Blood Death Knight Tank Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — 12.0.5

One of your biggest duties as a tank consists of holding aggro and generating threat against other DPS, and your co-tank if there is one.

The moment you enter combat with an enemy, you are placed on their threat table. This is unique to each enemy, and it tallies up the amount of threat each player has generated throughout combat. This does not decay, and entries are only removed on death; they can be masked by immunities such as Blessing of Protection, but this is an edge case.

If combat has just started, the first person on the threat table will have initial aggro. From there, it takes a 10% gap for an enemy to swap targets to somebody within 8 yards, and 30% if at range. This means that if you have 100 "threat units", the second highest threat entry must get to 110 to overtake you.

Fundamentally, generating threat means dealing damage, and each enemy tallies this individually depending on what hit them. This means that overall damage is mostly an irrelevant metric in AoE, particularly if a specialization has a target-capped spell (for us, Heart Strike is the best example, and it is why playing Mythic+ as San'layn frequently involves using Blood Boil even if Dancing Rune Weapon is active).

All tanks have a +950% threat multiplier on their spec aura.

Blood Death Knight also possesses no abilities with a unique threat bonus of any sort. This means that, outside of taunt windows, for us, threat is damage.

Taunting does three things:

• It fixates the enemy on you for 6 seconds, affected by diminishing returns. While the debuff is on a target, it cannot swap target, and you mask the #1 person on their threat table. The moment the debuff fades, the rules go back to normal.
• It puts you at the exact same value as the #1 entity on the threat table of the enemy. If this was you, it evidently does nothing.
• It increases your threat generation by 800% on this target while the debuff is on target. Increasing numbers of taunt on a target do not stack this up, and instead reduce the duration of each subsequent taunt by 35%, up to a minimum of 1.1 second.

Death Grip also functions as a taunt, and has the additional perk of forcefully relocating your target (if they can be relocated). This soft-interrupts a number of spells, but rarely works against bosses.

Death Strike is your most important self-healing ability. It is also part of your regular ability rotation during combat. Tomake the most out of Death Strike and your Mastery ( Mastery: Blood Shield), you cannot simply use Death Strike whenever it is available.

The most immediately apparent effect of Death Strike is that it heals you, so it is always well used after you have taken damage to heal yourself back up a bit and help the healers. Be smart about when you are using Death Strike. As it depends on your damage taken in the previous 5 seconds, it should be used after taking high damage. Of course, capping your Runic Power while not using Death Strike should also be avoided.

Note that Mastery: Blood Shield only absorbs physical damage; do not rely on it to mitigate a large magical attack.

Your Marrowrend ability applies 3 stacks of Bone Shield, and your Death's Caress ability applies 2 stacks of Bone Shield each time you use it, up to a maximum of 10 stacks. As long as you have at least 1 Bone Shield stack active, your Armor is increased by a percentage of your Strength and with the Improved Bone Shield talent, your Haste is also increased by 10%. Each successful melee attack made against you consumes a Bone Shield charge. Bone Shield has a duration of 30 seconds, after which the stacks simply drop off you. This is unlikely to occur while actively tanking in a normal boss encounter, but you should take care to watch the duration of your Bone Shield buff on encounters with no melee attacks or with long periods of downtime.

There is an internal cooldown of 2.5 seconds for Bone Shield charges being consumed.

Keeping Bone Shield up is pivotal to playing Blood properly. The Haste increase is essential for Rune regeneration, and the damage reduction is essential for survivability. Moreover, if you have the Ossuary talent, then with five or more stacks of Bone Shield, the cost of Death Strike is reduced by 5 Runic Power, which allows you to use it more frequently.

Effectively, you will always want to prioritize maintaining high amounts of Bone Shield stacks smartly; you should use Marrowrend when you have seven or fewer stacks of Bone Shield (unless you need the additional Runic Power from using Heart Strike). One of the pillars of optimization of Blood consists in managing to spend as few runes as possible on Bone Shield management.

Death Knights use a dual resource system of runes and Runic Power. While it is quite straightforward in how it works, we will explain it here for the sake of completion.

You have a total of 6 Runes, which are available by default. Some of your abilities have Rune costs, and whenever you use an ability that consumes one or more Runes, those Runes will immediately begin recharging. The exact amount of time it takes a Rune to recharge depends on how much Haste you have.

Whenever a Rune is consumed, you gain 10 Runic Power (more on that below).

At most, 3 of your runes can be charging up at the same time. It is therefore optimal to keep at least 3 runes on cooldown to maximise the recharge rate over the course of the fight.

Runic Power is a resource that resembles Rage, in the sense that it decays when out of combat, but does not decay during combat. As mentioned above, consuming Runes generates 10 Runic Power per Rune spent, and this is the primary means of generating Runic Power, although some abilities also help with this. You can have a maximum of 125 Runic Power, increased to 145 if using the Rune of Hysteria Runeforge.

Dancing Rune Weapon grants you a 20% chance to parry for 12 seconds with Everlasting Bond selected. Moreover, for the duration, there are several other benefits that you gain:

• Uses of Heart Strike will cause your rune weapon to strike and grant 3 additional Runic Power.
• Uses of Marrowrend will cause your rune weapon to stack Bone Shield exactly like using your own Marrowrend, making Marrowrend during Dancing Rune Weapon yield 6 bonus Bone Shield charges. Avoid using Marrowrend during Dancing Rune Weapon too much, since using it effectively brings you to maximum stacks.
• Using Blood Boil will leave an additional Blood Plague debuff on your target per active Rune Weapon. Your rune weapon's Blood Plague debuff is not attributed directly to you and does not heal you, and persists after the weapon despawns.

Your rune weapon's attacks deal approximately 33% of the damage you deal, making Dancing Rune Weapon a potent DPS cooldown. On encounters with burn phases where the boss takes additional damage, you should make sure you have Dancing Rune Weapon to line up with those phases, along with a potion of some sort. Do not, however, sit on this cooldown for too long.

Avoid holding Dancing Rune Weapon on cooldown for longer than 15 seconds in a misguided attempt to benefit from its parry value defensively. Dancing Rune Weapon is primarily a resource and throughput cooldown, as it amplifies your Runic Power generation during it (by granting you bonus Bone Shield charges and roughly doubling the RP generated from Heart Strike). The parry part is the cherry on top, not the main actor of the show.

Anti-Magic Shell's most powerful effect is its ability to prevent the application of debuffs. If a magical ability would apply a debuff and any damage the ability causes is fully absorbed by Anti-Magic Shell, the debuff is not applied.

Timing the use of Anti-Magic Shell is critical, particularly when you are taking magical damage from sources other than the ability you intend to protect against. Heavy magic damage can easily eat through the shield before the intended attack, leaving you vulnerable to the debuff.

Effects that increase your maximum health, to include Vampiric Blood, will increase the value of your Anti-Magic Shell even after those abilities fade. Planning around this can make the difference in Anti-Magic Shell being able to completely absorb an attack and, therefore, immune a debuff.

Anti-Magic Barrier can allow for more effective use of Anti-Magic Shell in nearly every way, with a reduced cooldown, increased size, and increased duration.

Vampiric Blood is your most versatile cooldown. It grants you 30% extra health for 10 seconds and increases your healing received (from all sources, including self-heals) by 30%. It can be used reactively; however, you will gain more benefit from using this proactively, and you should have a specific plan for what abilities you will mitigate with it.

It is worth noting that this increased healing can be used to game certain abilities or mechanics. For instance, certain effects will be 30% larger even after Vampiric Blood fades - such as Anti-Magic Shell and Tombstone's shield.

One peculiarity of Vampiric Blood is that it specifically has been flagged to not increase the cap on Mastery: Blood Shield while it is active.

Icebound Fortitude is a straightforward damage-reduction cooldown that lasts for 8 seconds, reducing all damage taken by 30%. Generally, you should use this when you are about to take high damage from pre-determined boss abilities, or when you are otherwise vulnerable (because the healers cannot reach you or because your other cooldowns are unavailable).

Icebound Fortitude also clears stuns and makes you immune to stun effects for the duration of the buff. In encounters where stun effects are applied to the tank, you should consider whether you can incorporate Icebound Fortitude into your cooldown plan in a way that both mitigates threatening damage while leveraging the stun immunity.

Blood Death Knights deal very poorly with abilities that take into account raw damage amounts before absorbs and self-healing (given their low number of damage reduction abilities). Abilities that mirror damage dealt to you onto other players or otherwise determine their effect based on how much damage you take can be particularly difficult for Blood Death Knights to manage; Icebound Fortitude should be saved for those abilities in those situations.

Lichborne is another tool in our arsenal of situational defensives, granting 15% leech and total immunity to Charm, Fear, and Sleep effects for 10 seconds. An additional benefit of it is the ability to use Death Coil on yourself to give yourself a poor man's AP-based healing should nothing else be in range and should you be in immediate, lethal danger, be out of both health potions and healthstones and without any other hope to survive - in other words, never practically.

While it is not a cooldown per se, Purgatory deserves a mention as it has a few quirks related to it.

For starters, it is the only cheat death in the game that is completely uncapped. As long as you are able to heal out of it, you can survive it. The hard part, evidently, is healing yourself out of it.