Blood Death Knight Leveling Guide from 8 to 70 — The War Within Pre-Patch
On this page, you will find our Level by Level Blood Death Knight leveling guide for The War Within. 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!
Talents to Level Up as a Blood Death Knight
Your talent build is the following:
Most of these talent points will be gradually available as you level; we will only note down the active abilities in the guide below, along with the most important talents to pick up. Throughout the levelling process, you will also pick up a variety of passive damage increases to other abilities.
Rotation to Level Up as a Blood Death Knight
- You start with access to
Rune Strike, acting as your main Rune spender, and
Death Coil acting as your main Runic Power spender.
Death and Decay is also available for large groups of enemies, although
Rune Strike does not cleave while inside it. Simply burn Runes with
Rune Strike and Runic Power with
Death Coil.
- Pick Blood! This provides three different bonuses:
- You also gain access to
Death Strike, a very powerful Runic Power spender that also heals you for 25% of all the damage you took over the past 5 seconds. A portion of this healing is also duplicated as an absorption effect through your mastery
Mastery: Blood Shield.
- Finally, you also gain a hidden effect called your "spec aura", which
buffs a number of things — the most important one to know about is
a 140% damage increase to
Death Strike. From this point on, you will no longer use
Death Coil.
- You also gain access to
- Pick
Improved Death Strike. This is a modest increase to the healing of
Death Strike, and is needed to path further down the tree.
- Pick
Heart Strike on your specialization tree; this turns
Rune Strike into
Heart Strike, a more efficient Rune spender.
- 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!
- Pick
Icebound Fortitude. This is one of your most powerful defensive cooldowns: it reduces all damage taken by 30% for 8 seconds, on a 2-minute cooldown.
- Pick
Marrowrend on your specialization tree; 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 stacks instead.
- Pick
Raise Dead on the class talent tree. This grants you access to your ghoul — it functions as a damage cooldown, and you can simply press it when it is available.
- Pick
Blood Boil on your specialization tree; this is your main AoE damage ability. It also applies
Blood Plague on all targets hit by it.
- Pick
Cleaving Strikes on the class talent tree. This allows
Heart Strike to cleave to 5 targets when you are standing inside your own
Death and Decay. This greatly increases your damage when fighting a large number of enemies
- Pick
Vampiric Blood - this functions as your second major defensive cooldown, and increases your maximum health and all healing received by 30%.
- Pick
Runic Attenuation - a completely free and completely passive source of bonus Runic Power.
- Pick
Bone Collector. This is mostly necessary to path down, but it does allow you to gain
Bone Shield charges when gripping enemies with
Death Grip,
Gorefiend's Grasp or
Abomination Limb
- Pick
Mind Freeze. The reason we put your interrupt this late in the levelling tree is because very few casts specifically need an interrupt while below level 20.
- Pick
Ossuary on the specialization tree. This further reduces
Death Strike's cost by 5 Runic Power - a 12.5% throughput increase! It also allows you to progress further down the tree
- Pick
Anti-Magic Barrier, a modest increase to
Anti-Magic Shell
- Put the first of two points into
Improved Heart Strike. Our goal here is to get
Dancing Rune Weapon as quickly as possible.
- Pick
Veteran of the Third War. This is a bonus 20% stamina.
- Put the second point into
Improved Heart Strike.
- On the class tree, pick
Permafrost - a noticeable and completely passive source of mitigation.
- Pick
Dancing Rune Weapon. This is your first offensive cooldown, but it also has major defensive benefits. While it is up, you gain 40% parry; it also doubles the number of
Bone Shield charges generated by
Marrowrend, and grants you 5 bonus Runic Power every time you cast
Heart Strike. This should be cast as close to on cooldown as possible, as it is a major DPS and survival increase.
- Pick
Unholy Ground. As you will see from the rest of the tree, standing in your
Death and Decay is a major staple of the current rotation. This is the first of five talents that encourages this.
- Pick
Insatiable Blade. This causes
Dancing Rune Weapon to instantly grant you 5
Bone Shield charges, and reduces the remaining cooldown of
Dancing Rune Weapon whenever you lose or consume a
Bone Shield charge.
- Pick
Icy Talons. Bonus melee haste!
- On the spec tree, pick
Everlasting Bond. This adds a second
Dancing Rune Weapon copy whenever you cast
Dancing Rune Weapon, and increases the duration of both to 14 seconds.
- Pick
Gloom Ward. 15% more to all absorbs, both yours and third-party absorbs cast on you!
- Pick
Heartbreaker. This grants you up to 10 bonus Runic Power per heart strike, depending on how many enemies were hit by it.
- Pick
Suppression. 3% free avoidance.
- Pick
Improved Bone Shield. 10% free multiplicative haste just to have at least one
Bone Shield charge. You do not get more for every
Bone Shield charge.
- Pick
Brittle. Some passive bonus damage.
- Pick
Reinforced Bones. This increases the number of
Bone Shield charges you can have to 12, and causes it to grant 10% more armor.
- Pick
Unholy Bond. This buffs
Rune of the Fallen Crusader.
- Pick
Hemostasis - a modest buff to
Death Strike and yet another reason to keep cycling
Blood Boil charges!
- Pick
Soul Reaper. It is not that useful in solo content, as enemies tend to not stay in execute range, but if you happen to do dungeons while levelling, you will get a chance to see its actual power on bosses.
- Pick
Ossified Vitriol. We delayed this for as long as possible as it is laughably bad, but it is necessary to path down.
- Pick
Unholy Endurance. This turns
Lichborne into a true defensive cooldown by making it grant you 15% damage reduction, and increases its duration to 12 seconds.
- Pick
Perseverance of the Ebon Blade. This will be a very small amount of bonus versatility over the course of a fight, but again - pathing. Our prizes on this are
Coagulopathy and
Rapid Decomposition.
- Pick
Grip of the Dead. A 90% snare tied to
Death and Decay is nice.
- On the spec tree, pick
Rapid Decomposition. This turbocharges
Blood Plague's healing done.
- As a leveling-specific tree, we've opted here for
March of Darkness in order to get you faster from one place to another.
- Pick
Coagulopathy. 5% free damage and another massive multiplier on
Blood Plague's damage and healing.
- Pick
Blinding Sleet - an AoE stop
- Pick
Voracious. This point is not strictly necessary, but we opted for it out of convenience and a modicum of safety while levelling. This buffs your self-healing significantly.
- Pick
Blood Draw. This was buffed significantly in The War Within, in addition to having its cost reduced to a single point. When you drop below its threshold, you instantly pulse a large amount of damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and heal for every single point of damage dealt. In addition to this, for 8 seconds after it procs,
Death Strike only costs 25 Runic Power.
- Pick
Tombstone on the specialization tree. This allows you to consume 5
Bone Shield charges to reduce the cooldown on
Dancing Rune Weapon by 25 seconds (because we picked
Insatiable Blade).
- Put the first of two points in
Will of the Necropolis, a completely passive damage reduction effect against large hits or when you are already low. You do not need to be below its threshold for it to apply.
- Pick
Shattering Bone. You now pulse a significant amount of damage to everything near you whenever you lose a
Bone Shield, either directly from auto-attacks or by consuming them using
Tombstone or
Bonestorm!
- Put the second point in
Will of the Necropolis.
- Pick
Bonestorm. This sounds weird, until you realize that in addition to its damage and healing, it triggers
Shattering Bone and grants 50 seconds of cooldown reduction on
Insatiable Blade.
- Pick
Insidious Chill. An attack speed slow on anything you auto-attack.
- Pick
Sanguine Ground. The third
Death and Decay talent, this is a bit more healing and damage dealt.
- Pick
Subduing Grasp. This is a filler/pathing talent and largely does nothing.
- Pick
Consumption. This is a small amount of upfront damage, 2 runes immediately refunded to you and another significant multiplier on
Blood Plague, usable every 30 seconds.
- Pick
Abomination Limb. This has lost its
Bone Shield charge ticks, but thanks to
Bone Collector, you can recover some of it.
- Pick
Heartrend. We take it purely to path to
Purgatory.
- Pick
Death's Echo - a bonus charge on
Death and Decay,
Death Grip and
Death's Advance.
- Pick
Purgatory, a very potent cheat death.
- Put the first of two points in
Rune Mastery.
- Pick
Red Thirst - a very significant cooldown reduction on
Vampiric Blood.
- Put the second point in
Rune Mastery. Boring filler talent, but necessary.
- Pick
Iron Heart - 20% more blood shield!
- Pick
Null Magic - 8% magic damage reduction and a significant duration reduction on all magic debuffs.
- Pick
Bloodshot.
- As the last levelling point, we opted to pick
Vestigial Shell. In the open world, you'll passively help others with it; in dungeons and raids, you'll instead protect your allies. Congratulations on reaching level 70!
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 are a tank) by allowing you to increase your effective damage by 30%.
Necrotic Aura passively causes all targets near you to take 4% more magic damage. This includes
Blood Boil,
Blood Plague,
Death and Decay,
Shattering Bone and any other magic damage you (or others) deal.
Decomposing Aura causes enemies to have their maximum health reduced by 3% every 2 seconds, up to a maximum of 15%.
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.
For simplicity's sake, we recommend defaulting to Necrotic Aura,
Death Chain and
Decomposing Aura, and to use
Death Chain whenever pulling more than one target.
Congratulations!
Congratulations on reaching Level 70! Now that you have hit Level 70, we recommend looking at our Easy mode page and Talents section to learn how to play at max level.
Changelog
- 23 Jul. 2024: Reworked for TWW prepatch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Updating talents slightly. Blood tap is probably a bit too complicated for starters.
- 18 Mar. 2024: Removed outdated reference to talents unlocking at level 15.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.5.
- 09 Nov. 2023: Removed outdated reference to Blood for Blood.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.2
- 04 Sep. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.7
- 10 Jul. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.5.
- 01 May 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.1.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Adding max level brackets to all options.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Fixes for Talent Tree displaying wrong order to pick talents.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 25 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight pre-patch.
More Death Knight Guides
Guides from Other Classes
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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