Blood Death Knight Guide for The War Within
Welcome to our comprehensive guide on the Blood Death Knight changes in World of Warcraft's latest expansion, The War Within. This page is intended to help you navigate the new changes and help you know what to expect from Blood Death Knight in the War Within.
In this guide, you will find detailed breakdowns of the new Hero Talent Trees for Blood Death Knight. We will explore the most significant updates to the spec, and offer insights into how these changes will impact your overall gameplay. Whether you are an experienced Blood Death Knight or new to the spec, this page will be useful in knowing what to expect come launch in late August.
Blood Death Knight: The War Within Expansion Preview
Welcome to our War Within expansion guide for Blood Death Knight. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Blood Death Knight spec in the forthcoming The War Within expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.
This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the War Within beta. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Blood Death Knight, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.
The War Within Changes for Blood Death Knight
Core Changes
We have received small but impactful changes to both our class and spec tree. While the changes were not exactly groundbreaking in scope, and did not fundamentally change the playstyle you are used to, a number of new choices are now possible, and a lot of the filler/costly talents have either been reduced down to all be 1-pointers (with varying constraints on them - some were merged down, others were just kept at their 1-point value).
This, overall, is a good thing. It allows the talent trees to breathe a bit more and stymies the feeling that you are just putting filler points everywhere as you level, or at least it attempts to.
Systems Changes
The addition of Hero Talents proves to be an extremely polarizing feature for Blood Death Knights. On one end, you can opt for the sleek, very well-designed but mostly just-damage (at least on the surface - more on that later) option in Deathbringer, or pick its literal antithesis, a literal spamfest variant of the rotation where rotational inefficiencies lead to success as San'layn. Both sides deal with the rotation, its resources and core systems wildly differently, and exacerbate some elements of it in their stead.
Hero Talent Trees for Blood Death Knight in The War Within
San'layn Hero Talents for Blood Death Knight
San'layn's identity is difficult to capture, as the entire
concept appears to hit Vampiric Blood as often as possible,
to stay in it for as long as possible. This is down to two mechanics:
- The intro talent,
Vampiric Strike, is a buffed replacement of
Heart Strike and is mostly only available during
Vampiric Blood. You may occasionally see it be castable outside of it after pressing
Death Strike, but the chance for this to happen is absurdly low.
Vampiric Strike grants you a stack of
Essence of the Blood Queen when cast. These last for 20 seconds, refresh on re-application, and grant you 1.5% haste per stack up to 10.5% outside of
Vampiric Blood. This haste is doubled during
Vampiric Blood.
A number of talents and interactions exist around Vampiric Strike to
strongly incentivize the player to spam that button:
Vampiric Strike has a 42% chance to refund the rune you used to cast it during
Vampiric Blood
Infliction of Sorrow causes an absurd amount of bonus damage based on your
Blood Plague's remaining duration and tick speed on target every time you hit
Vampiric Strike
- Hitting
Vampiric Strike has a chance to summon a Blood Beast to deal even more bonus damage over its lifetime. With the right talents, it also collects all your shadow damage to deal even more damage completely passively to everything nearby.
The gameplay loop is extremely poor, and the payoff for playing this is,
unfortunately, extremely high: the haste this provides is significant, the
bonus damage it provides is absurd, and being able to self-heal for 5% of max HP
per GCD in Vampiric Blood before accounting for
Vampiric Blood's
healing amplification is over-the-top levels of sustain for generic use.
The only silver lining is that, unlike its rival tree, this brings very little
party utility. Its only notable mention is Vampiric Aura, providing the
group with 6% leech when
Lichborne is active, which is, quite frankly,
a pittance.
How to Play as San'layn
The San'layn rotational differences occur in three different places: before
Vampiric Blood, during
Vampiric Blood and immediately after
Vampiric Blood. Suffices to say, to gain value out of this tree, you
will absolutely want to talent into
Red Thirst.
Improved Vampiric Blood is also, unfortunately, a significant throughput gain.
Preparing for Vampiric Blood
Due to how all of your Vampiric Strike casts in
Vampiric Blood
will trigger
Infliction of Sorrow, and you absolutely want to avoid
casting anything else unless absolutely required during that window, your last five
global cooldowns before
Vampiric Blood will look like this:
- Refresh bone shield if you have to (you absolutely do not want to
do this during
Vampiric Blood)
Death Strike (for
Coagulopathy).
Blood Boil (to refresh
Blood Plague to nearly maximum duration). Ideally, this gets you down to zero
Blood Boil charges.
Death and Decay (to get you 14 seconds of its buff - more haste, more damage and healing, and more
Shattering Bone damage for the entire duration of
Vampiric Blood)
Vampiric Blood and
Vampiric Strike (you cannot currently macro these together, but can castsequence the two and rapidly double tap it)
During Vampiric Blood
Before we go into the actual meat of this, one reminder: I will talk about absurd
amounts of damage here, but this is not the main purpose. If you've set up
your window correctly, you will have Voracious - i.e. 12% leech - running
for all of it. In addition to this,
Vampiric Strike alone heals for 5% of
your max HP before
Vampiric Blood's effect, and you will also get a
significant amount of additional healing from other sources during what is,
arguably, your strongest defensive cooldown.
Your priority in Vampiric Blood, assuming you followed the above set-up,
is very simple:
- Press
Death Strike if you will die otherwise (this should be exceedingly rare)
- Press
Death Strike to keep
Coagulopathy up
- Press
Consumption if
Vampiric Blood has less than 6 seconds left on it
- Press
Vampiric Strike
Consumption and
Death Strike are the only non-
Vampiric Strike
casts you will perform during
Vampiric Strike. The reasons for this are the
following:
- Maintaining
Coagulopathy actively buffs
Infliction of Sorrow, and with it the damage stored in blood beasts, by 150%. It also provides a significant amount of bonus trickle healing from
Blood Plague
Consumption makes
Blood Plague tick 50% faster for 8 seconds. This directly buffs
Infliction of Sorrow; however, we're opting to cast it late into
Vampiric Blood as the first
Heart Strike out of
Vampiric Blood fully consumes
Blood Plague's remaining duration (which will be extremely high thanks to
Infliction of Sorrow's in-
Vampiric Blood's duration extension) in order to deal absurd amounts of damage coming out of
Vampiric Blood. We have deliberately left a two GCD window for AoE reasons.
Coming out of Vampiric Blood
Coming out of Vampiric Blood is very simple, and is once again just about
setting things up. If you have followed the above, you will be at near-cap on Runic Power,
have two charges of
Blood Boil and
Coagulopathy is ~3 seconds from
expiring. This means you can do the following:
- Cast
Death Strike if you have less than 2 GCDs left on
Coagulopathy
- Cast
Death and Decay
- Cast
Death Strike if you have less than 3 seconds left on
Coagulopathy
- Cast
Heart Strike to consume your
Blood Plague on up to five nearby targets, dealing ~1000% AP damage to all of them in the process thanks to the buff from
Consumption we talked about earlier.
- Cast
Blood Boil to re-apply
Blood Plague
Your goal is now to perform your rotation as efficiently as possible with
the goal of never dropping Coagulopathy and to actively spend all
the Runic Power you've generated on
Death Strike in order to get back
into
Vampiric Blood sooner - dropping
Essence of the Blood Queen
stacks due to rotational impropriety between
Vampiric Blood windows is
by far the biggest loss on this spec's Hero Talent variant.
Deathbringer Hero Talents for Blood Death Knight
Moving on from what feels like a drug-addled variant of Blood, we have the finesse, the rewarding playstyle, and the search for balance: Deathbringer.
The prime gameplay hook in this Hero Talent is Reaper's Mark, and depending
on the choice nodes you pick on the tree, it will either be available every minute,
or every 30 seconds. It afflicts a single enemy (and is not copied by
Dancing Rune Weapon) with a 10-second, stacking debuff. While it is
active, any action taken that deals Shadow damage grants it an extra stack,
while Shadowfrost damage grants it between two and four stacks.
This sounds unwieldy and very hard to reach its maximum stack count of 40. Don't panic! The rest of the tree is there to help you, along with your base kit:
Blood Plague has a 45% chance to tick for 30% bonus Shadowfrost damage
Blood Plague ticks 100% faster
Blood Boil's damage type is changed to Shadowfrost (and its animation is now very noticeably blue)
When it expires (or detonates prematurely as the target it is on reaches 35%),
it directly buffs one or two Marrowrend casts within
30 seconds, causing them to cost either 1 rune or 0 runes (depending on whether
you play
Swift End or
Painful Death). These
Marrowrend
casts trigger
Exterminate, which has a small but noticeable chance to
re-apply
Reaper's Mark.
Reaper's Mark deals a very high amount of damage at three points in its lifetime:
- On application, directly by itself,
and to all targets nearby through
Wave of Souls
- On expiration, directly by itself, and to all targets nearby
through
Soul Rupture. This is also a no-questions-asked 5% physical damage taken reduction from all targets hit for 10 seconds after
Reaper's Mark expires.
- When casting an empowered
Marrowrend, thanks to
Exterminate
That's it! The tree simply rewards you for playing every element of your kit properly, does not get in the way, and rewards you with a lot of damage and a bunch of utility we did not mention yet:
- 30 second cooldown reduction on
Lichborne
- Near-permanent uptime on 10% physical and 10% magical damage reduction
from
Rune Carved Plates.
- The 5% phys damage reduction we talked about earlier from
Soul Rupture
- 100% more
Blood Plague damage amounts to a lot of bonus trickle healing, particularly with
Coagulopathy and
Consumption in the mix. The developer in charge of this hero talent tree also made the very nice choice of making it tick faster instead of harder, allowing it to be even more noticeable!
- The runes saved on empowered
Marrowrend are direct fuel for
Heart Strike!
There are a number of comical bugs present on this version of Deathbringer, and while all of them have a positive edge, they can lead to unfortunate surprises for newcomers. As such, we'll list them here:
Grim Reaper's
Soul Reaper application is an actual
Soul Reaper cast, and inherits all aspects of it. The hilarious, and likely unintended side-effect of this is that, if you have
Dancing Rune Weapon up, it will be copied by it. With proper timing, you can have up to 9 separate
Soul Reaper debuffs ticking on a target at once
Reaper's Mark cannot be applied more than once to a target. If you are playing
Painful Death, you need to be aware of this as each empowered
Marrowrend has a 30% chance to re-apply
Reaper's Mark. If at all possible, you should hit different targets with the two
Marrowrend casts in order to not whiff a potential
Reaper's Mark.
Blood Death Knight Tier Set in The War Within
Below are the Tier Set Bonuses for Blood Death Knight in The War Within. Where necessary, we added a small amount of additional detail in italic in order to convey the additional limits of the tier set.
-
Death Knight Blood Season 1 2pc — While you have one or more
Bone Shield charges, the damage you take is reduced by 2%. Losing a
Bone Shield charge has a 20% chance to reduce the damage you take by an additional 1%, up to 3% for 6 seconds.
-
Death Knight Blood Season 1 4pc — Your damage is increased by 1% per active
Bone Shield charge, up to a maximum of 10%. Taking damage while below 6
Bone Shield charges has a chance to generate 1-2
Bone Shield charges.
The 2-piece is boring, uninspired and its power level is entirely down to encounter design. It will be at its weakest in raid, and at its strongest (for a given definition of strong) in Mythic+, but its value will be mostly unnoticeable.
The 4-piece effect is ludicrously strong offensively, but provides nothing
other than damage. It is strong enough to justify sitting at 10 Bone Shield
charges as often as possible, and makes
Reinforced Bones a near-mandatory
talent in order to not lose resources while doing so.
Blood Death Knight Strengths and Weaknesses
A number of talent choices have massively increased our defensive toolkit: 2minute
Icebound Fortitude is baseline,
Red Thirst is equivalent to its Dragonflight 2/2 value, a number of Hero talents tap into
Lichborne, and a brand new set of class talents modify
Anti-Magic Shell.
The rotation, fluidity of the rotation, and expected value from the toolkit remains as valuable as before - unless you're San'layn, where both the offensive and defensive profile of the spec changes significantly!
The new
Cleaving Strikes changes reduces the dependence on
Death's Echo and reduces the number of casts of
Death and Decay required to keep it up.
Designed to take more up-front damage than other tanks and heal it back.
Cooldown usage and planning can make or break you. This is even more true if playing San'layn, as
Vampiric Blood will not be held for mechanics.
While the dependence on
Death and Decay was relaxed slightly with
Cleaving Strikes,
Death and Decay uptime is still very much an issue.
Changelog
- 17 Jun. 2024: Page added.
More Death Knight Guides
Guides from Other Classes
This guide was written by Mandl, a World of Warcraft guide writer and theorycrafter and Final Fantasy XIV enthusiast. Once an avid tank multiclasser and world 100 raider, he now spends his time hovering between helping others on Acherus, guide writing and spending time picking apart the fundamentals of both games.
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