bloody stamina vs mastery

[nicarlitos 13]

An age old question this....stacking stamina or mastery; which is best? I believe the general consensus is that it depends. Both are good.

But for my situation....

I'm back raiding in a 10 man again....the team's gear is a little on the low side and is still getting used to each other's play style. We're working on Megaera at the moment and my HP was getting scarily low at times.

I'm thinking of gemming into stamina.

This will affect their mana pools as it gives them more HP to heal, but gives us a bigger buffer. I'm thinking it might also help reduce healer panic and reduce the fast expensive heals. I also imagine that once I'm topped off, the healers can spread some healy love to the rest of the raid too. Might also reduce over healing?

I've dug out my Lao-Chin's Liquid Courage, so I can have extra mastery on demand too.

I forgot to log last night, but I think this could help us out.

From regemming I would have roughly 5k more stam (70k hp) and around 36% less mastery.

I guess the only way to be sure is to try. Maybe this is just more of a concern for Megaera anyway, due to the high magic damage going out from the breaths...

Any thoughts appreciated,

Cheers,

Nic

[Tyrendorf 1]

I wouldn't change your gemming. The most dangerous part of the encounter are the breath times. During this times, your mastery or dodge will have no benefit (expect for the increase self heal after the breath). So i would change the Steadfast Talisman of the Shado-Pan Assault for a LFR version of Soul Barrier a normal version of Fortitude of the Zandalari.

Besides that, your main strengths are using your abilities in every breath to absorb some part of the damage (AMS, Glyphed IBF, trinkets, etc ) and using vampiric blood, rune tap, lock stone, DS, etc... to recover your health.

[Storm 426]

HP is really a double edged sword. sure you'll have a larger buffer before you die, but the healers are going to go through more mana to keep you up. Although on this fight the parts where you take the most damage are unaffected by mastery.

Tyrendorf is correct though, the most important part of the fight for a blood DK is managing your cooldowns on the breaths to minimize damage and help out the healers.

On every single head you should be able to:

- AMS the first breath and take almost no damage

- Glyphed Vampiric Embrace the second breath which will make healing you easy.

- Rotate through some combination of Bone shield, rune tap, health stone, health pot, Icebound Fort, Empowered Rune weapon, if you're getting a third breath

- I hope you aren't getting 4+ breaths in normal. if you are then your tanking isn't the issue.

Edited July 11, 2013 by Storm

[nicarlitos 13]

Maybe I am over analysing....I was always last to die. Also, usually there was only 2 breaths to handle. I was using vampiric blood, rune tap and bone shield for the first one, then AMS for the second.

Really what I wanted to achieve was allowing the healers to focus more on raid healing. It felt like there was panic healing coming in when my HP was low.

We're continuing on Monday, so I guess we'll see.