Blood Death Knight Shadowlands Leveling Guide From 8 to 60
On this page, you will find our Level by Level Blood Death Knight leveling guide for Shadowlands Make sure to use the slider to make the guide adapt to your level. For more general leveling information, please refer to our Death Knight leveling guide.
Gear Options
When leveling up, you should always choose the piece of loot with the highest item level. The only exception to this rule is if you have a Ring or Necklace with a slightly lower item level, but 2 secondary stats on it instead of 1.
Your goal is, evidently, to go as quickly as possible throughout the zones and levels, and the best way to do this is to get the best possible gear without getting out of your way while doing so.
Level by Level Rotation and Talents
Move the slider below to make the guide update to your level!
Until level 10, if you are an old-school race, your
Heart Strike will be replaced by its generic alternative,
Rune Strike.
Depending on which race you picked, you will start a different level, and have a slightly different intro:
- If you picked an Allied Race, you start at level 10, and start with the new Bolvar experience.
- On the other hand, if you started with one of the old races, you start at level 8, and get to re-live the Scarlet Enclave original starting zone!
Regardless of this choice, your first talent row unlocks at Level 15.
Talents to Level Up as a Blood Death Knight
Your talent set up should be as follows.
- Level 15:
Heartbreaker
- Level 25:
Hemostasis
- Level 30:
Relish in Blood
- Level 35:
Will of the Necropolis
- Level 40:
Wraith Walk
- Level 45:
Bloodworms
- Level 50:
Purgatory
Rotation to Level Up as a Blood Death Knight
- You start with access to
Rune Strike, acting as your main Rune spender, and
Death Strike and
Death Coil acting as your main Runic Power spenders.
Death and Decay is also available for large groups of enemies, although
Rune Strike does not cleaver while inside it.
Simply burn Runes withRune Strike and Runic Power with
Death Coil (or, for a bit of healing at a cost of some damage,
Death Strike)
- Pick Blood! This will turn
Rune Strike into
Heart Strike, along with allowing you to benefit from a couple of enhancements and your mastery,
Mastery: Blood Shield. This is also coupled with a +132% damage increase on
Death Strike — as a result, you should unbind
Death Coil altogether, as you will no longer be using it.
- Use
Heart Strike as your filler, and
Death Strike as your RP spender. Along with the spec-specific increase to its damage, you also get the benefit of
Mastery: Blood Shield!
Marrowrend is your Active Mitigation ability. It is not very active, but that is down to terminology. Pressing it grants you 3
Bone Shield stacks; you lose a charge per melee hit taken, at a maximum of once per 2.5 seconds. You should ideally never cap those, and aim to be around 5-7 instead.
- Your first DPS cooldown,
albeit minor, is
Raise Dead. Do not hesitate to summon Timmy early, and to summon Timmy often. He actually does quite a bit of damage.
Dark Command is your single-target taunt. This one, unlike
Death Grip, is off the global cooldown. You now have almost every element of your toolkit to be able to effectively tank dungeons.
- With the first talent point, the dungeon finder also unlocks.
Blood Boil is your AoE threat/DPS ability. Keep its charges rolling, even on single-target! At level 25, you will pick up
Hemostasis to also have it provide defensive utility.
- The levels 29 to 40 reinforce your utility and
defensive toolkit, with the addition of four defensives
(
Vampiric Blood,
Dancing Rune Weapon,
Lichborne and
Icebound Fortitude), along with two utility spells: an undead crowd-control spell (
Control Undead) and a combat resurrection (
Raise Ally). At this point, your spec toolkit is complete.
- You can now sacrifice your
Raise Dead with
Sacrificial Pact for additional burst DPS as it is about to expire.
In addition to these baseline abilities, there are a number of passive effects that you unlock throughout the leveling process that are worth knowing about:
Crimson Scourge allows you to gain free casts of
Death and Decay; this is a 25% chance every time you melee a target affected by
Blood Plague, as long as you do not currently have a
Death and Decay active.
Veteran of the Third War grants you a flat 30% extra Stamina.
Heart Strike Rank 3 is unlocked, which increases the damage of it by 20%.
Vampiric Blood Rank 2 is unlocked, which increases the healing received by 5% and the duration by 2 seconds.
Ossuary is unlocked, which reduces the cost of
Death Strike when you are above 5 charges of
Bone Shield.
Blood Death Knight War Mode Talents for Leveling
While levelling with War Mode enabled, you gain access to three additional PvP talents. Their effects also work on enemies in the open world, and while most of them are lackluster, a couple of them can significantly speed up your levelling process. We have highlighted them below:
Death Chain allows you to frequently (50% uptime) chain an enemy with two nearby hostile targets. While chained, damage done to one enemy is partially copied over to the other two. This effectively rewards you for pulling more than one target (which you should do, anyway. You're a tank) by allowing you to increase your effective damage by 30%.
Decomposing Aura rots away the maximum health of nearby targets. Simple, effective.
Murderous Intent is a 3-15% damage increase on a target, refreshed by your auto-attacks. This is the least bad option we have access to after picking the other two.
Congratulations!
Congratulations on reaching Level 60! Now that you have hit Level 60, we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level.
Changelog
- 21 Nov. 2020: Fixed incorrect level information for Hemostasis.
- 20 Nov. 2020: Included Shadowlands leveling updates.
- 03 Nov. 2020: Changes to clarify the role of Rune Strike when leveling.
- 12 Oct. 2020: Guide added.
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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