Blood DK Stat Priority

[qawsican 0]

Hi there, I just recently decided to try tanking on my DK but am confused with the different stat priority choices. On the one hand, some people are telling me to full reforge my stats into mastery, leaving me very little hit/exp. On the other hand, others are saying I should get 7.5% hit/exp first before reforging into mastery. I am unsure which is the best way to go. Thank you.

[Vlad 411]

I do not believe you should aim for 7.5% hit/expertise ahead of Mastery. In my opinion, go full Mastery Rating with every reforge you can (for gems, you can check our suggestions in the gems page of the guide). On any items that already have Mastery Rating, there you should try to get some more hit or expertise.

Hope that helps, let me know if you still have questions!

[Soultrain 7]

Best choice like Vlad said would be to go for mastery as top priority. Like he also said reforge any gear that already has mastery into hit, i prefer not to worry about exp because blood strike can not be parried and your rune strike cannot be dodged, blocked or parried. There fore you will always be getting those self heals and good stacks of blood shield which is our main source of damage mitigation and you will have plenty of blood charges to use blood tap on command. Getting both hit and exp capped will give you better dps numbers but for pure survivability get as much mastery as possible. As for dodge vs parry, parry seems to be the better choice. I'll link my armory later, currently in dps gear. I personally do not like the pre set builds from mr robot so i kinda use the mastery build as a guidelines and tweak to what I think works.

[qawsican 0]

Alright awesome, thanks for the reply guys.

[jasonleekungfu 2]

I do not believe you should aim for 7.5% hit/expertise ahead of Mastery. In my opinion, go full Mastery Rating with every reforge you can (for gems, you can check our suggestions in the gems page of the guide). On any items that already have Mastery Rating, there you should try to get some more hit or expertise.

Hope that helps, let me know if you still have questions!

Well with respect, personally I beg to differ about the hit/exp part.

1) My opinion about hit/exp. Indeed DK's main surviving mechanics (Death Strike/Blood Shield) doesn't not require successful hit any more since hotfix in 4.3. However, I still recommend to build enough hit/exp. First of all, surely less misfire will make your resource regeneration smoother, which in the end makes your rotation smoother. Also more successful auto hit means more SoB which also gives you more self heal. However the most important reason, in my opinion, is that in MoP literally all tanks use hit/exp as primary stats except for DK, for all of them are much more resource-dependant than they used to be. That means, if a dk doesn't have enough hit/exp, he will most likely have threat problem against other tanks, especially bears and monks whose threat is as high as hell. Our group (unfortunately) has double dk tanks. I'm hit/exp capped and the other guy didn't care about them at first. I had to completely stop attacking even auto-attacking in order not to get aggro while he is tanking. Then I talked to him and he got some hit/exp. Now things are much better.

2) My suggestion about hit/exp: get 7.5% of both. I personally suggest to get 7.5% of both. Hit is just capped of course. But expertise is just soft capped, which is not dodgable but still parriable. Obviously as we know, our 2 main abilities, Death Strike (bypass parry) and Rune Strike (bypass parry/dodge/block) should now be guaranteed hit. As expertise goes higher, DK doesn't benefit too much about that (pretty much just melee and Heart Strike). However, FYI, I have 2 set of gears myself: straight tank set, and a hybrid "dps-tank" set. Tank set has 7.5% expertise, but "dps-tank" set goes higher, for those farm bosses to get more dps.

3) My suggestion about reforge: get hit/exp only from reforge. I recommend to choose gears have mastery on it, and reforge the other stat to get hit/exp to 7.5%. For those which do not have mastery, I still recommend hit/exp cap over mastery. This way you will lose around 1-2% parry/dodge, but hit/exp goes significantly higher. I don't think it's not worthwhile. I don't want to get hit/exp from enchant or gem. I'll explain in next part.

4) My suggestion about enchant/gem: Stamina>Mastery>parry/expertise. I do understand that theoretically mastery provides more damage reduction than stam. I even calculated to prove that myself. But it's just theoretically. Since 4.3 I found you will want as much stam as possible for those hard bosses (since you can't get it from reforge, I recommend to get hit/exp from reforge, and don't waste the source of stam from enchant/gem on hit/exp). There is much magic damage going as well as physical spikes. More health will always be better for those extreme situations. And I trust that for a skilled dk tank, several hundreds of mastery loss won't make that much difference, if he uses his abilities properly. Afterall there is always overhealing from healers which is more than enough to cover that little bit mastery loss.

Edited February 22, 2013 by jasonleekungfu