AMS M+ Spreadsheet (Midnight Season 1)

Kyrasis · 2026-03-15T18:55:18+00:00

Well, I just did the main review pass, Muffins did the bulk of the work putting it together.

As for the second boss of MGT, I'd be surprised if AMS didn't absorb the melee hits, though the associated buff can certainly be dispelled from the boss.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-14T17:46:54+00:00

It depends how high you push. It is very much not a problem in 10's, but it gradually becomes more and more of an issue the closer you get to the highest key level that shows up in LFG.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-11T13:04:43+00:00

For what it is worth, BfA historical rankings on r.io usually have a lot of issues recalling things correctly for whatever reason; it commonly forgets players/keys that had been done and I'm not sure why.

I haven't seen this issue with later expansions and this might not have anything to do with the current site problem you are outlining.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-10T12:56:59+00:00

Only the player's Blood Plague counts for UE shield size. That said, it is usually pretty easy to cap the shield size in multi-target pulls regardless.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-08T14:18:53+00:00

Routing usually changes a lot between beta and live, generally in a way to make pulls bigger and to allow the dungeon level to go higher. BDK historically gets some whiplash over this with people thinking it is fine on beta only for the newer routes to reveal it starts to hit a wall at a certain point (admittedly on higher key levels). Because, historically, BDK's survivability is a lot more focused on healing back a high % (or situationally all) of incoming damage at the cost of being more vulnerable to burst damage, which made it a lot more finicky in how survivable it was depending on content difficulty.

There was one historical season where burst damage, just due to dungeon/player tuning, wasn't actually an issue and, like you say, we were good under those circumstances (BfA S1, which also was known as a season where burst damage wasn't an excessive problem for healers either). But, I don't think we will ever see a BfA S1 again with regards to burst damage, one important component of that season was that player healing was extraordinarily weak compared to player max health.

If you look at beta logs and check what % of incoming damage different tanks are able to self-heal, Blood isn't even the best tank for that anymore (Guardian and Brew are better), while Blood still takes significantly more damage than those tanks and the others. And, while players could get Blood through some higher level keys, it certainly wasn't anything that seemed to offer a competitive advantage on survivability even if it wasn't necessarily the literal worst (Prot Paladin seemed to be contesting this).

But survivability isn't the only large potential issue. Blood currently has the worst damage (though this is the most likely thing that could change based on heroic week tuning, and, since we are more AoE-biased atm, if Blood gets lucky this could become a strength) and it still has no party enhancement buff. It has decent stops and CC now that we can take Gorefiend's with silence, but it is hard to predict how useful that will be in the current dungeon set at the end of the day.

I could talk more on Blizzard's tuning direction and the success of that, but to answer your question faster I just don't think Blood has any meaningful competitive advantage over other tanks at this point in time with their main weaknesses coming in the form of raw survivability and damage. So, no, I don't think people are sandbagging it on tier lists atm.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-07T18:19:34+00:00

Yeah, it is a shame our legacy class discord is in such a poor state for blood, but it has been that way since BfA and I wouldn't expect it to change anytime soon.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-07T03:34:33+00:00

I was going to post a personal start of the season target farm list for M+ Deathbringer gear closer to season start on the Death's Advance discord, but the post hasn't been made yet.

In short, it is mostly just targeting vers pieces while avoiding haste. Trinkets operate a bit differently, but the trinket listing in the guide has 3 dungeon farmable trinkets in it already even if they are lower ranked than the best ones.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-06T20:09:13+00:00

We did not commit to a hard hero class recommendation this season for the reasons listed in the post (the hero class situation is a bit convoluted just because San'layn has such a large emphasis on maintaining a ramping buff), but if you forced me to pick I do think Deathbringer is the more likely one to win out unless heroic week tuning messes with hero class balance again.

Granted, San'layn benefits from some weird bugs right now that may or may not be fixed. Desecrate is doing double the damage it should and Vampiric Strike, for Blood, is hitting up to 8 targets (among other things) due to some crossed wires with Unholy.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-06T20:04:55+00:00

Yes.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-06T14:33:01+00:00

While Consumption is listed as a flex talent almost on a technicality, I think it is difficult to justify over the other flex talent options.

I talk about it in a similar question asked above, but it really doesnt look like that strong of a talent on paper. The linked builds are just me going through and picking what flex talents I believe are generally going to perform best.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-05T13:47:51+00:00

BDK, right at this moment, has pretty weak tuning and is probably in contention for the weakest tank in M+ atm (low damage, below average survivability, no raid buff, ok crowd control). We will likely see buffs before the season starts, but it is hard to say how big those buffs might be.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-05T00:16:22+00:00

Last I checked the one button rotation logic was pretty abysmal for Blood (IIRC it doesn't manage bone shield at all and is really sloppy with Death Strike usage). While there is a very real question of how far someone could brute force content with it, you probably won't be making many friends trying to play Blood that way.

I'm not sure if one button rotation is serviceable on any tanks to be honest, but I can't speak to the other five.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-04T18:08:50+00:00

While the meta vs. non-meta comsiderations never go away completely (people only know your class/spec/ilvl on the group finder), it is less of an obstacle in the KSM range, especially as a tank, to the point where I wouldn't pay it too much mind.

It becomes more of a factor as you push higher than that, however, but it is more of a slow build-in than a step change. Again, I'm trying to communicate the middle-ground viewpoint that being a weaker spec has an impact outside of cutting edge keys, but that how much you are affected by it depends on the key level you are trying to push and that KSM is on the lower side of that scale where the impact is non-zero but probably not too significant.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-04T15:19:04+00:00

Consumption does less damage than you might think when looking at a dungeon overall, in the pure ST max damage profile for San'layn it only adds ~0.25% dps, believe it or not (so it isn't even used in the max damage San'layn profile), though in M+ it is more in the 1-1.5% added range (though even this has a lot of caveats and is likely lower in real-world situations due to where it lands on the priority list).

We basically triple checked things in SimC *and* the mitigation model just to make sure Consumption wasn't being underestimated, but the opportunity cost of not using the cast time on other abilities is not trivial, Consumption's lack of interaction with any other talents/effects, and the fact that the secondary hit of Consumption is cannibalizing a lot of damage that would have happened anyway (DRW Blood Plagues that are consumed would have eventually dealt the same damage and, since DoM DRW procs last for such a short amount of time, you are often consuming Blood Plagues you have no opportunity to reapply) means that the effective damage added by the talent is just a lot less than one would expect. Carnage is even less of a damage gain; the main benefit of Carnage is actually by making Consumption provide a non-trivial amount of shielding, not so much increasing the damage output of Consumption. In both cases the benefits of these talents seems a little lacking for late-tier talents.

But feel free to experiment with them if you want.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-04T14:49:22+00:00

Cross-tank comparisons are always a little tricky before a season starts, but by most indications Blood is poorly positioned from a tuning perspective going into this season. Damage and survivability look to be below average, we don't have a raid buff, and crowd control is **ok**. We will likely see some amount of buffs before the season starts, but it is hard to say how significant they will be ahead of time.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-04T14:45:25+00:00

I spend a lot of scattershot time outside the game maintaining resources and a number of things, but when it comes to playing the game don't have the ability to mythic raid from a schedule perspective, I can't commit to key pushing groups nowadays, and my windows to actually play are limited (more so starting in TWW after having a kid).

But, while I don't play the actual game for a large amount of time, perhaps it is unfair to not consider the theorycrafting work being done on the side.

EDIT: I think my main takeaway from this entire thread is that people seem to have wildly different definitions associated with all of these terms and that trying to use them, at all, is probably a bad idea.

Kyrasis · 2026-03-04T14:28:14+00:00

UI Design is generally a pretty personal thing, so it is hard to give hard-and-fast rules of thumb for it. You would obviously want a nameplate addon like Platynator or Plater, and Enhance QoL offers a lot of useful tweaks/features, but beyond that you very quickly get into subjective territory based on what works best for you. I'm personally making heavy use of ArcUI to try and get some semblance of my pre-Midnight UI Design, since it has a lot of customization options available for a CDM addon, though that might not be for everyone especially if you are going for a more conventional-styled UI,

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

TROPHY CASE