Mists of Pandaria Classic Blood Death Knight Stat Priority

The stat priority for Blood Death Knight is as follows:

1. Mastery
2. Hit Rating to cap (7.5%)
3. Expertise Rating to cap(7.5%)
4. Stamina
5. Parry
6. Dodge
7. Haste

It is important to know that there are several different ways to gear a Blood Death Knight depending on your tolerance for risk and the content you are currently doing. The recommended priority found in this guide focuses mixing both survivability and our ability to do damage. If you find yourself struggling to survive consider prioritizing Stamina, Parry and Dodge over Hit and Expertise. If you are comfortable with your damage taken and are looking to deal more damage prioritize Hit, Expertise, and Critical Strike.

Mastery is our most powerful defensive stat as a Blood Death Knight. Your mastery Mastery: Blood Shield causes your Death Strike ability to grant you a physical absorb shield based on the amount healed by your Death Strike. The more Mastery the higher this shield will be making Mastery incredibly valuable in any situation you are taking Physical damage.

Hit and Expertise are both incredibly valuable as a Blood Death Knight as it increases your chance to hit the target with both spells and attacks. It is important to note that we recommended only reaching 7.5% Hit and Expertise rating. In Mists of Pandaria Expertise and Hit both count towards your Spell hit cap so as a Blood Death Knight with both of these 7.5% caps you will be able to avoid your abilities like Outbreak which operate off of your Spell hit chance. It is important though to make sure we are at 7.5% of both Hit and Expertise as you will need 7.5% Hit rating to ensure your Physical hit cap is met and 7.5% Expertise will remove targets ability to dodge your attacks.

Stamina is a key stat as any Tank and as a Blood Death Knight it also acts as a DPS stat due to the fact it increases your overall Vengeance cap. The amount of Stamina already present on gear will likely be sufficient to get you through most of the games content but if you find yourself in a situation where you are struggling to survive and you cannot get more Mastery than Stamina should be your next choice for increases survivability.

Dodge and Parry are both great ways to reducing incoming Physical damage but in Mists of Pandaria you also gain the ability Riposte which any time you Dodge or Parry an attack you will gain 75% of your Dodge and Parry as Critical Strike rating for 20 seconds. It is important to try to balance the amount of Dodge and Parry you have on your gear as they do suffer from diminishing returns but do not be surprised if you have a considerable amount more Parry than Dodge on your stat sheet as Strength will also increase your Parry chance.

Haste increases our Attack Speed and the rate at which Runes regenerate. This is a great stat that will both increase your damage done and possibly even increase your survivability due to the increased Rune regeneration speed but in Mists of Pandaria we have more tools than ever to refresh depleted Runes so it has unfortunately lost some of its value.

Armor is a flat physical damage reduction that can be found in most gear slots. We will not have to do anything to optimize the amount of Armor on our gear as it is not able to be reforged to and it will already be present on most items.