Blood Death Knight Best Legendaries in Shadowlands — Shadowlands 9.2
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 |
---|---|---|---|---|
Mythic+ | ![]() |
Hands, Waist, or Shoulders | Halls of Atonement | Haste and Versatility |
Mythic+ | ![]() |
Hands, Waist, or Shoulders | Halls of Atonement | Haste and Versatility |
Torghast | ![]() |
Neck, Wrist, or Back | Torghast (Layer 6+) | Haste and Versatility |
Mythic+ | ![]() |
Hands, Waist, or Shoulders | Halls of Atonement | Haste and Versatility |
In addition to this, Patch 9.2 added Memory of Unity, an
additional Legendary that grants you your current Covenant's
Legendary bonus. This Legendary can be crafted in any slot. That
said, we would recommend crafting it on Boots with Haste/Versatility
if you never intend to play a DPS spec (Frost or Unholy), or with
Haste/Mastery if you do.
Once you have acquired all the pieces of your class Tier Set, and with the assumption that you have gold to burn, you can recraft Unity on Helm and gain a very slight amount of player power in the process (about 0.5%, assuming you had a 278 headpiece).
Best Overall Legendary for Blood Death Knight
A hotfix that landed midway through the Race to World First upended the
choice of Legendaries for Blood Death Knights, at least once they have
acquired their 2-piece Set Bonus. Prior to this, the choice was relatively
diverse, with the option of using Superstrain as a generic Legendary.
After the hotfix, and once you have acquired your 2-piece Set Bonus, your
generic choice is now Crimson Rune Weapon. Due to the sheer,
overwhelming strength of the
Blood DK 2-Piece, as long as you are able to lose
some
Bone Shield charges, this Legendary runs laps around any
other option. This is true for Raiding, and also for Mythic+.
There are some situational exceptions, or rather, additional cases where certain other Legendaries may have more value. We will highlight those in the section below!
Best Raiding Legendaries for Blood Death Knight
If raiding is your main focus,
and you already have Blood DK 2-Piece at your disposal,
you should be using
Crimson Rune Weapon on most bosses. This provides
you with a significantly higher uptime on
Dancing Rune Weapon, and
allows you to keep gaining stacks of
Blood DK 2-Piece much more frequently.
The defensive and offensive gains offered by
Dancing Rune Weapon remain
(mostly –
Blood DK 4-Piece changes things slightly) the same as before,
you will just be looking at 70-80% uptime on it instead of the 15% you are
probably used to.
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 | ![]() |
Allows you to completely ignore the application of the stacking debuff she applies for 17 seconds, up from 6s, if you have ![]() |
Halondrus the Reclaimer | ![]() |
Only if Night Fae |
Halondrus the Reclaimer | ![]() |
If not Night Fae, and when playing ![]() |
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
For Mythic+, Crimson Rune Weapon is the de-facto preferred
option thanks to the versatility of play it provides. As you will be tanking a
majority of the time, this Legendary allows you to lower the cooldown of
Dancing Rune Weapon to around 1-minute, and reap a ton of benefits on top of it.
The main benefit, however, is that you will have
Dancing Rune Weapon going into
virtually every pull of any key, instead of every other pull.
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, as this slot has
relatively underwhelming gear piece itemization in the raid, and does not
conflict with any choice of Legendary you may need.
Later in the tier, once you have two charges of the Creation Catalyst
available to you, along with both the off-piece gloves off Rygelon and
off-piece leggings from The Jailer at mythic item level (285), you will
be able to upgrade both of these into 285 tier pieces, thus freeing your Helm
slot. Once all these requirements are met, this is the absolutely ideal
slot to recraft Memory of Unity into. Evidently, this is a lot of
conditions, and will happen very late into the tier (the first charge of
the Creation Catalyst is slated to be available 8 weeks into the tier).
Changelog
- 10 Apr. 2022: Reworked entirely to account for the hotfixes to tier set.
- 20 Feb. 2022: Clarified Covenant Legendaries, reworked to account for Unity, and specified what slot Unity will be crafted in.
- 01 Nov. 2021: Reviewed and approved for Patch 9.1.5.
- 29 Jun. 2021: Updated for Patch 9.1.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Updated Legendaries; removed all mentions of Bryndaor as Crimson Rune Weapon is now better than it in every way.
- 29 Nov. 2020: Changed Raiding Legendary recommendation to Superstrain.
- 20 Nov. 2020: Page added.
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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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