Blood Death Knight Frequently Asked Questions — Dragonflight 10.2

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:

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).

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.