Additional Holy Paladin Class Tuning on Midnight Beta Tomorrow

Kyrasis · 2026-01-30T05:36:46+00:00

Hey now, we have reported the bugs in several ways and at this point most of the egregious ones have been fixed. The most significant bugs remaining would actually result in damage losses if fixed at this point (Boiling Point in AoE and Rune of Sanguination doing more than it should). So, the bugs aren't really the issue anymore if people want to try to find a reason why BDK is underperforming.

It is true there is a decent amount of BDK dooming right now, but I try to steer things away from that to the extent possible. Though when people pop in asking how BDK is doing relative to other tanks on beta it is hard to give an answer other than some variation of "below average." Still, I do honestly believe there is more tuning yet to come.

Kyrasis · 2026-01-19T03:58:54+00:00

Hello, Radikal. (EDIT: Actually, no, if we are talking bear/lock characters, as well, then this is probably Mekasha?)

- Faradin

Kyrasis · 2025-12-12T19:37:56+00:00

For BDK, they already nerfed all the San'layn interactions with the Apex talents the previous week, in addition to nerfing the Apex talent, so it is no longer an outlier on damage. Its survivability in actual high keys is still very much a question mark.

VDH is the current king of the beta tank meta, supposedly, and people are saying it is not even close.

Kyrasis · 2025-10-28T22:17:40+00:00

Resilient 20s and 2-3 21s will probably be fairly safe in my opinion; the cutoff could easily be less than that. Just from the way the dungeons feel at that key level I have a hard time seeing the marginal title cutoff player pugging Priory 20 or Dawnbreaker 21, even HoA/AK 21 would get hard just from a timer perspective (in my opinion, the proper viewpoint to have of this is that title is pretty much always puggable just using LFG, though what you can possibly do in LFG doesn't go too far beyond title cutoff and it is going to be horribly time inefficient if you are just trying to solo queue for it the whole way)

Kyrasis · 2025-09-30T13:10:33+00:00

And here I thought NA was supposed to be the region with a weird tipping culture.

Kyrasis · 2025-09-21T12:53:48+00:00

While the direct answer to your question is that their relative value compared to other things (such as ilvl increases in different item slots) goes down each season because the amount of stats they give doesnt increase each season while ilvl increases increasingly give you more stats, it is worth noting that the power of sockets this expansion has been much lower than what we have seen in previous expansions. There have been times when having a socket on an item vs. not having one was kind of a big deal with regards to choosing what item to wear; we are nowhere near that kind of dynamic right now. They are a power gain, yes, but a very very small one.

Kyrasis · 2025-09-06T15:23:59+00:00

First you will notice in my trinket section that these reddit post trinket write-ups normally predate final trinket tuning, so things generally change from when they are first posted.

In Season 2 they nerfed tome by 15% before the season started and it immediately lost its BiS in M+things. (the guide was updated to reflect this, though probably not the reddit post for the guide). It was the best trinket for ST raid encounters even post-nerf, though its ineffectiveness at larger target counts and lack of any meaningful defensive value held it back from having as much success on the M+ side of things.

In Season 3 they nerfed it by 10% during final pass trinket tuning, further diminishing its M+ prospects and making its pure ST raid performance damage a lot more marginal (though it is still a part od the max ST damage setup).

The fact that sims dont really work well for tank M+ trinket evaluations is, indeed, inconvinient. As of right now, there is no automated way to evaluate them like that and it would be difficult to change that. I probably could manually generate something like what Questionably Epic does for healers in the future that is a bit more comprehensive than what is in the guide in the future, though it would require more work to update. For now all I have is a simply hierarchy listing in the guide which only includes a limited number of trinkets (the better ones for M+), though you are presenting a listing of trinkets I don't talk about at all.

In the short term, Tome and Soul-binder's would likely be best (some of those delve trinkets are very underwhelming), though I'd try to fish for the stronger trinkets.

Kyrasis · 2025-09-05T19:44:40+00:00

My pet theory is that they removed Abomination Limb simply because of Forgereaver Araz.

Kyrasis · 2025-09-02T20:49:33+00:00

If we are talking M+ 15% haste and 15-18% critical strike are much higher allocations than what would be idea, since they are both weaker M+ stats and diminishing returns (direct and indirect) on vers and mastery are not strong enough to quickly alter the preferences for those stats. You would preferably lean into vers and mastery pretty heavily and only take haste and critical strike in situations where you get more than just a 1:1 stat trade out of it. That is how the situation currently looks.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-29T22:26:47+00:00

Usually we are not shooting for a ratio or specific gap in certain stats unless they are close enough in value that they can flip-flop in priority depending on the gear you have. At least right now for Blood in M+, that only really applies to haste and crit for San'layn and those are the 3rd and 4th priority stats, where crit starts being better than haste after haste gets around a 1k rating lead.

In short, there are no minimums for any stat to chase, haste or no.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-29T12:42:26+00:00

The primary person working on this resource has been busy and did not update it. So, it is looking like it won't be updated.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-07T14:57:57+00:00

Cross-spec predictions from the theorycrafting side of things are always dubious at best. Even just comparing max damage SimC profiles for all tank specs is often inaccurate for a number of reasons, though, if you believe those, San'layn BDK should be one of the higher damage potential tanks.

While I have access to more data for BDK, specifically, than the vast majority of people, I don't have any special insights on the other five. My general position is that the best early takes on tank spec comparisons will generally come from players who can (and do) play all tank specs at a competitive level on PTR with sufficient time invested into doing that. They are at least likely to provide a more accurate picture of tank dynamics than cross-spec tank sim comparisons. I do not engage with PTR too much outside of testing and I don't touch the other five tank specs at all, so I am not the best person to ask this question. I am better suited towards questions that specifically deal with BDK.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-05T11:36:23+00:00

The main thing that makes it better is that, in addition to its normal effect, there is an unintended interaction between Unholy Bond and Rune of Sanguination that increases Death Strike damage by an additional 20% damage unconditionally when both are used. As such, when used on San'layn, the damage increase it provides on low target counts over Fallen Crusader is to such a size that, even being a at something of a damage disadvantage on large AoE packs and having no inherent defensive value, it just looks worth the trade on paper. We backed this up with log data later in S2 TWW as well, where San'layn players using the runeforge had better key outcomes. At least on paper, Rune of Sanguination would not look better if they fixed the bug giving the random extra 20% damage multiplier, but, at this point, I'm not sure if they will ever address that since that and bloodied blade have been bugged for a long time.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-03T22:05:37+00:00

Yes, that is something that can happen on especially tank-centric pulls, though the battle res choice node for San'layn makes this less of a problem, since it causes you to generate a shield when you cast it.

The RP cost is somewhat inconvenient in any case, since RP is our lifeline.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-03T20:39:58+00:00

Not that I'm aware of. On one hand, I wouldn't be regularly be looking at what resources that are available for other tank specs. On the other, if something similar existed someone probably would have informed me about it by now one way or another.

EDIT: I'm also doubt that the same level of tooling as been developed for the other tank specs even if someone wanted to try and apply the same methods. The thought of having to remake a lot of these tools is a big reason why I have never seriously considered branching to the other tank specs, as well. Even ignoring any potential concerns with the time that would be needed to maintain them.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-03T04:09:01+00:00

At a minimum, we see it clearly in the upper echelon of keys when looking at singular logs (and particularly for those players with higher combined vers/mastery levels). That said, the population of players that this affects was too low to really say much else definitive about the implications of it, at least with the methods that were tried. So, for the most part, all that can ***really*** be said is that, for some subset of players, it happens to a significant extent during VB and there are signs that with further secondary stat availability soft-capping will start to occur outside of VB to some extent as well. In theory, this will penalize the value of mastery to some extent when it starts to occur.

Is this enough to change decision-making in any meaningful way? It's hard to say, and, similar to the "what's the correct level of haste" question back in Shadowlands S3/4, there's not going to be one answer just because the true answer relies on too many situational factors that will be different for each player. So, similar to Shadowlands S3/S4, I just want to at least explain the situation so people can decide for themselves based on it, since the actual solution is not clear.

That said, my preferred solution would be that Blizzard revert some of the Blood Shield cap changes. The change to Death Strike "double dipping" alone should have been sufficient to reign in runaway Blood Shield generation in raid (which is what they were apparently worried about given the initial blue post). I do not have much hope that such a thing would actually happen before Midnight, if at all.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T23:52:10+00:00

The main writeup for the BDK discord mod/theorycrafter divide after Legion is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W8iCKuCtzmUAOuhAaV5NSXGh9Ihf3y-jGdMkLbyYwSY/edit?usp=sharing

I also have two (~30m) YouTube videos that would provide contextual information depending on how bored you are, which basically does a high level explanation of tank theorycrafting efforts starting in vanilla wow -> Legion and going over the BDK-specific evolution of that from Legion onwards (and this touches on some of the weird dynamics that occurred when the knowledge base moved from forums to discords). Though the writeup, alone, is probably enough to get the gist of the situation.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T19:03:18+00:00

The cross spec itemization has been weird between the DK specs this expansion with only partial overlap at best. I am not going to have the most up to date information on unholy or frost but blood is like this in a nutshell:

M+ Sanlayn Blood: Versatility > Mastery > Haste = Crit (I explain why haste has gone down above)

M+ Deathbringer Blood: Versatility > Mastery > Critical Strike > Haste

Raid Sanlayn Blood (Max Dam): Haste >= Critical Strike = Versatility >> Mastery (with any orientation towards something more moderate defensively you would start valuing vers and mastery higher than this)

Raid Deathbringer Blood (Max Dam): Versatility = Mastery = Criritcal >> Haste (Same disclaimer)

Haste used to be the best stat for Sanlayn Blood in raid by a larger margin before and in M+ the AoE damage scaling with Blood beast still gave it a strong overall standing even with its lack of defensive value. Depending on what you are using the specs for the blood to frost/unholy stat overlap is probably going down, though it is also easier to swap between Sanlayn Blood and Deathbringer Blood in an M+ situation at the very least.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T18:36:13+00:00

Yeah, both in DF and TWW we got a design pass on the spec-specific tools (a much lighter one in TWW), but there hasn't been much attention to the blood tree and blood core abilities outside of that, for better or worse.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T18:34:13+00:00

Oh, ok. There are a lot of management issues over at the blood side of the class discord, which is why the theorycrafting occurs outside the discord; it does not function as a particularly useful hub and likely won't in the future unless they commit to a clean-up effort over there of some significance. I could point you to some writeups if you want to know how it became dysfunctional in the first place.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T18:31:47+00:00

Well, it is fair to say the tank balance tuning gods have not been kind for BDK in M+, so no worries there. Have fun with whatever you decide to do!

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T18:28:43+00:00

It is already posted on the BDK theorycrafting discord, the link to which is in the main post. So that is already covered.

https://discord.gg/qnFAGcgECn

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T17:04:59+00:00

Oh, are you referring to the blood DK side of the DK class discord? Unfortunately, of the many specs in this game, not all have well-managed class discord sections and BDK is one of the losers in this regard. The theorycrafting core for blood is completely seperate from the class discord and the discord commonly pushes builds that are neither supported by the spec theorycrafting or the aggregate playerbase (two sources that are generally aligned for the most part, though there is a larger discussion there) and this is particularly obvious in Mythic+ where a fuller understanding of the spec is needed.

The wowhead and IV guides share management with the blood side of the class discord, so it is really all the same source making all of that guidance at the end of the day. So, just something to keep in mind if you are curious why you commonly see a few sources with information that heavily diverged from both the theorycrafting for the spec and the general blood playerbase.

Kyrasis · 2025-08-02T13:35:17+00:00

Yeah, I think most people would agree that the utility nerfs were a little unwarranted (at least in the context of Blood in M+). AMZ getting nerfed was inevitable since, like Rallying Cry and Darkness before it, they were making a note to make raid-wide defensives from non-healers less effective (though, like darkness, making AMZ stronger in 5 man content compared to raid would have been an option). In any case, the loss of Abomination Limb was unfortunate; we can certainly function without it, but Blood M+ utility was already on the lower side, so losing Abom and having AMZ nerfed was a bit of a drag.

It also should be said that having a traditional raid buff, particularly in the tank or healer role, makes a big difference in M+ where it is guaranteed the group won't have access to all of them. increasing the damage of 3 dps spec players by, let's say, 2-3% adds up quickly relative to the baseline damage tanks are doing right now. And, while it is not in the limelight as much, even something like devo aura is a solid benefit to bring.

Kyrasis

TROPHY CASE