Blood Death Knight Tank Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

Blood Death Knight is one of the six available tanking specializations within World of Warcraft, and is centered around clear and precise usage of resources to reactively heal a large part of the damage taken using Death Strike, and using a large array of cooldowns to support yourself and your team.

Strengths

• Wide array of cooldowns for all situations: Anti-Magic Shell, Icebound Fortitude, Lichborne, and Vampiric Blood, to name a few.
• Unique Utility: Death Grip, Gorefiend's Grasp and Anti-Magic Zone.
• Immunities: Stun ( Icebound Fortitude), Knockbacks ( Death's Advance), Charm/Sleep/Fear ( Lichborne).
• Utility: ranged interrupt, 90% snare, combat ress, short-duration immunity to magic debuffs.
• Predictable, simple rotation, with options to truly get the maximum out of the spec in the hands of a skilled player.
• Reactive self-healing, based on damage taken.
• Two Taunts: Dark Command and Death Grip.
• Cheat Death: Purgatory.

Weaknesses

• Designed to take more up-front damage than other tanks and heal it back.
• Cooldown usage and planning can make or break you.
• Mistakes don't punish you immediately making it harder to come back from a resource deficit triggered by the mistakes.
• Limited mobility options Death's Advance (requires Death's Echo to get a second charge) and Wraith Walk.

Note that this guide focuses on aspects that are specific to Blood Death Knights and general tanking strategies are beyond its scope. If you wish to know more about the tanking role and what you can do to improve, we recommend that you read our tanking guide.

The War Within comes with a significant talent overhaul and is intended to streamline some of the biggest issues we saw in Dragonflight. A handful of new talents have been added and a lot of the filler points have been put to pasture, but the core rotation remains largely the same.

Players who remember Blood in Patch 9.1, or going even further back, Warlords of Draenor Blood will likely harken this and rejoice.

Do not let the patch notes deceive you: Blood has received a number of impactful rotational changes with the 20th anniversary patch, and these changes differ for both Hero talents as none of the changes overlap between them.

Deathbringer players will discover a significant overhaul to the entire hero talent tree, and the removal of two of the most underwhelming talents on the tree: Blood Fever has been removed outright, and Painful Death is now instead the default behavior for Exterminate.

Along with this, almost every node has been changed, moved or reworked entirely to reaffirm the identity of this hero talent: everything centers around Reaper's Mark. And, unfortunately, little attention has been put to making sure the choice nodes are competitive, which once again leads to a unique talent tree with virtually no choice:

The full rotational list of changes stemming from this rework is as follows:

• Grim Reaper is now a choice node talent alongside Reaper of Souls, with Reaper of Souls being massively stronger numerically. Reaper of Souls grants you a free reset on the cooldown of Soul Reaper whenever you apply (not just when you cast) Reaper's Mark. This Soul Reaper is also free, and detonates irrespective of the health of the target. This allows you to add another 250% AP worth of damage and 4-8 stacks to Reaper's Mark.
  As a neat added bonus, this also contains a flat 20% buff to every Soul Reaper cast and damage. It is worth noting that the random bonus execute Soul Reaper procs that Grim Reaper used to provide are also gone, although this is more than offset by the new Reaper of Souls talent.
• Wither Away is no longer sharing a node with Dark Talons. It was also changed to just double the tick rate instead of compressing Blood Plague down to 12 seconds, but if you were playing Blood properly, this is a meaningless change. Its replacement, Reaper's Onslaught, is the old Swift End and is still a numerical loss to pick. This is good news, however, as Dark Talons also received a significant makeover; in practice, this just means Death Strike is now a very large source of bonus stacks while Reaper's Mark is on target!
• Swift and Painful is a simple 100% buff to Wave of Souls on the target that Reaper's Mark was applied to.
• Rune Carved Plates was nerfed to 1.5% per stack, up to 7.5%. The difference is negligible.
• As an added cherry on top of the cake, Soul Rupture now grants you 10% strength on single target.
• Finally, Bind in Darkness now also increases the damage of Blood Boil by 10%.

Overall, these are fantastic, positive changes: removing most of the passive, boring procs, and shifting a lot more of the value of Deathbringer back into the hands of the player. Blood Fever in particular will not be missed as it interacted with nothing, did not even heal the death knight and merely existed as bonus stacks for Reaper's Mark (and 2-3% of your damage).

The only real rotational change is tied to Reaper of Souls. You will want to weave in the free Soul Reaper cast after Reaper's Mark on the marked target (this is to get 4-8 bonus stacks on the mark), and you will want to cast this in the first 5 seconds after casting Reaper's Mark in order for the detonation to happen before Reaper's Mark fades - the sooner, the better.

The San'layn hero talent tree received a number of numerical buffs bringing it up to speed with Deathbringer two weeks before Patch 11.0.5 launched, and unfortunately, the changes in this patch managed to fully reverse the steam: San'layn is now clunkier, worse on single-target (where its niche was), more unforgiving, more reliant on lucky procs at the right time, and frankly, overall worse thanks to a single change:

• The activator for Gift of the San'layn is now Dancing Rune Weapon instead of Vampiric Blood.

An additional soft-cap was added to The Blood is Life, but guaranteeing a Blood Beast at the start of a pull so that it would detonate with more than 8 targets nearby was already rare.

The only upside of this change is that three talent points were freed for other purposes: Improved Vampiric Blood is no longer necessary, and Red Thirst is now also optional for San'layn. The downside is that there is nowhere else valuable to put them.

The opener also becomes significantly more complicated as there is now a compelling reason for San'layn players to not try to line up Bonestorm and Tombstone as fast as possible after Dancing Rune Weapon. These casts, which are mostly free otherwise, now directly compete with getting 7 stacks of Essence of the Blood Queen during your first Dancing Rune Weapon in order to keep rolling them throughout the encounter.

By far the most problematic part of this change is the direct and indirect losses associated with it:

• Infliction of Sorrow's post- Gift of the San'layn hit (130% of the total predicted damage from Blood Plague on up to 5 targets near you) is now effectively halved in frequency because the cooldown of Dancing Rune Weapon cannot be brought down to 30 seconds anymore. In the absolute ideal case for this (10+ mobs constantly meleeing you), you can look forward to 40-45s.
• Consumption is no longer guaranteed to line up with Gift of the San'layn, and, as a result, a significant optimization allowing you to gain 30% more value from Infliction of Sorrow is no longer a certainty - and a loss if you hold Consumption.
• Because Dancing Rune Weapon's cooldown is the longest in raid and when facing enemies that do not melee frequently, this hits San'layn the hardest where it shined: single-target.
• The variability on duration between Gift of the San'layn means that the timing at which you get Vampiric Strike procs outside of Dancing Rune Weapon will matter a lot more. Previously, you had to go for 16 seconds between Gift of the San'layn activations when Essence of the Blood Queen stacks lasted 20 seconds - and if you followed our guide, your very last GCD in Gift of the San'layn refreshed it to 20 seconds, meaning that you never needed a proc. In 11.0.5, you will now need one to three procs between Gift of the San'layn windows depending on how fast you can reduce the cooldown of Dancing Rune Weapon by taking auto-attacks and losing Bone Shield stacks. If you fail to get them - you get to farm 7 new stacks of Essence of the Blood Queen during your next Dancing Rune Weapon.

The silver lining in all this is that these changes have effectively undone a significant part of the numerical buffs, and San'layn is now firmly back to being something not worth bothering with if optimization is something you care about. Our guide still fully supports it, and I have gone through a lot of effort to optimize its gameplay (both rotationally and on simulations), but unless you very strongly feel that you absolutely need this Hero Talent tree in your life, I would advise skipping it for now.

Returning players will be greeted with a completely overhauled talent tree. We've highlighted some of the most impactful changes below:

• Death Strike healing behavior has changed. The 5-second damage taken calculation ( Coagulating Blood) will now reset If your death strike did not heal you for the minimum amount. In reality, this does not change how you play Blood Death Knight but will punish you if you press Death Strike twice in a row (which you should be avoiding anyway).
• Mastery: Blood Shield is now capped at 50% of your maximum health (down from 100%).
• Dancing Rune Weapon has received several changes. Duration is reduced to 14 seconds, parry bonus reduced to 35% (down from 50%), and only grants 3 runic power per heart strike (down from 5).
• Bonestorm also saw a major glow-up: instead of costing your entire Runic Power bar, it now costs up to 5 Bone Shield charges and refunds up to 10 charges over its duration, one per second. Shattering Bone and Insatiable Blade both consider this cost as true "consumption". In practice, this means that Bonestorm now grants 25 seconds of cooldown reduction on Dancing Rune Weapon every minute!
• Consumption and Blooddrinker are back with a vengeance! They have both been significantly buffed and placed in a much more suitable place on the spec tree. Consumption now refunds two runes and massively amps the effect of Blood Plague on use, while Blooddrinker works as targeted damage reduction and grants 20 bonus Runic Power per use.
• Consumption increases the tick rate of Blood Plague by 30% for 6 seconds (down from 50% for 8 seconds).
• An additional capstone, Carnage, causes all damage dealt by Consumption and Carnage to count for Mastery: Blood Shield, and gives a low chance for the cooldown on both spells to be reset. In practice, unfortunately, it is a talent you will seldom use, as there are better options.
• Gorefiend's Grasp is now significantly more accessible. This is great news for Mythic+, particularly seeing the borderline criminal number of enemies that spam dangerous casts in the new War Within dungeons. A 3-second silence was added to Tightening Grasp, but after playtesting, it appears to be mostly redundant - Gorefiend's Grasp already is an AoE stop.
• On the class tree, Soul Reaper was made significantly more accessible, Empower Rune Weapon is gone entirely, and four new talents related to Anti-Magic Shell have taken their place. The most interesting one of them is Vestigial Shell, which grants Lesser Anti-Magic Shell to your two nearest allies whenever you cast Anti-Magic Shell.

Rotationally, the following critical changes need to be taken in consideration:

• Due to the changes to Cleaving Strikes, you now keep all Death and Decay buffs active for four seconds after leaving your Death and Decay, or if your Death and Decay expires. This means that you cannot rely on visual checks anymore and need a weakaura or buff tracking tool to track the buff from Death and Decay.

For a full breakdown of all Class Changes in the War Within, check out our dedicated page below.

Once you reach level 71, a new set of Hero Talents will be available to you. These significantly extend and enhance the gameplay of the base specialization while also providing more opportunities for finesse and skill to shine.

For Blood Death Knight specifically, you can look forward to playing as a San'layn and significantly buffing Dancing Rune Weapon, or as a Deathbringer and gaining a significant set of interactions that reverberate across your entire kit and allow you to scythe enemies down with ease.

The Blood specialization has an engaging play style, using self-healing through Death Strike as a primary source of damage mitigation. As Death Strike works off a constrained resource (Runic Power), clever optimization of all the ways to generate it becomes paramount. Blood also features a versatile and effective defensive and offensive toolkit, which comprises numerous smaller defensive cooldowns than other tanks, aimed at countering certain scenarios. These can be chained as needed during a fight, although we strongly recommend using them as close to on cooldown as possible.

Put together, this specialization is effective in the full range of current content with proper management. Essentially, if you can survive a hit, you will come out stronger after it.

If you are new to Blood Death Knight and would like to learn the basics of the class, we recommend looking at the Spell Summary, as well as the Easy Mode page we have linked below.

We also have a guide for the Blood Death Knight talents and rotations below.

Gear, enchants, consumables, and gems also play a big part in increasing your character's DPS. Linked below is a page to show you which enchants, consumables, and gems to use, as well as a stats page where you can find more information on each stat and how they interact with your character.

If you do not have a Blood Death Knight at maximum level (or at all!), you can follow our dedicated leveling guide that will walk you through the best talents to choose on your journey, and also provide you with a number of tips and tricks. Before you start on your journey, though, we recommend setting up your UI so that you can familiarize yourself with it before you reach maximum level.

Once at maximum level, we recommend checking out our Easy Mode guide, linked below. This guide will briefly go over what you need to do to play your character optimally, though, of course, the main Rotation and Talents pages are slightly more optimized.

With the right play style and the knowledge of encounters, Blood Death Knights are a force to be reckoned with, particularly in fights with infrequent, high, but not lethal Physical damage. Their toolkit is also varied, and seasoned players will find answers to almost every situation they might get into, both in raids and Mythic+.

Riding on the success of Dragonflight, we have kept a large number of positive changes and only gained more, both offensively and defensively. The cooldown of all of our defensive abilities were reduced significantly, our damage is up, and we have access to new (and old) tools, ranging from being able to easily pick Gorefiend's Grasp to the ability to provide allies with a smaller copy of Anti-Magic Shell through Vestigial Shell.

All is not roses and clear skies, however, as two impactful changes happened on the War Within beta and are notable enough to be mentioned:

1. The damage window used to calculate Death Strike healing is now reset every time you cast Death Strike. In practice, this is very unimpactful with proper play, but compounds on rotational mistakes made by new players.
2. More problematically, Mastery: Blood Shield's cap is now 50% of maximum health, down from 100%. This effectively acts as an EHP nerf against physical tankbusters.

Even more so than in Dragonflight, Blood Death Knights live and die by their ability to play properly, to anticipate and plan ahead instead of working reactively, and to bring the right tools for the job. To this end, we strongly recommend perusing the following pages in particular:

1. The Blood Death Knight Rotation page will contain a fully fleshed-out priority list and will describe in much more detail when cooldowns should be used together, as Blood is now a lot more receptive to chaining cooldowns properly
2. The Blood Death Knight Talents page will also be fleshed out to clearly describe all the interactions between talents, and the effective level of gain or loss, both in absolute and regarding specific synergies.

Do not panic! It sounds like a lot, but in reality, with a bit of work, you should be up to speed in no time.

Blood happens to be very straightforward when it comes to gearing priority: all four of our secondaries do something and synergize with one another. Putting it simply, the more of one secondary you have, the more value per point all the others gain. Strength, Stamina, and Armor (the so-called "primary." budget on pieces) are also extremely valuable to us defensive and offensively and are much more plentiful than secondaries on gear pieces.

As a result, outside of trinkets and weapons with special effects, you can very often find the largest upgrade by simply looking at a piece's item level.

We maintain a page with gearing advice for the current patch, including Best in Slot alternatives from different content sources. You can find a link to this below:

Once you have started to gear, you will need to make sure that you have the appropriate consumables, gems, enchants, and more. We have a dedicated page for exactly this, as shown below, as well as the stats page, where you can find more information on the possibility of a changing stat priority and the necessary changes you may need to make for consumables.

Starting off as any tank is an exercise in frustration due to the high learning curve associated with having to learn both your spec and the encounters. However, fortunately, we also maintain a set of pages containing tips, tricks, and strategies for all end-game content:

Blood Death Knight has an indirect feedback loop in that instead of getting crushed right off the bat, you will slowly fall behind on resources. The main drivers to this are bad Marrowrends (wasting Runes on inefficient Marrowrend casts — remember, these generate 5-15RP less per Rune spent than a Heart Strike), capping Runes/RP or not using your entire toolkit, particularly holding cooldowns for extended periods of time without a reason to do so. Remember, anything in your toolkit that is free should be used as close as possible to on-cooldown, particularly if they are dual-purpose cooldowns like Dancing Rune Weapon!

We collected a list of common mistakes, along with explanations for each of them, resources to train and counter them, and tips on how to truly understand what makes the spec tick. You can find these below: