Blood Death Knight Leveling Guide from 8 to 80 — The War Within (11.1.0)

When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level. The only exception to this rule is if you have a Ring or Necklace with a slightly lower item level but 2 secondary stats on it instead of 1.

Your goal is, evidently, to go as quickly as possible throughout the zones and levels, and the best way to do this is to get the best possible gear without getting out of your way while doing so.

Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!

Until level 10, if you are an old-school race, your Heart Strike will be replaced by its generic alternative, Rune Strike.

Your talent build is the following:

Most of these talent points will be gradually available as you level; we will only note down the active abilities in the guide below, along with the most important talents to pick up. Throughout the levelling process, you will also pick up a variety of passive damage increases to other abilities.

The basic rotation as a Blood Death Knight is based on this priority. We have shown/hidden elements based on the level at which you acquire them; please use the slider at the very top of the page to select what level you are at.

1. Use Death and Decay where you intend to fight; your goal is to keep both you and your enemies in it for as long as possible. Cast it on cooldown, but do not overlap them!
2. If Reaper's Mark is not on your target, apply it in the following priority order:
   • Casting Marrowrend if Reaper's Mark has recently detonated to try and get a free proc from Exterminate.
   • Casting Reaper's Mark on the target directly.
3. Use Abomination Limb as close to on cooldown as possible. This will attempt to grab your enemy on use, and grant you a Bone Shield charge thanks to Bone Collector.
4. Use Dancing Rune Weapon on cooldown as long. You should aim to be below 7 Bone Shield charges when you cast this, but it is better to just send it.
5. Use Tombstone when you have at least 6 Bone Shield charges, you are within your own Death and Decay and Dancing Rune Weapon still is on cooldown.
6. Use Bonestorm when you have at least 6 Bone Shield charges, you are within your own Death and Decay and Dancing Rune Weapon still is on cooldown.
7. Use Consumption. If Dancing Rune Weapon is about to become available, wait until it is available and use it as your first GCD in Dancing Rune Weapon instead.
8. Use Marrowrend (or Death's Caress if you are out of melee range) if your Bone Shield is about to expire.
9. Use Death Strike if your health is low or if you are above 75 Runic Power.
10. Use Soul Reaper if your target is below 35% and will live for 5 seconds.
11. Use Blood Boil if any nearby enemies do not have your Blood Plague disease, or you are close to having 2 charges of Blood Boil.
12. Use Marrowrend if you have 6 or fewer stacks of Bone Shield.
13. Use Heart Strike if you have 2 or more Runes.
14. Use Blood Boil.

1. You start with access to Rune Strike, acting as your main Rune spender, and Death Coil acting as your main Runic Power spender. Death and Decay is also available for large groups of enemies, although Rune Strike does not cleave while inside it. Simply burn Runes with Rune Strike and Runic Power with Death Coil.
2. Pick Blood! This provides three different bonuses:
   • You also gain access to Death Strike, a very powerful Runic Power spender that also heals you for 25% of all the damage you took over the past 5 seconds. A portion of this healing is also duplicated as an absorption effect through your mastery Mastery: Blood Shield.
   • Finally, you also gain a hidden effect called your "spec aura", which buffs a number of things — the most important one to know about is a 140% damage increase to Death Strike. From this point on, you will no longer use Death Coil.
3. Pick Improved Death Strike. This is a modest increase to the healing of Death Strike and is needed to path further down the tree.
4. Pick Heart Strike on your specialization tree; this turns Rune Strike into Heart Strike, a more efficient Rune spender.
5. Use Heart Strike as your filler, and Death Strike as your RP spender. Along with the spec-specific increase to its damage, you also get the benefit of Mastery: Blood Shield!
6. Pick Icebound Fortitude. This is one of your most powerful defensive cooldowns: it reduces all damage taken by 30% for 8 seconds on a 2-minute cooldown.
7. Pick Marrowrend on your specialization tree; is your Active Mitigation ability. It is not very active, but that is down to terminology. Pressing it grants you 3 Bone Shield stacks; you lose a charge per melee hit taken at a maximum of once per 2.5 seconds. You should ideally never cap those and aim to be around 5-7 stacks instead.
8. Pick Raise Dead on the class talent tree. This grants you access to your ghoul — it functions as a damage cooldown, and you can simply press it when it is available.
9. Pick Blood Boil on your specialization tree; this is your main AoE damage ability. It also applies Blood Plague on all targets hit by it.
10. Pick Cleaving Strikes on the class talent tree. This allows Heart Strike to cleave to 5 targets when you are standing inside your own Death and Decay. This greatly increases your damage when fighting a large number of enemies
11. Pick Vampiric Blood - this functions as your second major defensive cooldown and increases your maximum Health and all healing received by 30%.
12. Pick Runic Attenuation - a completely free and completely passive source of bonus Runic Power.
13. Pick Bone Collector. This is mostly necessary to path down, but it does allow you to gain Bone Shield charges when gripping enemies with Death Grip, Gorefiend's Grasp or Abomination Limb
14. Pick Mind Freeze. The reason we put your interrupt this late in the levelling tree is that very few casts specifically need an interrupt while below level 20.
15. Pick Ossuary on the specialization tree. This further reduces Death Strike's cost by 5 Runic Power - a 12.5% throughput increase! It also allows you to progress further down the tree
16. Pick Anti-Magic Barrier, a modest increase to Anti-Magic Shell
17. Put the first of two points into Improved Heart Strike. Our goal here is to get Dancing Rune Weapon as quickly as possible.
18. Pick Veteran of the Third War. This is a bonus 20% stamina.
19. Put the second point into Improved Heart Strike.
20. On the class tree, pick Permafrost - a noticeable and completely passive source of mitigation.
21. Pick Dancing Rune Weapon. This is your first offensive cooldown, but it also has major defensive benefits. While it is up, you gain 40% parry; it also doubles the number of Bone Shield charges generated by Marrowrend and grants you 5 bonus Runic Power every time you cast Heart Strike. This should be cast as close to on cooldown as possible, as it is a major DPS and survival increase.
22. Pick Unholy Ground. As you will see from the rest of the tree, standing in your Death and Decay is a major staple of the current rotation. This is the first of five talents that encourages this.
23. Pick Insatiable Blade. This causes Dancing Rune Weapon to instantly grant you 5 Bone Shield charges and reduce the remaining cooldown of Dancing Rune Weapon whenever you lose or consume a Bone Shield charge.
24. Pick Icy Talons. Bonus melee haste!
25. On the spec tree, pick Everlasting Bond. This adds a second Dancing Rune Weapon copy whenever you cast Dancing Rune Weapon and increases the duration of both to 14 seconds.
26. Pick Gloom Ward. 15% more to all absorbs, both yours and third-party absorbs cast on you!
27. Pick Heartbreaker. This grants you up to 10 bonus Runic Power per heart strike, depending on how many enemies were hit by it.
28. Pick Suppression. 3% free avoidance.
29. Pick Improved Bone Shield. 10% free multiplicative haste just to have at least one Bone Shield charge. You do not get more for every Bone Shield charge.
30. Pick Brittle. Some passive bonus damage.
31. Pick Reinforced Bones. This increases the number of Bone Shield charges you can have to 12, and causes it to grant 10% more armor.
32. Pick Unholy Bond. This buffs Rune of the Fallen Crusader.
33. Pick Hemostasis - a modest buff to Death Strike and yet another reason to keep cycling Blood Boil charges!
34. Pick Soul Reaper. It is not that useful in solo content, as enemies tend to not stay in execute range, but if you happen to do dungeons while levelling, you will get a chance to see its actual power on bosses.
35. Pick Ossified Vitriol. We delayed this for as long as possible as it is laughably bad, but it is necessary to path down.
36. Pick Unholy Endurance. This turns Lichborne into a true defensive cooldown by making it grant you a 15% damage reduction and increasing its duration to 12 seconds.
37. Pick Perseverance of the Ebon Blade. This will be a very small amount of bonus versatility throughout a fight, but again - pathing. Our prizes on this are Coagulopathy and Rapid Decomposition.
38. Pick Grip of the Dead. A 90% snare tied to Death and Decay is nice.
39. On the spec tree, pick Rapid Decomposition. This turbocharges Blood Plague's healing done.
40. As a leveling-specific tree, we've opted here for March of Darkness in order to get you faster from one place to another.
41. Pick Coagulopathy. 5% free damage and another massive multiplier on Blood Plague's damage and healing.
42. Pick Blinding Sleet - an AoE stop
43. Pick Voracious. This point is not strictly necessary, but we opted for it out of convenience and a modicum of safety while levelling. This buffs your self-healing significantly.
44. Pick Blood Draw. This was buffed significantly in The War Within, in addition to having its cost reduced to a single point. When you drop below its threshold, you instantly pulse a large amount of damage to all enemies within 8 yards and heal for every single point of damage dealt. In addition to this, for 8 seconds after it procs, Death Strike only costs 25 Runic Power.
45. Pick Tombstone on the specialization tree. This allows you to consume 5 Bone Shield charges to reduce the cooldown on Dancing Rune Weapon by 25 seconds (because we picked Insatiable Blade).
46. Put the first of two points in Will of the Necropolis, a completely passive damage reduction effect against large hits or when you are already low. You do not need to be below its threshold for it to apply.
47. Pick Shattering Bone. You now pulse a significant amount of damage to everything near you whenever you lose a Bone Shield, either directly from auto-attacks or by consuming them using Tombstone or Bonestorm!
48. Put the second point in Will of the Necropolis.
49. Pick Bonestorm. This sounds weird until you realize that in addition to its damage and healing, it triggers Shattering Bone and grants 50 seconds of cooldown reduction on Insatiable Blade.
50. Pick Insidious Chill. An attack speed slow on anything you auto-attack.
51. Pick Sanguine Ground. The third Death and Decay talent, this is a bit more healing and damage dealt.
52. Pick Subduing Grasp. This is a filler/pathing talent and largely does nothing.
53. Pick Consumption. This is a small amount of upfront damage, 2 runes immediately refunded to you, and another significant multiplier on Blood Plague, usable every 30 seconds.
54. Pick Abomination Limb. This has lost its Bone Shield charge ticks, but thanks to Bone Collector, you can recover some of it.
55. Pick Heartrend. We take it purely to path to Purgatory.
56. Pick Death's Echo - a bonus charge on Death and Decay, Death Grip and Death's Advance.
57. Pick Purgatory, a very potent cheat death.
58. Put the first of two points in Rune Mastery.
59. Pick Red Thirst - a very significant cooldown reduction on Vampiric Blood.
60. Put the second point in Rune Mastery. Boring filler talent, but necessary.
61. Pick Iron Heart - 20% more blood shield!
62. Pick Null Magic - 8% magic damage reduction and a significant duration reduction on all magic debuffs.
63. Pick Bloodshot.
64. As the last levelling point, we opted to pick Vestigial Shell. In the open world, you'll passively help others with it; in dungeons and raids, you'll instead protect your allies.
65. At Level 71, you will unlock access to Hero Talents. We will be picking Deathbringer, which gives us access to a new ability Reaper's Mark. Use this on cooldown for additional damage. It will jump to a nearby target once it expires or explode and deal AoE damage if there are no other targets nearby or if the target is below 35% HP. We will be pathing down the left side of the tree to get to Exterminate as fast as possible!
66. aPick Wave of Souls. This will deal damage to all targets between you and your target when you apply Reaper's Mark to them, and increases all Shadowfrost damage you deal to them for a short duration.
67. Pick Soul Rupture. When Reaper's Mark explodes, this will deal a portion of the damage from it to targets nearby and make enemies hit by the explosion deal less physical damage to you.
68. Pick Swift and Painful; this gives you a very potent Strength buff if Reaper's Mark detonates and there are no enemies nearby. It also doubles the upfront damage of Wave of Souls and doubles the shadowfrost damage increase on the target that you Marked.
69. Pick Exterminate. You've now unlocked the core gameplay loop of Deathbringer. When Reaper's Mark explodes, you will gain 2 stacks of Exterminate; these will give your next 2 Marrowrend trigger 2 scythes to attack enemies. The first scythe deals a large amount of damage to your target and has a 30% chance to apply Reaper's Mark. The second scythe deals AoE damage.
70. Pick Bind in Darkness. This will allow you to explode your Reaper's Mark before it expires by fitting 2 Blood Boil's in the Reapers Mark window.
71. Pick Wither Away. This will make your second scythe from Exterminate apply Blood Plague, additionally Blood Plague will deal its damage in half of its duration.
72. Pick Grim Reaper. Reaper's Mark will now deal up to 30% increased damage based on the missing Health of the target. The three Bone Shield stacks it also provides are nice, but not really noteworthy or worth caring about.
73. Pick Dark Talons. This grants you a chance to gain three additional stacks of Icy Talons, and causes Death Strike to grant 2 stacks when cast on a Marked target, with a bonus 2 stacks if it crits. This does not change the damage school of Death Strike.
74. Pick Rune Carved Plates. This will give you rotational damage reduction based on your Runes. Each Rune spent will reduce magic taken by 1.5% for 5 seconds and can stack up to 5 times. Each Rune generated will reduce physical damage by 1.5% for 5 seconds and can stack up to 5 times. With good rotational management, you can maintain high stacks for prolonged periods.
75. Pick Death's Messenger as your final talent point. This will reduce the cooldown of Lichborne and Raise Dead by 30 seconds. Congratulations on reaching level 80!

Congratulations on reaching Level 80! Now that you have hit Level 80, we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level.