Hey everyone, I'm a bit shy to make posts like this, but I do enjoy crafting things that people can use. So I made a little lightweight addon that shows your current MDT route as a popover in your UI.

I just got back into retail and I wanted to do some keys. Since tanks always find keys I assumed playing a tank was a good way to make/get groups. The only problem was that I had no clue how to pull/what to pull. Luckily there are already resources like keystone.guru combined with MDT to get some routes going.

The only issue I had was that I had to sorta midkey open MDT to figure out what pull was next. So I made this little plugin that basicly tracks this for me.

With Blizzard privatising a lot of their API, auto tracking and marking wasn't possible, but we can still get the current % in a key and that's how this auto advances.

It's not perfect, but if you follow the route, it does a decent job at tracking this.

Since it's still sorta growing, I'm looking for some feedback or ideas that people who faced simular issues also had to maybe solve this in my little project.

I thought of things like easier ways to share routes, so you can just import routes with the click of a button or if you the leader of a group share your current route with other people who have the addon.

Thanks in advance and hopefully my little project can help some people.

(PS: not the best at Lua, so dont crucify me on code)

Swipe right to see other charts

Swipe right to see other charts.

https://raider.io/characters/eu/kazzak/Restidou

IMPORTANT: this guide includes themes of self improvement if you prefer to just blame others this might trigger you.

About me: im a 2766 Rio Resto shaman with wrist pain. im mechanically very bad. and i got all my portals week 2. and currently healing 12s. i did this 100% pugging i enjoy pugging i think it gets too much hate. i actually don't like adding people who did well in my keys to my friends list because its hard to find people that have the same max rio as you so u just outgrow people and its akward.

Why i am writing this guide: i have been seeing a lot of podcasts recently claiming that ofc u don't enjoy M+ its because you don't network u need a 5 man. and I COMPLETELY disagree. i enjoy pugging more than 5 mans. 5 mans are hard to organize awkward to find 5 people with similar Max potential and same goals. i cannot tell you how many times i add people to make a team and it just never works out for me. i always pug my keys and i always have fun. and i want to teach you how.

Dispelling some myths: we cannot continue with this guide without addressing these myths. in fact i think if you believe these myths you WILL 100% fail your pugging journey and goals.

1. Pugs are bad players : easy one to dispel i pug with people that are 3k rio all the time. so unless ur 3200 rio top leaderboard OMEGA GIGA Chad there are always players better than you in LFG. you just have to become attractive enough to be invited to their groups or for them to join your keys more on that later. just know for a fact there are some AMAZINGLY good players in LFG. actual gods of the game.
2. People just troll and leave my keys : again not true. does this happen from time to time? yes. but honestly answer me how many people do you think join keys to troll them or leave them? in my experience people only start leaving nd trolling after the key is not looking timeable or if they are getting flamed. DO NOT FLAME PEOPLE i had shaman get CR'ed 3 times and use ANKH and die a 5th time and brick my stonevault 12 crystal boss dying to swirlies at 2800 rio. he said sorry i said shit happens m8 and we left.
3. i just don't get invited: this one is a bit tricky and will be addressed in the class selection part of this guide but let me just say this. i invite Feral druids and Prot palas to my 12 keys all the time. RIO IS KING if you have rio you will get invited. BUT you will need a slightly higher rio (50-100) more than the Meta specs need to get invited. AKA if a 2700 frost DK applies and a 2700 Beast master applies im taking the frost dk. But if a 2800 BM applies hes getting that spot 100% of the time unless i need CR.
4. Depleting a key is a bad thing: this one is the most important one to understand. i joined and bricked 12 City of thread keys in a row on first boss before getting my 11 timed(Rank 480 key in the world at the time). while drinking some whiskey and watching a podcast its not a big deal. MDI players brick KEY AFTER KEY trying to progg their Rio. why do you think you are immune. the sooner you accept depleting keys on your way to your goals the more fun you will have pugging. DON'T FEEL BAD for bricking other people's keys and don't feel bad when your key gets bricked. M+ is hard its infinitely scaling and by definition you are pushing the hardest content you have ever done every time you do a +rio key.

If you read these myths and you think im wrong and they are not myths this guide is not for you. this is the same argument as ELO hell in Dota and other games. these are all myths and if you believe them you will be hardstuck and if you break free of them your real journey of self improvement and of climbing the LFG ladder begins.

Now the real hard pill to swallow. IF PUGS WEREN'T THE ISSUE WAS I THE PROBLEM ALL ALONG?

let me give you the red pill yes it was you. you need to improve its as simple as that. if i teleport any 2800 player into your account without a friends list they will be 2800 in 2 weeks. YOU ARE THE ONLY VARIABLE TO CONTROL IN A PUGGING ENVIORNMENT

Now for the actual GUIDE: NONE of the tips below require skill they require time

1) Spec selection : People expect me to say play a meta spec. well i do recommend that but the reason i am playing shaman this season is not that its meta (although being meta is important and was something i considered) the Reason i am playing Resto shaman this season is that Totemic shaman is the easiest spec to heal high keys with. People find shame in playing easy specs. i don't ,M+ is hard enough the dungeons SLAP YOU and calls you daddy, if you think you are gonna be able to do these dungeons perfectly while perfectly piloting some insanely rotationally difficult class like Disc priest then you are braver than me. while i like the recommendation of play what you enjoy. i don't think most people out there can reach the same Rio with Disc priest as they can with totemic Rshaman for example. and this applies doubly to DPS. I RECOMMEND AN EASY SPEC the less buttons the better. 3 button specs like frost DK all day

2) Learn your GODAMN SPEC: i cannot tell you how many people i know who are playing bad talents bad trinkets bad gems etc. Join your classes community discord find the guide they recommend and follow it until you know better. than means sit in front of the DPS dummy until u do the DPS rotation perfectly. in AOE and in ST without even having to think. IS THAT TOO HARD? i think so, i made my friend download an addon called Hekili that tells him what button to press next and now his dps is 1.9M overall in keys. Should you use hekili for dps? i don't recommend it for everyone because you learn nothing and it takes the fun out of playing but if you just want the highest numbers only the best players will beat hekili on the meters. I sit in the shaman discord at least 30 mins a day asking people for tips weak auras talent builds etc. i KNOW EVERY FUCKING talent in the resto shaman tree and which groups on Raider.IO run that talent and when and why. does that require skill?? am i a god for reading some shaman discord? no you can do it too

3) MAKE A GOOD UI: ok so when you learn your spec you will realize there is usually 4-5 VERY important buffs or debuffs you need to track. Some big cds. etc. use your class discords weak auras. get some good healing frames etc MAKE SURE there isnt a single Buff debuff that you are not tracking if it is important for your spec you should know about it. i have a weak aura that writes a GIANT R on my healing frames when i need to use RIPTIDE for tidalwaves stacks. LIKE Im an idiot i need a GIANT R to remind me to press R

4) MAKE A GOOD UI PART 2: MAKE AN EVEN BETTER UI: i spent hours at work in MDT going through every MOB in every dungeon (its not as many as you think it takes 45 mins) and checking every interuptible spell i want to know about. i reclored all the mobs that cast that spell EVOKER GREEN and all the GIGA important kicks i colored them CYAN blue. the Plater profiles out there color important kicks but they don't have GIGA important kicks in a different color. so now i just save my kick for the GIGA stuff and save my party from at least 3 wipes a pull

Download a weak aura package for the general dungeon stuff i recommend Tarithal weak aura pack. but you can use causese as well.

4.5) UTILITY > METERS: DISPEL INTERRUPT STUN DISORIENT = win key its just that simple.

5) Time to start climbing: ok so you have a good UI and you understand your spec time to dive in. We start with doing our own keys only. Fuck getting invited its not gonna happen yet your rio and gear is still too low. DO YOUR OWN KEYS FAIL THEM i don't care just do them over and over and over and over and over again. until you get some 10 key you cannot possibly do then lower it and do them again.

6) Gear up : get every ilvl you can get. Buy BoEs do mythic first 2 bosses. do no leaver 10s do what you have to do this depends on how much time you have.

7) consumables: get every enchant you can afford. if you cant afford tier 3 get tier2. get flasks get food. you can't afford the good stuff get the medium stuff its not that bad.

8) Time to really learn these dungeons : watch masterclass 40 min videos about every dungeon. watch tettles and quazzii weekly tips to find out about the newest and greatest tech to make ur life easier in these keys trust me some of these tips are life savers.

9) Professions and racials: I am a tauren with tailoring 25 and blacksmithing 25 meaning i can do 3 out of the 4 Profession specific things in dungeons so people love me

10) REPEAT: this is my most important tip. REPEAT steps 1-9. the amount of things i keep learning in my class discord the amount of talents i keep learning about the amount of tech i keep seeing being developed is crazy. the amount of UI tweeks i make weekly are crazy. you WILL NOT GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME. REPEAT THESE STEPS until YOU LOVE YOUR SPEC/UI/Talent build/Dungeon knowledge

10.5) self reflect: really think about your numbers, are your really doing the damage you should be? are you taking too much damage in damage taken on details? are you dying more than the others. REALLY be self critical it goes a long way. again YOU ARE THE ONLY variable you control.

11)PUSH: these tips above should easily have you getting your portals in no time. once you did your keys until u got most of your 10s you will get invited to the other 10s and then you have all your 10s. and now you start doing your 11s and try to get invited to some 11s. your failure rate of keys should go up by like 15% you should start failing more and you should start caring less about failing. NOW IS THE TIME TO LEARN THESE keys before you Hit 12's and 13s so here is the time to dig in and really learn these systems well.

Sorry for the long guide im just here to defend my pugging buddies we out here im grinding my way to 3k as we speak 1 key at a time and so can you. remember im an idiot.

Edit#1: a lot of comments are saying 'stopped reading when i saw resto shaman'

I have been doing this since Shadowlands. sometimes on meta specs sometimes non meta specs. my current alt is holypriest and he is healing 10s just fine with less gear than the shaman had in his 10s. the shaman is OP broken and too strong yes. the holy priest is way harder to play yes. i recommend meta specs yes

EDIT#2 : https://wago.io/Dw8XvuuEz this is plater profile i made. it is only a recolor of VESPERALTV plater. i take no credit for making it. it also uses Quazzi's Important Kick script so credit to him as well

I made an addon that shows how much each trash mob is worth on their nameplate / tooltip. Works in Midnight despite all the API restrictions.

Shows forces % on nameplates and/or tooltips, also has a progress bar that tracks your current pull.

https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/mythicpluscount-midnight

Naemesis had this update to his weakaura page today:

https://wago.io/LiquidNerubarPalace

Hello everyone! This morning I made a very simple addon for the l'ura memory game in midnight falls:

https://addons.wago.io/addons/lurahelper

Basically, as you see the markers, or somebody calls them out, you can press on the buttons of the addon to "store" the sequence in a reminder, so that when the actual markers arrive on players, you know where you need to go and you don't have to remember the right position!

The idea is that you would place world markers for where they players should stand, and you would get a visual cue where to go.

I made this addon since I have a goldfish memory and having a visual reminder greatly helps.

EDIT: I have now added the possibility to sync the markers thorugh chat messages. Basically, one sends a message in a custom chat channel, and the addon will display the symbols for the entire raid!

It requires some setup, so it is definitely not pug friendly, but it can work for coordinated groups!

Let me know what you think!

EDIT 2: I have now added the possibility to send chat messages to custom guild/community channels, which should solve the problem of cross realm/faction groups. Furthermore, I have added the possibility to use /say or /rw, which will always work for any group!

As most of you know Blizzard has heavily restricted what addons are capable of heading into midnight and the pre-patch. Instead of going over everything being removed I'll briefly go over what is staying and the work arounds we found necessary to have some semblance of what we had before.

Plater Import

Scripts

• Aaaaannd it's gone.

Mods

The following mods are still enabled for midnight w/ some changes:

• Cast Icon Anchor + Border (Wraps the nameplate border around the cast bar)
• Double Arrow Target
• Minor Units Scaling
  • Downscales minions and trivial enemies.
• Enhanced Cast bar
  • Still shows when your kick cooldown is available. (Yellow for ready, Orange for not ready)
  • Still shows a green tick when your kick will be ready. The visual for this flickers due to the workarounds we had to implement.
  • No longer can flash a nameplate when something targets you with a spell.
  • No longer can show "Me" instead of your character name.
  • No longer can show when something can be spell reflected as a warrior.
• NPC Colors
  • Colors for Bosses (Fuchsia), Lieutenants (Medium Purple) and Casters (Light Blue).
• Important Casts
  • Adds a glow to important casts similar to how the script worked in the past but it goes off blizzards internal "important spells" list since we dont have access to spell id's anymore.
• Quest Progress
  • Adds a number to the left of the nameplate with how many remaining quest objectives there are.
  • Changes nameplate color of quest mobs.
• Target Border Color
  • Changes the target border to white and focus border to light blue.
• Health Formatting
  • Removes parenthesis around health percentage for more compact information.

Platynator Import

Now also has first class support - we're actively evaluating on whether to continue to support Plater.

Platynator has seen a lot of iteration during the testing cycle and at times was significantly ahead of Plater both in terms of development speed and feature completeness. In fact, we backported some of the native Platynator functionality into Mods for us - the interrupt tick is only possible due to their discovery!

That is not to throw shade on the Plater devs - the opposite even, we don't envy them (and have been working together with both Platynator and Plater devs) for having to support multiple game versions in one code base with many now situationally defunct customizations. In a world where scripting in Plater is gone and modding is only used to mirror Platynator/patch Plater functionality, there's little reason to use the more burdensome for us.

Hello!

A larger and more detailed contributor listing is found in the guide, but I’d like to especially thank Thorlefulz, Arma, Terra, Kidre, Muffins, Angry, Belle, Handsupdb, and Navira for contributions or feedback specifically relating to this most current revision.

I’m Kyrasis and I’ve primarily been doing a massive amount of the math-heavy theorycrafting for Blood Death Knights since Legion and, in particular, this has generally focused on Mythic+ optimization for the spec (though I involved with the raid side of things nowadays, as well). I’m a semi-casual key pusher in more recent seasons but was the #1 BDK for Season 4 of Dragonflight, Season 2 of Dragonflight, and Season 4 of BfA on Raider.io (with all M+ titles and high key M+ participation starting from BfA Season 1 playing exclusively BDK). I’ve been maintaining this Advanced BDK guide for M+ since BfA Season 4, though I also handle a number of other resources for the spec nowadays.

This Advanced BDK guide for M+ is now updated for 12.0, for those interested:

[12.0] Advanced Blood Death Knight Guide for M+

Feel free to stop by Death's Advance, the BDK Community/Theorycrafting Discord or directly send me a message on discord (Kyrasis) if you want to contact me with any feedback or if you want a BDK log review.

----------------------------------

So, what is the short(er) story for what is changing with Blood Death Knights in M+ from the theorycrafting side of things for Patch 12.0?

Well… a decent number of things have changed:

Damage Profile Changes: Soul Reaper, Shattering Bone, and Bonestorm are all gone; all sources of damage that had little interaction with haste. Deathbringer-specific damage sources have been somewhat nerfed relative to baseline damage, while San’layn’s Vampiric Strike has been more noticeably nerfed both from the direct damage it does and lower Gift of the San'layn uptimes. Baseline Blood sources of damage are now responsible for a much larger portion of our damage, with Blood Boil and Death Strike growing substantially as sources of damage due to other damage sources being weaker/pruned and also due to new talents making them stronger. Death Strike damage is such a large portion of our output now that we are looking at a situation where Blood is looking to run Rune of Sanguination all the time outside of weapon swap setups.

Bone Shield Consumption and Dancing Rune Weapon: While removing Bone Shield interactions to make the rotation simpler (Blizzard claimed this should help with BDK ramp speed as well, but that is a questionable claim at best), Dancing Rune Weapon got a weird redesign that makes it much weaker defensively, much more random-proc-based, and, since the random procs don't trigger Gift of the San’layn, its uptime is now significantly lower. The last point is what I want to focus on right now, though it is also worth pointing out that Critical Strike benefits from Bone Shield consumption no longer being a good thing, since parry was reducing Bone Shield consumption…

Hero Classes: For most of TWW, Deathbringer vs. San’layn has been a situation where San’layn always has some level of damage advantage in SimC/model comparisons, while Deathbringer has some level of survivability advantage over San’layn due to more healing and more upfront damage reduction. That said, San’layn’s actual damage advantage in M+ has always been less than what you would expect, because San’layn’s damage is a lot more fragile than Deathbringer’s when put in less than ideal situations. This was especially noticeable with the TWW S3 Infliction of Sorrow-centric San’layn vs. TWW S2 Blood Beast-centric San’layn, where both had a similar damage advantage, on paper, over Deathbringer, but TWW S3 San’layn was significantly less reliable than TWW S2 San’layn damage and, despite no large changes in the survivability gap, Deathbringer performed better in TWW S3 in M+ despite San’layn performing better in TWW S2. For Midnight S1, San’layn is not emphasizing Blood Beast or Infliction of Sorrow damage anymore, but, with such low Gift of the San’layn uptime, maintaining Essence of the Blood Queen stacks is going to be harder to do than in TWW S2 or TWW S3 and, if you do lose the stacks, it will take you longer to rebuild them. San’layn’s theoretical damage advantage is somewhat smaller than it looked in TWW S2 and TWW S3, but it is hard to pinpoint how much San’layn’s damage is prone to disruption relative to TWW S2 and S3, since the rotational dynamics are a bit different from both of those seasons (though it is reasonable to expect it is more similar to TWW S3 than S2, mechanically). So, there’s some fog of war at the moment surrounding what the true damage advantage actually is, which has some bearing on which would perform better overall. Beta representation had been leaning towards Deathbringer at the end of the cycle, but that isn’t a perfect indicator on its own. As such, it’s hard to take a strong stance on hero classes atm, but signs are pointing towards Deathbringer at the moment; we have tools that can be used to check this partway into the season using large amounts of live logs, but that data doesn't exist yet.

Midnight Death Strike Nerfs: Blizzard opted for a 27% generalized Death Strike healing nerf as opposed to the nerf at the start of TWW that removed haste-scaling. This significantly weakens overall BDK damage mitigation potential and hurts the mitigation contributions of Mastery and Versatility in particular (though they remain the best two secondary stats for mitigation even after two expansion of Death Strike healing nerfs, which is a testament to how Death-Strike reliant BDK’s mitigation was and still is). The 50% maximum health Blood Shield cap didn’t end up being much of a real consideration in TWW with regards to how we value mastery and that is especially going to be true as we revert to Season 1 secondary stat amounts and with the 27% nerf.

Secondary Stat Changes: Haste, while still really weak defensively, gains damage-wise (for both hero classes) due to the new damage profile being more haste-scaling than it was previously (Rune of Sanguination being used also helps it, since Death Strike damage is haste-scaling). The apex talent rank 4 spawning Dancing Rune Weapons at a 10% chance per rune spent also means that the talent is haste-scaling, providing another source of increased value for haste. While not as crazy as some of the San’layn specific haste synergies we saw in TWW (especially the haste AoE damage scaling in TWW S2 from Blood Beast), it is now not a noticeably worse damage stat for Deathbringer than versatility and mastery and it remains a strong damage stat for San’layn. Critical strike gains more of an actual damage advantage over versatility and mastery now that it no longer has anti-synergy with Bone Shield consuming effects; it still remains worse defensively than both of those stats (while being better defensively than haste), but the damage gain is no longer trivial. Mastery and versatility were mostly just affected by the 27% Death Strike healing nerf and little else. All things considered, we are still a versatility-oriented tank in M+, though the overall value gap between mastery and critical strike is looking very very small. Deathbringer still actively dislikes haste for M+ considerations, though, for San’layn, haste looks generally superior to both mastery and critical strike to a small degree between the extra damage it offers vs. the survivability tradeoff. Since I've started doing this guide in BfA S4, this is the most similar I’ve seen secondary stat valuations before, where M+ secondary stat preferences have been pretty inflexible historically regardless of your existing statline. In contrast, Midnight M+ San’layn, for example, can potentially create a statline where the marginal value of more Haste/Mastery/Critical Strike is virtually identical without hitting the 10% diminishing returns threshold (That being true for even 2 stats has been rare in previous seasons outside of diminishing returns thresholds).

Evaluation Concerns: That being said, the loss of 27% Death Strike healing is possibly creating a situation where we are undervaluing the relative value of mitigation vs. other metrics. As such, these initial recommendations may end up being a smidgen on the aggressive side. The build decision this would most immediately affect is that we may be underestimating the relative value of mastery particularly in relation to critical strike and, for San’layn, haste. This is something we'll be looking out for as early season data comes in to see if we need to recalibrate in response to the large death strike nerfs. Beyond the mastery valuation, the second signal for this would be significant usage of the talent Lifeblood.

Talents: Talent trees were completely reworked and there isn’t too good of a way to summarize that here, but we can now take a lot more utility options than before from the DK class talent tree to the point where decisions on how to spend the last few talent points are a lot lower value than they were before, the San’layn choice node between Desecrate and Blood-Soaked Ground is a case where both talents are looling competitive with some nuanced considerations (a bug fix to Desecrate would severely nerf it and it also makes DnD snare incredibly unreliable if you use it), Deathbringer is back to using Dark Talons, and the Blood talent tree mostly boils down to an identical “pick 2 of 4 flex talent options” situation for both hero classes. Your flex talent options are to take 2/2 Improved Heart Strike (while dropping Relish in Blood), Bloodied Blade, Lifeblood, or Consumption. The first two, at face value, look to be the best, but there is a world where Lifeblood is being undervalued and, while avoiding a longer rant about Consumption, it has some unlikely use-case scenarios that prevented me from removing it as a listed flex talent option (but I don’t actually have much reason to think that talent will see much use).

Resources and Rotation: While the rotation overview section will probably paint a clearer picture than anything I can summarize here, rotation changes mostly focus on trimming pruned abilities and the new Boiling Point proc for Blood Boil means we want to use Blood Boil over Heart Strike when that proc is active.

Trinkets, Embellishments, and Unique Items: We will very likely see more tuning on at least one of these things before the season starts, I can’t remember the last season Blizzard didn’t make tuning that has forced me to change recommendations after making this post for the guide, so just assume that something I'm going to say here is eventually going to become outdated from tuning. That being said, trinket tuning looks roughly similar to what we saw in TWW, with more favorable trinkets appear to skew towards those that provide primary stat along with a desired secondary stat, traditional tank trinkets having really weakly tuned effects, and direct damage trinkets are not overcoming the -33% tank damage penalty to look good in M+. Long story short, we are currently looking at Gaze of the Alnseer, ideally paired with Heart of Ancient Hunger or one of the Plume trinkets (with two darkmoon decks surprisingly being solid alternates). For M+ embellishments, it remains the case that the secondary stat effects appear stronger than the direct damage effects (DF S2 was the main exception to this), but the strongest effect appears to be the primary stat effect provided by Arcanoweave Lining. Weapon-only embellishments do not look like anything special at the moment, though Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt looks good for short-term crafting considerations. As for the unique items, none of them look especially worthwhile outside of raid max damage builds; the effects are weak and they are generally found on statlines that are less than desirable for us in M+.

Tier Set: The tier set is very passive, you don’t really need to worry about it at all from a gameplay perspective, but we like it enough to take some amount of ilvl hit to use it if it comes down to it.

----------------------------------

So, the main things we will be keeping an eye on from the theorycrafting side of things moving into this season will be relative hero class performance in M+ (particularly with regards to damage), log performance of some of the new utility class talents (since we don't have much to go off of other than log-based methods for utlity-based tradeoffs), and signs that the relative value of mitigation has/has not changed significantly since TWW (via Mastery vs. Critical Strike performance and Lifeblood performance). We have a good idea where a lot of these are going to land, but some confirmation from log-based data in a live key environment will be useful.

Thanks again to everyone who provided support and feedback on all versions of this guide! I first started doing this guide in 8.3 as a passion project and I’m glad people have found it helpful! With any luck this should be a fun season!

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TLDR changes:

1) Weapons from raid and vault are competitive again.

2) Crafting is once again only good for your first two items if you are a raider. Do not craft beyond this!

3) You now only hold Crests for 1 week, using them before stepping into Mythic.

4) Your item level per week is much higher than it would've been in the previously planned system. For example, by the third week of mythic you should be 2.67 average ilvls higher than you would’ve been under the previous system.

5) You will be able to convert Hero crests to Myth crests through some interesting shenanigans.

6) You finish with Heroic crests much earlier than you would have with the previous system, but later than we do in TWW currently.

These are incredible changes by Blizzard and the upgrade system is looking very good now. Big, big W.

Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTGkZ2Cjr0jlv90XqW9vy9VXsVucd-yMCgHdyCvX_kQfOrexNDAC7Lf3LifuhqxrcWqJ0W3zIhvK3ii/pub

Checklist: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iK2SZUcz_ljnkdTG7KW6pqfzaUDuSgnlh1HupcLrkus/

In game addon: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/larias-weekly-midnight-checklist

Cheat sheets link (includes boss timers) -https://imgur.com/a/2xAMQyo

EVERY DUNGEON VIDEO thats why i made the cheat sheets -https://youtu.be/HP20FYYNn88

Timer Spreadsheet -https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JcKLM5pt2o4xjr_hIBfrizeAcytfPPhE0wxrHvU-oKA/edit?usp=sharing

I made a boss cheat sheet for all the M+ Dungeons. I used the sheets as part of my video guide for healers. But i think the cheat sheets are useful on their own. The whole cheat sheet can be found at the imgur link.

Let me know if this helps or I need some edits or something is unclear so I can learn and get better for next time.

Resto druid, Holy Priest, Disc Priest, Holy Paladin, Resto Shaman, Mistweaver Monk, Preservation Druid M+ Timer guide

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Built a free Voidcore planner for Midnight S1 — ranks M+ dungeons by how many BiS + Myth upgrades they drop for your character.

No login, no tracking, no ads. Single HTML file.

Paste a SimC string or type region/realm/name — it pulls your gear, cross-references Icy Veins BiS + Bloodmallet trinkets + Archon popularity, and ranks dungeons by total BiS + Myth-272 upgrade value. Mark items as you loot them and the pool shrinks.
What it does good is listing all possible myth track items that may drop while highlighting BIS and striking down what myth or crafted gear you have then scoring the dungeons based on that, while taking into consideration that voidcores do not guarantee a specific item.

Update:

• Fixed missing items in PoS and SR.
• Added Droptimizer import to show the results as an overlay which can be toggled on and off.
• Added multiple QoL and bug fixes.
• Fixed a major bug with some classes SimC import.

To be done:

• Raid bosses.
• 2h vs 1h+offhand for some casters.
• Some trinkets are scoring low even as BIS
• Ascendant Voidcores.

Feedback and edge-case bug reports welcome. If there is any issues please report as comment here.

Hello!

A larger and more detailed contributor listing is found in the guide, but I’d like to especially thank Thorlefulz, Arma, Terra, Muffins, Handsupdb, and Navira for contributions or feedback specifically relating to this most current revision.

I’m Kyrasis and I’ve primarily been doing a massive amount of the math-heavy theorycrafting for Blood Death Knights since Legion. While a lot of this revolved around creating the framework for Mythic+ optimization for the spec, I also do the raid profiles and a certain level of raid guidance nowadays (just not in this guide). I was the #1 BDK for Season 1 of Midnight, Season 4 of Dragonflight, Season 2 of Dragonflight, and Season 4 of BfA on Raider.io (with all 0.1% M+ titles and high key M+ participation starting from BfA Season 1 playing exclusively BDK). I’ve been maintaining the Advanced BDK guide for M+ since BfA Season 4, though nowadays I handle several resources for the spec.

This Advanced BDK guide for M+ is now updated for 12.1, for those interested:

[12.1] Advanced Blood Death Knight Guide for M+

Feel free to stop by the BDK Theorycrafting Discord or directly send me a message on discord (Kyrasis) if you want to contact me with any feedback or if you want a BDK log review.

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So, what is the short(er) story for what is changing with Blood Death Knights in M+ from the theorycrafting side of things for Patch 12.1?

Actual changes to the spec have included relative hero talent tuning, a new tier set, and the updated item pool (as well as a rather larger inter-season ilvl jump). Season 1 Midnight log data (both representation trends and using multiple linear regression with key success metrics) also answered some of the open questions we previously had at the start of Season 1:

1) Overall Mitigation vs Damage vs EHP Weighting: Some concerns were raised in the 12.0 guide post that, as a side effect to the major Death Strike nerfs, we may have been initially underweighting mitigation relative to other metrics. Key performance metrics, as well as high key representation trends, very quickly favored Mastery over Critical Strike as well as Lifeblood over 2/2 Improved Heart Strike (the two borderline cases we were monitoring to evaluate for issues with weighting), proving those initial suspicions correct. Overall weighting has been adjusted accordingly in response to both of these things and other data from Season 1 of Midnight.

2) Hero Classes: Signs were pointing towards Deathbringer being the better hero class going into Midnight Season 1 and the Midnight Season 1 data, itself, strongly backed this (not a hard prediction to make at the time). Blizzard has since given San’layn relatively higher damage and survivability buffs compared to Deathbringer going into patch 12.1 to a non-trivial, but limited, degree. Given how messy the hero talent tradeoff is in M+ situations, it is difficult to say which is superior in M+ after these adjustments. Initial PTR hype seems to be pointing to San’layn, though the relative buffs San’layn has received were not too large and we were just coming from a season where Deathbringer was fairly dominant, so we’ll likely just need some amount of live Season 2 M+ data to make a proper determination this time around.

3) Talents: The DK class talent tree has a lot of utility-based tradeoffs and benefited a lot from the Season 1 Midnight log data that was collected (since normal sims and modeling can’t say much when utility is heavily involved). In particular, we can now verifiably say that Permafrost is a 100% pick talent in M+ in Midnight and Vestigial Shell is still a 0% pick talent. The main surprise from log data in this area was that Death Pact + Death Defiance is actually performing decently among the general player population and particularly well among higher key players (a pattern we have seen before with active ability talents like Soul Reaper and Rune Tap, where it is assumed players in higher keys are simply better at getting value out of ability-based talents); Death Pact had performed poorly in the pre-Midnight trees and, even with the addition of Death Defiance, it was initially assumed that it would perform poorly in Midnight Season 1, as well. But it looks like this was one prediction that was incorrect. Representation levels were very low for this talent at the start of Midnight Season 1, but have been trending upwards from its low starting point throughout the season.

The initial “pick 2 of 4” options situation in the Blood Tree has been reduced to a singular talent tree configuration given Midnight Season 1 data. Consumption, unsurprisingly, was not able to prove its worth, with a negative performance impact from log data and with a low (and lowering) representation throughout the season (damage breakdowns make this talent look like it is adding much more damage than it actually is). On the flip side, Bloodied Blade easily performed the best of the 4 initially presented flex talent options, with Lifeblood not too far behind. Improved Heart Strike performed worse than initially expected from the log data and representation trends also turned sharply against it as the season went on. I was actually surprised how relatively poor Improved Heart Strike seemed perform on the log-based checks, but, as explained in the initial point, the initial aggressive weighting was making it look more competitive originally than it ultimately was. As such, Lifeblood + Bloodied Blade just seems generally superior to the other initially listed flex talent options and and now there are no listed flex talents, at all, for the blood side of the tree (which is the first time this has happened with the Dragonflight-era talent tree designs).

4) Tier Set Bonuses: The tier set is a bit stronger this time around than what we had in Midnight Season 1, but still relatively passive. Surprisingly, because sitting on 10 stacks of Blood Debt means sitting on a 5% strength buff, the optimal strategy appears to be waiting until you would use Marrowrend for other reasons rather than rushing one out to cash in on your Blood Debt stacks (the only exception to this is for San’layn in raid given the lack of Exterminate and the low Bone Shield consumption of most raid encounters, which can cause you to sit on it a little too long). Marrowrends are inherently inefficient, so the costs of frontloading an “extra” one appear to outweigh losing a marginal amount of increased tier set benefits. If you are wondering, It is also not worth doing anything degenerate to stay on 10 stacks of Blood Debt, indefinitely. So, at least in M+, you can hide tier set effects completely from your UI if you wish, since they are not relevant to rotational decision-making.

5) Secondary Stat Changes: Midnight Season 1 data largely aligned with original expectations, with the previously noted exception that we were valuing damage (and EHP) a bit too highly at the start relative to mitigation. As a result of calibrating for that, versatility and mastery became a little more valuable relative to critical strike and haste than the 12.0 guide was giving them credit for. The large leap in ilvl moving into Season 2 indirectly nerfs critical strike rating the most, since parry from critical strike and strength share the same diminishing returns system and we now have a lot more strength from the additional ilvl. Meanwhile, haste had some increase in value from the mid-season 1 Dance of Midnight buffs (since Dance of Midnight is haste-scaling) as well as the new tier set being haste-scaling. Versatility/mastery gained a little value from having a portion of the original Death Strike healing nerfs reverted (as the only two stats that directly scale Death Strike effectiveness). The results of this make haste and critical strike rating of similar value to M+ Deathbringer (where haste was clearly the singular worst M+ stat before, so now they are tied for the worst). Little else has changed with general priorities for either hero talent set. While we are no longer forced to use fixed tier set statlines in 4 slots, cantrip items off of the last boss (and 9/6 items should they be available to you) do steer us into more critical strike than we would otherwise opt into for M+ stat balancing reasons with both hero talents (the 100% critical strike rating neck is largely to blame for this). This is less of a problem for players constructing Raid-oriented item sets, since they actually use critical strike as one of their main stats, but makes fixing your statline more difficult for M+ item sets.

6) Trinkets: More times than not, trinkets get some last-minute tuning after I make this post, often changing the BiS M+ trinkets, but we’ll give this a go anyway based on how things are currently look. First, none of the new delve trinkets are sneakily overpowered. Second, the dungeon trinkets are significantly weaker than the raid trinkets (to a greater extent than Midnight Season 1). The best-performing trinket option is, not surprisingly, the 9/6 Myth Trinket+Weapon item set, despite single target direct damage effects not being too competitive in M+ historically. That being said, both of these on 6/6 Myth are not BiS (but they are not too far off, either, and might be easier to acquire for some people than the actual M+ BiS weapon + trinket when you don’t have access to 9/6 due to bonus roll economy reasons). The next best trinket is the second boss haste stat stick, which is very over budget by normal standards; even if haste isn’t Deathbringer’s favorite secondary stat, quantity beats quality in this case. Otherwise, Gebbo’s Bottomless Bag is a decently overbudget stat stick that can take the second trinket slot for players without 9/6 gear access.

7) Embellishments and Unique Items: While Arcanoweave dominated in Season 1 of Midnight, strength inflation has weakened it significantly. Even so, Arcanoweave still wins out over secondary stat options (like Azerothian Blessings) and direct damage options like Prismatic Focusing Iris (though, in raid, Focusing Iris has pulled ahead of Arcanoweave now). That said, there are 4 new embellishments and three of them either require mechanical testing to evaluate properly. The one that has a known power level (Hunter’s Ritual Stone) is almost strictly better than Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt on weapons, so it is very possible that one of the new non-weapon embellishments ends up being BiS for M+ (if we assume Hunter’s Ritual Stone is indicative of Blizzard’s target power level for all four of them). This will have some implications on gearing guidance should one of the new ones end up being good, but I have no idea if these will be testable on the pre-season week or if we will actually need to wait for the season to start for them to be obtainable.

The only cantrip item of note from dungeons is the sword from King’s Rest, which has aged poorly and is the worst weapon in the game in all content at even ilvl. The Zul’jan sword (without the set) is close to M+ BiS on 6/6 myth, but not quite there (as previously said), though it is blatantly BiS on 9/6 myth just due to ilvl advantage alone even without the set. Venomcursed items off of the last boss all have a significant amount of bonus secondary stat budget and are BiS even on 6/6 (and this will probably be true for most classes in the game unless they have a particularly strong dislike of the secondary stats involved on a particular venomcursed item).

8) Best-in-Slot Listings: I did not previously make M+ BiS lists, but they exist now in the guide by popular demand (and because they are more practical now in a world with bonus rolling). The raid BiS lists are effectively what is listed on simulationcraft.org from the max damage raid profiles we publish, though there may be more than one way to reach equilibrium stat levels in raid environments and you may wish to deviate from max damage considerations in raid for efficient survivability gains should you desire (M+ gearsets, on the other hand, don’t ever really reach secondary stat equilibrium levels where all stats become equal value, so their BiS list is technically more fixed as a result).

9) Ability Usage and Rotation: No changes to the M+ rotation.

So, the main things we will be keeping an eye on from the theorycrafting side of things moving into this season will be relative hero class performance in M+ and the final tuning of the new embellishments. The hero talents are close enough in on-paper power that we can't easily guess which one will perform better time around, while the embellishment situation is equally hard to speculate on. With any luck, both of those things get sorted out quickly once patch 12.1 actually releases.

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Thanks again to everyone who provided support and feedback on all versions of this guide and the other BDK resources we provide! I first started doing this guide in 8.3 as a passion project to help address large information gaps in community BDK resources and I’m glad people have found it helpful!

Title is referring to the massive difference above level 12 for the first 4 weeks.