Blood Death Knight Tank Mythic+ Tips — The War Within (Season 1)

Mind Freeze is your kick; it is a talented ability, has a 15-yard range and is on a standard melee cooldown. You can choose to spec into Coldthirst to reduce this to 12 seconds if you manage to successfully interrupt a spec, but we generally recommend against it; in Season 1, no notable enemy has a 12-second recast time on a dangerous ability.

You should use a macro similar to the one below in order to be able to easily transition between kicking your focus or your current target if you do not have a focus target set. This generally allows you to pre-identify what you will kick, even if it is not your current target:

• /cast [@focus,exists,nodead] [] Mind Freeze

Make sure that your UI shows your Focus Target's casts clearly so that you are always able to kick it on cooldown or in coordination with the rest of your group.

Asphyxiate is available on the class tree; it is a relatively long cooldown (45s), ranged stun, and costs an entire GCD to cast. When used, your target is stunned for 4 seconds.

Blinding Sleet disorients all targets in front of you until they take a small amount of damage, or for 5 seconds. When the disorient breaks, they are slowed by 50% for 6 seconds.

Death Grip's primary utility is as a soft stop on casts; with two charges on a rolling 15-second recharge timer with Death's Echo, and only costing 1/3 of a GCD, it is very useful to force certain enemies to restart their cast. Unfortunately for us, in The War Within, the default behavior of most spells is to just attempt to recast if stopped, and as a result, this only buys you a short amount of time.

Abomination Limb can technically be considered a stop, as it will reliably pull the furthest target further than 8 yards from you to your position, and this check + grip can occur up to once per second and up to once every 4 seconds per mob.

Finally, Gorefiend's Grasp can be picked on the spec tree; it functions as a targeted AoE displacement tool. It requires a target to cast, and when used, all hostile targets within 15 yards of the target are pulled to the center of that target's hitbox. This is incredibly dangerous to cast on yourself; you should always cast on somebody (or something) else. It is also worth noting that the target you cast it on is not moved, and thus, no cast is stopped if they were casting.

You can augment Gorefiend's Grasp with a 3-second silence on anything it gripped, including its main target, by talenting into Tightening Grasp.

Death and Decay, when paired with the Grip of the Dead talent becomes a highly effective tool for starting to kite as you head to the next pack. As with Bone Shield, be sure that Death and Decay is available to use when you are ready to move on to the next pack.

Raise Ally is the Death Knight combat resurrection spell. While in a raid environment, you would not normally want to rely on the tank for combat resurrection, in a Mythic+ dungeon, you may be the only player to bring this utility. Additionally, the instant-cast nature of Raise Ally will make it preferable to other combat resurrections in some circumstances, even considering its steep Runic Power cost. If you need to resurrect an ally, be sure to consider both timing and positioning — avoid placing the newly resurrected player in the path of a dangerous boss cleave or immediately before a dungeon-wide damage event.

Anti-Magic Zone provides Death Knights with a way to help the group survive large bursts of magic damage. Its range and duration are limited, but mostly sufficient in Mythic+. Its cooldown can be brought down to 90 seconds with Assimilation, but much like Coldthirst, we recommend evaluating whether this is a concrete gain for you instead of just blindly picking it and never leveraging it.

Our default builds already include Blinding Sleet and Mind Freeze. Be aware of the orb spawn timer, and position yourself so you can stop multiple with sleet!

You should practice strafing around enemies without them repositioning around you in order to be able to assist your group on this affix without accidentally causing enemies to eat orbs. When you are able to do this, use Death's Advance to rapidly strafe around enemies and soak up all the orbs - or just let your DPS deal with it, as the penalty for screwing it up is significantly worse.

Voidbound emissaries are a straightforward DPS check. If you are playing Deathbringer, we recommend trying to save either an Exterminate stack or two to assist in dealing with it.

You can pre-emptively Anti-Magic Shell this affix. Pay attention to the affix cycle timer and pre-cast it!