Help with understanding (if I have a) Flex 25 performance problem...

[SlippyCheeze 2]

G'day.  I feel like I have a reasonable grasp of the basics, and not nearly enough of how to figure out the detail of being a good Blood DK tank, not just an average one, so I was hoping y'all could help me understand if I have a problem, and how to fix it.  (It could be that the rest of the group was not keeping up their end, so I got squashed because of it -- but I don't want to blame others for my shortfalls!  No improvement for me if I start doing that.)

 

Basically, tanking SoO Flex 14 Garrosh I was doing reasonably, I think.  (We still wiped, but it was mostly mechanics and learning the fight, rather than my inability to keep standing up.)  On our last few tries we stepped up to Flex 25, and had more healers, more DPS, and ... more tank deaths.  Didn't really make it out of P1, and I felt super-squishy.

 

My current build mirrors the icy-veins recommended "balanced" build; you can see my armory here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/proudmoore/Larelina/advanced

 

(Actually, looking at that my hit is lower, and expertise higher, than I thought.  I should check that; I thought I had that carefully aimed at 7.5 for both, but hit is low.  This is probably an artifact of trying to push by my unbuffed mastery closer to the 200 mark, with a view to hitting about 250 raid-buffed as an experiment.  Advice on continuing for that, or dropping back to ~ 200% fully buffed for SoO 10N, and Flex 14/25 welcome.)

 

I use AMR for my gearing combination, and have a bunch of LFR, etc, bits in the bank, but pretty much all the flex and Ordos drops I have are no my at the moment.  No tier set for blood, yet, since I have the LFR 2pc, and all of AMR, SimCraft, and my testing agree that I lose more performance wearing it than I gain from the 2pc bonus.  If I get the LFR 4pc I will reassess that, and I am still waiting on a flex tier drop at all...

 

I use Fallen Crusader rather than one of the other runeforges because, until Garrosh flex 25 I was happy with the small healing and high uptime on strength it gave, and was comfortable that the trickle-down parry and so forth from that were worth it compared to the extra parry or EH.  I will certainly reconsider that if that would make the difference, but I have trouble imagining that being so...

 

You can see the logs here on World of Logs: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/7ztpra1k6pbvugzu/

 

I am mostly interested in the last two or three attempts at Garrosh, though you are welcome to make any suggestions you want regarding improvements to gear, or rotation.  The earlier attempts will show you the Flex 14 performance, the last few the Flex 25 -- and that is where I felt the most ouchy.

 

I currently have an addon that gives me an indicator for DS, suggesting it if I would not overheal given my current Scent of Blood stacks (but not damage taken), if I have less than 2 seconds before the shield expires, or if I have two DS available to avoid capping runes.  I also have Blood Shield Tracker, with the estimated healing from damage taken component active, and try to use that to time DS to either avoid overheal, or to get a larger shield if I won't cap.

 

I think those are the basic conditions and considerations around DS use, but I would welcome corrections if I should be aiming for something different.  (Also, I know that the last timing component is something I need to improve; I too often find myself landing that hit just after the DS damage boost falls off.  Practice will solve that, I suppose.)

[Storm 426]

The healers are partially to blame.

 

Your self healing was around 50-60% on most of the attempts, which is actually extremely high. My standard metric for determining if I'm performing well is to see if I'm covering at least 40% of my healing on my own.

 

It looks like you're using all of your cooldowns, I see fairly consistent usage of vampiric blood, and icebound fortitude across all of the fights. The later attempts your bone shield only had about 25% up time, compared to closer to 50% on your earlier attempts. This is mostly because you were getting hit harder with more people in the fight, so your blood shields weren't absorbing full hits anymore.

 

The one thing I do notice though on the shorter attempts is that your incoming damage is almost a 50/50 split between garrosh and adds. I'm guessing you were probably tanking the boss, and had so much vengeance you pulled the adds off the off-tank. essentially doubling your incoming damage according to the logs. If you ever notice you're tanking everything, and it's in a larger flex where the incoming damage is too high, have the OT taunt garrosh off you until the adds are dead. it's easier than having him try to pick up all the adds and compete with your vengeance.

[Failhard 2]

 

I think those are the basic conditions and considerations around DS use, but I would welcome corrections if I should be aiming for something different.  (Also, I know that the last timing component is something I need to improve; I too often find myself landing that hit just after the DS damage boost falls off.  Practice will solve that, I suppose.)

 

 

What DS dmg boost are you talking about?

 

What you said:

This add on sounds pretty cool, what's it called? I'd like to give it a shot.

Only thing I was going to say here is that overhealing or capping your blood shield isn't the worst thing in the world.  Yeah its not "ideal" but a shield is a shield and that's damage you aren't taking as long as you have it up.  On your last 2-3 wipes your shield uptime is under 50% where as I saw 78% on attempt 7.

 

Storm said:

Stuff I agree with, he's kind of been there and knows his tanking stuff. Just wanted to hit on the add part, if the other tank rounds them up and builds some vengeance before dragging them into your fully stacked vengeance that may not happen.

 

From logs:

like Storm said you seem to be doing a pretty good job at using your cooldowns and this looks mostly to fall on your healers. Except for AMS. if you look at the damage taken, even though its small the chain lightning and iron star dmg could be mitigated.

 

From Armory:

Well, you are tanking with quite a bit of dps gear and neither trinket is providing much help for your tanking as much as it is your dps.  Have you tried to swap out a trinket with Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal?

 

Your necklace and ring 2 are kind of "eh". The hit neck is a step towards hit cap which will help because 5% is pretty low.  You missed mostly melee and a few heart strikes, the occasional rune strike too.  Its not worth gemming/enchanting for, but you are basically wasting those resources when your abilities don't land.

Edited December 5, 2013 by Failhard

[SlippyCheeze 2]

What DS dmg boost are you talking about?

That was a clumsy way of trying to say "I try to use Death Strike when my damage taken over the last five seconds means it will do more than the minimum amount of healing and shielding", but ... came out badly. I know I need to improve timing that a bit, and am working on it.

 

What you said:

This add on sounds pretty cool, what's it called? I'd like to give it a shot.

Only thing I was going to say here is that overhealing or capping your blood shield isn't the worst thing in the world.  Yeah its not "ideal" but a shield is a shield and that's damage you aren't taking as long as you have it up.  On your last 2-3 wipes your shield uptime is under 50% where as I saw 78% on attempt 7.

Thanks for the comments on shielding. I am trying to make sure I ... basically, overheal/overcap by a small enough percentage that I am happy I am not wasting too much, while still avoiding major spikes. I am not yet sure what the right amount of mastery for that is, and have experimented with dropping down to 200 percent buffed -- for the first half of SoO 10N that seems to be reasonable, but I still need to look into tonights logs in more detail. (http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/1eq0k6pdztsyjsfv/ if you want to, but no obligation.

As to the addons, there are two of them that I use for this. The first is Blood Shield Tracker, and especially the estimated death strike heal bar. That sits right in my status area, and lets me know when I will *probably* do better on DS than the minimum. (Estimated, obviously, so it can miss ... but usually by being low rather than high in experience to date.)

The second is Bitten's SpellFlash: DK. I picked that up while I was learning the class, and it was great for that, but now I mostly use it because it pays attention better than I do to some of the complex resource tracking. (It never gets distracted and forgets that Bone Shield should be up even if the Juggernaught is stomping me into the ground

It is what suggests DS when it will not overheal, or when the shield is about to drop off, or when I have plenty of runes. I don't always follow that, but I know when the button flashes I should consider the state, and assess if I want to hold that DS for later, or burn it now.

(I am sure that in a few years I will laugh at the idea of needing that, but right now it is a huge help.

 

From Armory:

Well, you are tanking with quite a bit of dps gear and neither trinket is providing much help for your tanking as much as it is your dps.  Have you tried to swap out a trinket with Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal?

 

Your necklace and ring 2 are kind of "eh". The hit neck is a step towards hit cap which will help because 5% is pretty low.  You missed mostly melee and a few heart strikes, the occasional rune strike too.  Its not worth gemming/enchanting for, but you are basically wasting those resources when your abilities don't land.

Yeah, ring 2 and a better neck are very much on my list -- I just don't have a better drop than either of those yet. (Though I think I just swapped out the neck for a different, equally meh, choice to help balance out stats

I only have the LFR focusing crystal, and it seems to me that the overall result would be worse, especially since survivability is pretty good except the Flex 25. Do you think it would make that much difference?

(I very much hope for better non-DPS trinkets, but my luck so far has not been good. Skeer's crit trinket, especially, is in line for the chop as soon as I have something better fall my way. Fingers crossed for a Flex Malky or Thok trinket drop this week.

The trinkets are also the first thing I would change out if I had longer term problems with survival; I also have the AOE damage reduction trinket floating around for that, and can grab the timeless tank trinket. (The dodge didn't seem that worthwhile with ~ 30 percent parry though.

[Ceraius 34]

The one thing I do notice though on the shorter attempts is that your incoming damage is almost a 50/50 split between garrosh and adds. I'm guessing you were probably tanking the boss, and had so much vengeance you pulled the adds off the off-tank. essentially doubling your incoming damage according to the logs. If you ever notice you're tanking everything, and it's in a larger flex where the incoming damage is too high, have the OT taunt garrosh off you until the adds are dead. it's easier than having him try to pick up all the adds and compete with your vengeance.

 

This is how our group does it each time. One tank pick up Garrosh at start, the other gathers the adds and brings them to the boss. The bosstank then AoEs/Cleaves the adds with high Vengeance while tank two taunts garrosh off for the time when adds still stand. Rinse and repeat, and you're good for phase 1.

 

One general thing is that before getting to Garrosh, the previous bosses don't require as precise DS usage but on Garrosh it really pays off noticeably. (At least this was the case for me)

Edited December 5, 2013 by Ceraius

[SlippyCheeze 2]

So, a suggestion from another thread discussing this was to use Conversion rather than Death Pact.

 

I can't see the logic in this, and the guide doesn't support it.  The only way I can imagine it working is if you can use Conversion while getting the high RP generation from a boatload of parry, and Scent of Blood procs to generate a constant flow of self-healing.

 

OTOH, even given that this feels like a TDR tool rather than a spike mitigation tool or emergency heal, and I don't feel like I have any sort of problem with that.  Is that logic more or less correct?  Does conversion still block SoB RP generation?

[Storm 426]

I've never tested it, but the way the tooltip reads, Conversion should block RP gains from sent of blood and empowered rune weapon. and I just can't see it being useful because using it will also reduce your rune strikes, which will reduce blood taps or RE/RC procs, which will lead to fewer death strikes.

[SlippyCheeze 2]

I just wanted to follow up and thank you all so much for your advice. It is very, very much appreciated.