Death Knight Hero Talents — The War Within (11.1.0)

Deathbringer is the strongest Hero Talent for raiding if you are still progressing on an encounter, or if you are forced out of melee somewhat frequently, as it provides somewhat consistent value. Once you know an encounter, however, it tends to fall by the wayside offensively.

San'layn's core value is its lack of button bloat, as it brings no new ability. This is as far as the simplicity goes, however, as it is both more punishing, more complex, more reliant on constant melee uptime in order to be able to fully gain value from Essence of the Blood Queen.

Dancing Rune Weapon activates Gift of the San'layn, and provides a significant window of strength. When it ends, the race for the next Dancing Rune Weapon - and the period of scarcity - begins.

Deathbringer is the strongest Hero Talent for Mythic+ as it provides the most offensive and defensive benefits. However, the defensive benefits are all dependent on managing your runes well and playing optimally.

Deathbringer excels at priority damage, AoE damage and defensive value, and it does all three of these consistently.

San'layn suffers from an additional issue in Mythic+; you do not always want to send Dancing Rune Weapon on cooldown. This can easily lead to losing Essence of the Blood Queen stacks, and having to essentially start from scratch multiple times in a key.

Offensively, San'layn is an uncontrollable mess, since most of its damage comes from a random proc on a proc in the form of The Blood is Life. Some pulls, you'll beat DPS; other pulls, you'll compete with the healer on damage. You have no real way to know which one it will be, and this gets worse the lower the key level is, as pulls last less time and a Blood Beast takes a full 10 seconds to explode.

Deathbringer adds Reaper's Mark to your toolkit. There are three methods in which Reaper's Mark can be applied to a target:

• Casting Reaper's Mark on the target.
• When a target affected with Reaper's Mark dies, the mark will seek the closest nearby target in combat and re-apply itself to them.
• Casting Marrowrend (with Exterminate stacks) has a 30% chance to apply Reaper's Mark to the target.

Your goal is to game Reaper's Mark and Exterminate in order to cause as many Reaper's Marks to detonate as possible during an encounter. On single-target, this is largely down to using all Exterminate procs. In AoE, this involves spending Exterminate stacks on targets not marked by Reaper's Mark while leaving a handful of Global Cooldowns between applications in order to be able to spend Exterminate stacks when the first one detonates.

Effectively gaming re-applications of Reaper's Mark causes you to gain a significant amount of offensive and defensive value:

• Every Exterminate cast is the most efficient RP generator in your kit in addition to being the highest damage button in your kit. The only better RP generator in your kit is Heart Strike in AoE (25 RP for 1 rune vs. 20 RP for 1 rune)
• Applying Reaper's Mark also causes Soul Rupture to be applied when it detonates, making you take less physical damage for 10 seconds.

It is worth noting that the number of stacks on Reaper's Mark are just damage, but reaching 40 stacks is done trivially by following your rotation as you normally would, with three simple changes:

1. If you are about to hard-cast Reaper's Mark, make sure Blood Plague is already ticking on the target.
2. While Reaper's Mark is on a target, make sure you have Death and Decay ticking under them. It is very often worth to just recast it when it fades if you have a Crimson Scourge proc or play Death's Echo.

While the absence of a new ability might at first look like simplicity, San'layn's rotational changes could not be further from the truth. At various points in the back-and-forth loop that Gift of the San'layn introduces, San'layn arbitrarily causes you to ignore certain resources entirely. In order to explain the implications, let us first explain the basics of the hero talent tree.

When you cast Dancing Rune Weapon, for the duration of it, Heart Strike is permanently replaced with Vampiric Strike, a shadowy version of itself that deals more direct damage, extends Blood Plague by 3s (and allows you to bypass its pandemic cap), and grants you a stack of Essence of the Blood Queen, increasing your haste and the damage of Death Strike. This buff stacks up to 7, lasts 20 seconds and is refreshed to its original duration only when Vampiric Strike is cast.

Outside of Dancing Rune Weapon, casting Death Strike has a combined 30% chance to enable a cast of Vampiric Strike, allowing you to refresh Essence of the Blood Queen to its original 20 second duration outside of Dancing Rune Weapon and giving you a precarious time advantage while racing for the next Dancing Rune Weapon cast.

Because of this loop, you have a perverse incentive to ignore certain resources:

• Before casting Dancing Rune Weapon, you will want to burn off all of the resources that you will not need during it: exactly one Blood Boil charges, and as little Runic Power as possible.
• During Dancing Rune Weapon, you will cast Blood Boil once to apply plague copies, and Death Strike only to maintain Coagulopathy. You have a very strong incentive to hoard as much of the Runic Power generated from casting Vampiric Strike in order to fish for Vampiric Strike procs when Dancing Rune Weapon runs out.
• After Dancing Rune Weapon, you will predictably cast three GCDs in a row to consume Infliction of Sorrow efficiently: Heart Strike - Blood Boil - Death Strike. The goal from there is to fish for Vampiric Strike procs while using all of the tools you neglected during Dancing Rune Weapon.

As Dancing Rune Weapon's cooldown is variable and the proc chance on Vampiric Strike is slightly larger than it used to be (but still not large enough!), you need to cash in one proc every 20 seconds to keep Essence of the Blood Queen stacks rolling. Since even under optimal constraints, it is difficult to cast Death Strike more frequently than every 4 seconds, this gives you a ~75% chance to keep your stacks on a rolling 20 second chance. An implicit assumption the rotation page will make in this guide is that we will engineer everything to come out of Dancing Rune Weapon with nearly full Runic Power. In AoE, this loop goes on for 30-35 seconds (for a total of 50 seconds), increasing the moment you need to hold Dancing Rune Weapon. On single-target, this can go on for upwards of 50 seconds, requiring two procs to keep Essence of the Blood Queen stacks rolling.