The State of BLOOD DEATH KNIGHTS in Dragonflight | New Tier, Raid and M+ Talent Builds + MORE

This time, I'm diving into Blood Death Knights. I'll be looking at what's changed for Blood DKs from Shadowlands to Dragonflight, including their new tier set, a major Talent revamp coming in the expansion, and a couple of potential builds that'll work for both raid and Mythic Plus content. I've already done similar videos for both Protection Warriors and Guardian Druids, which I'll link in the description below. If you want to check those out, make sure to subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications so you know when those get posted.

The biggest difference is that there is no more extending your Dancing Rune Weapon. This was an extremely powerful playstyle, but it wasn't healthy for the spec or the game in general. Blood DK feels much better to play without it since you don't need to use every available Rune just to spam Hard Strike and extend your weapon.

Instead, what you're getting a lot more focus on is Death and Decay being inside your Death and Decay at all times, so it is pretty easy to get that 100 uptime that you're aiming for, thanks to the ability to get multiple charges as well as those procs you can get, and I'll explain that in the talent section a bit more as to why that is a thing. Luckily, things that you are keeping moving into the expansion is the CDR on your Dancing Rune Weapon - while you're not able to extend it forever, you are able to get it back fairly quickly, or at least much quicker than you could before wearing that legendary, so you'll always be able to kind of move into pulls in Mythic Plus, for example, with that up to help get through that initial setup period on pulls, which is something that notoriously Blood DKs have kind of struggled with. So, you'll still have that tool for you, which is very, very important and it's really nice to have specifically in Mythic Plus content, and when that's paired with some of the other defensive options Blood DKs have in the new talent tree, it makes them probably the most durable tank out of all six, moving into Dragonflight, even Tankier than the Protection Warrior, which we already covered.

Moving into this expansion, you're of course losing Gavel of the Hell-Ruler, and you're losing those Strength sacks from your Tier bonus, so they're losing quite a bit in the damage front. Though, at this point in the development cycle, being slightly under-tuned numbers-wise in a single area is honestly a pretty solid spot to be in. It's not even like Death Knights' damage is atrociously bad or behind anything like that; they're just slightly behind some of the other tank specs in both AOE and single-target.

This is probably more prevalent in AoE, just because their damage is also slightly more sustained as opposed to bursty, so you can run into some threat issues if DPS aren't careful if you're lacking a misdirect or something like that, which is definitely a bigger problem for them in Dragonflight than something like single-target, which can actually be kind of fixed with a different Capstone Talent selection—which again I'll go through in the talent section.

I think Death Knights are looking really solid going into Dragonflight, and with some slight tuning of their damage output, they could be one of the strongest tanks in the game for both raids and Mythic+ activities.

Let's talk a little bit about their tier, so first off they're two piece when a bone Shield charge is consumed you have a 20% chance to generate one Rune and the 4-set after 10 bone Shield charges are consumed you gain 10% damage and haste for 10 seconds so overall runes are always nice to have especially with the new talent tree, again I'll go through that in a second here but you get a lot more runic power uh generation from this new talent tree and so being able to have more runes as well is nice.

The only downside is the reliability of a tier set right the randomness is not something you really want when you're looking at tank tier sets for DPS there's having that like something like a 20 chance for example you have it consistently enough that you know you're able to play around and with it tanks like to be a lot more reliable and so I'm not a big fan of it being just a chance to generate a rune uh but I don’t think it's a massive impact uh to blood Dk being that Randomness because you do have so many runes to play with in general, it's just something I'm not the biggest fan of but it's still decently powerful uh to have that four piece bonus giving you 10% damage and haste for 10 seconds also, not too bad.

You have pretty decent up time on it right now uh not quite fifty percent less than slightly less than 50 percent uh at the moment uh the one thing to note for both of these effects is that they currently don’t interact with Tombstone which I assume is a bug so hopefully it does get fixed but there's something to note at least for now so you can't use Tombstone uh to get you know five I assume it would be five chances at a 20 hit of a rune or uh to get five additional stacks of this four piece towards your damage and haste proc uh so something to note uh this could get a little bit better if Tombstone gains interaction with it which again I hope it does and I think it should uh but something to keep in mind in general this tier set is fine uh it's nothing super impactful but again blizzard is really not aiming for super interesting uh insanely game-changing tier bonuses uh in this first raid of the expansion with the massive Talent revamp coming uh so while this is a little bit boring it's pretty fine power wise especially compared to the other tank ones so nothing really to complain about there aside from the bugs and the slight randomness of this for a tank spec all right.

That brings us to Talent so let's look a little bit at these talents here I'll walk you through kind of choices starting with the general class tree here or DK, so starting off you do have that death strike and moving down here let's just talk about like everything you really do want to have off the top here so AMS of course you really want to have that uh improved death strike that five RP reduction and 10 increased healing which is is the healing is nice but the RP reduction is really really big for DK's here and moving down this is just 10 stamina per point so you get a total of 20 stamina for two points kind of nuts uh and there you're going to get it moved down again probably on this side here because ibf is over here so you're gonna go you're gonna grab your kick.

This is where you have three completely viable choices in what you take depending on the content uh you have the kick giving you Runic power and making the three second reduction so it's a 12 second kick, now dks have access to which can be very very powerful uh if you again if you need the couple kicks maybe there's a certain ability in a dungeon which is uh able to be kicked by a 12 second kick that has existed for example the biggest thing was uh that I can remember off my head is the Goliath in spires for Ascension last expansion shamans who have the only 12 second kicker before this could get every single kick so this is something that can be very very powerful in certain dungeons in certain situations or even certain boss fights, in raid if there's a kick on them as well so keep that in mind.

You also have access now to blinding sleet which is an AOE stop for dks not attached to mass grip um one minute CD so kind of middling when it comes to AOE stops better than something like intimidating shout that Warriors have worse than in cap Roar that Guardian Druids have overall pretty decent utility option having an access to take an AOE stop if you want it always nice your default options probably going to be permafrost which is just you get some extra absorb Shields from Auto attacking things and blood dk do auto attack fairly hard so you'll probably default to this but all three of these are viable choices so this is a really really great row, you can take any of these and you may have a spare Point later on to take a second one if you really want to but we'll see as we move down the tree from there.

Let’s go get our ice bound and this opens up the next row for us here, I kind of want to decide okay so where do you want to go from here taking this 60 second CDR on icebound honestly in the vast majority of cases I don’t think is necessary, it's a nice little extra thing you can have but really you have so many tools and you are so durable as a blood DK through some of the other talents you're taking already so it's not really needed it's just kind of an action you can take later on so we're gonna actually move down here we're going to take our crit and moving down you have a couple options and it's going to vary depending on again raid, Mythic plus that kind of thing right string or as fixate rather is right there uh you're five seconds done so you can take that if you're in content like Dungeons where you know you can stun things a lot.

Otherwise you're going to move straight down this way because you really really want to move down this left side of the tree so your choices here are cleaving ICT or chains of ice or 15 stronger absorbs so that's pretty good, it interacts here with permafrost and drops with your Mastery or with your blood Shields so pretty pretty not bad.

Moving down here so Auto attacks have a chance to renew power so as I mentioned you're running power generation is going to be a whole lot better uh in this uh moving into this expansion if you're compared to the beginning of expansions right uh so this is part of that but now we still need nine points to kind of unlock this and this is where it kind of starts branching out to a different part of the tree right so you have a couple like one point options over here right like you have uh AMZ something you probably aren’t always going to take right, like there's definitely uh like in dungeons for example like there's there’s situations where you don't take AMZ even some raid bosses probably less likely in raids you probably always kind of want this in raids uh so let's assume we're doing a raid, Centric build here where we're gonna grab AMZ uh maybe we don’t necessarily need the bigger AMZ uh this is a 10 increase to the absorb on AMZ.

As a blood DK you do already have that default bigger AMZ here uh so you don’t necessarily need this so let's just say we're getting AMZ I still need eight points so let's move down the side here of this tree uh and you get some good things so raise that is free damage cleaving strike in your DND I kind of have to just take that then you have the choice of either sacrificial pact on the side here or in feeble uh control Undead hasn't really had uh any uses use far in the expansion situationally if it's ever good in a specific dungeon for example you could take it I tend to prefer taking in feeble here but sacrifice pack is perfectly fine as well uh just be careful not to kind of desync it from your raise Dead uh too much you always want to make sure you're using it in your raised dead and if timing is not right uh you can kind of like scuff one so be careful.

Moving down here brittle bones have a chance to weaken your enemy causing your attacks against them to deal six percent increased damage. Nice extra damage uh passive two percent strength here and then you also are still three points away from unlocking the bottom and we can get down there.

So what you're gonna take uh you've got lichborne becoming a Dr again that conduit that we currently have access to, plus it has a two second duration increase so that's always nice as a little buffer thing because that is the one thing with dks right often you don’t really care too much about having the bigger DRS and so like if you're just directly comparing these two right this one gives you an extra two minute CD whereas this one it just reduces this to it from a three minute to a two minute so honestly this is like a way more valuable Point than this in my opinion because it gives you another button.

Then we have one of our first Big D Buffs here you get fibers and haste at all times and death and decay obviously this one is also a definite DK buff in AOE but raid we're shipping it to lower Target scenarios so we're moving down here so you do now have one point available to you that you can kind of spend as you wish, again this is going to be a raid scenario so we're assuming we don't really need things like asphyxiate uh we probably don't need this kick or this uh blinding sleet upgrade here.

So you have really only a couple options sacrifice pack for a little damage uh the 60 second CDR on Ice bound uh there's some leech uh not really needing the leech has a blood DK there’s a little speed boost to death advance, again not too too importantit is easier to access than wraith walk is as you see we don't actually have wraith walk accessible to us right now and we're not going to in a raid build uh so if you needed the extra mobility and seeing as we can't really access wraith walk that's something you could do.

Big anti-magic barrier buff here as well 20 seconds on the CD and a bigger absorption effect, that's probably what you're going to be defaulting to especially if you can actually get use out of AMS consistently, you may not always be able to do that and there's also actually uh the extra death grip range down here as well so all things you can consider depending on the fight but again I'm going to default by Syngenta-magic barrier multiple options here then as I mentioned.

Now we're going to go down the left side of this Capstone area so here is the kind of DK raid buff thing Auto attack producing the target's attack speed by five percent obviously uh weakness or whatever that curse is does exist now it wasn't in the beta for a while it is in there now so warlocks have this uh Rogues have this as a choice node as well so I'm not actually 100% sure if these all stack uh but there it is, it is kind of like a pseudo raid buff for dks.

Then you have icy Talon so your runic power spending abilities with Death Strike increase your next or your melee tax You by three percent for six seconds so you get a total of nine percent uh assuming you are death striking every six seconds which again combined with runic attenuation gives you a fair bit of extra runic power to play with, then going to get him power Rune weapon uh you get 15 haste one Rune and five runic power instantly and then every five seconds uh for 20 seconds two minute CD uh just pretty nice for a general resource generation increase.

You're also gonna get will of the necropolis of course pretty big Dr putting in work there and you're going to want to go down to A-bomb limb as well so you get consuming a rune increases your has a chance to increase your strength by six percent for eight seconds just a little passive buff and then a bomb limb of course and this leaves you with another two points to play with and this is again kind of where you have okay what am I doing here in raids in the situation so uh We're Not Gonna really access Soul Reaper so if we just wanted pure damage and we didn't need anything else uh you can go two points and Unholy bond to increase the effectiveness of Rune Forge stuff if we don't really care about that.

What we can do here um this gives you another uh charge of death Advance so it has Mobility gives you another charge of death and Decay so it helps with your death and Decay uptime and it gives you another charge of death grip in case you are gripping ads for whatever reason so this is actually a pretty value single point, it's not going to be good on every raid fight like I'm sure there's raid fights where this is probably not great in terms of the utility of it,  the disadvantage and the death grip but it's always always going to basically ensure you have 100 uptime on that death and Decay for uh not only is five percent haste but also some stuff in the blood DK specific tree so it is a pretty very very solid single point to invest in and since we have two I think the default is always always going to be investing that single point here.

Then we have one more Point, again the only real things you have here is when you fall below 30 this is not too great honestly uh very passable uh we can't really reach Faith Walk Alone unfortunately so it's one point on unholy Bond uh or again going back to those talents that I mentioned previously uh if you need more Mobility then two charges of Justice Advanced right you just need to be a little bit faster in those Advanced you can grab March uh if you need uh kick at a certain timer or AOE stop which is unlikely for raids I can grab those you can get your 60 seconds.

Now on icebound uh you can get it done if you need it you can get a slightly buffed AMZ if you need it you can get death grip range if you need it so it's really up to you where you put this last point, I'm just going to slap it here just because but you have a couple pretty flexible points in the DK tree which is really really nice because you have a lot of different options.

Now if we're talking about something more Mythic plus oriented uh I'm gonna move this around a little bit I'm gonna say you're going to take blinding sleet uh instead of permafrost here just be because I think blinding sleet is more likely to be valuable but again all three of these are good I just I'm a big fan of AOE stops, they're very very strong in Mythic plus so I think it’s likely you'll take that.

You probably won't be taking AMZ you'll be taking asphyxiate and now you've got this one extra point you definitely though you have access to wraith walk now you almost 100 will not take this in a dungeon scenario you really don't need wraith walk especially if you are taking desecrate over here for two charges of just Advance it's not something that's super valuable in Dungeon content in my opinion if you're back to having similar options though now.

Grip of the Dead is on this Choice as well which is a lot more powerful uh in dungeons as well, I’ll put a point in that for the sake of putting a point in that but again you have a lot of similar options you have the option to take AMZ right like and not every dungeon you will take AMZ but if you have a dungeon that's very high magic damage maybe you want AMZ for a lot of the bosses or even some of the trash, that point is 100 takeable maybe you have a dungeon that now control dead is good in 100 you can also just drop in people to take control Undead as well uh maybe just like hey I just want to have that 12 second kick you can take that as well you could even drop lining sleep to take that as well right so you do have again options to play with in the blood DK tree.

I'm just I'm gonna slap this and grip at the dead but again you could go anywhere uh with this Mythic plus stuff it's just the more there's a few more likely want to tank are that AOE stop there uh and asphyxiate to make sure you have you can also drop this point here also an anti-magic barrier if you’re not going to get as much use out of it, again options really nice to have.

Then let's look at the blood specific tree, so moving down you're going to take all these beginning points because you kind of have to kind of open up your tree so this is just your default stuff right heart strike, mirror and blood boil, Vamp blood uh your Crimson Scourge stuff, I'm removing down the stream kind of want to see so what do we really need to grab down here.

So we need to get to dancing weapon and the center area here uh how do we do that it's kind of improved Vamp blood or improved hard strike, this is a little bit more defensive this is obviously damage you don't really need this uh trust me so we go for the damage here so we now can have access to dancing Rune weapon and we have one more point to spend between these two, also wearing death caress it’s definitely the must pick foregoing to see we have to take both anyways but uh we're gonna let's put the point in all story for now to open up this next area and kind of see where we want to go from there.

So dancing and weapon for sure we need uh here's insatiable blade which is the generating five bone Shield charges and when you consume bone Shield uh it reduces the cooldown so that’s your CDR on Dancing Rune weapon and here we have kind of like the pseudo of our current tier in uh the last year's shadowlands so you get an additional copy of dancing weapon and a flat Eight Second duration increase,e you cannot extend it more it's just a flat duration increase so this is still really really nice to have uh it's still very helpful in all situations it's just you don't get that infinite extension style which again I am a fan of the playstyle being not that so I am a fan of this.

Moving down though what do we really want to access here now the thing is we kind of want to access both the left and the right side of these bottom trees uh I think for both raiding and Mythic plus, so you need to work your way down these trees uh on both sides so how do we really do that.

So you want to look what are some of the kind of mandatory traits you really want to grab on this side and it's really just improved bone Shield that's like your big big I want that trait even to the right side which you kind of want on the way down is coag oh which lets anybody's affected by your blood takes like five percent increase damage and death strike increases the damage of your blood plague uh which Stacks a bunch of time and again that's an eight second buff uh and you already have a six second buff that you're hoping to keep up with that strike here so that's going to passively kind of keep itself up anyway so you really want to make sure you access that uh and then rapid decom just further amps your blood plaque so as you can see blood plague damage uh is is decently upboosted here a fair bit so you really want to grab these two as well.

So how do we do that, let's start on the right side need to take desk caress here for sure because you have to take one of these two, perseverance of the ebon blade so when you proc your death and Decay things uh you get some versatility through this is a two-point node uh versus Rushing blood which is when that thing is active your next step in the heals you of per bone Shield charge.

We're gonna go with this because it's a single point investment instead of two which frees you up some points later on, so again we're not going to go down we need a rapid decomp we're gonna get coag, we're done at the bottom we still have five points moving at this side uh so some of the traits that we're pretty happy to have are like Rune tap is pretty nice uh Heartbreaker isn't the worst in AOE uh though in in single Target it's not great it's also a two-point investment, again we skip this one here as a 2-1 investment you're a little strapped for points here so two point Investments area little rough so that means that the only single point investment you can have is foul ball work which isn't the greatest uh it's not the worst uh but it's not the greatest but it is one point over two points investment to get down to that trait you really want which is your bone chill giving you haste so I'm actually going to recommend taking foul ball work and taking improved bone shield.

Now to move down uh we really do actually do want to move down because Tombstone is very very good, you get that CDR from consuming bone Shield charges with Tombstone I assume at some point it will work with your two and four piece, it should in my opinion and also there's a trait after it that gives you some damage from using Tombstone as well so you really really do want to do Tombstone and you have kind of three points uh to get there so you have a couple options right uh this trade sucks okay uh it's it's not good uh you don’t want to take it however that lets you get there as fast as possible you could get there in three points by going Rune tap, bleaching strike, blood tap and that gives you access to both rune tap and blood type which are really really nice to have so you could do this and that opens up your bottom trait.

However this does mean that you are missing out on things like voracious, another buff that's eight seconds long attached to Death strike that you're going to keep up uh you're missing out on hemostasis which is that blood boil increasing death strike damage which is not insignificant especially in AOE but also even in single Target it's not it’s a pretty decent damage increase uh as well even like blood worms they're nice to have they're a smaller damage increase but again there's a bunch of nice to haves uh all in this tree.

From here leeching strikes is not the greatest uh it's not really needed at all, you won't really notice it also as well so you're really going down the sign to get access to both a rune tap and blood tap but like you can do you can get rid of these you can get reinforced bones as a single point investment to get access to this and then that frees you up to buy these other trades here like hemostasis like voracious right and all of a sudden now you've gone down here and yeah you had to take reinforced bones which is certainly worse than every single other trait that we just picked including all three of these and and voracious, but now you also have voracious and hemostasis uh instead of like leeching strike and and blood tap it was kind of a trade-off again you have the options available to you, you can take any number of those uh so it's really up to you up to the content that you’re doing, what you kind of really need.

So moving down here Tombstone for sure taking that and you have shattering bone which is that damage that I was talking about uh related to Tombstone, so when bone Shield is consumed you deal x amount of Shadow damage nearby enemies and this damage is tripled when you’re within your death and decay so there's your second reason so far uh to stand in your death and Decay at all times as you’re getting hit your bone Shields are being consumed this is dealing triple damage while you stand within your death and decay so very very very powerful.

Only moving down the right side here you've got sanguine ground another reason to send death Nike just five percent more damage and he healing while standing in death and decay freebie let's do that, red thirst pretty easily accessible here this is just CDR on Vamp blood for 10 runic power spent very very good Iron Heart here which is based just 20 more absorbed on your blood Shield which again does kind of Stack with glue Mort over here so it makes these actually relatively large and that's kind of like the general stuff you take and now you kind of like okay what content am I doing.

As you can see here very unfortunate placement of gorefriend, I don't know any content you would take this in if you aren't completely forced to have gorefriend specifically for a fight right because you already have things like two charges of death grip you have a bomb slab so you have these tools over here to group mobs you don't really necessarily need gorefriend and because it competes in the cap Zone and dks have a lot of good traits down here in the Capstone uh you're not necessarily ever going to take this spell if you don't absolutely have to so a little unfortunate you're really never going to see gorefriend uh but it is what it is.

Now if you’re talking about like Mythic plus especially High Mythic plus uh you're probably going to want to get access to Purgatory uh so you'll put a point in this heart Rend here so heart track has a chance to increase to damage your next Death Strike nice uh to get access to that purgatory and you have one point to play with, again if you're doing purgatory and high Keys there's a pretty good chance uh you're gonna want uh umbilicus eternus over here so this is when Vamp blood expires you absorb damage equal to five times the damage that your blood plague dealt during that time and again you have a decent amount of blood plague modifiers as I previously mentioned here so that can be a pretty large shield and against an absorb Shield so it scales with Gloom Ward as well and it's something you can kind of use as a staggered fashion with the dancing Rune weapon into Vamp blood to get this big shield and stuff make you super tanky so it's really really nice uh in especially in content where you're able to kind of uh multi-target spread that blood plague.

In lower Target scenarios it's really less valuable uh so like raid for example if you want to move this over to bloodshot where while this blood shield that is now pretty pretty fat is active you get 25 increased physical damage of course again uh death strike is physical damage heart strike physical damage right all those things are are physical uh this has pretty solid uptime even when you're tanking 100 of the time by the way and this will give you like a lot more rank single Target boss damage as well especially in Mythic Plus or rage as well probably going to be taking this all the time in raids it's pretty good it's pretty good 25 extra damage unlike most of your abilities is nothing to scoff at either right.

They do have things like bone storm here uh which I Don’t think you're ever gonna want to take bonus on Maybe I'm Wrong uh but I I would rather take some of these other things uh than kind of double down on like bone storm because I'd much rather also be spending that runic power on consistently getting uh death strikes right to keep up uh icy Talons to keep up coag to keep up voracious those kind of things uh and so yeah I'm not a big fan of bone storm.

Here you also have all this RP reduction on Death strike as well right there's five there five there uhso overall uh I'm I'm a big fan of not taking bonestorm, but it is there if you want it for a whatever reason you're like hey nope no danger at all let's take that let's go damn here you know uh something you can do uh you're a little locked again.

The frustrating part is kind of like this area to me but I guess it's a it's not a bad spot to be in for dks that you have so many good options that on other parts of the tree you're kind of forced to take worse options in one part of the tree just because uh they are cheaper Investments talent wise right specifically taking foul ball work because it's a one point of here, Heartbreaker which is a dew point, reinforced bone because it's a one point and lets you take uh two pretty solid talents on this end right these are these are talents that you'd be happy to not take if they weren't kind of gating you uh from padding down the side of the tree but unfortunately they are but it's a relatively small small price to pay.

I think blood DK is like Mentioned in a pretty solid spot uh overall right now, they're so tanky and they have the cheat death as well like they are played well like they are the tankiest tank easily no no question uh they're so so tanky, they have options here to go deeper into tankiness uh get some more damage uh they have a lot of them have a couple points of freedom in their in their uh class tree uh and their spec specific tree to kind of put in certain places depending on the situation which is really really nice and overall they just play a lot more fun in my opinion.

Again that's very uh subjective, let me know what you guys think though are you planning to main blood DK in dragonflight maybe one of the other tanks leave a comment down below letting me know if you enjoyed this video, make sure you guys leave a like And subscribe to the channel again I’ll be doing this for all of the tanks in the next few days so keep an eye out for those videos if you have any questions again and comment down below or comes up by my twitch Channel at tactics and I'll do my best to answer, I also stream of course beta Mythic plus, Mythic rating and high Keys as well otherwise, thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video!