Blood Death Knight Tank Guide — The War Within (11.1.5)

Blood Death Knight is one of the six available tanking specializations within World of Warcraft, and is centered around clear and precise usage of resources to reactively heal a large part of the damage taken using Death Strike.

Blood's large array of cooldowns include one of the most potent magical defense cooldowns in the game ( Anti-Magic Shell), an uncapped cheat death talent ( Purgatory) and a spectacularly large array of defensive buffs on very short cooldowns.

Note that this guide focuses on aspects that are specific to Blood Death Knights and general tanking strategies are beyond its scope. If you wish to know more about the tanking role and what you can do to improve, we recommend that you read our tanking guide.

Strengths

• Wide array of cooldowns for all situations: Anti-Magic Shell, Icebound Fortitude, Lichborne, and Vampiric Blood, to name a few.
• Immunities: Stun ( Icebound Fortitude), Knockbacks ( Death's Advance), Charm/Sleep/Fear ( Lichborne).
• Utility: ranged interrupt, 90% snare, combat ress, short-duration immunity to magic debuffs, and Purgatory.
• Predictable, simple rotation, with options to truly get the maximum out of the spec in the hands of a skilled player.
• Reactive self-healing, based on damage taken.

Weaknesses

• Designed to take more up-front damage than other tanks and heal it back.
• Cooldown usage and planning can make or break you, and the feedback on improper play is not direct.

The Blood specialization has an engaging play style, using self-healing through Death Strike as a primary source of damage mitigation. As Death Strike works off a constrained resource (Runic Power), clever optimization of all the ways to generate it becomes paramount. Blood also features a versatile and effective defensive and offensive toolkit, which comprises numerous smaller defensive cooldowns than other tanks, aimed at countering certain scenarios. These can be chained as needed during a fight, although we strongly recommend using them as close to on cooldown as possible.

Put together, this specialization is effective in the full range of current content with proper management. Essentially, if you can survive a hit, you will come out stronger after it.

If you are new to Blood Death Knight and would like to learn the basics of the class, we recommend looking at the Spell Summary, as well as the Easy Mode page we have linked below.

We also have a guide for the Blood Death Knight talents and rotations below.

Gear, enchants, consumables, and gems also play a big part in increasing your character's DPS. Linked below is a page to show you which enchants, consumables, and gems to use, as well as a stats page where you can find more information on each stat and how they interact with your character.

Levelling a Blood Death Knight is mostly a straightforward and painless experience, as you are quite literally able to pull entire zones on your own, all at once. Being able to instantly get into dungeons thanks to being a Tank also allows you to break the monotony whenever and wherever you want.

The very start of the levelling process, up until level 17, is relatively tedious due to two of your core spells ( Blood Boil and Marrowrend) requiring a small amount of talent points to unlock. Once you are there, however, it is almost effortless to keep going.

You can follow our dedicated leveling guide that will walk you through the best talents to choose on your journey.

Once at maximum level, we recommend checking out our Easy Mode guide, linked below. This guide will briefly go over what you need to do to play your character optimally, though, of course, the main Rotation and Talents pages are slightly more optimized.

Blood is very straightforward when it comes to gearing priority: all four of our secondaries do something and synergize with one another. Putting it simply, the more of one secondary you have, the more value per point all the others gain. Strength, Stamina, and Armor are also extremely valuable to us defensively and offensively.

As a result, outside of trinkets and weapons with special effects, you can very often find the largest upgrade by simply looking at a piece's item level.

We maintain a page with gearing advice for the current patch, including Best in Slot alternatives from different content sources. You can find a link to this below, along with information on consumables and enchants to enhance them: