If you haven’t heard, Blood is getting a bit of a nerf in 3.2.2. This is the proposed change: “Heart Strike: Secondary targets of Heart Strike now take half as much damage.” (source) The reasoning, apparently, is that we shouldn’t be able to do extremely good AoE damage without somehow losing out on single-target DPS.
While I, like anyone else, dislike getting nerfed, I agree with this philosophy. One discrepancy that bothers me is the case of Ret Paladins. In their regular rotation they use two powerful AoE moves, Divine Storm and Consecration. If there are 3-4 targets around, Ret Pally AoE begins to really outshine DK DPS without even having to break from regular rotation. DKs currently still have to use Pestilence to spread diseases in order to make AoE truly effective, so the reasoning is a bit fuzzy to me.
I wonder, though, if we deserve some other way to boost DPS in place of this nerf? Blood has pretty bad AoE damage (especially with the nerf). The best suggestion I saw was something on the EJ forums: that Blood Strike should get an AoE component through a talent deep in the Blood tree. That way in order to do AoE DPS, we’d have to sacrifice some single-target damage to get more cleave.
Making a change like this allows for more choices to be made during Blood DPS, akin to the way Frost works. That’s the one thing I think Blood is really missing. Aside from cooldowns, the Blood rotation is very set in stone which makes it a bit less fun to play with.
Runeforge Gossip 
Actually, I think Ret AoE got nerfed in 3.2, because they now require Seal of Vengeance stacks to do decent damage.
Yes, this nerf sucks in the respect that what little AoE we did, relied on Heart Strike.
However, in the Grand Scheme of Things, the only boss fight that we currently face where cleave damage is helpful is the Faction Champs. (Unless of course your raid strat is to tank the Twin Valks side by side.)
This may actually help our survivability a little bit on Yogg. I have a bad habit of cleaving another add in P3 and pulling aggro and the next thing I know, I am looking up the dress of the Pally next to me. For those fights I usually switch to Blood Strike until the adds are under control and then go back to Heart Strike, but I still am hesitant to use it for fear of aggroing an add that doesn’t have established tank aggro.
So all in all, this is a trash nerf, not a boss fight nerf. In my opinion, the nerf to ArP is a bigger DPS nerf to Blood DKs than the HS Nerf is.
Heart Strike is considered AoE so it’s reduced by 75% on Faction Champions, making it effectively useless. 😦
I’ve been Blood since they messed up SS on Unholy and with the recent changes to Unholy I am definetly doing back to SS. The problem is with Blood is Heart Strike is always our number 1 damage ability. So say you cause 100k damage on 2 targets beside each other, so with the new changes it won’t be 100k with ArP nerf and now you can take 25% off because the secind target gets hit for half now. Like Kathmaul says “It’s a trash nerf.” Yeah it is but really, its a PVP nerf. Which irritates me about Blizzard, you have talent which is unique and interesting to 1 talent tree and they completely change it. Its like the UB change, no other class had a talent like that and now its like a Mages Ignite I think its called or Scorch.
I recently saw Ghostcrawler say that they didn’t want DKs to go back to the big massive hits they had when they were first introduced, this seems to step 1 in the that plan.
P.S. I think Blood AoE was actually fairly competative, load the diseases up and then use 4 10k Blood Boil on trach ain’t too shabby.
Because Blood AoE capability was clearly OP
/sarcasm
This is a PvP nerf affecting PvE again, period
I really don’t think it’s a PvP nerf given how Blood DKs have had little to no representation in PvP pretty much since they nerfed DRW to do 50% damage.