Blood Death Knight Tank Easy Mode — 12.1

The following build has been designed to provide as simple a rotation as possible; it brings convenient choices at the loss of some throughput, all with the goal of making starting out as a Blood Death Knight more seamless.

It is technically also one of the core builds Blood Death Knights can use and is usually the most applicable to all content. The main difference between this build and actual builds presented elsewhere in the guide is the removal of a single active ability: Consumption.

We recommend this build for beginners in all content, as the choices otherwise would include very specific gameplay-specific tweaks based on criteria that are unlikely to apply to newcomers.

Use the 'Export Talents' on the calculator to easily copy the build in-game.

The basic rotation as a Blood Death Knight is based on this priority. It includes both single-target and AoE recommendations. As usual, more information is available on the in-depth rotation page!

1. Use Death and Decay where you intend to fight, and refresh it when the buff it applies to you when standing in it fades. Do not get fooled by its visual presence, as Cleaving Strikes causes the buff from it to last four seconds longer.
2. Use Death Strike if your health is low or if you are above 75 Runic Power.
3. Use Blood Boil if any nearby enemies do not have your Blood Plague disease, if you have a Boiling Point proc, or you are close to having 2 charges of Blood Boil.
4. If Reaper's Mark is available, cast it on any nearby enemy.
5. Spend Exterminate charges by casting Marrowrend.
6. Use Dancing Rune Weapon on cooldown.
7. Use Marrowrend (or Death's Caress if you are out of melee range) if your Bone Shield is about to expire.
8. Use Marrowrend if you have 6 or fewer stacks of Bone Shield.
9. Use Heart Strike if you have 2 or more Runes.
10. Use Blood Boil.

Blood's Apex Talents provide a proc reducing the cost of Heart Strike and amplifying its damage significantly after you parry an attack when Dancing Rune Weapon is active, and a 10% chance whenever you spend a rune to spawn a Dancing Rune Weapon.

As a general note, Blood's Apex Talents are almost completely passive. The only real priority change from them is to consume Dance of Midnight procs as soon as they come up in AoE, as the internal cooldown on it is short enough that it is possible to overwrite procs.

Since Deathbringer is the default choice for this page, most of the intricacies regarding whether you currently have a hard-casted Dancing Rune Weapon active is less relevant, which also boils this entire set of four talents down to "press Heart Strike when it glows".

The Season 2 Tier Set, Baleful Grave-Knight's Lament, modifies your rotation very slightly. When you reach 10 stacks of Blood Debt, you should aim to consume them by casting Marrowrend. As San'layn, you specifically want to do this before Dancing Rune Weapon if at all possible.

You have two active mitigation abilities that you need to use to keep yourself alive, although simply making use of the above priority will ensure you are doing this to a great degree.

Death Strike is your primary means of keeping yourself alive, and you should use it whenever you can benefit from the healing it provides, particularly after you have sustained high damage (since its healing is based on the amount of damage taken in the preceding 5 seconds).

Bone Shield (applied by your Marrowrend) should be kept above 5 stacks at all times.

In addition to the active mitigation abilities, you must also use your defensive cooldowns as necessary:

• Anti-Magic Shell absorbs up to 30% of your maximum health in magic damage over 5 seconds, and should be used to mitigate magic damage and generate Runic Power.
• Vampiric Blood increases your maximum health and the amount of healing you receive by 30% for 10 seconds. It should be used either proactively in anticipation of high amounts of damage or reactively when low on health and in danger of dying.
• Icebound Fortitude reduces all damage taken by 30% for 8 seconds. It should mostly be used proactively when you anticipate taking high damage, such as from specific boss abilities.
• Lichborne provides a decent amount of leech for 10 seconds on use. While it is nowhere near as impactful as in prior expansions, it is off the global cooldown and costs no resources — send it as close to on cooldown as possible.
• Dancing Rune Weapon increases your Parry chance by 20% and also increases your damage dealt and resource generation significantly. You should use it on the pull, and then generally as soon as it is available, as it doubles up as a resource-generation cooldown and also provides 5 Bone Shield charges

To get a better understanding of how the abilities mentioned above, as well as many more, work, you can look into our Spells Summary guide.

Other than trinkets and jewelry, prioritize item level over second stat itemization. Prioritize stats as follows if you are using Deathbringer. For more information on what's presented on this page, check out our main Stat Priority page.

There are situations where this generic gearing advice falls short. This will only occur in encounters with mechanics that can be reduced through other means, such as by equipping items with Avoidance on them.

The Combat Assistant one-button rotation mode is a downgrade, but not enough to warrant avoiding its use anymore.

While the changes made to it for Midnight are slightly better than its historic counterpart, and the dominance of Deathbringer helps a bit further, it is still woefully behind offensively and defensively.

This new version also casts some cooldowns — it attempts to cast Dancing Rune Weapon as one of its highest priority items, along with Reaper's Mark, but reverses their priority.

Nevertheless, it is viable, and does do some things right: it reactively casts Death Strike while in danger, which is a welcome sight. As such, while we cannot recommend it for veteran players, we can now at least recommend it while levelling.