WotLK Classic Blood Death Knight Spec, Builds, Talents, and Glyphs

Blood Death Knight talents focus on survivability, threat, gaining powerful cooldowns such as Vampiric Blood, and giving your group powerful buffs such as Abomination's Might and Improved Icy Talons.

The build listed above is the most standard talent build for raiding Blood Death Knights and includes both of the powerful buffs Abomination's Might and Improved Icy Talons. This build sacrifices some personal threat and mitigation in order to get Improved Icy Talons, so if you are consistently raiding with a Frost Death Knight talented into it or an Enhancement Shaman you can consider dropping this talent and putting the talent points into the Unholy tree for powerful early tree talents such as Virulence, Anticipation, and Morbidity. There are many slight variations of this build depending on if you need the hit from the Unholy tree and your gear, but this is the build you should be running in most Raids; it becomes especially useful in 10-mans where buffs can be difficult to get with so few players.

If you were looking for a leveling-oriented build, please refer to our Death Knight leveling guide.

The Blood tree is filled with talents both focused on increasing your damage (threat) and self-sustaining. It is important to make sure you choose the correct talents as there are many powerful ones to choose from, but you only have so many talent points to spend.

Rune Tap is a massive personal cooldown, healing yourself for a percentage of your maximum health at the cost of one Blood Rune, and can save you from needing to use a bigger cooldown or possibly prevent you from dying.

Veteran of the Third War grants a massive amount of important stats and is one of the largest stat gains you can get in exchange for talent points.

Death Rune Mastery causes your Death Strike to turn the Unholy and Frost runes spent on it to become Death Runes when they are reactivated, allowing you to have considerably more flexibility with your ability choices.

Spell Deflection gives you a chance equal to your Parry to take 45% less damage from an incoming spell. Death Knights are largely vulnerable to damaging spells when Anti-Magic Shell is on cooldown, so smoothing out the damage between its uses can be extremely strong and greatly increases the value of your Parry rating.

Abomination's Might is a powerful buff that not only makes your entire party stronger but also increases your total Strength as well by 2%.

Unholy Frenzy is an extremely powerful buff that increases the Physical damage done by the target that you choose to buff with this ability. It is a massive damage increase for any DPS that deals largely mostly Physical damage.

Vampiric Blood is one of the strongest cooldowns Death Knights have and can allow you to survive a high-damage situation you may not have been able to otherwise because of the massive amount of increased healing you receive while it is active.

Toughness massively increases the value of the Armor on your gear.

Black Ice is helpful since a considerable amount of damage you deal is either Shadow or Frost, making this talent a massive damage increase.

Endless Winter increases your Strength, but more importantly removes the Runic Power cost of Mind Freeze, allowing you to spend your Runic Power freely.

Improved Icy Talons is a massive group buff that considerably increases the damage done by nearly every melee in game.

Glyph of Disease causes your Pestilence ability to refresh your diseases' durations, so instead of using an Unholy Rune and a Frost Rune you can use a single Blood Rune, allowing you to cast additional Death Strikes. Your main limitation on ability casts will be having your Runes off coolddown, so trading one Rune for two, especially when both Runes you are saving are used for your main self-sustaining ability in Death Strike, is incredibly valuable.

Glyph of Death Strike somewhat synergizes with Glyph of Disease, but this glyph will greatly increase the damage done by your Death Strike which will in turn cause more threat. The only catch to this glyph is that you should remain above 25 Runic Power at all times, but this should be no issue as your only spender — Death Coil — is not particularly impactful as Blood.

There is some debate for which you should choose in the third glyph slot. Until you are sufficiently geared and are Hit-capped to ensure your taunt will always hit we recommend using Glyph of Dark Command, as a missed taunt in a raid could easily result in a wipe; when you are at that hit cap you should instead be using Glyph of Vampiric Blood which increases the duration of one of your strongest personal cooldowns.

Glyph of Raise Dead removes the reagent cost of summoning a ghoul.

Glyph of Pestilence increases the radius of your Pestilence ability by 5 yards.

Glyph of Blood Tap causes Blood Tap to no longer damage you.