Blood Death Knight Tank Stat Priority — Dragonflight 10.0.7

The general stat priority on armor pieces for Blood Death Knights is as follows:

1. Item Level;
2. Haste;
3. Critical Strike / Mastery;
4. Versatility;

The benefit of Armor, Strength, and to a lesser extent Stamina from higher item level gear generally outpaces the benefit from optimal secondary stats. Do not consistently sacrifice item level to chase Haste — outside of rings and trinkets, practically any item that provides a 10+ item level increase should be treated as an upgrade.

Mastery and Haste are your two best secondary stats, with Haste having a slight edge to cover rotational mistakes. That said, neither of those is actively worth stacking, and the defensive value of Mastery is only against physical damage, and only with proper management of Runic Power.

Just as in Season 4, Dragonflight will enable you to keep a noticeably higher uptime on Dancing Rune Weapon than before. While it will not be as spectacular as Season 4, you can expect 35-40% uptime. This, in turn, massively increases the relative defensive value of Critical Strike, as the bonus parry from Dancing Rune Weapon is additive and without diminishing returns. This makes every single point of avoidance (dodge, parry, miss) 40% more appealing while Dancing Rune Weapon is up.

Versatility is the weakest of the four secondaries offensively and defensively this expansion, but not by enough to avoid it, and it brings value that the others do not:

• Versatility applies before any hit, in a similar fashion to Critical Strike
• Unlike all other stats, Versatility applies to all damage type. The only other stat to do so is Haste, and it does so indirectly

As a result, even though Versatility is weaker per point, it is broader, more versatile and depends less on operational level of play of the user.

As a tank, you will be trying to optimize for too many competing metrics to assign numerical weights to different stats with any precision. Additionally, the value of a given stat will depend greatly on your individual circumstances — how many healers you have, the difficulty of the content, and your strategy for an encounter can all have a significant impact on the relative value of each stat.

Strength is your primary statistic as a Death Knight. It increases the armor bonus of Bone Shield, increases your damage, increases your chance to parry attacks, and provides a small increase to your self-healing though several leech abilities available to Blood Death Knights.

Mastery increases the size of your Blood Shield, which gives Death Strike a damage-smoothing component. Mastery also increases the damage dealt by all your attacks through Mastery: Blood Shield.

Critical Strike increases your chance for your abilities to deal 100% more damage, and all of your Critical Strike chance is converted into parry chance.

Versatility increases all your damage and healing done, and decreases all damage taken.

Haste increases your attack speed and Rune regeneration, the latter granting you more resources and therefore allowing you to use more abilities. Due to the reactive nature of Blood mitigation, Haste makes your mitigation more effective - reactive mitigation is only valuable if your healers do not change their behavior due to damage spikes; your goal as a self-healing tank is to heal damage spikes before your healers realize you took damage.

Most encounters have abilities that cannot be mitigated or avoided. Also, you need to have a decent amount of health, in order to give yourself the chance to be healed before a subsequent attack kills you. As such, you need a minimum amount of Stamina. This amount will, in most cases, simply come from the Stamina found innately on your gear. Therefore, item level is the determining factor in keeping your health pool growing.