Blood Death Knight: Midnight Expansion Preview

Welcome to our Midnight expansion guide for Blood Death Knight. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Blood Death Knight spec in the forthcoming Midnight expansion, including changes and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the Midnight Alpha. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Blood Death Knight, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Alpha, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Blood Death Knight has received a significant talent tree rework as part of the initial content builds on the Midnight Alpha. The stated goals are the following:

Practically, this means two concrete goals:

1. The outright removal of Dancing Rune Weapon's variable cooldown reduction and all effects that fed off of Bone Shield charge removal
2. The direct loss of Bonestorm and Tombstone as short-duration cooldowns due to their resource cost and interaction with Insatiable Blade, which feels very ham-fisted.

In addition to this, the following applies to Blood's damage reduction gameplay loop:

This currently translates to the following intended changes:

• A small reduction in Death Strike's direct healing (25% to 20%, and Voracious from 12% to 5%)
• An intended re-distribution of these nerfs into other parts of the tree. In practice, this is not completely done, as we will see below.
• Buffing Blood's baseline damage reduction, whether active or passive, in order to prevent it from just falling over or reducing the 100%-0%-100% loop players are used to seeing. This is not done in practice on Alpha, and there are a number of effects to unpack here.

The updates and changes received so far solely focus on the talent trees, as no ability was made baseline. The biggest baseline change to the entire class is the reduction of the healing window multiplier on Death Strike from 25% to 20%.

All of the class talent changes focus on the paths before the second gate, with the last set of talents being functionally unchanged. The keynote changes to this tree are as follows:

• Gloom Ward is now one of the first few talents you will pick, and is now a 2-point talent. Its new point adds another 15% bonus absorb value, for a total of 30%.
• Unholy Momentum was also turned into a 2-point node, for a total of 4% haste.
• Wraith Walk and March of Darkness now share a choice node, making it impossible to grab all the speed boosts in the class tree.
• Death Notes was added. As Blood, since our Raise Ally cost is so frighteningly expensive, this is a very welcome change.
• Soul Reaper has been entirely removed and all effects that triggered from it or interacted with it are also removed.
• Blood Bond has found its way into our talent tree, and allows your ghoul to be used as a ridiculously small health transfer tool. This also very rapidly kills the ghoul, which leads to a loss of throughput.
• Asphyxiate and Death's Reach now share a choice node and the pathing constraints around it make it virtually impossible to avoid.
• Finally, a very interesting addition to Death Pact can be found on the class tree. Death Defiance allows you to receive drastically more healing while the healing absorb effect from Death Pact is active, allowing you to more easily clear it - or drastically amplify certain other effects.
• Unholy Endurance's damage reduction bonus when Lichborne is active has been entirely removed. This seems to run counter to the stated goals of the design notes.

These changes are overall healthy for the life of the specialization, and they all contribute towards picking new options or discovering new twists on old paths. None of them confer any playstyle changes or fundamentally new design decisions, but they are all welcome choices.

The changes to the Spec talent tree were significantly more far-reaching, and impact both pathing and available options. Unlike the class tree, this also comes with direct gameplay implications.

The following talents have been changed substantially, added or removed entirely. We have listed them, and their effects, below:

Modified:

Removed:

Added:

A stated goal of the developer notes was the reduction of some of Death Strike's healing throughput, and this appears to have been done. Lifeblood was added in its stead and roughly compensates for the removal if you assume that none of it ends up in overhealing.

The defensive strengthening outside of this, however, appears to have been mishandled. Cooldowns such as Lichborne, Rune Tap and Tombstone are gone entirely with nothing to replace them, and while Consumption can provide a very small amount of added damage reduction every 45 seconds, it does not do anywhere near enough to fill the shoes these talents have left.

The passive defensive aspect to Blood has also been hampered, as the Bone Shield increase on Alpha is only an increase if you assume 11.0.5 values - Bone Shield was since hotfixed up to 126% of Strength in 11.2, while Alpha has its modifier at 125% of total Strength. This makes it a net nerf once you also include the direct removal of Reinforced Bones.

In turn, as we will discuss in a moment, the Apex Talents provide an unreliable and variable uptime on Dancing Rune Weapon, and a lot of the new talents are a chance to activate something. Overall, it feels like Blood has lost in reliability and gained a number of procs to justify these losses.

Finally, the most unsightly loss in all of this is the centralization of power on casted Dancing Rune Weapon, which runs directly contrary to the new Apex Talents. There was no reason to tie Blood Mist to Dancing Rune Weapon and splitting them would be a huge quality of life increase for Mythic+ player - where they would be able to cast Blood Mist while gathering, benefit from the large amount of Runic Power provided by it, and then follow it up with Dancing Rune Weapon once everything is gathered.

Armor is a peculiar stat, as its defensive value changes based on multiple factors:

1. The content you are doing: Mythic raid instances see a significant dampening of Armor's damage reduction value per point by design
2. The total armor value you currently have - with each subsequent point being worth less

The developer intent of providing a very small amount of bonus armor has been proven empirically to do very little throughout the War Within development cycle, where Blood started the expansion with a conversion ratio of 88%, and finished it at 126%, in both cases with additional multipliers on top. This has resulted in no difference in terms of content applicability, noticeable smoothing of damage, or closed the gap on the Mythic+ leaderboards.

In light of this, it may be worth exploring other tools, and the apex talent is a good attempt at this, although it falls way too short in reliability. Granting other effects that are significantly larger in magnitude, such as bonus parry (something that Vengeance Demon Hunters enjoyed when Illuminated Sigils was reworked to provide 12% parry on essentially 100% uptime), or additional defensive or group utility to prop up their presence would work a lot better than a small armor buff.

Either way, this is moot: On Alpha right now, despite the intention of the blue post, Blood DK has lost Armor compared to live servers.

Blood's Apex talents focus almost entirely on Dancing Rune Weapon. Its first point grants a small power gain to Heart Strike during it, and the second talent grants bonus damage and reduces damage taken for each active Dancing Rune Weapon.

The Apex capstone, Dance of Midnight, completely upends the specialization by granting a ~15% chance when you spend a rune to temporarily summon a Dancing Rune Weapon for 6 seconds, and these can overlap. Summoning one of these does not trigger any other talent except Gift of the San'layn (and this feels completely unintended), and as long as at least one Dancing Rune Weapon is active, you gain 20% parry.

Needless to say, this has absurd potential in Mythic+ while also providing a decent amount of throughput for raid. The biggest weakness is the random aspect of it, but given the very generous proc chance, it is rare to have very long windows of downtime on this.

Both Deathbringer and San'layn have received relatively minimal changes. Beyond pruning obsoleted effects such as Reaper of Souls or the Bonestorm proc from Exterminate, each hero talent received three new nodes:

• Deathbringer has gained access to Frigid Resolve, a defensive node whose main draw is the conversion of damage from Exterminate into an additional shield. Permafrost appears to still be capped to 20% of your maximum health, so while this looks interesting, it will be way less impactful than it looks at first.
• Most of the Season 3 2-piece tier set bonus made it to the hero talent nodes - Echoing Fury causes Reaper's Mark to deal 5% more damage and grants a bonus Exterminate charge when you cast Dancing Rune Weapon (it is currently bugged on Alpha).

Overall, the focus on Dancing Rune Weapon causes Deathbringer to be left in the dust with very few positive changes. Tying an Exterminate charge to Dancing Rune Weapon feels misguided considering that it is not copied (and thus loses you a copied cast if you consume it during Dancing Rune Weapon), and the real problem is that Deathbringer has very few other places to spend the points. The additional 5% damage to Death Strike also feels misguided considering how little of Deathbringer's damage is tied to it, particularly when a single San'layn node currently gives it a 126% amplification on essentially 70% uptime.

Frankly, the changes to Deathbringer feel like the hero talent tree was an afterthought and the primary vision of it was lost along the way.

Where do we even start with this one. There is so much to unpack! But before we do so, one small word of preface: currently on Alpha, procs from Dance of Midnight activate Gift of the San'layn. I will assume this is unintended in the following analysis.

Thematically, the three new nodes make sense. This is not surprising as they are all copies of the most successful elements of the Season 3 tier set, but seeing them mesh seamlessly within the Hero Talent tree is neat. In a lot of ways, these shore up the Dancing Rune Weapon window for San'layn even more.

With Blood Mist adding an extra level of power to San'layn's burst window thanks to being shadow damage and feeding into The Blood is Life, the talent question on the spec tree will very likely lead to tough decisions. Unlike Deathbringer, the entire bottom gate of the spec tree is extremely appealing to San'layn.

The biggest question mark in terms of gameplay will be the negative interaction between Consumption and Infliction of Sorrow. Unlike for Deathbringer, San'layn has reasonable grounds to drop Consumption entirely.