Cataclysm Classic Blood Death Knight Talent Builds

Blood Death Knight has a relatively restrictive talent build especially with the way Crimson Scourge now interacts with special attacks. Highlighted below is our guide on what talent set up will yield you the best chance of surviving each encounter while taking the least amount of damage and dealing the most damage possible.

This spec goes is focused on optimizing our survivability and single target threat so it is largely geared towards Raid boss encounters. In a situation where you find yourself lacking in ways to maintain AoE threat consider moving two of the points from Toughness, two points from Runic Power Mastery and one of the points from Blade Barrier and put those points into Virulence and then Morbidity which will greatly increase the damage dealt by both your diseases and your Death and Decay ability allowing you to maintain threat on multiple targets much easier.

In this section we will go over some of the key talents you will use when you are playing a Blood Death Knight. Be sure to understand your most important talents as they are vital to play the build to its fullest strength.

• Bladed Armor — 6 Attack Power for every 180 Armor you have, while this acts as a largely passive damage increase this talent is great as it increases the potency of nearly all of our abilities and turns our Earthen Potion into a small DPS cooldown.

• Improved Blood Tap — greatly reduces the cooldown of your Blood Tap ability which we will be using quite often to turn our Blood Runes into Death Runes and more importantly instantly refreshing the Runes. The more Death Runes available the more we will be able to cast Death Strike which is our primary ability we will use to self-sustain.

• Bone Shield — gives you a buff that has six charges, each instance of damage you take while it is active will consume a charge. While you have at least 1 charge active it reduces your incoming damage taken by 20% and you deal 2% more damage. Paired with Glyph of Bone Shield it will also give us a bit of a movement speed increase, as a Death Knight you will always struggle with mobility so anything helps.

• Abomination's Might — increases Melee Attack Power by 20% and Ranged Attack Power by 10% of everyone in your raid and party while also increasing your Strength by 2%. This is an incredible group buff ontop of a slight personal DPS increase.

• Sanguine Fortitude — increases the damage reduction of your Icebound Fortitude spell by 30% and removes the Runic Power cost. This makes one of our already most powerful cooldowns even stronger while makign it easier to use.

• Improved Blood Presence — increases the rate you regenerate Runes by 20% and reduces the chance you are critically hit by 6% while in Blood Presence. The increased rate of regeneration for Runes is incredibly important as your single largest limtiing factor as a Death Knight will be Rune availability.

• Vampiric Blood — increases your Maximum health by 15%, and increases the amount of healing received by 25% for 10 seconds. This greatly increases the amount of healing you are able to receive while this is active from both Healers in your group but also by your own Death Strike ability.

• Rune Tap — instantly converts one of your Blood Runes into 10% of your maximum health.

• Will of the Necropolis — whenever a damaging attack brings you below 30% maximum health your Rune Tap ability will be instantly refreshed and cost no Runes. You will also take 25% reduced damage for the next 8 seconds. This effect can only occur once every 45 seconds. While not a true defensive cooldown this is a great tool to deal with large incoming damage.

• Improved Death Strike — increases the damage done of your Death Strike ability by 120%, it's Critical Strike chance by 30% and the healing done by 45%. Death Strike is our primary spender of Unholy and Frost Runes while also being our main form of self-sustain so maximizing its effects is never a bad thing.

• Crimson Scourge — increases the damage dealt by our Blood Boil ability by 40% and causes our melee attacks against a target infected with Blood Plague to have a 10% chance to cause your next Blood Boil to be free. This talent is able to be procced not only off auto-attacks but special abilities like Death Strike and Heart Strike.

• Dancing Rune Weapon — summons a second Run weapon that replicates your attacks for 12 seconds, it also grants 20% Parry rating while active. This is a great way to establish initial threat thanks to Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon.

Prime glyphs are new to Cataclysm, giving you a third "row" of glyphs you can use on your character. While there are a couple of different options to choose from, there are some very clear front runners for each specialization.

• Glyph of Rune Strike — increases the Critical Strike chance of your Rune Strike ability which acts as our main spender of Runic Power.
• Glyph of Death Strike — increases the damage done by your Death Strike by 2% for every 5 Runic Power, as Blood we will naturally always have a lot of Runic Power so this acts almost as a passive damage increase to your Death Strike ability.
• Glyph of Heart Strike — increases the damage done by our Heart Strike ability by 50%. Heart Strike is our primary spender of Blood Runes so the added damage is a great benefit.

Major glyphs typically offer utility-based options and can be highly situational. For Blood there are two mandatory Glyphs with the third slot being up to player discretion.

• Glyph of Bone Shield — is our first mandatory Glyph as the added movement speed is incredible on a class that is as limited as Death Knight when it comes to mobility.
• Glyph of Dancing Rune Weapon — is our second mandatory glyph. This glyph causes our Dancing Rune Weapon ability to increase your threat generation by 50% while active, this makes initially establishing aggro considerably easier either at the start of a boss or when a new target appears.
• Glyph of Blood Boil — increases the radius of our Blood Boil ability by 50% making it much easier to hit multiple targets you may not have established threat on yet.
• Glyph of Pestilence — increases the radius of your Pestilence ability by 5 yards making the range of your disease spread much larger allowing you to spread diseases to enemies you may have otherwise missed.

Minor glyphs typically provide very minor benefits. Your choices will typically depend on what quality of life increase is the most meaningful for you.

• Glyph of Horn of Winter — increases the duration of your Horn of Winter ability by 1 minute. This ability is used to generate Runic Power so we will often be using it to do so on cooldown but this can be helpful maintaing the buff when you are otherwise too busy to rebuff.
• Glyph of Resilient Grip — instantly refreshes your Death Grip cooldown on a target that is immune.
• Glyph of Death Gate — reduces the cast time of your Death Gate ability by 60% allowing you to return to Ebon Hold much quicker. Anytime you get a Weapon upgrade or need to respec you will need to head back to Ebon Hold so this will save a great amount of time over the course of an expansion.