Blood DK + Necrotic affix

[Gnarkill 0]

Normally I don't participate in the "QQ my class is in a bad spot" but after finishing VoH mythic+8 necrotic/raging I'm considering rolling a warrior tank and not looking back. At the very least it means next time I roll necrotic on my mythic keystones I will just sit out that week. Necrotic absolutely breaks blood tanks. The affix completely negates the vast majority of our toolkit, leaving us to take unmitigated, unhealable hits to the face the majority of the time. The only real way I found to deal with it is to hope it tics down to 5s remaining and you can AMS it off, but good luck since it immediately stacks up to 15+, and it just won't work on a boss that doesn't stop for a long time to cast or reposition. 

A single mythic+ affix should not flat out negate a tank for a week of play. 

[demonardvark 556]

Necrotic is considered one of if not the hardest affix you can get. It actually wrecks most tanks outside of pallys. One way to go about it is to redo your group comp to ensure as many aoe stuns as possible (tauren for lyfe). Wait until you are at 15 stacks then stun lock the poop out of the adds. Another popular method is to actually bring 2 tanks and employ a sort of tank swap on the adds every 10 stacks or so, just to take stress off healer and keep it from going oom.

So, necrotic is a rough one to get, you just need to play around with it. The only true tank that can self drop stacks is pally, others may be able to but i don't know that right now. 

[TalonShadowsong 5]

I wrote about dealing with Necrotic in the guide comment, but I will go into more detail here.

Last week Necrotic was on NA servers. No one had fun with it, I'm sure. However, the group I run with actually swapped in my Blood DK instead of our regular Guardian Druid for Necrotic because I managed the stacks so much easier.

Anti-Magic Shell negates the application of stacks for its duration. If you have the Archeus Drapes Legendary, this would certainly be best way to drop any and all stacks every minute as the duration of AMS would match that of the Necrotic timer. What I would suggest is popping AMS before taking the first auto-attack round from the engaged pack of mobs to ensure negation of stacks until some form of AoE stun, or snares, can come out from your group. 5 seconds is at least 2-3 swing rounds from average mobs and with a pack of 5, for example, that could be the difference between 10-15 stacks off the bat. From there, after you start reaching the 10 stack marks, plan your kite.
Necrotic is only applied on Auto-Attacks, making is easier to avoid stacks with our Parry and more so during Dancing Rune Weapon (albeit unreliable), but it does provide us with a larger window of non-applications than other classes.
Furthermore, with a 50% snare on our frequently used ability (Heart Strike) in addition to the 70% Snare from Death and Decay via Tightening Grasp, Kiting mobs is really a joke. I had trouble while using Tremble Before Me in these scenarios as the fear was too frequently broken to provide with sheer escape potential. I found that dropping an Death and Decay behind me, or to the side of the mobs, and kiting them around the circle of the Death and Decay, for its duration, to be a sure-fire way to drop stacks.

Keeping these aspects in mind, we never had to CC groups, even at +8 and higher. We rarely had to wait more than 3 seconds for stacks to drop between packs and could even pulling multiple groups, pending space within the instance for kiting.

Another thing to note is that my group never really runs an ideal composition for such things. Last week we ran with Blood DK, Feral Druid (normally our Guardian), Rouge or Hunter or Monk (depends who was on), Fire Mage, Resto Shaman (and a couple of times with a Resto Druid). As you can see, in some cases we had minimal AoE control, while others it was decent. Regardless, we tried to just have fun with it, with the people we had, all while reducing the headache on the healer who preferred the Blood DK vs. the Guardian Druid for the Necrotic affix. We were successfully able to complete our weekly 10, as we have no desire to push further, for our phat loot. I agree with mr ardvark that Necrotic is a rough affix and it will certainly slow down runs if not properly planned for, but as we have seen, there were several 10+ clears this week, with various tanks, with the Necrotic affix, so it is entirely possible, to use almost any composition and still complete the content.

Perhaps this will help you for the next time Necrotic rolls around? Else enjoy the reprieve from that junk as we have Bolstering and Overflowing this week, which is a much easier combo.

 

[Sniz 60]

8 minutes ago, TalonShadowsong said:

I wrote about dealing with Necrotic in the guide comment, but I will go into more detail here.

Last week Necrotic was on NA servers. No one had fun with it, I'm sure. However, the group I run with actually swapped in my Blood DK instead of our regular Guardian Druid for Necrotic because I managed the stacks so much easier.

Anti-Magic Shell negates the application of stacks for its duration. If you have the Archeus Drapes Legendary, this would certainly be best way to drop any and all stacks every minute as the duration of AMS would match that of the Necrotic timer. What I would suggest is popping AMS before taking the first auto-attack round from the engaged pack of mobs to ensure negation of stacks until some form of AoE stun, or snares, can come out from your group. 5 seconds is at least 2-3 swing rounds from average mobs and with a pack of 5, for example, that could be the difference between 10-15 stacks off the bat. From there, after you start reaching the 10 stack marks, plan your kite.
Necrotic is only applied on Auto-Attacks, making is easier to avoid stacks with our Parry and more so during Dancing Rune Weapon (albeit unreliable), but it does provide us with a larger window of non-applications than other classes.
Furthermore, with a 50% snare on our frequently used ability (Heart Strike) in addition to the 70% Snare from Death and Decay via Tightening Grasp, Kiting mobs is really a joke. I had trouble while using Tremble Before Me in these scenarios as the fear was too frequently broken to provide with sheer escape potential. I found that dropping an Death and Decay behind me, or to the side of the mobs, and kiting them around the circle of the Death and Decay, for its duration, to be a sure-fire way to drop stacks.

Keeping these aspects in mind, we never had to CC groups, even at +8 and higher. We rarely had to wait more than 3 seconds for stacks to drop between packs and could even pulling multiple groups, pending space within the instance for kiting.

Another thing to note is that my group never really runs an ideal composition for such things. Last week we ran with Blood DK, Feral Druid (normally our Guardian), Rouge or Hunter or Monk (depends who was on), Fire Mage, Resto Shaman (and a couple of times with a Resto Druid). As you can see, in some cases we had minimal AoE control, while others it was decent. Regardless, we tried to just have fun with it, with the people we had, all while reducing the headache on the healer who preferred the Blood DK vs. the Guardian Druid for the Necrotic affix. We were successfully able to complete our weekly 10, as we have no desire to push further, for our phat loot. I agree with mr ardvark that Necrotic is a rough affix and it will certainly slow down runs if not properly planned for, but as we have seen, there were several 10+ clears this week, with various tanks, with the Necrotic affix, so it is entirely possible, to use almost any composition and still complete the content.

Perhaps this will help you for the next time Necrotic rolls around? Else enjoy the reprieve from that junk as we have Bolstering and Overflowing this week, which is a much easier combo.

 

Really really helpful to know. Thanks for this explanation!

[bladegrasp 0]

I checked my cache'd versions of armory and you (OP) run March of the Damned on your tier 6 talent, and haven't changed it in forever. Please keep in mind that information on the Icy Veins guide focuses primarily on raiding; you have to change it up for this type of content.

 

My suggestion would be to use Tightening Grasp as your tier 6 talent, and concentrating on using both benefits of this talent to counteract any given affix you get. Some useful ideas for kiting would be:

1. Place your Death and Decay (DnD) right behind you but right on the border of your feet so you can get the benefits to Heart Strike and slow as many mobs as you can, then walk back through it and destack or at least slow down the gaining of Necrotic, saving your AMS for the 1-2 spells they might get off while you kite back to prevent wasted interrupts/stuns from your team when mobs are high hp (if, like last week, we also get Raging with it).
2. If you are engaging a pack of caster mobs (imp patrols on Court of Stars, etc.), you have to be careful with AoE silence mechanics (Blood Elf Torrent) because now these mobs will attack you all at once, both bursting you a bit and stacking you up quite a lot (assuming Necrotic affix). Wait for all of them to start casting, then Gorefiend's Grasp them all to a single mob and then Death Grip that mob to you to interrupt it while saving your actual interrupt for another more important spell. Since none of them were silenced, they probably will restart casting almost on sync, helping your team be effective with their AoE while not stacking you up.
3. Certain mobs can be "ignored" if tanked properly. On Court of Stars, there's a patrol on a bridge that has one of those annoying robots that heal the rest of the mobs while also having casters and autoattackers. Use your Death and Decay in front of the patrol and then Death Grip the robot to you, tanking it away from the group for a couple seconds and massively slowing the rest. Then you can let the robot get his first Charging Station off and the others won't be healed while your team focuses the rest down.
4. On bigger groups, like certain pulls on Halls of Valor or Neltharion's Lair, you can drop your Death and Decay in front of the mobs you want to fight but initiate on them by casting Asphyxiate on the furthest one. The others will come at turtle speed towards you, but will get Gorefiend's Grasp'd to the stunned mob in the back around 4 seconds later. I use this often in +9/+10 to give my team a lot of leeway with early interrupts and also to give healers a break to drink while still chain pulling when possible. You can save your Asphyxiate if the some of the mobs are casters that will stay behind.
5. A combination of things that give you bursts of movement speed is also valuable and should matter when selecting peripheral items for your build. If you have Sephuz's Secret, Chrono Shard, etc. then give them some serious consideration for certain dungeons. Places like Black Rook Hold and Arcway have a ton of smart corners and pillars you can use to line of sight mobs into obedience. You can take insane advantage of these if you have the movement speed to get in and out of combat without always burning your Wraith Walk.
6. After 20% haste, get some versatility. It's the real deal. After Mastery gets to 25% is not super important for mythic+
7. Get a free Discord voice chat room and invite your parties over. Don't expect great runs without great communication.
8. Make friends with a great hunter and/or a great rogue. Their misdirect mechanics will help you cheese half of the content in half of the time.

 

All in all, I feel like Blood DKs do a great job at managing Necrotic. I feel we do worse than other tanks with Teeming and some others, because we lack Damage Reduction cooldowns to truly get ahead of the damage, but so far I've been able to do all of the content without an issue I can't overcome with my kit. Maybe it could be easier, but it isn't.

 

Hope it helps

[Gnarkill 0]

Thanks for the constructive notes, all good comments. Will be better prepared for the next round of Necrotic.