Blood Death Knight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

General Rotation

Blood Death Knight is heavily dependent on resource and buff management, although we will cover openers and rotation priority in the below sections there are some general points you always want to be aware of and monitoring.

To perform your best, you should understand what it means to optimize resources, keep your cooldowns on cooldown and to have strong buff management, you should track buffs like Death and Decay, Bone Shield, and Coagulapathy.

What does it mean to optimize resources?

• You should aim to never cap your Blood Boil charges.
• You should aim to have 3 Runes recharging as often as possible.
• You should never overcap Runic Power.

Here’s a short priority list including explanations for most abilities.

• Don’t drop Bone Shield, use Marrowrend to maintain this when necessary, but note that Bone Shield doesn’t provide more armor the more stacks you have.
• Cast Dancing Rune Weapon on cooldown.
• Spend runic power on Death Strike, either to save yourself or when you’re above 75RP(San’layn), this ensures that you’ll always have another Death Strike in the ‘bank’, and isn’t too high to overcap you from any other incoming global. It is also used to maintain Coagulopathy rotationally.
• Cast Death and Decay if you don’t have the buff (Cleaving Strikes maintains the buff for a further 4 seconds.)
• Cast Bonestorm if you will reduce Dancing Rune Weapon CD by atleast 10 seconds
• Cast Consumption on cooldown
• Cast Blood Boil to not overcap charges.

You’ll notice our Bone Shield stacks will actually stack to 12 now if you have talented Reinforced Bones.

Opener

This opener is going to assume you are using the default M+ or Raid builds suggested with the talents (Abomination Limb, Consumption and Bonestorm).

Raid Opener - Deathbringer

Far easier to map out than an M+ opener as it will change pack to pack pending your cooldown availability.

1. Pre-cast Death and Decay at the location you’re going to move to with the boss or if you’re pulling the boss to yourself to start.
2. Cast Death's Caress as your opening ability to pull the boss
3. Cast Reaper’s Mark
4. Cast Marrowrend to consume your first Exterminate
5. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon along with Raise Dead (macro)
6. Cast Marrowrend to consume second Exterminate
7. Cast Soul Reaper
8. Cast Bonestorm
9. Cast Blood Boil
10. Cast Death Strike when above 35 RP, Heartstrike if below, and make sure to keep Blood Boil charges rolling from this point.
11. Cast Tombstone
12. Cast Death Strike
13. Cast Consumption
14. Move to the General Rotation list from here.

Raid Opener - San’Layn

Far easier to map out than an M+ opener as it will change pack to pack pending your cooldown availability.

1. Pre-cast Death and Decay at the location you’re going to move to with the boss or if you’re pulling the boss to yourself to start.
2. Cast Death's Caress as your opening ability to pull the boss
3. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon along with Raise Dead (macro)
4. Cast Bonestorm
5. Cast Blood Boil
6. Cast Vampiric Strike if below 75 Runic Power
7. Cast Death Strike when above 75 runic power
8. Cast Consumption in the last 4-5 seconds of Dancing Rune Weapon
9. Cast Death and Decay
10. Cast Heart Strike
11. Cast Blood Boil
12. Cast Tombstone

Raid rotation priority guidelines

1. Ensure you keep Bone Shield up. You’ll be using Marrowrend to keep your Bone Shield stacks up stay at +5 (this changes with Bonestorm use)
2. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon off cooldown unless heading into a phase change etc where you will lose uptime on the boss. Remember you can cast Blooddrinker and Dancing Rune Weapon through the channel.
3. Cast Death and Decay if it’s not active AND STAND IN IT.
4. Cast Soul Reaper if enemy HP below 35% HP
5. Cast Tombstone if Dancing Rune Weapon has at least 25 seconds remaining on it’s cooldown, you have at least 6 Bone Shield stacks, and you are standing in your Death and Decay.
6. Cast Bonestorm if you are on 5+ Bone Shield charges, you want to maximize your Bonestorm in reducing the CD on Dancing Rune Weapon, so ensure DRW is on cooldown prior to activating and ensure you’re standing inside your Death and Decay to make the most of shattering bone damage.
7. Use Death Strike when you need to heal, or to keep the buff from Coagulopathy active.
8. Cast Consumption of cooldown
9. Cast Blood Boil, don’t just sit on 2 charges, keep them cycling.
10. Spend your runes on Heart Strike to consume Runes. Your gameplay loop is to aim to have 3 runes recharging at all times.

M+ Opener

This is much harder to map out as your cooldowns will vary pull to pull and you’ll likely just end up relying on your priority.

1. Pre-cast Death and Decay just before the packs location
2. As you move towards the pack Cast Death's Caress to trigger agro into the DND
3. Cast Reaper’s Mark (If playing Deathbringer)
4. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon along with Raise Dead (macro)
5. Cast Blood Boil
6. Cast Bonestorm
7. Cast Heart Strike
8. Cast Death Strike
9. Cast Soul Reaper (if playing Deathbringer)
10. Cast Heart Strike
11. Cast Tombstone (if playing San’layn don’t use tombstone whilst DRW is active, keep hitting Heart Strikes and weaving Death Strikes)
12. Cast Blood Boil

M+ rotation priority guidelines

1. Ensure you keep Bone Shield up. You’ll be using Marrowrend to keep your Bone Shield stacks up stay at +5 (this changes with Bonestorm use)
2. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon off cooldown unless heading into a phase change etc where you will lose uptime on the boss. Remember you can cast Blooddrinker and Dancing Rune Weapon through the channel.
3. Cast Death and Decay if it’s not active AND STAND IN IT.
4. Cast Soul Reaper if enemy HP below 35% HP
5. Cast Tombstone if Dancing Rune Weapon has at least 25 seconds remaining on it’s cooldown, you have at least 6 Bone Shield stacks, and you are standing in your Death and Decay.
6. Cast Bonestorm if you are on 5+ Bone Shield charges, you want to maximize your Bonestorm in reducing the CD on Dancing Rune Weapon, so ensure DRW is on cooldown prior to activating and ensure you’re standing inside your Death and Decay to make the most of shattering bone damage.
7. Use Death Strike when you need to heal, or to keep the buff from Coagulopathy active.
8. Cast Consumption of cooldown
9. Cast Blood Boil, don’t just sit on 2 charges, keep them cycling.
10. Spend your runes on Heart Strike to consume Runes. Your gameplay loop is to aim to have 3 runes recharging at all times.

Playstyle

There are only a few things to remember to optimize your rotation as Blood.

1. Keep Ossuary up. This means you want to Marrowrend at 5 Bone Shield stacks, or with 5 or less seconds remaining on the buff. However, if either Dancing Rune Weapon or Abomination Limb will be ready to use within 3-7 seconds or Abomination Limb is active, it’s okay to hold off on Marrowrending.
2. Keep Death and Decay up as often as possible. With Death’s Echo, it’s very easy to reach uptimes of 85% or higher on Death and Decay. Maintaining a high uptime will be the biggest and easiest increase in your dps and survivability when playing Blood. Be sure you time your usages of Death and Decay with movement as well. Try not to place a brand new Death and Decay within a couple seconds of heavy movement.
3. Keep Icy Talons and Coagulopathy up at max stacks as often as possible. It’s entirely possible to keep Coagulopathy up for 100% of an encounter. The 8 second duration is more than enough time to refresh the buff, and keeping the buff at max stacks is incredibly important. Icy Talons on the other hand is a little bit harder to do with its 6 second duration, but with enough practice it is possible. Keeping these buffs up means you need to Death Strike about every 5-6 seconds which is hard, but doable.
4. Keep Blood Plague up on all targets you’re in combat with. This one is simple, just make sure that Blood Boil doesn’t cap charges and you’ll be more than fine. On 2+ targets you want to use Blood Boil a bit more for damage as well as funneling damage and healing from Hemostasis.
5. Make sure to weave your spells, neglecting runes, rp or blood boil charges will always be bad, there’s a balance to find, if you’re struggling, read up on the priority list section.
6. Optimize Dancing Rune Weapon.
1. While Dancing Rune Weapon is up you want to try and only use abilities that it copies. So Blood Boil, Death Strike, Heart Strike, Marrowrend, Death’s Caress, Consumption, and Soul Reaper. There are 2 exceptions to this rule. Death and Decay and Tombstone. All other non-utility abilities you should try and use before you use Dancing Rune Weapon.
2. The first and last globals of your Dancing Rune Weapon are fixed. The first global will always be Blood Boil. Your rune weapons gain benefit from Coagulopathy, but from their own Blood Plague, so you want to make sure it’s up for them right away. Your last global will be Marrowrend, but only if you have 6 or less Bone Shield stacks, or less than 10 seconds remaining on your Bone Shield.

Defensives & Cooldown Usage

Blood is fortunate in that almost all of its survivability comes from doing the basic dps rotation correctly. As long as you are keeping all the plates spinning you’ll be able to survive most things. Increasing your survivability past this point is also relatively simple. Use your cooldowns often and well. This sounds pretty dumb, but you’d be amazed at the amount of times I’ve gone through peoples logs, even people doing high keys or on mythic end bosses, where they just don’t push their cooldowns.

Planning cooldowns is pretty simple, you’re either getting whacked by a million mobs, or the boss is channelling a massive smash on your face. Planning them is also pretty important to do beforehand if possible, it will simply save either your party or your raid team the worry. Once you are able to script out your movement and cooldown usage, your job as a tank is pretty much done. You just deal as much damage as you can while surviving and making sure to not deviate from your script as much as possible.

Generally, in m+ it can be pretty hard to recommend exact actions, there is alot of variables to deal with, including your teammates, but I have some rules of thumb that I myself follow, and have preached to others for the longest time too;

• Prioritise Vampiric Blood when setting up pulls, it is one of our best and most frequent cooldowns
• Don’t send Dancing Rune Weapon unless you are about to plant with the pack, doing otherwise will waste both defensive and offensive benefits of the spell
• Aim to always have something ‘Running’, for example, If you use Vampiric Blood to set up the pull, assuming you have Red Thirst talented, it should be ready again for when your Dancing Rune Weapon ends, and after that you could use Lichborne to coast until your next Dancing Rune Weapon.

Additionally, you need to ensure that you have both Bone Shield stacks and runic power going into pulls. The easiest way to do this is to make sure that your last global in a pull is either Marrowrend or Death’s Caress.