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.

• Your aim is to always have 3 Runes recharging
• You want to spend the majority of your runes on Heart Strike to fuel Death Strikes
• Cycle your Blood Boil charges do not sit on 2 charges.
• Death and Decay is heavily modified throughout the talent trees. You are severely impacting your performance if you’re not maintaining good uptime in your Death and Decay and standing in it.
• Coagulopathy causes your Death Strikes and Blood Plague to deal more damage, this stacks to 5 and it’s an important buff to maintain through your rotational gameplay.
• Ossuary has long been a staple in the Blood DK rotation, ensuring that you’re staying above 5 stacks of Bone Shield.
• Do not back to back Death Strike, it is important to weave Death Strikes into your rotation not fill your Runic Bar and drain it back to back.
• Dancing Rune Weapon time, Blood’s kit is tied to reducing the cooldown on Dancing Rune Weapon via Insatiable Blade, Tombstone and Bonestorm feed into this do not sit on these.

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

Fair 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 into your Death and Decay location.
3. Cast Reaper’s Mark (If playing Deathbringer)
4. Cast Abomination Limb
5. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon along with Raise Dead (macro)
6. Cast Blood Boil
7. Cast Bonestorm
8. Cast Soul Reaper
9. Cast Blood Boil
10. Cast Heart Strike
11. Cast Death Strike
12. Cast Tombstone
13. Cast Heart Strike
14. Cast Blood Boil
15. Cast Death Strike
16. Cast Consumption

Raid Opener - San’Layn

Fair 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 into your Death and Decay location.
3. Cast Abomination Limb
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 Heart Strike
10. Cast Tombstone
11. Cast Heart Strike
12. Cast Death Strike
13. Cast Heart Strike
14. Cast Consumption

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 Tier Set and Bonestorm use)
2. Cast Blooddrinker off cooldown (If talented)
3. Cast Reaper’s Mark off cooldown
4. Cast Soul Reaper after a Reaper’s Mark when you have a Reaper of Souls proc regardless of enemy HP.
5. Cast Abomination Limb off cooldown.
6. Cast Bonestorm if you are on 10+ 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. Cast Death and Decay if it’s not active AND STAND IN IT.
8. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35% HP.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. Use Death Strike when you need to heal, or to keep the buff from Coagulopathy active.
12. Cast Blood Boil, don’t just sit on 2 charges, keep them cycling.
13. 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 Abomination Limb
5. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon along with Raise Dead (macro)
6. Cast Blood Boil
7. Cast Bonestorm
8. Cast Heart Strike
9. Cast Death Strike
10. Cast Heart Strike
11. Cast Tombstone
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 Tier Set and Bonestorm use)
2. Cast Abomination Limb off cooldown.
3. Cast Bonestorm if you are on 10+ 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.
4. Cast Death and Decay if it’s not active AND STAND IN IT
5. Cast Consumption ensuring that you have 2 runes on recharge prior to pressing this.
6. Cast Soul Reaper if the target is below 35% HP or after you have used Reaper’s Mark and have a Reaper of Souls proc (remember Soul Reaper explodes regardless of health due to this)
7. Cast Dancing Rune Weapon off cooldown
8. 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.
9. Use Death Strike when you need to heal, or to keep the buff from Coagulopathy active.
10. Cast Blood Boil don’t just sit on 2 charges, keep them cycling.
11. Spend your runes on Heart Strike to consume Runes. Your gameplay loop is to aim to have 3 runes recharging at all times.

Playstyle

Examples: Cooldown and Ability usage, Pandemic, Movement, Survivability & Defensives

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. Keep Tombstone synced with Abomination Limb and Dancing Rune Weapon. Ideally you should be using Tombstone at the same time as either Dancing Rune Weapon or Abomination Limb in order to mitigate the cost of the 5 Bone Shield stacks.
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.

In raid it’s pretty simple when to use your cooldowns. Big tank nuke incoming? Use a cooldown. Planning your cooldowns beforehand is an important part of raid tanking. 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.

Mythic plus is a bit more nuanced. You want to have cooldowns running as often as possible to help lessen the amount of incoming damage in each pull, while still saving cooldowns for big tank hits. The easiest way to do this is to rotate between your cooldowns. Use Dancing Rune Weapon on pull, followed by Vampiric Blood, then Icebound Fortitude or Lichborne depending on which is available for large incoming tank nukes or large pulls, and using Anti-Magic Shell for incoming magic damage. The goal is to get as many uses out of each defensive ability as possible, without overlapping them.

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. The rework to Death’s Caress to also give Bone Shield stacks helps a lot with this problem as well.

Being able to generate Bone Shield stacks from range means you’ll never have to walk into a pack without the extra armor and haste that Bone Shield provides. As for runic power, don’t be afraid to hit abilities while you are gathering mobs to build up runic power. Just because you are gathering does not mean you can’t hit the mobs. This will help you twofold as well. You’ll be generating runic power as well as building threat on the mobs. Just having Bone Shield up and having runic power banked will help you a ton with surviving on pull, where Death Knight is typically at its weakest