Heroic Dungeons - Putting the heroic back into heroic?

[Wake]

Heroic mode instances have been released on the beta and I managed to level up another DK in time and quickly get together some form of a tanking gear set. My gear was far below what the heroic instances are actually (supposed to be) tuned for. Below follows a small summary of my experience the last couple of days on the beta.

The tanks are far and few on the beta, and DKs are arguably the strongest tanks together with Druids at the moment, though gimmicks as always gib us quite hard (more on that later).
I never had much of an issue finding groups. Before I set foot in most of the heroics I hadn't seen to much of all the normal dungeons, so there was a lot of learning through trial and error and I eventually adapted my playstyle, gear, enchants, and spec.

Gear and stats
Avoidance is gold worth, that much I can say without hesitating. Of course you need a reasonable ammount of health, but that will mostly come by default through gear. The way we're designed with Rune Strike at the moment also promotes stacking avoidance to obscene (28%!!) levels. I didn't really bother stacking Mastery too much, even though it scales up quite quickly.

I've found the Blood Shield to, in several situations, be hard to get the full effect out of. It requires the tank's involvement to activate, and even if you're a great player and manage to get the full effect out of it (no, I didn't manage perfectly, took me some time to get used to its mechanic), there will be situations where you just won't be able to, due to various restrictions of the encounters you're up against.
Avoidance always grants its full effect without the players involvement, though there's always the RNG argument (which for the most part is invalid when we can't be 2-shot anymore).

The actual loot that drops in the instances is quite good as it is, and reforging makes pretty much ever item great. I'm even using a few reforged DPS parts. Still haven't seen more than one tanking trinket though.

Combat
Over the course of the heroics I did, I definitely started to appreciate our Spec bonus Blood Rites (formerly Death Rune Mastery). The flexibility it provides probably makes us the strongest AoE tank in many situations. It's even perfectly fine without the application of diseases through Pestilence. It actually looks like most classes have had their AoE capabilities increased since Wrath.
On the topic of AoE, the loss of the glyph of Pestilence annoyed me at first, but with a lot of CC going on, it was often better not to have it. Running the mobs a few yards more together before using was really a non-issue.

Our self-healing may feel nerfed in some ways, but it's definitely still quite powerful, partly because of the damage to health ratios and healers having limited mana. Blood Worms are simply awesome.

Since we're quite resource-bound under the new rune system, most boss pulls I initiated with Dancing Rune Weapon and dished out as much threat I could in order to be able to "slack off" further into the fight and handle adds, self-healing, CD-usage and such much more smoothly. Dancing Rune Weapon is powerful, and feels nice when you proc a few more Rune Strikes, but I would like for it to be able to copy my Outbreak (perhaps I'm asking for too much).
The only negative feedback I have on DRW would be that it's a "no-skill" ability. You can't use it wisely, it just makes you 50% more powerful.

Bosses and Trash
First and foremost, a lot of this felt only roughly tuned. It's the first pass on the heroic dungeons and I expect some to be tuned up and others down. We spent half a day in Stonecore heroic, and cleared Vortex Pinnacle without any real issues, for instance. Secondly, gear is hard to come by and most are really under-geared for heroics at this point.

Crowd control is most certainly back, and I love it. Pretty much every class has some form of control now, and I'd even count DKs into that category. Locking out a caster with Mind Freeze, Strangulate and Hungering Cold/Gnaw is also more fun than most CCs! The Unholy pet can even tank an add or two.

From a tanking perspective, several bosses are actually just as engaging as raid bosses are, some even more engaging. Tank movement, add control and cooldown management is all there, though depending on how the heroics end up getting tuned this could possibly be negated. As of now there are several boss abilities that are definitely deadly and some even one-shot if you don't handle them correctly. Great change to demand more of the tank as opposed to bosses a la Blood-Queen.

This post has turned into a wall of text and it's getting pretty late so I'll wrap it up here by saying I'm quite impressed with what Blizzard has done so far. I don't even dare imagining what the raids will look like.

Here's some of the runs I did (props to TotalBiscuit)
Vortex Pinnacle Heroic

Stonecore Heroic (part 1)

Stonecore Heroic (part 2)

[Gravity]

You tanked with Totalbiscuit in your party?

[Wake]

Yeah. Hopefully more to come, possibly tonight.

[Fearlezz]

How did you feel about single target threat? By doing loads of heroics on the ptr I can hold most aoe packs easily as long as dps don't go all out before I pest, but on single targets, especially if they are doing some casting, it's an uphill battle. Also, do you ever find yourself resource starved for a few seconds and feel helpless while you see dps creeping up on you on omen?

One thing I especially have trouble with is tanking mobs in Hall of Reflections. Problem with them is they come one by one and by the time the third one comes you're out of runes and there is no way to keep them on you. This is a problem with first 10 waves, but becomes especially apparent in the gauntlet. I really find myself missing the snap threat of Icy touch, so many death runes to spare but picking up mobs with Icy Touch doing just 1.5k damage is really hard, even against just heal aggro. The more I think about it, since Icy Touch spamming is something developers don't like us doing, an elegant solution would be Icy Touch being Icy Slam on targets not infected by frost fever, the tooltip being something like "While in Blood presence, Icy Touch produces a high amount of threat on targets not infected with frost fever." That would help immensely with picking up incoming adds and wouldn't break the design in any way imo. Do you find yourself in these kind of situations in the beta too?

Plus, watching all the waves of small adds in Stonecore and other videos, do you find yourself missing the lower DnD cd at all?

[Wake]

Single target threat is quite fine actually. I've stacked some avoidance so my Rune Strike lights up a bit more. Up until this latest build I could also build up RP pre-pull and use Dancing Rune Weapon right away which significantly helped my threat. This is no longer possible. I've mostly found Frost Death Knights, Enhancement Shamans and Balance Druids pulling aggro off me in single target situations, other classes and specs are fine.

The resource starvation is definitely there. Death Coil spamming and not proccing any runes sucks quite badly and will leave you with bad threat gen sometimes.
In AoE situations I do miss the shorter Death and Decay cooldown, but the buffed Blood Boil and its glyph helps a lot and should tide you over. Heart Strike hitting three target is nice as well.

Bone Shield is still clunky as ever and is almost solely reliable as a pre-pull ability. Remove the darn rune cost or change the entire ability.

[Fearlezz]

How do you feel about streaming adds (comming at you 1 at a time like in HOR) and not having any snap threat ability? Or do those kind of situations not really happen in beta heroics?

[Wake]

There are a few gauntlets. The main issue is that you'll have to sacrifice survivability for threat in these situations - Plague Strikes for free Blood Boils means no Death Strikes which means no self-healing or mastery. Streaming adds can definitely be a bit of a challenge, you'll have to think ahead and not waste all your runes at once.

[Satorri]

Yeah, I kind of got screwed by being in early and pushing through content. When I did them Vash'jir, the first half of Deepholm, Uldum, and the Twighlands didn't have gear from quests or any random world drops. So my DK is 85 and has a pretty meager selection of gear replacing his level 80 epics. Suffice to say they want me to increase my item level to run level 85 instances and I've been slow (and distracted) from farming stuff out of Tol Barad. At least now the instances I can get into have gear (ran all the instances I could access before loot was added there too...)!

[Insolence]

I do hope they re-implement "Icy Slam" into some Ability, if not Icy Touch. Shield Slam still has it's High Threat Modifier, I'm not sure why DKs shouldn't have one somewhere. The Icy Touch idea was probably just a temporary solution (people were telling Devs it would get spammed even from PTR and it is, but so far they haven't made a single move on it), now however they don't seem too interested in finding a proper replacement, if they still want DKs to have some sort of "Snap Threat." Don't mean to sound whiney but if we can't have ours why do Warriors get to keep theirs, after all the original idea was to give DKs their own "Shield Slam," could be they changed their minds though or they don't want to implement a whole new Ability just to give us Snap Threat.

[brangwen]

Ok, now I have a good reason to watch TBs vids. Been doing the "I will get around to it at some point", but if Wake is in there I really have no excuse any more!

[Wake]

Just completed Deadmines heroic. Some really cool mechanics, but sadly it's quite easy. Also a couple of interesting trash pulls.
Not sure TB got all the footage he wanted from it so we're going back tomorrow, specifically for a particularly interesting "event" in the instance.

Edit: Perhaps I should have mentioned, even if it's mostly no-brainers, here's my spec as requested by quite a few http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#jcIRdhrf ... :Ro0aszMm0

[Scripts]

BcB is that big a threat boost then? And the DG cooldown is as useful as the reduced DnD cooldown used to be? Interesting...

[Fearlezz]

My guess would be that while running these new heroics a lower CD on DG is way more important than a bit more threat on DnD. Maybe it could be a bigger issue if you had trigger happy random pug DPS in your group, but since most of the stuff is focused down target by target by competent party members and DnD only serves to keep rest of the mobs on you while the focusing part is done, it also makes me think that the same thing explains the reasoning behind taking BCB. This could also explain to an extent why Wake felt threat on single target was OKish while I found it a bit lacking on my DK. Of course, the DG > DnD will probably change when you start running raid content, but untill then it is probably not something you should worry about and go with the more convenient option.

[Insolence]

Its not a reduced DnD Cooldown scripts its increased DnD Damage now

BCB is nice, just very expensive. Well look at the bright side, if they ever get around to scrapping Bladed Armor we'll probably get BCB anyway (Assuming they move it up).

[Scripts]

Right, the DnD talent is now extra damage. Was using the utility of the old talent as a comparison point for the DG talent.