Blood Death Knight Tank Mythic+ Tips — Midnight 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 spell, but we generally recommend against it unless you specifically need this to reduce the number of kick assignments on an enemy.

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:

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 5 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, 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.

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. All enemies it attempts to grip are silenced for 3 seconds, including the target you casted it on.

Control Undead deserves a section of its own in Midnight Season 1, as two dungeons - Pit of Saron and Maisara Caverns - justify its use.

This ability allows you to control an enemy and use it as a pet until cancelled. While it is controlled, it deals substantially less damage than normally, and often retains some unique spells that then become usable by you.

The Control Undead potential in Maisara Caverns is mostly about simplifying your life, or your group's life. You can opt to remove a Reanimated Warrior and remove Dread Slash from play, or a Tormented Shade to remove a dangerous source of AoE damage.

Pit of Saron one of the highest value Control Undead in season 1. The Scourgelord Tyranus encounter has the boss casting Army of the Dead as an intermission, and on Mythic+, this summons a Scourged Plaguespreader. You can Control Undead it to completely remove the AoE/group damage and kick requirement of this intermission.

The more conventional Control Undead targets are the following:

• Tormentors - to remove the bonus shadow damage they deal while you are above 65% health
• Wrathbone Enforcers - to not have to deal with Sunderstrike
• Coldwraiths - to remove a very dangeorus set of casts.

Since it will be so prevalent, we recommend adding the following macro:

This recasts Control Undead on your pet, allowing you to not have to re-target, find the spell, and use it. It also re-enables pet combat assist in case you had it on passive.

Death and Decay, when paired with the Grip of the Dead talent becomes a highly effective tool to snare and control enemies' movement. It is both useful in cases where enemies run away at low health, as it is to control the flow of encounters, and also allows you to use it to desync melee auto-attacks. While it is a rotational priority in your default rotation, an extra charge of it can be kept for these purposes.

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, and the talent Death Notes practically removes its 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 3 minutes 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!

Periodically, a large blue orb will spawn around all players and slowly orbit them. Another player needs to come in contact with it to remove it, granting 4% mastery and 2% leech per stack.

Failure to do this within 15 seconds buffs all mobs within 100 yards, granting them 10% damage and 20% damage reduction per stack.

There is nothing to do about this from a talent or spec perspective - just help soak the orbs!

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.

They have 1% health and a large shield, making them ideal targets for Soul Reaper.

You can pre-emptively Anti-Magic Shell this affix, but this costs your entire team damage. Instead, you should simply Death Strike it away!