Blood Death Knight Frequently Asked Questions — Dragonflight 10.2
On this page, we go over several of the most frequently asked questions regarding Blood Death Knight in World of Warcraft — Dragonflight 10.2. This will be updated as more common repeated questions surface over the course of the expansion.
How Much Haste Should Blood Death Knights Have? / Is There a Haste Cap for Blood Death Knights?
Blood has no "soft caps" or "minimum thresholds" with any Haste or any other secondary stat. Secondary stats for Blood are all close enough to each other in value that you should prioritize item level over secondary stat itemization for nearly any piece of gear except trinkets and rings.
In case you would like more details on stats and their interactions for Blood Death Knights, a more expansive stats page is available below:
What Race is Best for Blood Death Knights?
For Horde players, we recommend Blood Elves. Arcane Torrent
is a powerful ability, particularly in Mythic+ dungeons.
For Alliance players, we recommend Night Elves or Dwarves.
The choice is between a complete purge of debuffs and an additional minor
defensive cooldown ( Stoneform) or a way to drop yourself out of combat,
along with being able to redirect or delay spells cast on you (
Shadowmeld).
Should I Play Defensively or Offensively?
This is the main question most people will ask with tanking. The basic answer is
that, outside of cooldown usage, most of your toolkit does not have defense vs.
offense trade-offs. Whether you play offensively or defensively, you will still
maintain Bone Shield at 5+ stacks, you will still spend both Runes and
Runic Power optimally, and you will still make sure not to cap
Blood Boil
charges.
The major difference lies in cooldown usage. In practice, we recommend people to go into a new encounter making sure to plan their cooldowns in order to not die. This can be easily done by checking logs of other players having progressed a fight (or just going blindly in by yourself!), and mapping out what cooldowns you will use for which mechanic.
The most common changes if more situational defensiveness is necessary are listed below:
- Replace one or both of your trinkets with pure DPS trinkets. This is often the easiest and most significant change you can make. Note that very few trinkets exist in Dragonflight that are tanking-specific; you should feel comfortable using a non-tanking trinket that provides advantageous stats without feeling like you are impairing your survivability.
- Take slightly more offensive talents. Are you not at risk of death? Dropping
Purgatory for slightly more damage (typically by picking
Bloodworms or a point in
Heartbreaker for raids, or
Bloodworms for Mythic+). Be aware that this removes a very potent safety net for very little additional value.
Many of our default recommendations for Blood assume you will be playing at least somewhat offensively to begin with. To shift more defensively, consider the following changes.
- Drop
Hemostasis and put this point into
Red Thirst after verifying that you would gain value from doing so. This reduces the cooldown of
Vampiric Blood to around 30 seconds instead of 45. While this sounds valuable generally, it is only so if you are able to make
Vampiric Blood align with dangerous events by doing so.
- Review encounter mechanics you are struggling with, and decide whether
a change of Phial is in order. If it is a tankbuster,
Phial of Icy Preservation can situationally have massively more value.
Can I Sim Myself? Should I?
The Blood Death Knight module for SimulationCraft is well-maintained and can generally be relied upon to help understand the effect to the damage output your gear, talent, and Conduit choices can have.
That having been said, SimulationCraft cannot be used to evaluate defensive choices. Do not consider simulations in a vacuum; a choice having the highest damage potential does not make it the best choice.
Changelog
- 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: Updated the FAQ.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.7.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Reviewed for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 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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