By Gravity
23 commentsBlood tanks have so many variations in spec. You can grab talents to emphasise raid buffs or single-target threat or AOE threat. There’s even Will of the Necropolis, which is like a Plan B talent I like, but some others don’t. I thought to help people understand the choices, I’d try a diagram.
If you take my 54-8-9 blood spec from my ‘3.2 tank specs’ post‘ as the starting point, you can shift a few talents about as shown in this picture.
Shows where talents can be moved to, or avoided
In pictures, it says you can drop Hysteria, Mark of Blood and maybe even Will of the Necropolis.
You can invest those points into Scent of Blood or Morbidity (big green circles), or as second-priority choices Spell Deflection or Sudden Doom (their green circles are thinner and smaller).
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feels a bit better if you can think at wow like...
I looked around a bit (ok…about 2 minutes) and couldn’t find a reason why Improved Blood Presence is a “no go” for tanks. Granted, half of the talent is wasted in Frost, but as WowHead comments point out, healer GCDs are healer GCDs and 4% is better than 0%
Why do you say this talent is just for dps?
Twitter: gravitydk
It’s too small to keep you alive.
My mate Vexill wrote this: “You will be tanking in frost presence which means you will be getting 4% of your outgoing damage as healing. I had a look through the parse of my guild killing Freya (about 8 min long) its a good fight for MT threat as you can stand and spam your rotation for most of the fight. Across the fight I caused 1139000 damage which means if I had had imp blood presence I would have healed myself for almost 40K….thats about 2 Greater heals….less if you consider that I optimise for threat and I would have to cause less damage to take imp blood presence. Imp blood presence is not worth the points. “
Interesting, thanks for the information.
I agree…. I was tempted to take Imp BP until I calculated how much healing that would be as a tank…
Nice use of picture, Grav!!! That’s worth a thousand words, at least.
Just thinking about it: the better your gear/healers, the more you can sink into threat talents. Personally, I love Sudden Doom.
Twitter: OMGToddSpears
I am going to be trying this build and was wondering what a good rotation for it would be?
BTW, thanks for providing this build….it seems to be the best looking one i’ve saw while trying to find a good single target build.
Twitter: gravitydk
Standard blood HS spam. Look up any blood dps rotation; it’s the same. Rotations are the wrong way to think about blood tho; you want to use death strike and rune tap for self-healing which stuff up any rotation idea you might have.
why did you go for (improved)RT ? i feel like healing is the healers job not mine, dont you agree?
my choice was:
not taking RT, to take SD and Morbidity and also glyphed for DC. with SoB i have a lotta RP to spend for DCs plus the free ones from SD. i ‘m still in the field-testing state. i still have crappy Inevitable Defeat (armory)… so casting a lotta DCs produces more threat than some more crits on RS (with glyph), since DCs are not based on weapondmg. i cant provide any data yet, but dds in my raid confirmed my feelings.
with a new weapon i’d go for something like that, and moving one point from MoB to RT when getting T10 S4 bonus (but this could take a while)
what are your thoughts?
little correction… 8 a.m. just seems to be to early to post
i ment moving one point from Sob to RT… not MoB… its not even skilled in the posted build
btw. i’d glyph for DS, VB and RS with the above stated build
regards
Twitter: gravitydk
I hold a strong view that a tank’s first job is to survive, and secondly to generate threat. Surviving is not someone else’s job. For a start, tanks use cooldowns to reduce damage, and manage their own HP. Blood tanks can self-heal and rune tap’s 30s cooldown is an incredible tool. You can react very quickly to a spike of damage and heal yourself, possibly staying alive (or on easier fights you can help healers by using rune tap regularly to top yourself up).
To be honest, I’m actually restraining myself from being rude about the opinion “healing is the healers’ job” because (other than strongly disagreeing) I think it represents a misunderstanding of the tanks’ role.
Keeping the tank up is a mutual responsibility between the tanks and healers. It’s not even mostly the healer’s job. The tank really has to do everything he possibly can to keep himself alive. That’s why I like blood tanking so much; it lets you take more active responsibility, more often, and not just using damage-reducing cooldowns but also health-increasing skills.
So, I would never spec into threat unless I was having threat problems. I’d stick every talent point I could into survival. (Depending on your level of content, this transition may have already happened).
I have to agree with gravity here. Even speccing almost entirely for survival, I very rarely have any threat issues. So, why not use a wonderful tool! RT is fantastic for staying alive, and that’s your job!
threat infact is an issue for me. not only my outdated weapon but also (and most important) my often undisciplined raid doesnt make a tanks life easier :/
thanks for the advice, you convinced me
you are right – thats not new to me, maybe the phrase i used was a bit too “i have aggro, go heal me, if i die it is your fault”. but i did not feel like having to help the healers… during coliseum25 non heroic and 10 heroic… but with some serious tries in 25 heroic mode yesterday…. damn i wished i had RT
i should have checked here earlier
Twitter: gravitydk
I really dislike undisciplined deeps who think their job is to pull agro off you, as if it’s a test of manhood.
Rune Tap is very nice indeed, you can pop it with Vampiric Blood up too for even bigger self-heals!
Ok, so im the old (age) wow noob. Been playing a few months now and I really love the Blood Spec. DK. I just hit 80 a couple weeks ago and was not sure what i wanted to do…lol** First I wanna tank (blood) and second spec i wanna DPS… my question on the 54/8/9 blood tank spec you have listed, what is your attack rotation? And what would be the best DPS (blood) talents. My link to toon is http://www.wowarmory.com/character-talents.xml?r=Archimonde&n=Th%C3%A1natosnyx&group=1 Thanks!!
in general single target rotation is
IT-PS-DS-HS-HS
DS-HS-HS-HS-HS-RPDump
for multiple targets
DnD-IT-PS-Pest
tab (for next target) HS(or BB)-DS-Pest-BB-RPDump
but rotations for tanks arent as fixed as for DDs since you have to react on certain events during fights, popping cooldowns, taunting adds etc etc and you cannot straightly keep to your rotations
you should check elitistjerks.com for further infos
Thanks so much ,,,,and this by far the best site i have found that i truly understand what ur talkig about …lol
Tanked ToC last night with 2 noobs (one lev78) was a breeze,,,healer done good but i went through the warrior WW and never moved off (hehhehe) had to press the good ol runtap/vampiric macro (huge heal)…
One other thing i use should i get in HP trouble is Death Pack…8k-9k HP instant..WONDERFUL…stuff…
and what presense do you stay in?
Twitter: gravitydk
This is a tanking site. There is only one presence.