Blood Death Knight Raid Guide

Welcome to the Blood Death Knight raid guide for the World of Warcraft patch 11.0! This guide covers everything you need to know to understand your character! Are you starting out and leveling up from 70? Check out the leveling guide!

Blood Death KnightRaid

Single-Target

Excellent

AoE

Strong

Utility

Excellent

Survivability

Excellent

Mobility

Average

• San'layn and ‍Deathbringer are both very competitive with each other and influence your gameplay in different ways. ‍San'layn requires you to utilize ‍‍Dancing Rune Weapon on damage cooldown while ‍Deathbringer only introduces a new ability that augments ‍Marrowrend but does not otherwise change your gameplay.
• Deathbringer has better output and is easier to use, so the rest of this guide assumes you have this talent.

Tier Set

• 2-Set: While you have one or more Bone Shield charges, the damage you take is reduced by 2.0%. Losing a Bone Shield charge has a chance to reduce the damage you take by an additional 1.0%, up to 3.0% for 6 sec.
• 4-Set: Your damage is increased by 1% per active Bone Shield charge. Taking damage while below 6 Bone Shield charges has a chance to generate 1-2 Bone Shield charges.

Opener

• The Goal of your opener is to make sure you have all the benefits of Death and Decay active while min maxing Bone Shield stacks with Dancing Rune Weapon and Tombstone + Bonestorm to maximize CDR through Insatiable Blade while also getting all your offensive cooldowns rolling.
• Deathbringer adds one more button to your opener.

• Death's Caress has a travel time and should be cast while running in for the pull.
• When casting Tombstone and Bonestorm make sure to stand in your Death and Decay to gain the maximum benefit from Shattering Bone.

Priority List

This is the standard priority list, follow this unless a Boss or scenario requires you to hold some abilities listed here. You can learn more about when to hold cooldowns in the Raids section.

1. Never drop your Bone Shield! Use Marrowrend or Death's Caress to keep it active.
   • Maintain 5+ Stacks of Bone Shield to make use of Ossuary, dropping below 5 is ok if Dancing Rune Weapon is coming up soon.
2. Cast Abomination Limb + Raise Dead on cooldown unless a fight requires you to hold it.
3. Keep up your Death and Decay buff, check out the Deep Dive section for more info.
4. Use Reaper's Mark on cooldown.
   • Consume your Exterminate buffs before casting the next Reaper's Mark.
5. Cast Soul Reaper if the Target is below 35% HP.
   • Or you have the buff Reaper of Souls from your Reaper's Mark application.
6. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon on cooldown.
7. Cast Tombstone on cooldown under the following conditions:
   • You are standing in Death and Decay for Shattering Bone.
   • You have 5+ Stacks of Bone Shield.
   • Your Insatiable Blade talent provides you with 20/25 seconds of cooldown reduction for Dancing Rune Weapon.
8. Bonestorm on cooldown under the following conditions:
   • You are standing in Death and Decay for Shattering Bone.
   • You have 10+ Stacks of Bone Shield.
   • Your Insatiable Blade talent provides you with 20/25 seconds of cooldown reduction for Dancing Rune Weapon.
9. Spend Runic Power on Death Strike when you are about to overcap or Coagulopathy is about to fade.
10. Cast Blooddrinker on cooldown.
11. Cast Blood Boil to avoid overcapping on stacks.
12. Cast Heart Strike to consume runes as a filler.

Defensive Cooldowns

• Vampiric Blood
  • Most of the time you want to use Vamp Blood as much as possible when you take any form of damage. Holding it is only really required if you need to survive a big hit or are about to have downtime on the Boss, and it can't get full value.
• Dancing Rune Weapon
  • Generally use this on cooldown unless you need the parry for some special situation, more detailed info is in the Deep Dive below.
• Anti-Magic Shell
  • One of the strongest defensives when it comes to magic damage. In general, it can be used when taking magic damage, in a lot of scenarios delaying it and using it to immune mechanics is the best usage this ability can have. Make sure to keep an eye out during the specific sections on what to immune and how to make the most out of Anti-Magic Shell.
• Icebound Fortitude
  • An amazing defensive for general damage reduction, use this as much as possible in a fight without overlapping it with other cooldowns unless it's needed. It can also be held to immune a stun mechanic, but this is rather rare.
• Lichborne
  • Nice and small defensive when specced into Unholy Endurance provides you with 10% Leech and 15% DR which makes it a good button to press when you just need a little bit of help, in an AoE scenario it becomes more worthwhile since leech is really strong in AoE. Also, if you get feared for some reason, press it!

Offensive Cooldowns

• Abomination Limb on cooldown, every time it tries to grip an enemy you get 1 stack of Bone Shield with Bone Collector.
• Reaper's Mark
  • New Hero Talent make sure to press it on cooldown.
• Tombstone on cooldown under the following conditions:
  • 1. You are standing in Death and Decay for Shattering Bone.
  • 2. You have 5+ Stacks of Bone Shield.
  • 3. Your Insatiable Blade provides you with 25 seconds of cooldown reduction for Dancing Rune Weapon.
• Bonestorm on cooldown under the following conditions:
  • You are standing in Death and Decay for Shattering Bone.
  • You have 10+ Stacks of Bone Shield.
  • Your Insatiable Blade talent provides you with 20/25 seconds of cooldown reduction for Dancing Rune Weapon.

Death Strike Healing and Absorb

Death Strike is what makes you a Blood Death Knight. This ability is the core of your class! Understanding how it works and how to properly use it is very important for maximizing your damage, staying alive, and being the best tank out there through your incredible self-sustain.

• Death Strike heals you for a % of your maximum HP and the healing is increased this healing based on your damage taken in the last 5 seconds. This makes Death Strike an ineffective source of healing when you haven’t taken a meaningful amount of damage in the last 5 seconds.
  • Environmental and friendly fire damage are not counted in the damage taken formula and are the main cause of self-healing issues. Environmental damage can come from a lot of sources such as Boss room AoE damage, and affix damage like Storming.
• Your healing from Death Strike is now multiplied by a lot of different abilities and stats:
  • Versatility is a multiplier for Death Strike healing.
  • Voracious also increases your Death Strike healing as well as your Mastery: Blood Shield value.
  • Hemostasis only multiplies your Death Strike healing, but does not increase the size of your Mastery: Blood Shield.
• Mastery: Blood Shield is the other important mechanic of Death Strike:
  • The generated Shield from Mastery: Blood Shield is based on the full healing value which includes overhealing.
  • The absorb is purely physical and does not work on magic damage at all.
  • The absorb is increased by your Mastery stat value.
  • Voracious increases the Healing and value of your Shield, whereas Hemostasis does not.
  • The maximum value that Mastery: Blood Shield can have is your max HP. This dynamically updates with HP buffs such as Vampiric Blood and Rallying Cry for example.

Managing Death Strike

Now that you learned how Death Strike works, let's talk about how to use it to gain the most damage and survivability out of it.

• For damage, you want to use Death Strike when you are getting close to overcapping your Runic Power or when you can afford to spend all your Runic Power to just do damage to a target.
• If you want to use Death Strike properly to heal up or counter certain mechanics, it all comes down to a good gameplay flow:
  • Take your damage taken in the last 5 seconds into account when Death Strike is being used. Most of the time you want to Death Strike after tank mechanics or taking a lot of damage. This benefits you with both a big heal and big absorb shield right after using Death Strike.
  • Most of the time, using 2 Death Strikes back to back is not a good idea since using 1 already tops you and gives you a big absorb. There are scenarios where you would want to use Death Strikes back to back, but they are rarer than just using 1 with precise timing.
  • Timing Death Strike correctly against magic damage is very important, since your Mastery: Blood Shield does not help you at all against this type of damage.
  • Stacking up the absorb to be ready for tank mechanics can be quite handy but often comes at a great cost since generating big shields takes a long time if you don't take enough damage to feed into your Death Strike healing.

With all this info you are ready to fully understand and utilize Death Strike to the max. Always keep in mind tanking is not set on a rotation or rigid flow of abilities, getting a good gameplay flow going and having proper Death Strike usage comes with experience and practice.

Death and Decay Optimization

• Maintaining high uptime on Death and Decay is important for both your damage and healing done as a Blood Death Knight because of these effects:
  • Unholy Ground and Sanguine Ground.
  • Because of Shattering Bone, whenever you use Bonestorm or Tombstone stepping out of your Death and Decay effect costs you a lot of damage.

• The main idea is to always use Death and Decay whenever it's not active, and you have it off cooldown. Cleaving Strikes grants you a lot of extra duration and quality of life benefits for your Death and Decay.
• Here are the advantages provided by Cleaving Strikes:
  • You walk out of Death and Decay and retain the benefits for 4 seconds.
  • Death and Decay duration runs out and this buff appears afterwards.
  • Walking in and out of Death and Decay always refreshes the buff regardless of Death and Decay duration.

• Due to Cleaving Strikes giving you another 4 extra seconds of Death and Decay the rotation to upkeep this effect is very nice and smooth even without Death's Echo.
  • The average uptime without Death's Echo is around 93% which is already very good.
  • With Death's Echo you never drop the Death and Decay buff when playing correctly.

• Here is a timeline of how a good Death and Decay usage with Cleaving Strikes looks. Just pressing it off cooldown.

Dancing Rune Weapon

Dancing Rune Weapon is one of the most important spells in the Blood Death Knight's arsenal and has a lot of things that are not that obvious at first!

It is essential for both damage and defensive value when playing the class, and these are the key features you should know about the ability.

• The Weapon more or less counts as an untargetable "guardian" and always follows the target you used the ability on. This means when that target dies it follows you and attacks your current target.
• Dancing Rune Weapon spawns behind the target so it can pull more enemies when used on far away targets.
• Each weapon you summon duplicates certain spells and gives you the benefits, so let's talk about them:
  • Marrowrend grants you 9 Stacks of Bone Shield (3 Stacks per weapon).
  • Death's Caress grants you 6 Stacks of Bone Shield (2 Stacks per weapon).
  • Heart Strike grants you 15 Runic Power instead of 5 (each weapon casts Heart Strike generating 5 Runic Power).
  • Blood Boil now applies 3 individual debuffs of Blood Plague (1 Debuff per weapon extra) the health transfer does not increase you still only benefit from your own Blood Plague.
    • The same goes for Blood Plague applied from Death's Caress.
  • Death Strike does more damage as the ability is copied by the weapon but the heal is not increased.
  • Reaper's Mark does NOT get copied but, Soul Reaper on the other hand does. (1 Soul Reaper per weapon extra when the Mark expires or explodes)

All these great benefits in addition to getting a 40% parry chance buff makes gaining Cooldown Reduction on Dancing Rune Weapon one of the most important things you can do. Keep that in mind while playing and make the most out of your CDR and your Dancing Rune Weapon.

Understanding Mechanics

Rotational min-maxing is just one aspect of mastering a specialization, but there are numerous other key mechanics that influence your performance. Use the following guides to improve them.

• Pandemic
• Spell Queue Window
• Stat Diminishing Returns

The following tips are mainly applicable to Heroic Bosses. Mythic tips are going to be released after our progression concludes.

← Scroll for more Bosses →

Understand your secondary stat priority and the tertiary stats needed for optimal performance during Raid boss fights as a Blood Death Knight. For more detailed information, visit the Stats and Attributes guide.

All secondary stats are affected by diminishing returns. Click here to learn more!

Tertiary

• Avoidance - Great stat to reduce the damage intake of "Area of Effect" abilities.
• Leech - Provides additional healing through damage dealing.
• Speed - Niche tertiary that can be very useful and has been proven useful in the past. This makes managing certain mechanics a lot easier.

In general, Leech is really strong for tanks, especially in AoE scenarios it can be by far the best stat you can have.
Avoidance is great but most of the time tanks are not struggling to survive the typical Area of Effect abilities.

Trinkets

Below you can find active and passive alternatives to our recommended trinkets. Do note that some trinkets are better than others depending on the raid boss.

Active Trinket alternatives

• Mad Queen's Mandate
  • Very strong on use trinket if you want more damage.
• Swarmlord's Authority
  • Very strong absorb on use every 1 min.
• Sikran's Endless Arsenal
  • Provides you with some extra damage with a 1min on use.
• Oppressive Orator's Larynx
  • Another trinket giving you some passive stats with a strong on use.

Passive Trinket alternatives

• There are currently no really good passive trinkets apart from Ara-Kara Sacbrood which is already in the BIS list.

Embellishments

• 2x Elemental Focusing Lens.
  • Nice damage proc.

Remaining Sparks

• Crafted items are 636 item level and regular items are 639 on max item level, therefore, it's a small loss to equip crafted items outside of your 2x Embellishments unless you don't have access to other high item level gear on that slot.

Simcraft

To find the best combination of gear available to you or identify the best possible upgrades, visit our Simcraft guide to learn how to utilize Simcraft easily and effectively.

• Phials
  • Flask of Alchemical Chaos -- maximum DPS.
  • Flask of Tempered Versatility -- less DPS but more survivability.
• Food
  • Feast of the Divine Day
  • Feast of the Midnight Masquerade
• Combat Potion
  • Tempered Potion
  • Potion Bomb of Power -- Group potion, this is a DPS loss for you.
• Health Potion
  • Algari Healing Potion
• Mana Oil
  • Algari Mana Oil
• Augment Rune
  • Crystallized Augment Rune
• Sockets
  • Deadly Sapphire
  • Elusive Blasphemite -- Unique, use one of each gem colour to enhance your Blasphemite.
    • Versatile Emerald
    • Versatile Ruby
    • Versatile Onyx
  • Culminating Blasphemite is the best raw output option but using ‍Elusive Blasphemite can help you maintain uptime and dodge mechanics easier. This is an extremely minor dps gain in exchange for a valuable 8% movement speed.

Enchantments

For min-maxing a Blood Death Knight in Raids, different racial traits can provide a tremendous benefit to your characters. If this is not your top goal, picking a race that fits your style works just as well.

• Stoneform -- Dwarf
  • Is very valuable because you can dispel yourself or remove dangerous bleed effects.
  • On top of that using Stoneform gives you 10% physical DR which can be used as a small extra 8 second personal when tanking.
  • Use-cases:
    • Disembowel, Ravenous Spawn
    • Poison Bolt and Void Bolt, Skeinspinner Takazj
• Arcane Torrent -- Blood Elf
  • Strong racial to dispel or purge enemies, the value is very limited but sometimes can come in handy.
• Rocket Jump -- Goblin
  • Do a small jump in the direction your character is facing.
  • While you're in the Rocket Jump animation you are placed on a global cooldown until your character lands.
• Spatial Rift -- Void Elf
  • Spawn a shadow traveling into your facing direction, and activate again to teleport to the rift.
  • Maximum range of 100 yards.

Recommendation

As a tank picking a racial for damage is a small gain that it's not worth it most of the time. If you care about min-maxing your DPS go with the highest DPS racial.

That being said the recommended race for Raid tanks is Dwarf for the on-use physical damage reduction and the ability to self-dispel when needed. These uses are insanely strong and should not be undervalued!

Discover recommended macros for Blood Death Knight for Raids and watch a quick video guide on creating simple macros for your character.

Macro Import Guide Video

Taunt Macros

Taunt Macro --- This macro either casts Dark Command at your target or your mouseover (very handy to pick up mobs)

#showtooltip Dark Command
/cast [@mouseover,exists,harm][@target,exists,harm] Dark Command

Boss 1 Taunt --- Casts Dark Command on Boss1

/cast [@boss1] Dark Command

Boss 2 Taunt --- Casts Dark Command on Boss2

/cast [@boss2] Dark Command

Mouseover Macros

Chains of Ice --- This macro either casts Chains of Ice at your target or your mouseover

#showtooltip Chains of Ice
/cast [@mouseover,exists,harm][@target,exists,harm] Chains of Ice

Mouseover Grip --- Casts Death Grip at your mouseover target

/show tooltip
/use [@mouseover] Death Grip

Mouseover Focus --- This macro sets your mouseover as your focus

/focus [@mouseover]

Mouseover Battle Res --- This makes it so you can use Raise Ally as mouseover on your frames

#showtooltip Raise Ally
/cast [@mouseover,help,dead][]Raise Ally

Focus Macros

Focus Grip --- Casts Death Grip at your focus target

/show tooltip
/use [@focus] Death Grip

Focus Kick --- Casts Mind Freeze at your focus target

#showtooltip Mind Freeze
/cast [@focus,harm,nodead][] Mind Freeze

Mouseover Focus --- This macro sets your mouseover as your focus.

/focus [@mouseover]

Utility Macros

AMZ Macro --- Casts Anti-Magic Zone at your Cursor position

/cast [@cursor] Anti-Magic Zone

DND Macro --- Casts Death and Decay under your character

/cast [@player] Death and Decay

Mass Grip Macro --- This casts Gorefiend's Grasp either at your mouseover or character

#showtooltip Gorefiend's Grasp
/cast [@mouseover,exists,nodead][@player] Gorefiend's Grasp

Control Undead --- This allows you to recast control undead without targeting your pet.

/target pet
/run PetDismiss()
/use Control Undead
/petassist

Cancelaura BoP --- This cancelaura's Blessing of Protection on you very useful to have when playing with a paladin ever

/cancelaura Blessing of Protection

Below, you see a screenshot of the author's User Interface for their Blood Death Knight, outlining which addons are used and how they are utilized in Raids to make your life easier.

Addons

• Shadowed Unit Frames (SUF) -- Full User Interface replacement
  • Addon to replace your Unitframes and other UI Elements with a more clean look. Takes quite some time to configure but there are plenty of pre-done profiles that you can easily import and check out.
• BigWigs -- Generic Boss Mod
  • BigWigs is a boss encounter add-on. It consists of many individual encounter scripts, or boss modules; mini add-ons that are designed to trigger alert messages, timer bars, sounds, and so forth, for one specific raid encounter.
• Weakauras -- Jack of all trades
  • WeakAuras is a powerful and flexible framework that allows the display of highly customizable graphics on World of Warcraft's user interface to indicate buffs, debuffs, and other relevant information. This addon was created to be a lightweight replacement for Power Auras but has since introduced more functionalities while remaining efficient and easy to use.
• Plater -- Advanced Nameplates
  • Plater is a nameplate addon with an extraordinary amount of settings, out of the box debuff tracking, threat coloring, and support for scripting similar to WeakAuras and wago.io + the WeakAuras-Companion for Mod/Script/Profile updates.
• Details -- In-depth Damage Meter
  • Most powerful, reliable, handsome, damage meter for World of Warcraft.
• MRT -- Notes, Raid cooldowns, and more
  • Helpful addon for raiders, especially for raid leaders and officers.
• Echo Raid Tools -- Notes, Raid cooldowns, and more
  • Echo Raid Tools is a World of Warcraft addon designed by Echo Esports to enhance raiding efficiency. It offers "Echo Approved" WeakAuras for each raid boss accessible through an in-game Dungeon Journal interface, allowing easy import and customization.
• Bartender -- Action Bar Changer
  • Bartender4 is a comprehensive action bar replacement addon for World of Warcraft. It allows full customization of action bars, including scaling, alpha settings, and visibility based on macro conditions.

Weakauras

Blood Death and Decay

It tracks when you have the Death and Decaay buff active, and shows its timer.

Patch 11.0.5

• Death Knight

• Hero Talents
  • Deathbringer
    • New Talent: Reaper's Onslaught – Reduces the cooldown of Reaper's Mark by 15 seconds, but the number of Marrowrends/Obliterates empowered by Exterminate is reduced by 1.
    • New Talent: Swift and Painful – If no enemies are struck by Soul Rupture, you gain 10% Strength for 8 seconds. Wave of Souls is 100% more effective on the main target of your Reaper's Mark.
    • New Talent: Reaper of Souls – When you apply Reaper's Mark, the cooldown of your Soul Reaper is reset, your next Soul Reaper costs no runes and it explodes regardless of the target's remaining health. Soul Reaper damage increased by 20%.
    • Grim Reaper has been updated – Reaper's Mark initial strike grants Killing Machine/3 charges of Bone Shield. Reaper's Mark explosion deals up to 30% increased damage based on your target's missing health.
    • Wither Away has been updated – Blood Plague/Frost Fever deals its damage 100% faster, and the second scythe of Exterminate applies Blood Plague/Frost Fever.
    • Dark Talons has been updated – Marrowrend and Heart Strike/ Consuming Killing Machine or Rime has a 25% chance to grant 3 stacks of Icy Talons and increase its maximum stacks by the same amount for 6 seconds. Runic Power spending abilities count as Shadowfrost while Icy Talons is active.
    • Bind in Darkness has been updated – Rime empowered Howling Blast deals 30% increased damage to its main target. Blood Boil deals 10% increased damage, and is now Shadowfrost. Shadowfrost damage applies 2 stacks to Reaper's Mark and 4 stacks when it is a critical strike.
    • Painful Death's effects are now baseline to Exterminate. Exterminate empowers 2 Obliterates/Marrowrends to summon the scythes baseline.
    • Rune Carved Plates now reduces the magic and the physical damage you take by 1.5% per stack (was 2%).
    • The following talents have been removed:
      • Blood Fever
      • Painful Death
      • Swift End

• Blood

• San'layn
  • Gift of the San'layn has been updated – While Dancing Rune Weapon is active you gain Gift of the San'layn (was Vampiric Blood).

Patch 11.0.2

• Death Knight
  • Death Strike can now only heal the Death Knight for a percentage of damage taken from a given damage event once. Death Strikes that heal the minimum health amount do not count as using damage events in this way.
  • Unholy Strength (Rune of the Fallen Crusader) now heals for 4% maximum health (was 6%).
  • Enfeeble reduces damage dealt to you by 12% (was 15%).
  • Null Magic reduces Magic damage taken by 8% (was 10%).
  • An issue causing Raise Abomination to deal less damage than it should has been fixed.
• Blood
  • All damage increased by 10%.
  • A new aura, Coagulating Blood, shows the amount of recently taken damage that will be used to calculate the value of your next Death Strike. The aura description lists the value as a flat amount and the number of stacks shows it as a percentage of your current health. 
  • Blood Shield's cap is now 50% of the Death Knight's maximum health (was 100%) and the cap is no longer temporarily increased by Vampiric Blood. 
  • Bone Shield increases Armor by 100% of Strength (was 80%). 
  • Leeching Strike now heals for 0.25% maximum health for each target hit (was 0.5%). 
  • Dancing Rune Weapon increases Parry chance by 35% (was 40%). 
  • Each active Dancing Rune Weapon generates 3 Runic Power when mirroring Heart Strike (was 5). 
  • Everlasting Bond increases Dancing Rune Weapon's duration by 6 seconds (was 8 seconds). 
  • Blood Drinker reduces the damage the enemy deals to you by 15% (was 20%). 
  • Bonestorm damage increased by 20%.
  • Bonestorm heals you for 2% of your maximum health (was 3%), up to a maximum of 10% (was 15%). 
  • Bonestorm now consumes up to 5 Bone Shield charges (was 10).
  • Bonestorm now lasts 2 seconds per Bone Shield charge spent (was 1 second).
  • Consumption's Blood Plague damage occurs 30% more quickly (was 50%) and duration reduced to 6 seconds (was 8 seconds).
  • Rapid Decomposition's Blood Plague and Death and Decay now deal damage 15% faster (was 18%).
  • Coagulopathy now increases Blood Plague damage by 25% per stack (was 30%).

Q: Why do I keep dying?

A: You didn't use Death Strike correctly or didn't press enough defensives. Make sure to read the Deep Dive for more info!

Credits

Written By: Skövte

Reviewed By: Miniaug