sudden changes. 1) I don't think they would get a big backlash from players who don't agree with these changes if it was done at the start of beta versus changing it 1 week before prepatch drops and a month before xpac release. 2) Due to the over tuned damage in dungeons and keys in the beta its difficult to tell how these nerfs are having an overall impact, is it the dungeon or is it the tank nerf? 3) I am seeing a lot of people who support this change for the tanks having no clue on how tanking works or how it plays out in dragonflight, I keep seeing mentions of "tanks shouldn't be OP Gods" and "They should rely on the healer like in the old days". From actually playing M+ I can tell that tanks are not some unkillable machine and that they do die usually to their own mistakes or key scaling at higher keys, plus you still heal them as a healer just not as often and it should be like this. If people want to babysit the tanks HP they can go to classic era servers and play those there is a reason they stopped this play style in retail wow after or during CATA I think. 4) What annoyed me the most about these changes was the blue post mentioning groups running without a healer in M+ and that was usually done at very high keys by well coordinated groups and from what I can tell wasn't done in regular group finder. This just feels as an overall punishment to the rest of the player base to stop a small minority of high end players doing that strat. I am glad I have a static group of friends to fill a 5 man for m+ with because I can predict another case of SL season 1 kiting and or possibly a shortage of tanks that will lead to an even larger shortage of healers as a domino effect. I am just hoping we wont be stuck with tuning during live season to fix this fiasco of doing these changes late.

They need to implement these changes in the pre patch so people can actually give comparison feedback on dungeons they've done all season and how they'd feel with the tank changes instead of having two many variables like new dungeons, affixes etc

The biggest issue with the changes is that they've only made the changes to the tanks, and need to make the changes to all the content. If they retune the dungeons, like, nerfs by 30%, then I think the philosophy that they're trying to go with is a good one. But, the fact that they made the changes, and said, hey, please give us feedback on the tanks with most overtuned dungeons they've ever made just doesn't make sense. My biggest worry is that they've got terrible balance in the beta right now, the affixes are the most hideous affixes they've ever made, and we have 4 weeks left. They better not do what they normally do, and that's balance raid first for the first 3 weeks while m+ festers in chaos, with absolutely no changes. I'm sure at some point the balance will be there for season 2, but season 1 is going to pure hell. Shadowlands Season One was the worst m+ season, in terms of balance that I've ever played. It looks as though Monk is going to be the best raid tank and best m+ due to the way it's designed. Monk actually plays as Blizzard wants, slow damage over time due to stagger, but all the other tanks look so spiky it's scary that these changes come with 4 weeks to go. I switched some of your live stream and you're getting slapped. You look as though you're on a knifes edge every 2 seconds. If they want less spikey damage then they have increase HP by another 50% or so to allow player to react, because we're playing ping pong right here. I play a bear tank, and some are saying bears aren't that bad. My worry for bears is that the talent tree is in shambles right now. Another expansion comes along, and they didn't fix the talents at all. I guess the beta test will be happening on live servers next week. It's a shame it has to be this way, but so be it. I'm disappointed that Blizzard wanted to achieve so much in such little time.

The healing taken tab is also a good way to figure out how self-sufficient you are. It'll breakdown who you've received healing from as a %, yourself included. Warcraft Logs also has an External Healing Received Per Second(EHRPS) graph that does this in greater detail.

Check the progress of the people who are pro tank nerfs… lfr and heroic heroes 99% of the time.

I just wonder why now? There’s so many changes to tanking, m+ and healing that you can’t single out the failure point. On top of that, how many more weeks left in testing? Why so late in the cycle?

Exactly , healers healing abilities is not even comparable to our self healing , the best thing they can do is watch us die , and then say what a noob tank and leave the dungeon :/

Ever group I’ve seen do high keys has just been pulling massive and kiting, it was boring in shadowlands s1 it’s boring now

Sorry spamming a bit, I wonder if they had like a partial buff on tanks via an absorb mechanic, specifically Blood DK but maybe the others as well where your absorbs appear or perhaps a healing absorb appears when you death strike for a partial amount and when that is removed you gain X% Mitigation for 8 seconds? Seems fairly convoluted but I can't really think of a better way to make a healers heals feel impactful on a tank with a huge health pool. So, death strike - Recover hp up to 80%, heal absorb topped off for the remainder - Gain 20% damage reduction for a small portion of time?? But then again that introduces a new set of issues. Sigh, why are they doing this so close to release again -.-. I bet they release a statement of " We will continue to monitor class balance in season 1 " only for it to take months to actually address the core problem as usual.

does looking at damage taken and healing done incorporate the armor buff?

Did say I was worried about BDK and Guardian druids across the board, looks like BDK definitely got hit way way worse

For me what is scary is blizz's incompetence. Like first do some tank rework (BDK , Brew). Then out nowhere 1 month till new expansion completly changing BDK gamestyle and identity. Blizz said want to healers feel important and thats why they nerfing tanks... But problem was in offhealing and aug. I dont get it how aug not getting nerf....

maybe we will get something like reduced dmg incoming for some seconds after using death strike. we still have one month of hoping getting something better. :D

i Like your content, being a DK since LK ,the change is no the first time, originally the DS heal was base on your attack power they change that in WOD to be the version we have until TWW, is difficult to word the change because the mechanic in self is unique; but what happen is make a snap shot of all the damage you receive in 5 second and add 30% of that to all your DS heals in that snap shot; with the change the snap shot is only for 1 DS that will consume the sample snap shot. this is a nerf to the dps DK because as a tank the snap shot recharge in a global normally and as Blood DK you can take more that one hit to happen. but the tank and DK community around the Blood spec is, peculiar because they say the get one shot but use the dps engravement no the tank one, even when you have a cap of parry rate. In the beta all Dungeons are over tune, the scaling system don't work ( some stats don't scale equally because you lose a lot in the jewelry), a lot of embellishment don´t work at all and trinket are a shit show. like you say in your others videos, is no the right environment for testing nothing objectively.

I just want to know what the guy who came up with all these changes was smoking, because it sure hit him hard. Then there are people on forums and reddit who genuinely think these are good changes? It puts more pressure on healers, and then adds another uncertainty tanks have to worry about. The only constant I've ever had in m+ was that I knew I would not just fall over, unless I messed up, and now I need to depend on a healer, in a pug group? bruh. Blood shield doing only 20% is ridiculous. How BDKs are supposed to survive in higher keys is just a mystery to me, and of course, there is no way they can tune these new dungeons properly, especially the ones that are over a decade old, s1 is just gonna be a mess, back to SL s1 era, and DH is meta again, because dh jump far. I am just hoping they revert all of this, literally no one asked for these changes, not to mention how stupid they are. Ridiculous. Otherwise, I dont know if I am willing to stick with bdk or any other tank spec next season. For the context, I also exclusively pug as a bdk, and this season stopped pushing around 3.2k.

I don't understand what's going on with some of the insane opinions I've seen in the community. Why all of a sudden do people seem to hate tanks being good at tanking? Why do people keep saying "tanks shouldn't be gods", "tanks op" etc. I really don't get it.

I'd love your take on Equinox(monk)'s take on the changes. He's completely on the other side it seems...

As far as your healing percentages you can definitely see the nerf. The new number is approaching demon hunter on live, 82-85% is my average healing. Haven't tested on beta post changes since like you are saying, I feel like there is more to come.

As one of the "I can't see much difference" folks, I can admit you raise some good points here.

I feel like 5 weeks prior to launch, Dragonflight tuning felt nowhere near as batshit crazy as war within class and dungeon tuning feels right now. And they literally reinvented every talent tree for that expac.

bDKs historically being the most difficult tank to trhow effective heals 'cause of how their design works. Now imagine how stressfull it will be to heal a bDK with this new philosofy and the new DS... healers need to time the window where DS will not heal enough. Leading DKs to receive less effective heals then other tanks... but still need the heals... man, such a frustrating gameplay. You can do 100% your job and still die, and you can't really blame the healer cause it will be really hard to maximize the heal on a Dk. Jeez.

My copium is that they changed the tanks, but have not yet done the dungeon damage rebalance. Which actually is probably bad, since they will probably increase the damage tanks take even more. But since they said they want to lower party damage healers should be able to heal us more, which will not help with blood dk spike damage and will global us more, but healers will maybe be there to pop heals on us more, maybe saving us? But probably not. And just hover over healing taken and you can see % of the healing you took from yourself, instead of using calculator.

Honestly I think I need to play it. Worried about BDK, as I am by no means a great player. But looking at bear as my second choice.... Their changes have me nervous too. But again. I don't know. I have to play it.

Was going to play dk and pally for hc clears and 10s but with the tank changes i think i may go aug evoker and not tank this first season...

As a healer main, I look forward to being asked/demanded by DPS to handle the affix like it can be dispelled and being blamed for wipes caused by it because I “Didn’t handle it.” I get groups that can’t swap to killing totems. I cannot imaging these groups handling the affix. Thanks official forums whiners for giving us this affix. You didn’t ask for it, but you deserve it.

il give prot paladin a try then will see how it goes. worst case i got holy and ret aswell :p

as a person that still wants to play dk and got pushed into tanking in m+ since sl, the only saving grace is that i dont think my friends are good enough to play keys high enough to where this nerf would be relevant

Big true regarding the Tank changes. ffs blizzzzuuuurd

I do like "Coagulating Blood" aura. I tried it in the beta. It is a welcoming change for beginners who wants to play Blood DK. If they can fix passive mitigation, Blood dk will be in a good position along side other tanks and the spec will be accessible for intermediates in high keys.

Alot of the 15's done were done when the symbiosis trinket was still giving 25k versa, made it a breeze

Honestly, at this point i just think they want to Raids and M+ (the competitive mode$) being only doable on high difficult by coop groups (with voice chat) and let every pug player just go for Delves Endgame.

So as you know the only tank ive played in the past like 7 years is Prot pally. So i tried a few beta keys on my pally.. I deff felt the nerfs .. when you subconsciously think a CD is lasting a certain time after X years it deff got me a couple times. The mastery nerf was noticeable. BUT big but.. i thought i was going to be noticing it more... maybe i went into thinking the nerfs we just bigger in my head then in reality .. deff felt them deff needed more healing from the healer. I only play prot pal when it comes to tanks so just seeing it from that PoV i was expecting it to be worse than it actually was i was only doing 5s and 6's tho. So i do feel like it was a bit of a overreaction from most of the community (shocker). and as ive said in your stream... if they nerf the instances that also acts as a buff to tanks.. and as i also said if there isnt atleast 1 full wave of nerfs to the instances i think everyone is in trouble not just tanks. also i should say im perfectly fine with them wanting tanks to actually be a target of healers.. but in doing so they NEED to lower the aoe/rot dmg to the rest of the group to make up for the attention the tank is getting.

Blizz watch Equinox super tank, and tune based on him and for sure some others....... great, the rest of us tanks, we go dps. GG Blizz. On the other hand, keep it coming, you give valuable comments!

Really disappointed with these changes. I was excited to continue with my bdk going forward. One thing I was curious that I felt wasn't really touched on was do you feel it is still fun to play? I feel like, especially after seeing your build and some others, that they did a talent rework so we could play with some of our old toys again and now none of them are even worth it.

I rather would have liked to see more dungeon nerfs compared to tank changes. Unless they throw out a statement saying we want the difficulty to be insane then the community as a whole won't be happy.

The funny thing is, they ask for our feedback, but the feedback an changes are not going to occur untill AFTER the first season of m+. Trust me on this one, anyone who know how blizzard work, KNOW when they decide something they believe is GOOD, there in no way they gonna change it. GG for 1st m+ season...ITs KITE time again!!.

I feel like when they made the change to the keystone level i think they just made the dungeons so much worse. Especially since thye now since they also giga nerfed some tanks, especially Blood Death Knight. I think all would just benefit from just making dungeon keystone levels to what it was before, i don't think anyone asked to squish the dungeons like that.

What is crazy is they compared deathstrike to shield block from prot warrior... They are so out of tuned with their own game.

It’s so odd to me why they force the scaling. They should just let you choose your item level.

Ho boy, strappin in for an interesting video. Coffee ready, ears open.

Really need a flat decrease to auto attack damage across the board. Flat decrease to damage overall across the board, tbh. As a healer aoe healing feels much better than spamming 1 target. Not too looking forward to healing tanks. However, looking at the streams, trash packs do pretty good amounts of damage to the party, so that's good. It won't be too boring healing trash.

i bet they buff healers cant wait to see it. would be the funniest thing if they do

Part of the tank blue post talked about tuning the dungeons according to their tank goals. I think it might be a bit preemptive to doom this hard. You are basically playing the changes halfway through as far as I can tell. Not saying I agree with the tank nerfs or that I’m even confident they will hit their goals, but I think judging the dungeons too hard pre any major tuning passes isn’t going to be accurate. Still good to give feedback but your feedback should really be more measured with this in mind imo.

its 2 videos now that say just dont tank....play dps no reason to quit the game. but for some people it mean finding a new guild cause they already have all dps slot filled or dont want more dks/melee. these changes really make me want to quit cause its telling me they have no clue what they even doing. so why pay them as they figure it out

I mean it's probably really only going to effect the like top 5% of players

Blood DK can only be insanely OP, or dumpster fire tier. It can't really be balanced, in a way that is fun for the whole group. I'd say just keep it how it was in Dragonflight, I personally would rather have my tank, tanky. What REALLY needs adjusted is the defensives of the DPS. DPS are just as tanky as a tank, but with 4x the damage. I personally am just going to stick to playing Cataclysm, the game feels SO much better to me. I hate how retail has become an AOE spam meta, and every spec/class is a giga tank.

When I’m healing dungeons in Dragonflight with a DK I usually don’t have to pay too much attention to them. They pretty much take care of themselves the whole dungeon. When I do heal them, it’s usually a huge chunk of damage that catches me off guard. They are never my number one healed person in the dungeon. I love it.

hmmm. lots of really interesting data points and such in this video. feel pretty happy with my decision to skip season 1 of TWW on my DK. pretty glad that I told my GM I won't be playing my DK until at least season 2, and he said "ok sounds good" Mage for me! man, these changes are pretty bad. oh well. at least my Mage is in a good spot woohoo!

I've simply lost faith in their ability to balance the game in general, but in particular M+. This new expansion looks like a rush job right now too, so many wild changes coming so fast that it cannot possibly stick a smooth landing.

Whats up bro

Sounds like you want a looking for raid dungenes. Looking for raid made it to easy for ppl to forget how to play the game and do the mechanics.

Blizzard casualising the game to bring back those who left Is the only reason I can fathom for some of their recent decisions. I feel everything was well in DF and now they wish to change everything.

There are really people who wanted tank nerfs? Lmao, just imagine how long it will take to pug if people stop playing tanks cuz it’s no longer fun and hard. It will affect everyone

If they make tanking unfun its gonna be a problem and blizz will have to back pedal. I pug i am a solo player no guild no friends who play WoW anymore. Tanks need to be fun to play and remain functional. Idiots praising any tank nerf must really love long que times.

I have said before DK's can't have nice things

I was sort of tolerating all the other bad choices they've been making, mostly because "No matter how bad everything else is, at least I still have BDK". If that's no longer true I might finally rid myself of this game. I'm sure it'll be doable, it's just not going to be as fun or comfortable. The only viable tank in a world where tanks are not independent is VDH, because if the healer sucks you can at least infernal strike away until they wake up.

I think Jak put it best, to make healing fun there's just no way around the fact they have to take some agency away from tanks and dps. DF healing has been absolutely terrible, you are either completely unnecessary or everyone is dying in 1-2 hits. The annoying this is that they didn't also address DPS defensives along with this (and apparently won't for a while) and also then start cutting back on monster mechanics. Instead it's just nerfing tanks and leaving everything else for a while

I don't understand this complaint. As someone who has done a lot of tanking and healing, why do you not want the healer to heal the tank at all? Why do you want tanks to be able to go through dungeons without any healing from the healer? It makes no sense to me.

So funny, Blizzard does a slight change(what they said they would do) and guy is mad because they didn't do what they said they would do and more changes coming. lol

nerf dh buff all other tanks ez ez

they just need to delete dk as whole and rework it from 0. Its literally my favorite class but its also the most problematic and they cant fix it

Love these changes. Hope the continue down this road. Tank never should have been able to sustain.

I'm so happy for BDK nerfs. Now if we can get DH nerfed too, maybe we can get some new tanks in higher content. BDK and DH are way over represented.

sorry not sorry but all the tanks and non tank players were just perma crying meanwhile people like dorki went in tested it and said they barely felt a differnce its so pathetic and such a loser mentality Edit: i dont agree with nerfing tanks in general besides maybe dh cuz u know obivioulsy its giga op

The point of these changes is that so Blizz can increase HP across the board and make the game bearable again. No one cares about your ability to heal yourself in this context, we care more about the game being fun. Being 1 shot randomly is not fun. It's called a necessary sacrifice.