Welcome to our Blood Death Knight tank guide for World of Warcraft MoP 5.3. Here, you will learn everything you need to know about playing a Blood Death Knight in a raid environment, though most of the content also applies to normal and heroic dungeons.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Reniat, the author of the Blood Death Knight guides on the Official Forums and MMO-Champion.

Compared to the other tanking classes, Blood Death Knights bring few useful raid buffs or cooldowns, and we feel that they take a lot more precision and skill to play to their maximum potential. The reason for this is that a large part of tanking as a Death Knight is done "manually", by the player, who has to constantly make game-influencing decisions regarding which abilities to use.

Death Knights rely heavily on self-healing, being one of the most self-sufficient tanks.

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.

To make it easy to bookmark the specific sections you are interested in, we have split the guide into 7 pages:

• Builds, Talents, and Glyphs: learn what the best talent trees are and how to customise them;
• Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities: understand how to play your class in an optimal way;
• Buffs, Debuffs, and Useful Abilities: discover your arsenal of useful abilities;
• Statistics Priority and Reforging: read up on the respective values of your statistics;
• Gems, Enchants, and Professions: choose the best gems, enchantments, and consumables;
• Macros and Addons: benefit from useful macros and addons to step up your game;
• Gearing Up and Best in Slot: find the best gear you can wear.