Blood Death Knight Guide
Introduction
The Blood Death Knight Tier Set for Season 2 revolves almost solely around Crimson Scourge. The 2-piece set bonus provides a moderate attack speed increase and a small increase to the proc chance of Crimson Scourge, while the 4-piece doubles the damage dealt by Death and Decay and grants you 5% critical strike chance for 8 seconds when you consume Crimson Scourge.
"Complexity"
The specified goals for the tier set effects are as follows:
Create set bonuses that are more complex than the Season 1 set bonuses.
Create cool, impactful set bonuses that introduce a variety of gameplay in Season 2.
It is somewhat difficult to align these goals to the Blood specialization design without delving into either Hero talent or Apex talent effects, as the spec has gradually lost every dynamic interaction over the course of the last four expansions. The last two remaining dynamic effects (or procs, if you will) were Crimson Scourge and Boiling Point.
That said, it feels like this tier set misses the mark by ignoring the underlying restrictions on Crimson Scourge or Death and Decay, and the specialization as a whole:
Outside of a very sporadic bugged instance case, Crimson Scourge cannot proc while Death and Decay is a visible unit on the floor
The attack speed bonus on the tier set is nice, but outside of Deathbringer-specific cases, the swing timer on a Blood Death Knight is typically around 3s; reducing this by 15% does very little towards guaranteeing a Crimson Scourge before Death and Decay's other effects run out. In AoE, parry haste will help on this slightly, but this serves to reduce the value of the 15% attack speed bonus.
Blood generally gains very little from extra auto-attacks on a target.
Playing around Crimson Scourge is primarily a single-target/ San'layn goal, and the gains are the buffs tied to Crimson Scourge, not Crimson Scourge itself. Adding another one compounds the penalty for casting Death and Decay without a proc, despite some effects in the talent tree encouraging it (Sanguine Ground), leading to conflicting and unclear priorities for the player.
Death and Decay reliably competes at the very bottom of the damage list for Blood; doubling it effectively does nothing, particularly since it is impossible to overlap them. Gone are the days of Classic when Death and Decay actually slapped; its meager 8.3% AP/second is hardly a footnote in your damage breakdown, with the main driver for pressing it being the plethora of buffs on yourself, not its damage.
"Unintended Impacts"
Another quote from the design goals is the following:
BlizzardLikely degenerate or unintended impacts on rotations, including:
Using single target abilities in AOE or vice versa.
Being flooded with resources faster than they can be spent.
Being encouraged to use core abilities repetitively, or not at all.
This tier set matches the first and last point relatively well for AoE, in that instead of increasing the payoff of playing properly, it increases the penalty of not gambling for a Crimson Scourge in AoE. Death and Decay is what allows Heart Strike to hit 5 targets instead of its usual two. In an environment where gathering inefficiency is already punished and where Exterminate (compounded by a bug on Echoing Fury) is generally the solution, is it wise to also effectively punish players by denying them the ability for their main RP generator, Heart Strike, to only be able to truly cleave in AoE when they first fish for a proc?
Murky Defensive Value
Unlike our current tier set, this new tier set provides near-zero defensive value:
Auto-attack speed and Crimson Scourge effectively do very little; the only murky defensive gain from this would be an increase in uptime on Perseverance of the Ebon Blade (if talented; talent tree makes this unwieldy outside of single target) or Visceral Strength, but neither of these will be large
The 4-set provides zero defensive value, and to compound this issue, the critical strike chance buff is a flat percentage and not rating. Riposte only converts rating; at the very least, if you wanted it to apply, add a moderate amount of actual parry percentage on it.
Even ignoring all of the glaring other issues, this feels like a DPS tier set. Even tying moderate effects to Runes spent or RP spent instead of tying it to Crimson Scourge would feel like a breath of fresh air, but the real, glaring problem is also its value to a tank overall.
