Blood Death Knight Patch 9.1 Changes Analysis

Unfortunately, as is the case for most patches, Blood Death Knights are entering Patch 9.1.5 with very small and non-impactful changes to the spec.

As the original target-capped tank, most of the uncapping also has little to no effect. The only noticeable changes are the following:

• Abomination Limb has been uncapped and now deals falloff damage beyond 5 targets instead of only hitting 5 targets. This means that the very small large-scale-AoE Swarming Mist had is no longer a thing.
• Bonestorm now deals falloff damage beyond 8 targets, which is nice, but the healing remains capped at 5 targets hit.

We have also seen a couple of changes to Conduits, but there is no reason to fret — even with a 600% buff, Debilitating Malady is still very firmly in the "never use" box, both due to its design and its relative strength for all realistic encounter durations and fight profiles.

Finally, there is the matter of Covenant swapping; we cover this in more depth on the Mythic+ and Covenants pages, but to summarize: in raids, nothing changes. In M+, you are the ideal person to bring that one Covenant bonus you may not otherwise have for a key. Unfortunately, this also means having to potentially grind two or three times to 80 Renown.

A full list of recent changes to the entire Death Knight class can be found on our dedicated page below. For a condensed list of changes that happened in recent patches, you can also check out our Patch 9.1.5 and 9.1 Overview pages.

Blood Death Knights received a 6% aura tuning buff.

This aura change does not affect the usual suspects, such as trinkets, and other class-independent effects. As a result, it will translate to slightly less than a 6% buff in overall damage. It does not actually fix the damage profile issues, namely the lack of upfront burst outside of Covenant abilities, but it does do something to bring the average slightly up.

Blood Death Knights have received no talent changes in 9.1 so far.

All specs are scheduled to gain access to four Legendaries in 9.1, with each of them working solely with one — and only one — Covenant.

Abomination's Frenzy is the Necrolord Death Knight Legendary, and modifies Abomination Limb in three important ways:

• It makes it last longer, totaling roughly 30% more damage over its duration.
• It also reduces the interval between Bone Shield charge gains from 6s to 4s.
• Finally, whenever it grips a target, your current target gets a debuff making it take 10% additional damage for 12s. This is likely a bug compared to the debuff applying to the gripped target instead.

With current tuning, this is weak. It adds a relatively small amount of damage compared to other Legendaries such as Superstrain and Crimson Rune Weapon, and the throughput gain from the extra Bone Shield charges is largely neutered by the reduction in time between them, to the point that it becomes impossible to lose previous charges fast enough to not cap. As a result, this Legendary is weak compared to the competition. We feel that Bone Shield charge overflow is a real problem with this Legendary, and would recommend generating an additional resource instead as a potential fix/improvement to this Legendary. Runic Corruption would be perfect for this role.

Harkening all the way back to early beta, the Kyrian Legendary is an effect that grants you 2% Strength and refunds a Rune whenever you manage to spread Shackle the Unworthy. The Strength bonus caps at 10%.

This Legendary has zero value in single-target, very little value in 2-target cleave — Shackle the Unworthy can only be spread to targets that do not already have it and the Legendary only grants you the bonus if you successfully create a new debuff — and very little value on 3+ targets due to the difficulty in not letting the stacks drop.Even on target counts where it should be good, it pales in comparison to the competition due to the fact that it is almost purely offensive since the Armor gain from the extra Strength is very weak and the extra Runes do not come in often enough on "realistic" pulls.

This Legendary is comprised of two distinct effects, even though the tooltip can be misleading:

• While you are in Death's Due, you generate 20% more Runic Power.
• The Death's Due buff lasts 2s longer, and each stack grants 1% more Strength, boosting the total Strength bonus of Death's Due to 12%.

This Legendary looks strong at first glance, but is extremely weak in practice. The Strength is laughable, the Armor gained from it even more so, it does not modify the debuff part of Death's Due — the hard part to keep stacked up — and it has no defensive benefits beyond the meager Runic Power bonus. It is, once again, a Legendary completely eclipsed by Superstrain and Crimson Rune Weapon. It is more on-par with a Conduit in terms of power than a Legendary, so a power tuning may be in order.

This Legendary adds a detonation at the end of Swarming Mist, scaling up with the amount of Runic Power you spent during it.

Unfortunately, this runs contrary to the way you would play the spec in most content, as this incentivizes you to come into Swarming Mist with Runic Power, and exit it while running on empty, both of which are dangerous in progression content. As a result, we expect this to be, at best, a farm/parse Legendary used on fights with enemies suffering from damage amplification effects — think Sludgefist for a great example.

Unlike some other classes, no other Legendaries have been tweaked or reworked.

In 9.1, all the Soulbinds gained a number of additional rows of Conduits and generic traits, along with a new capstone trait.

To provide a quick summary before the wall of text explaining each trait in detail:

• Kyrian players will likely stick to Pelagos, or potentially start using Forgelite Prime Mikanikos in Mythic+. On fights where there is a need to cleanse debuffs, Kleia allows you to cleanse a friendly target.
• Venthyr players will likely switch to Nadjia the Mistblade for everything.
• Night Fae players currently get to enjoy a brokenly-OP Dreamweaver, and will likely fall back to Niya when he gets his wings clipped.
• Necrolord players may end up playing Plague Deviser Marileth more often, but likely will still play Bonesmith Heirmir. Emeni gained very little and, as a result, there is not much chance of seeing the construct that often.

Pelagos gains the following Conduits:

• An additional Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Better Together, effectively working out to 40 permanent additional Mastery.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Path of the Devoted, which is very weak considering that tanks generally do not get affected by full loss-of-control effects outside of core misplays.
• Newfound Resolve, working like the Lady Inerva Darkvein Mythic mechanic, and granting you 12% Strength and Stamina for 15s if you succeed the test. This can be problematic as the add can spawn behind you.

Thanks to the last trait and the "bonus" 40 Mastery on top of the Mastery provided by the 9.0 tree, Pelagos remains a very viable and competitive Soulbind going into 9.1.

Kleia gains the following Conduits:

• An additional Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and 3% Critical Strike whenever you damage an enemy above 90% health. Since it is Critical Strike percentage, it does not convert into Parry.
  • A Finesse Conduit and 10% damage reduction for you and your lowest-health ally, along with the heal and the debuff cleanse for them as well, whenever you use your Phial of Serenity.
• Light the Path modifies Valiant Strikes by making each stack grant 0.25% more Critical Strike. When the stacks convert into a heal, you and the affected party member gain 5% Critical Strike. This, again, is just purely offensive.

Kleia's additional traits provide immense value if there is an encounter with debuffs to clear, thanks to Hope Springs Eternal. The rest is... well, DPS, DPS, DPS.

Forgelite Prime Mikanikos gains the following Conduits:

• An additional Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Soulglow Spectrometer, granting you up to 5% damage to your target, stacking over 15s, and possibly changing targets between activations.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Reactive Retrofitting, which works out two absorbs totalling 16% of your maximum Health at time of proc, one for physical damage, and one for magical damage, per 30 seconds.
• Effusive Anima Accelerator deals AoE damage around the target you used Shackle the Unworthy on, and reduces its cooldown by up to 20s. This is pretty potent, but not as impactful as for some of the other classes — Vengeance Demon Hunters gets absolutely insane value out of this.

Overall, Mikanikos is likely going to show up for those of us that are Kyrian and doing Mythic+, which is more use than the poor Forgelite has right now. Look out for all the cool stuff you can do with Bron!

The added benefit of all this is the new Potency slot for this Soulbind, which allows us to not have to take Forgelite Filter and opens up a world of new possibilities when it comes to not wasting your Phial of Serenity.

Nadjia the Mistblade gains the following Conduits:

• An additional Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • A Finesse Conduit and Sinful Preservation, granting you 50% of the value of all Healthstones and health potions you consume as an absorb. This has mad value for Mythic+.
  • An Endurance Conduit and Nimble Steps, snaring enemies near you by 10% and turning into a 4s root when you drop below 35% health. We are not sure what DR chain the root is on, if any, and frankly the other trait is so much better due to the fact that we already bring a 90% on-demand slow with Grip of the Dead.
• Fatal Flaw, granting you 20% Critical Strike or Versatility after The Euphoria effect from Thrill Seeker ends for 10 seconds. If you are going for parses, you will likely get the gigantic amount of Critical Strike. If you are doing high keys, you will almost always trigger the Versatility. Since both are percentage ratings, they are unaffected by diminishing returns making it a blatantly ludicrous amount of stats.

With these changes, Nadjia will very likely dethrone Theotar as the default Soulbind overall, even on top-tier progression.

Theotar the Mad Duke's final trait allows you to obtain an item when you speak to Theotar in Sinfall. This item works the same as an Augment Rune in practice: increasing a stat by 3%. It's Always Tea Time will provide you with a 5% damage reduction whilst standing in Soothing Shade and will also heal you for 1% of your Maximum Health every second.

General Draven gains the following Conduits:

• An additional Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • A Finesse Conduit and Regenerative Stone Skin, converting 15% of all overhealing into a 6s heal-over-time effect. This is very weak as our main "overhealing spell" for difficult content, Death Strike, cannot trigger this.
  • An Endurance Conduit and Intimidation Tactics, granting you cooldown reduction on Door of Shadows when you are low on health. This is completely pointless.
• Battlefield Presence, which is basically up to 3% damage reduction. This is weak and, frankly, outclassed by virtually every new Soulbind row except Theotar.

Draven continues in his EHP niche, which nobody in the world currently has a valid use case for. Theotar blew him out of the water in 9.0.5, and Nadjia will likely smoke both of them in 9.1.

It is also problematic to end up with three mandatory Potency Conduits. I know it sounds weird, but we only have two viable Potency Conduits.

Niya gains the following Conduits:

• An additional Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Called Shot, granting you movement speed when you land a critical strike.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Survivor's Rally, working as a 20% heal over 10s when you drop below 50%, once per minute. This has huge value on paper, but is very likely to overheal. Oh, and while it is up, you also receive 5% more healing, making it even more likely to overheal. It triggers off-GCD, since it is based on damage taken, and is largely independent of anything you do.
• Bonded Hearts, causing you to effectively heal up to 5 nearby friendly targets for 2% of their health every 15s. If you heal somebody from another Covenant — which is kind of difficult considering that 95% of the DPS are Night Fae these days — each stack of Grove Invigoration is amplified by 50%.

Overall, Niya's new stuff focuses on defensive gains. It is a shame that Dreamweaver is in the state he is in, because otherwise, you might see her get played.

Dreamweaver remains in the same state as he was in 9.0 with regards to if you will use him as a Blood Death Knight or not due to how Podtender functions. The new traits, like Waking Dreams, are decent. However, the cooldown on this does not make it as strong as it could be. The end ability, Dream Delver, is just a simple 3% buff to damage dealt.

Korayn gains the following Conduits:

• A Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Vorkai Ambush, effectively working as a 5% DR from any mob you interrupt for 5 seconds. If you manage to kick on cooldown, which is already a big ask, you can expect ~30% uptime from this. It evidently has no value otherwise, as we have no disorient in our kit.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Hunt's Exhilaration, giving you 3% Leech for 5s when you damage a new mob.
• Wild Hunt Strategem, allowing you to gain a small amount of execute damage whenever you trigger First Strike and requiring you to have two targets nearby to optimize:
  • One high on health (to proc First Strike)
  • One low on health (to convert the Wild Hunt Strategem into its 5% extra damage buff)

Overall this Soulbind is, frankly, weak. First Strike still carries it, but that is all it has going for it.

Plague Deviser Marileth gains the following Conduits:

• A Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Viscous Trail, which feels like a PvP Conduit. A positioned snare is kind of weird considering that we already have one in our kit that we are in full control of: Death and Decay.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Undulating Maneuvers, which is basically a reduced version of a Brewmaster Monk's Stagger. It works as an absorb and can proc off itself, which is kind of amusing and good news since it means it counts "double" into the Death Strike healing calculation.
• Kevin's Oozeling, which is very unwieldy and very poorly-described by the tooltip. Think of it like a pet guardian that melees whatever you autoattacked last. Whenever somebody nearby takes real damage (i.e. not absorbed), they gain a small shield. You, meanwhile, get 2% extra damage to anything the oozeling touched while it was up. When it despawns, all the effects go away.

Pocket- Stagger by itself makes this Soulbind very desirable defensively. On fights with lots of damage being dished out to your group, Kevin's Oozeling provides a ton of, well, mostly pad healing, but healing nevertheless.

This helps round up Marileth as the defensive option, and likely the Mythic+ option, for Necrolords. Now that Volatile Solvent is a lot less annoying to use you can safely keep the buffs up consistently, and his previous array of other traits work a treat defensively.

Emeni gains the following Conduits:

• A Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Sole Slough, granting allies 20% speed when you start moving. Potentially situationally good on fights where fast, specific movement matters.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Resilient Stitching, working out to a 15% magic damage absorb per minute. This is weak and uninteresting, but still worth mentioning.
• Pustule Eruption, which forces you to cast Fleshcraft to deal some damage to nearby enemies every time you take damage and heal your friends for some as well.

The last trait honestly feels like it would belong on Marileth better, as Emeni has basically zero ties to Fleshcraft. The fact that this costs you three GCDs in order to deal a relatively lackluster amount of damage and uncontrollable healing is weak.

Bonesmith Heirmir gains the following Conduits:

• A Potency Conduit
• A choice of either:
  • An Endurance Conduit and Carver's Eye, granting you a large amount of Mastery for 5 seconds whenever you damage an enemy above 90% health, stacking 5 times. It is a lot of Mastery and it has a ton of value on fights with adds or in Mythic+.
  • A Finesse Conduit and Waking Bone Breastplate, increasing your max HP by 5% whenever 3 or more enemies are nearby. This is simple and likely good in Mythic+ when EHP at the start of a pull matters, but weaker than Carver's Eye due to it having no offensive/throughput benefits.
• Mnemonic Equipment, working out to 3% more execute damage; woo wee, boring and uninspired, and weak in the face of the competition.

Overall, Heirmir seems poised at just being carried by Serrated Spaulders and Heirmir's Arsenal: Marrowed Gemstone. She is probably the least interesting new set of traits, although the Soulbind was already really strong for Blood.