Blood Death Knight Tank Guide - Dragonflight 10.0.2

Welcome to Wowhead's Dragonflight Season 1 Blood Death knight guide. This guide will help you master your Blood Death knight in all aspects of the game including raids and dungeons.

This guide has been written by Panthea, who raids in Catalyst (Tarren Mill-EU) and Mandl (Mandl#0001 on Discord). They are both tank multiclassers and Useful Minions for the Acherus Death Knight community, where they answer questions regarding death knights and discuss class and encounter strategies.

As one of the six tank specializations in the game, our design as Blood Death Knights involves a reactive, optimization-driven playstyle: generating as much Runic Power as possible through spells and abilities, prioritizing the right one at the right time, and healing the damage you take back up with Death Strike. Our toolkit breadth holds a variety of answers for many situations, ranging from self-sustain cooldowns such as Vampiric Blood and Dancing Rune Weapon, immunities to specific mechanics, a combat resurrection for allies, and even a pet ghoul acting as a source of DPS thanks to Raise Dead!

Blood Death Knights are designed to excel in fights where damage is very high but not lethal; a large portion of our kit scales off damage taken, allowing us to heal for more and more as the damage taken gets higher. Obviously, this has a limit (when you die), but in the hands of a skilled player, this specialization is a force to be reckoned with.

Overall, we are the jack-of-all-trades tank. We have answers to everything, although they may not be the most powerful answers individually. We bring a temporary immunity to magic debuffs and curses, a combat ress, and hands-down the best slow in the game ( Grip of the Dead).

As the original hero class, Death Knights start at level 8 rather than level 1. All races from both the Horde and the Alliance can be Death Knights. If you like deep, engaging gameplay as a tank, and a rotation that truly rewards clever planning, we strongly encourage you to give Blood a try!

More Facts and Background about Blood

Dragonflight Pre-Patch is here! To help you out in the upcoming expansion, we prepared a special pre-patch page with everything you need to know for you Blood Death Knight during the Dragonflight Pre-Patch.

Blood Death Knight is the perfect introduction to microeconomics: you have a resource in very limited supply (Runes), and need to maintain a cost-inefficient but necessary maintenance buff with it ( Bone Shield) at a certain level; every other Rune you can spare, you can spend more effectively on Heart Strike to generate more Runic Power, which allows you to heal yourself and deal heavy single-target damage. If you manage to do this properly, you are rewarded with a cost reduction on Death Strike, and 10% haste!

While you do this, you also get to weave in Death and Decay procs for even more haste and damage, along with Blood Boil charges to deal damage and amplify Death Strike even further. It all sounds very disorienting, but it is rather simple - and a lot of it is helped by tracking the right things and committing the right habits to muscle memory early on.

Dragonflight brings with it huge changes to talents, bringing new talent trees to life and allowing vast customization with them. We prepared dedicated guides with the best information about Talents, Talent Trees, and the best Talent Builds to use during Dragonflight Season 1.

For more information on how to play your Blood Death Knight, please see our Rotation Guide.

Looking to start playing your Blood Death Knight? Our starting guide provide all the information you're looking for, including the best talent builds, how to execute the proper rotation, and the best companion tools for your class with Macros, Addons, and Weak Auras.

Blood Death Knights can be any race from both the Horde and the Alliance.

Alliance Death Knights should strongly consider being a Night Elf, Dwarf (either regular or Dark Iron) or Human, although these are just slightly ahead due to their utility: Night Elves can proactively use Shadowmeld to avoid certain mechanics (within reason) and gain 2% passive additive dodge, Dwarves can cleanse all debuffs on themselves every 2min, and Humans can use Will to Survive as a second way to remove stuns while also gaining 2% more secondary stats. Horde Death Knights can be any race, but we have a slight preference towards Goblin the additive passive haste buff is great, and Rocket Jump comes in handy to reposition and avoid mechanics that feature unavoidable knockbacks.

Not sure what race to play? Below is a breakdown of each race for this spec among players with updated Wowhead Profiles. Data is updated once per week. Our Blood Death Knight guides are always updated with the latest information from in-game experience, simulations, and logs; make sure to check our changelog to this page, by clicking on View Changelog at the top of the page. If you are interested in more in-depth Blood Death Knight guides for Dragonflight Season 1, make sure to browse the Navigation Bar below, and our list of Related Guides just beneath the Table of Contents.Would you like to quickly find this guide using Discord? You can do it easily using Jeeves Bot! Click here to add Jeeves to your Discord server.

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