Blood Death Knight Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Dragonflight 10.2.5
Legendary Powers are targetable, unique effects that you can imbue certain base items with through the Runecarving system. In Shadowlands, these enable you to customize your Blood Death Knight, drastically improving your performance, and are arguably the most important aspect of your gear.
The purpose of this page is to help you pick the right legendary powers (and item slots for them) for your character, depending on the content you are interested in.
Introduction: Legendaries in Shadowlands
As part of your progression through Shadowlands you will gain the ability to craft Legendaries through Runecarving. Runecarving becomes available to you as you progress through Torghast. The Legendary Powers are obtained via various gameplay sources and once obtained you can craft your own specific, targeted Legendary! Each of these Legendaries will boost the power of your character in a specific way, however you can only wear 1 Legendary item at a time. This guide will detail the Legendary Powers available and which are the best ones to use in any given situation.
Best Legendaries for Blood Death Knight
In the table below, the recommended slot for each item is bolded.
Focus | Legendary | Available Slots | Source | Stats |
---|---|---|---|---|
Raiding | Superstrain | Neck or Shoulders | Stone Legion Generals | Crit and Mastery |
Mythic+ | Superstrain | Neck or Shoulders | Stone Legion Generals | Crit and Mastery |
Torghast | Stable Phantasma Lure | Neck, Wrist, or Back | Torghast (Layer 6+) | Haste and Versatility |
Best Overall Legendary for Blood Death Knight
As part of the Dragonflight Pre-Patch changes, a large number of the new talents introduced with the talent tree rework were made not to stack with (and to instead replace) the legendaries they loosely resembled. The current list is as follows:
- Crimson Rune Weapon is overwritten by Insatiable Blade
- Phearomones is overwritten by Sanguine Ground
This leaves Blood Death Knights with two possible legendary choices:
- For general purpose, the strongest legendary we have left available is Superstrain. This still causes all your disease application spells to apply Frost Fever and Virulent Plague at reduced effectiveness. With the changes to talents and the borderline mandatory choice of Rapid Decomposition, these have now picked up a neat 15% buff compared to 9.0 and 9.1!
- In pure single-target, Death's Certainty can be considered a fun little side-grade option. This shuffles a major amount of your damage into pure single target by massively buffing Death Strike. We only mention it encourages players to adopt a couple of interesting rotational changes related to Death Strike optimization; in practice, it is very likely to be inferior to Superstrain on anything but pure single-target and deep execute fights.
Best Raiding Legendaries for Blood Death Knight
Raiding sees no divergence from the general choice, and as a default legendary, you should opt to craft Superstrain, at least while the Dragonflight pre-patch is ongoing. This will provide decent, albeit completely passive, offensive and defensive throughput.
Certain bosses deviate from this default choice on Mythic. Wherever there is a specific case where this is significant, we have highlighted it in the table below:
Boss | Legendary | Notes |
---|---|---|
Dausegne, the Fallen Oracle | Death's Embrace | Allows you to completely ignore the application of the stacking debuff she applies for 17 seconds, up from 6s, if you have Anti-Magic Barrier picked |
Halondrus the Reclaimer | Death's Certainty | When playing Rune of Sanguination. This will greatly amplify your damage in the last two phases. |
Should you find yourself in a situation where you do not require the defensive benefit from a Legendary, we would recommend simming your character to find out what your highest DPS option is.
Best Mythic+ Legendaries for Blood Death Knight
As most Mythic+ players were already using Crimson Rune Weapon, the change to the new talents effectively mean that they are now able to capitalize on the power of two legendaries: Insatiable Blade for the Dancing Rune Weapon cooldown reduction they were used to, and Superstrain as an AoE damage legendary with significant Runic Power generation capabilities.
Best Torghast Legendaries for Blood Death Knight
Should you require additional Phantasma in Torghast, then Stable Phantasma Lure is a natural choice, as it will facilitate faster and more reliable Phantasma.
Should you not need the additional Phantasma, then we would recommend a more generic Legendary choice or the Mythic+ choice.
Memory of Unity Legendaries for Blood Death Knight
Patch 9.1 brought with it the addition of one new Legendary Power for each Covenant. With Patch 9.2, these Powers are now craftable using Memory of Unity, a new Legendary Power acquired in Zereth Mortis, on any base piece of your choice.
This Memory of Unity Legendary Power is also equippable alongside your regular Legendary, allowing you to benefit from its effect wherever you go!
In the case of Blood Death Knight, unfortunately, none of the Covenant Legendaries are overwhelmingly powerful, and as a result, this is unlikely to change your choice of Covenant. That said, we have summarized their effects below:
- Venthyr Insatiable Hunger — This Legendary will make Swarming Mist deal a burst of damage when Swarming Mist ends which is based on the amount of Runic Power spent whilst Swarming Mist was active. In reality this means that to get the benefit from this Legendary you will need to play in a somewhat reckless manner by dumping all your Runic Power in order to gain a momentary burst of damage. There can be cases where you would want to take advantage of this, such as Sludgefist's Pillars from Castle Nathria, but in practice, it will just be treated as a passive effect.
- Necrolord Abomination's Frenzy — This Legendary will increase the duration of Abomination Limb, make the target(s) pulled in by Abomination Limb take 20% increased damage from you for 12 seconds, and finally, increase the total amount of Bone Shield charges you will gain each cast. You were already gaining more Bone Shield charges than you needed, so adding more to this seems somewhat redundant. Just like Final Sentence, the biggest gain is the extra burst potential and the additional resources this legendary allows you to save.
- Kyrian Final Sentence — This Legendary will refund a Rune each time Shackle the Unworthy is applied to a new target and give you a stacking 3% damage buff for 18 seconds, stacking to a maximum of 15%. Obviously, the more targets you have at your disposal, the more value this provides, but even in single-target, the damage buff happens while Shackle the Unworthy is active, making it a neat compounding effect.
- Night Fae Rampant Transference — This Legendary will increase the Strength gained from Death's Due (not the damage reduction) to a maximum of 20% bonus strength, and increase your Runic Power generation by 20% whilst you are inside Death's Due. Both effects are noticeable gains, although their value will greatly depend on your ability to min-max your performance as a Night Fae.
Memory of Unity will be re-crafted to another slot immediately. The ideal slot for this, at least early on, will be Boots or Bracers, as both of these slots are relatively low budget and clash with no other choice of legendary.
Changelog
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
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This guide has been written by Mandl and Panthea.
Mandl is one of Acherus' Useful Minions and Blood Death Knight theorycrafter.
Panthea raids in Catalyst and is the author of TankNotes. He plays all tanks and is a "Useful Minion" for the Acherus Death Knight Discord. You can follow him on Twitter.
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