Blood Artifact Progression

[Desruc 15]

Hey
I have been using icy veins and other sites + common knowlegde to try and think and be criticical too some of the guides.

Now i have noticed multple times that this artifact progression is adviced:

 

Now i have a few issues with this.. the main critic i have is that blood shield atm is just too weak to invest so many points into making it better.
The fact first path is directly into leech with blood shield active makes me wonder, at low end content it might be worth, but as soon as you start anything above hc or maybe mythic. Blood shield is shreded instantly rendering the trait useless.
Then 2nd golden trait to aim for is an absorb shield that is as high as 5 times our blood plague dmg during vampiric blood.
This is our least dmging ability so the shield we get after is kinda usefull but not big enough to be an "oh shit im in danger" button.
With DRW the shield will be twice as large but i doubt its worth it after burning DRW.

where as skeletal shattering the last golden trait is priotized so low. at high numbers this reduction will be way more esp as more crit == more parry aswell.

now what im interested in is a nice solid debate on which directions you would recommend and why.
as for me id say:
Skeletal shattering -> Extra chance for boneshield -> into the leech while blood shield is active -> passive leech on HS -> then darkening -> meatshield -> then to final golden trait.

So at 24 artifact power somthing like this:

http://www.wowhead.com/artifact-calc/death-knight/blood/I4t5IPAREDESAxFQMRYDEXAxGAMRkBEaARHAER0BEeARIQFTMBA

(inserting url for picture wouldnt work)

 

[Shells 64]

All 3 are currently weaker than the other tanks golden abilities (in my view).

Of them, the shattering is the most useful and pushes crit way up the stats priority over mastery, which currently is pants. 40% mastery is a 130k ish blood shield, 25% mastery is a 95k ish blood shield. Neither last long enough to make any difference and its not like you can stack up a load of them unless your pooling runes and RP. 

Hence the bottom golden trait looks great but as your shield only lasts a few seconds its kinda meh in all but world quests where its godly. 

Lets look at the warrior tank. One of theirs gives them 10% more armor. Not massive but a nice little boost. The other tanks have similar nice but not amazing bits. We have some, err might be nice in very special circumstances ish artifact talents.  Add that to a rubbish mastery of crappy little shields and it looks like we need a boost rather than an incoming 10% damage decrease, on top of the general -10% one a week ago.

[Shells 64]

I sound very negative towards Blood sometimes and to clarify a bit, I am a bit disappointed that they nerfed the most fun tank in the game with some not well thought out bits. While they might work better in later tier equipment, having abilities that dont work out of the box as opposed to ones that would scale well is a bit of a let down.

That said, I dont see me playing another tank. :)

[Desruc 15]

1 minute ago, Shells said:

That said, I dont see me playing another tank. :)

We might be abit weaker than most other tanks

but i love the utility we bring as tanks, death grip, gorefiends Grip, magic absobtion and high hp pools.

Even talents seems like most of them have a good use for some things. like mirror and rune tap.
Tremble before me in mythics

[Zataron 5]

I think a lot of people are overestimating Skeletal Shattering. Let's say your crit chance is 25%. Then the average damage reduction you get from the trait is 8*0.25 = 2%. That's additive with your bone shield, which makes the actual multiplicative damage reduction (1-0.18)/(1-0.16) = 0.976, i.e. about 2.4%. It's hard to tell if it's better than Unending Thirst, but I'd say that neither trait is great.

In my opinion, Umbilicus Eternus is the only golden trait that makes a noticeable difference, especially when you're doing Mythic+ content where the focus is on trash packs rather than fighting a single boss.

Despite 2 of our golden traits not being that great, I don't think Blood is in a bad spot right now. Warrior and Druid are a little better for raiding overall right now, but blood DKs can still be used for mythic progression. In addition, we provide some nice utility like gorefiends grip.

[Shells 64]

I think we are a bit more than "abit" weaker than the other tanks currently with a crappy shield ability that wont absorb anything of interest and a Bone shield mechanic that gets eaten by dots and feels a bit meh as well. 

Far cry from where we were 

[Zataron 5]

2 minutes ago, Shells said:

I think we are a bit more than "abit" weaker than the other tanks currently with a crappy shield ability that wont absorb anything of interest and a Bone shield mechanic that gets eaten by dots and feels a bit meh as well. 

Far cry from where we were 

I don't think listing a few weaknesses of the spec is enough to assess whether or not Blood is overall weaker than other tanks. From what I can tell, the consensus among progress raiders about tanks right now seems to be that DKs are weaker than Warriors and Druids, about as good as Paladins, and better than DHs and Monks. The last two are the only ones that see little to no use in progress raiding.

[Sniz 60]

Perhaps Blood needs a little more stat tooling than other classes, and the wherewithal to adapt your rotation to the givin situations, but weak? No.

During a reg Mythic 4 Eye this weekend, my 851 ilvl blood dk did over 100k HPS on bosses (healer was at 150k for a reference), and my EHRPS was only 53k.

A little under 1/3 of healing resources required, Leaving the healer to heal the party 2/3 of the time.

Plus its interactive, adaptable and fun.

Im looking forward to testing Vampiric Fang x5. (Just got a second rune). Which bumped my health pool to 4.4mil. Kind of a sick "oh snap" button imo.