Blood Worms

I haven't actually built a tanking spec yet for level 85. I had a rough one at level 80 and then got tapped to tank some dungeons at level 84. I had 4 talent points to spend at that point and figured I'd just throw them anyplace and go rather than think about it. Those places were Scent of Blood for more Rune Strikes and Blood Parasite because pets are cool. I figure I'll build a real spec soon, but part of that is figuring out what the different talents actually do. What are these blood worms and what are they doing? I went to the log of our first raid and went into the section for the Argaloth kill. This isn't a perfect fight to work things out on but it's the best I've got.

It seems I spawn a blood worm every 15 seconds or so when I'm actually fighting. 12 of the 13 blood worms actually killed themselves to pop a heal and the 13th was alive when the fight ended. When a worm exploded it healed everyone nearby for 1666 times the number of buff stacks it had. On average it had 7.25 stacks on explosion, so it was healing over 12k to everyone nearby on average. A 12k AE heal every 15 seconds feels good. I try to hit rune tap on cooldown when anyone in my party is damaged and it's only a 6k heal every 30 seconds.

Now, rune tap has the advantage of being on demand, no range restrictions, and healing me personally for more like 16k when I hit it so I like it more but it seems in a world where healers are willing to leave people at not-full the blood worms will pump out an awful lot of extra healing to those nearby.

Which is the main problem with bloodworms. Who exactly is 'nearby'? On Argaloth the answer was hardly ever me. Our rogue and the hunter pet were nearby almost every time. Sometimes it also hit people in the other tank group. (Especially Byung for some reason... I guess maybe he was standing on the melee side of the other group? Elemental shamen are melee units, after all...) Overall for the fight they only did 2.28% but that's completely mana free healing and feels ok.

On top of that they do damage as well. Unfortunately they don't do very much of it. They were only 0.28% of our damage on the fight. They swung for only about 630 damage a swing and tend to die after 7 or so swings. It's not nothing, but it's not exactly something either.

If there were fights where the heal actually hit me as the tank I think they'd be very solid. Unfortunately we also threw some attempts at the Conclave of Wind encounter and bloodworms healed me for 84 across the entire night. They actually did a substantial amount of healing on our ret paladin who was fighting my mob, doing 105k healing or 16.6% of the total healing he took over those attempts.

I think they probably need a design change to be a reasonable option. They either need a much larger radius so they'll heal the tank no matter how big the boss is, or they need to melee from the front without providing parry haste, or they need to make the heal always hit the DK who made them along with the people in melee range. They're just not consistent enough to build a positional strategy around and if they aren't healing a few people or a tank they're not powerful enough to justify 2 talent points. I'm not sure what I could take that's better though. 2% spell hit probably.