Blood Death Knight Tank Guide — Midnight (12.0.1)

The Midnight launch brings bugfixes to Blood Death Knights, and the addition of a total of 10 new talent points - 3 on the class tree, 3 on the Hero Talent tree (which means you can finally just take everything instead of being limited by a hard choice), and 4 remaining points on the spec tree to spend on Apex Talents.

Beyond this, haphazard numerical hotfixes to certain abilities have had priority implications compared to the pre-patch:

• A 20% buff to Heart Strike without a compensation buff to Vampiric Strike effectively pushed two San'layn talents down and tapered the value of Gift of the San'layn while also feeding into both the strength of apex talents and Bloodied Blade.
• A base buff to the direct (non-empowered) damage of Consumption without buffing the empowered Blood Plague-specific damage results in never actually wanting to empower Consumption. Great job, I guess.

The addition of Apex talents and the most recent buffs to Blood's base kit were enough to propel San'layn back to the fore on single target and consistent three-target cleave. Your mileage may vary in between or in AoE, as this depends entirely on the availability of Reaper's Mark (45 second window vs. 90 second window for San'layn).

Blood's apex talents are simple in design:

• The first has a guaranteed chance on next parry while Dancing Rune Weapon is active to make your next Heart Strike free, while still generating runic power. This is gated behind a 3 second internal cooldown
• The second node (2 points) increases your damage done and reduces your damage taken for every Dancing Rune Weapon active.
• Finally, the capstone grants you a 10% chance to spawn a Dancing Rune Weapon when you spend a rune.

The procs from the apex talent are regular Dancing Rune Weapons - only one at a time, for six seconds only, and if you already have a Dancing Rune Weapon active, the duration of the buff it provides is simply re-calculated to be the longest lifetime of any Dancing Rune Weapon. There are some caveats to this due to a limit on how many you can have up at any time, but this only really applies in single target under the effect of Bloodlust.

To call this disappointing is an understatement, especially when you consider how hard they nerfed Dancing Rune Weapon to accommodate for the increased uptime rather than actually differentiating a hard-cast of it or a proc from the apex talents. With Dancing Rune Weapon's bonus RP generating, parry rate and duration all having been on the chopping block to accommodate these, it is hard to be positive about it.

Nevertheless, it is what we are stuck with, and beyond Heart Strike occasionally glowing and an incentive to slightly delay Dancing Rune Weapon in AoE to optimize the first point, these talents are mostly passive.

Both Hero talent trees have picked up three new nodes, and you will be able to select every single one of them by the time you reach 90.

San'layn has lost its end-of- Dancing Rune Weapon burst of damage from Infliction of Sorrow, but the newly redesigned Consumption brings some of the complexity back by forcing you to cast it once Dancing Rune Weapon ends instead of just before it. As such, the complexity is, frankly, mostly the same.

Deathbringer picks up an element of complexity in Echoing Fury. The outright removal of Soul Reaper also helps a bit in removing some of the most clunky aspects, but no damage profile values or related spell effects have been adjusted to account for either the direct loss of it, or the loss of the Bonestorm procs from Reaper's Mark.

Numerically, Deathbringer is ahead where it matters, and the compounding choices from the dev team to keep buffing Heart Strike without applying the same buffs to Vampiric Strike simply push San'layn further and further with every hasty hotfix.

Blood lost the following:

• Improved Death Strike nerfed from 15% bonus to 5% bonus healing
• Death Strike's base window nerfed from 25% of all damage taken to 20%
• Tombstone, Bonestorm, Lichborne's damage reduction, Rune Tap outright removed.
• Dancing Rune Weapon's duration reduced to 12 seconds (from 14) and bonus parry from 35% to 20%
• Insatiable Blade changed to flat 30 second cooldown reduction
• 10% less armor from Bone Shield from the removal of Reinforced Bones
• The outright and confirmed removal of Blood Strike (the 3 RP bonus from every Heart Strike when Dancing Rune Weapon is active)

And in exchange for this hoard of abilities and effects, it picked up the following:

• 35% bonus base armor from items (equivalent to roughly half of Bone Shield's bonus armor)
• A total of 12% more armor from strength on Bone Shield compared to 11.2 (factoring in Reinforced Bones).
• Lifeblood, located in such a way that it is not a mandatory talent
• Bloody Reflection, located below the second gate - in other words, costly
• Blood Mist, acting as a small amount of bonus Runic Power when you need it the least

Calling this a negative change does not even begin to describe this level of decimation.

The only noteworthy change in utility stems from a change in the layout of the spec tree. Gorefiend's Grasp is now a choice node with Abomination Limb, and either point is almost mandatory in the current layout.

This is great, and while there are practical use-cases for both, you will most often default to picking Gorefiend's Grasp.