Blood Death Knight Talents Guide

The general moves you’ll see in each build will be from Mythic+ build we will swap Blinding Sleet to March of Darkness you can also change this to Wraith Walk if you’d prefer. You do also have the option to swap Death’s Echo to Osmosis if you need the extra healing on sections via an activation through Anti-Magic Shell.

You do have another flex point with Soul Reaper, though I would absolutely recommend taking it, you could shift this to any of the other options listed above or Assimilation if for whatever reason that was required of you.

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The Class and Spec Tree both have some variation of choice pending raid and M+ content,and which hero talent structure you choose to follow in Deathbringer or San’layn.

On the class tree you have the following options, you can swap for one of the options in the Blue Circled talents, in this build I’ve selected Blinding Sleet. But you can swap that out for Assimilation, March of Darkness or Wraith Walk depending on your needs.

For M+ options if you needed another stun for example, you might elect to pick up Asphyxiate, but this is the most set and forget build for all forms of content.

Core Talents

The Death Knight class tree is incredibly strong and offers a good variety of talents that allow Blood access to many things we haven’t had recently. We’ll go over some of the core talents, ones that you will be taking no matter what and that have a direct impact on how you play, and then situational and utility talents.

Icebound Fortitude

Icebound Fortitude is a 30% DR and a stun immunity for 8 seconds, Icebound Fortitude is a powerful cooldown in the Blood DK Kit. It has also seen a change from Dragonflight to TWW with it now being a 2 minute baseline cooldown without the need to use a talent point to reduce the cooldown anymore.

Improved Death Strike

Improved Death Strike is a very powerful talent that we gain access to very early on into the tree. The 5% increased Death Strike healing is nice, but the real power comes from the 5 runic power cost reduction. This, tied with other talents like Ossuary, allows us to cast Death Strike very frequently due to the heavily reduced runic power.

Cleaving Strike

Another talent that buffs Death and Decay, Cleaving Strike allows you to cleave an additional 3 enemies whilst standing inside your Death and Decay. You also retain this bonus effect for 4 seconds when you leave your Death and Decay.

Anti-Magic Barrier

Anti-Magic Barrier has been incredibly powerful for a very long time, it just had the unfortunate situation of sharing the row with Will of the Necropolis. Now, with the talent trees, we gain access to it with very little cost. In situations where AMS is good this talent just makes it better.

Unholy Ground

Unholy Ground is one of the many talents that buffs Death and Decay, Unholy ground provides you with 5% increased haste while standing inside your Death and Decay. Similar to Improved Bone Shield and many other haste effects, this effect is multiplicative.

Permafrost

While it looks rather bland, Permafrost tied with other talents like Gloom Ward and Icy Talons on the class tree, and Sanguine Ground on the spec tree, become a very powerful passive ability. Being a 2-handed weapon spec, Blood’s melees typically hit for a decent amount. This tied with the auto attack speed increase from Icy Talons and haste, along with the absorb size increases from Gloom Ward, Sanguine Ground, and Vampiric Blood, allow for Permafrost to be quite a potent talent and absorb a lot of damage that comes your way.

Icy Talons

The 18% increased auto attack speed that Icy Talons gives is a very strong effect. Not only does it increase the amount of damage that our auto attacks do, but it also provides a lot of defensive benefit from Permafrost, and minor benefit from Runic Attenuation. In fact the benefit is so potent that you should strive to have 100% uptime on this buff throughout any encounter.

Gloom Ward

Gloom Ward is another simple, but very powerful talent. A flat 15% increase to absorbs is incredibly powerful once you start looking at how many absorbs blood actually has. Permafrost, as mentioned above, Anti-Magic Shell, and Blood Shield, from our mastery, all benefit. Gloom Ward also increases the value of external absorbs as well. So abilities like Power Word: Shield and Life Cocoon are increased, as well as absorb based trinkets.

Anti-Magic Zone

Anti-Magic Zone is a great raid cooldown that Death Knights bring. 15% magic damage reduction is very strong in certain encounters and your raid leader will love you for taking it. Do note that it is not increased by Gloom Ward despite stating that it is an absorb, this is similar to how Will of the Necropolis is treated.

Soul Reaper

Soul Reaper is VERY strong on pure single target fights, especially with the change to be copied by Dancing Rune Weapon and the rework of Eternal Bond to have the second weapon apply its own debuffs. The new talent tree moves enables us to flex pick this talent and now basically provides us with an easy to pick up execute. You do gain the talent also in a sense via Grim Reaper, but that comes linked to Reaper’s Mark, Soul Reaper is a fantastic addition to the kit for Raid and M+ now with no real downside to picking it up.

Unholy Endurance

Unholy Endurance is actually a rework of a mainstay Conduit from Shadowlands, Hardened Bones. In fact, it’s been buffed from its Shadowlands version to give even more damage reduction as well as increase the duration of Lichborne by 2 seconds. This adds another powerful cooldown to Bloods arsenal and is definitely a must take.

Will of the Necropolis

This staple of Blood is making a return yet again and is just as potent as ever. This effect allows you to dip below 30% without much worry and provides a very good safety net. I will note that even though the game displays Will of the Necropolis as an absorb, and things like Details! and Warcraft logs treat it as one, it is not affected by Gloom Ward, and it showing up as an absorb is just the game’s way of presenting it to you.

Vestigial Shell

Vestigial Shell causes Anti-Magic Shell to additionally grant 2 nearby allies a lesser version of the spell, that will reduce magic damage taken, but also reduce the duration of harmful magic effects against them by 50%. This is going to have fantastic applications in both M+ and Raid.

Subduing Grasp

Subduing Grasp causes enemies you grip to deal 6% reduced by damage to you for 6 seconds. This coupled with Abomination Limb and death grip means you can take advantage of an easy access DR if the mob is grippable.

Null Magic

Null Magic: Magic Damage taken is reduced by 8% and the duration of harmful magic effects is reduced by 35%. This furthermore powers Blood DK’s toolkit and its ability to deal with magic debuffs.

Situational Talents

Blinding Sleet

Blinding Sleet is very good for Blood. It’s an uncapped AoE stop that doesn’t share diminishing returns with many other stops. It’s relatively short cooldown of 1 minute and the 50% slow afterwards make it a very powerful tool for M+.

Coldthirst

Coldthirst causes successful Mind Freeze interrupts to grant an additional 10 runic power and reduce mind Freezes cooldown by 3 seconds.

Asphyxiate

Asphyxiate, the single target stun we have come to know and love is still available to us. It’s a bit outshined by Blinding Sleet, but there are certain situations where it’s still very powerful and it’s a good tool to have in Blood’s toolkit.

Death’s Echo

Whilst not as heavily required in The War Within, thanks to the change to Cleaving Strikes and that Perseverance of the Ebon Blade is now a default pick in the spec tree, Death’s Echo is still a very solid quality of life talent choice. It not only nets you an extra charge of Death Grip, but it also allows you to maintain an incredibly high uptime on Death and Decay with minimal effort or proc reliance.

Osmosis

Osmosis enables you to turn AMS into another increased healing cooldown. It’s need will likely be very niche and not an often choice for a pathway in the tree, but it’s good to have the option if certain encounter checkpoints called for it.

Never take these

Blood Scent

Blood Scent only grants leech which has never really been a strong secondary for Blood and nothing has changed.

Proliferating Chill

Chains of Ice is a button you almost never ever press as Blood, so spending a talent point on Proliferating Chill to make it hit an additional target is worthless and should be avoided at all costs.

Death Pact

Death Pact is just a worse Death Strike on a two minute cooldown with downsides. Never ever take this.

The spec tree allows you a few choices, pending again what hero talents and what content you’re doing and what is required of you in that content.

If you need Gorefiend’s Grasp for any reason then you can drop Hemostasis or Voracious to do so, though I wouldn’t advise this, as again you need to think about what you’re giving up to obtain this. However, if the encounter calls for it, or you just want it cause you think it makes you cool, then go ham.

If you wanted to juice as much damage for lower or trivial content, then you could drop Purgatory and pick up Carnage which makes for a powerful combo combined with Consumption. In a raid setting you could swap out Voracious for Bloodworms also, and change Consumption to Blooddrinker (you won’t run Carnage with Blooddrinker though).

Rune Tap

Rune Tap reduces all the damage you will take by 20% for 4 seconds at the cost of 1 Rune. And although the button itself may seem inexpensive, the talent point usually comes from Hemostasis, which is one of our strong sources of Death Strike healing in AoE. You would feel this loss the most in Mythic+, where you consistently hit maximum stacks for 40% added bonuses on Death Strike.

Each Rune spent on Rune Tap directly reduces your resource generation.

With Heartbreaker talented, every Heart Strike in AoE contributes just enough RP generally, to allow you to reach another Death Strike. Replacing these casts reduces your long-term throughput, making it more difficult to survive longer-lasting pulls.

Compounding Losses

Over an entire pull, the negative effects of Rune Tap stack together to create a downward spiral for your survivability. Fewer, Weaker Death Strike weaken your self-sustain and limits your ability to recover during large pulls with heavy AoE intake, although Rune Tap offers a short defensive window, the cumulative impact will lead to worse long-term survivability, and this is why the guide does not recommend it in standard Raid or Mythic+ builds.

Rune Tap can still be useful when a plan is in place.

Despite the long-term losses, there are times where the Blood DK toolkit is stretched too thin, and proper cooldown planning isn't enough to allow you to survive an encounter, it is then where we should take Rune Tap into consideration. These situations however, are few and far in-between and I strongly recommend that you first correctly evaluate your cooldown usage should you find yourself considering it.

Umbilicus Eternus

This talent grants you an absorb shield equal to five times your Blood Plague damage during Vampiric Blood, but the shield is only applied after Vampiric Blood ends. By that point, we are usually stable and have managed to pool a significant Blood Shield to help us bridge the gap to our next active cooldown.

“UE” doesn't come without a cost, either. We would have to drop Bloodshot for it, which is a consistent benefit across all content. This is because Blood Shield is always applied before the damage of Death Strike, meaning we gain the damage modifier from Bloodshot for "every single Death Strike".

Damage taken prioritises the most recently applied absorb first, meaning that every time you Death Strike with “UE” active, your Blood Shield 'wastes' potential “UE” absorb, and Death Strike healing also gets wasted, because of the “UE” shield until it has fully broken, by which point you've wasted your Death Strike and have no RP left to recover the situation.

In practice, “UE” can be used as a method of patching up inconsistencies, but this comes with an inhibited learning curve, and a loss to overall performance. It is up to you to decide if it is a worthy trade, but for now the guide does not recommend it, and instead advocates for fundamental improvement.

Spec Tree Talents

Dancing Rune Weapon, Insatiable Blade, and Everlasting Bond

Dancing Rune Weapon is an offensive and defensive button packed into 1 cooldown, you gain 35% parry chance on its activation, plus its ability to copy abilities in our toolkit. Insatiable Blade causes your activation of Dancing Rune Weapon to grant 5 Bone Shield Charges, and when a Bone Shield charge is consumed the cooldown of Dancing Rune Weapon is reduced by 5 seconds. Everlasting Bond summons an additional copy of the Rune Weapon and increases its duration by 6 seconds.

Coagulopathy

Coagulopathy is a flat 5% damage increase to targets affected by your Blood Plague. This means you always want to have Blood Plague up on every target you are attacking. Additionally, your rune weapons also benefit from this, so make sure to apply their Blood Plagues as soon as they are summoned. The second part of Coagulopathy is a damage increase to Blood Plague itself by 30%, stacking up to 5 times for a total of 150%. This makes Blood Plague hit VERY hard, especially in AoE, and is the second buff you gain that requires you to Death Strike often to keep it up.

Sanguine Ground

Sanguine Ground is another reason to always be inside Death and Decay. A 6% damage increase and 5% healing increase is nothing to scoff at. This talent alone would be enough to warrant standing in Death and Decay as much as possible.

Shattering Bone

Shattering Bone does an absurd amount of damage, both on single target and in AoE, and is the biggest reason to strive for 100% uptime on Death and Decay. The damage done by Shattering Bones is tripled while you are inside Death and Decay. This, on top of it being uncapped AoE makes this talent one of the strongest ones on the Blood spec tree.

Bloodshot

Bloodshot is absolutely amazing. Currently how the game works is that when you Death Strike, Blood Shield is applied before the damage event, meaning you get the 25% physical damage increase to every single Death Strike. However, this is a bug, and the devs have stated that they will fix it, but until they do this talent is an incredibly potent damage option for both raid and M+. Once it’s fixed, you’ll likely drop it for M+, but it will still be worth it in raid.

Red Thirst

Red Thirst got an upgrade coming into The War Within. It was condensed from a 2 point node to a single spend node, now giving you the full value at only a 1 point spend. This reduces the cooldown on Vampiric Blood by 2 seconds per 10 runic power spent. This talent brings the total uptime of Vampiric Blood to around 45-50% and just adds to the power of this cooldown.

Tombstone

Tombstone has had a hell of a glow-up the last few tiers. While the spell itself hasn’t changed, the interactions it has with other abilities has caused its value to skyrocket. In season 3 and 4 of Shadowlands it was primarily used to reduce the cooldown of Dancing Rune Weapon to obtain very high levels of uptime on the ability. In Dragonflight, it has done so much more. In fact, it does so much that it has become our single most important and impactful cooldown.

There are 3 considerations you should make around your Tombstone usage

• You’ll gain more than 20 seconds of CDR from Tombstone on your DRW
• You’ll consume 5 Bone Shield charges
• You’re standing inside your Death and Decay

When you use Tombstone correctly it will:

• Give you a 30% max HP absorb shield
• 30 runic power
• Up to 25 seconds of cooldown reduction on Dancing Rune Weapon from Insatiable Blade
• Deal 160% AP uncapped AoE damage from Shattering Bones

Proper usage of Tombstone will make or break how much damage you do.

Consumption

Consumption is back! Not like it was in Legion, but at least we can press it again. This strikes all enemies in front of you and heals you for 150% of the damage done on a 30 second cooldown. The real value however comes in the fact that it causes your Blood Plague damage to occur 30% quicker for 6 seconds, which feeds amazing into Infliction of Sorrow if you’re playing San’layn, and also directly interacts with Coagulopathy causing a big amp to your damage and bonus healing via Blood Plague. To ice the cake you also get 2 runes refunded each time you press this.

Blooddrinker

Blooddrinker is a solid raid talent choice, the big advantage with Blooddrinker is that you can actually be channeling this as you run into melee range on the boss, and cast Dancing Rune Weapon at the same time without breaking the channel. Whilst channeling the selected enemy deals 15% reduced damage to you, which also lasts for a further 5 seconds after completion of the channeled cast.

Carnage

Carnage is the new talent on the block, this causes Blooddrinker and Consumption to now contribute to your Mastery: Blood Shield. Each time an enemy strikes your Blood Shield, the cooldowns of Blooddrinker and Consumption (whichever you have talented) have a chance to be reset. This proc is hasted, and the talent is very valuable in M+ when paired with consumption though due to the nature of raiding and varied uptime on taking direct damage from the boss it’ll be unlikely that this is a recommended raid talent choice.

Bonestorm

It took a long time, but we are finally back. Bonestorm is once again a standard pick in your talent pathways, due to the huge ability to impact cooldown reduction on Dancing Rune Weapon. Bonestorm can consume up to 5 Bone Shield charges at once, netting you a max of 25 seconds CDR on your Dancing Rune Weapon. You combine this with Tombstone and you have some nutty uptime on DRW. Bonestorm also feeds into Shattering Bone making this a very satisfying button press once again.

Hero Talents become available at level 71 and as you level you unlock each talent slot on the chosen trees. Blood Death Knights have a choice between San’layn (the right side) and Deathbringer (the left side).

It’s important to highlight, straight off the bat, that unless you’re chasing the boundaries of cutting edge content in a raid environment or mythic+, both hero talents are viable and suitable for all available content.

Deathbringer

Deathbringer sits upon a throne of rewarding gameplay loops and cool ass visuals. Deathbringer offers a reward for solid gameplay and delivers on a thematic concept that we all wish San’layn captured.

Deathbringer’s gameplay revolves around the talent Reaper’s Mark, this ability impacts a single enemy, with a 12 second debuff, this debuff stacks to a max of 40, then explodes for damage.

The way you build these 40 stacks is linked to your rotational gameplay. Good rotational gameplay will see you making 40 stacks for a big bang, poor rotational gameplay will see fall short. The Deathbringer hero talent tree is built to assist you though, thus striking an awesome balance between the hero talents and the class itself.

How Do The Stacks Work?

Explain the stacks to me like I’m 5, do I get 1 stack per button press or what’s the go? Is it spammy to reach 40 stacks?

Your stacks are generated via shadow damage, with special shadowfrost damage netting you extra stacks. The Deathbringer talent tree arms you with a range of talents that make all of this very manageable just by executing your rotation. To highlight some of these key talents

• Bind In Darkness causes your Blood Boil’s damage type to be changed to Shadowfrost damage. It also causes Shadowfrost damage to apply 2 stacks to Reaper’s Mark and 4 stacks for Critical Strikes.
• Wither Away causes your Blood Plague to tick 100% faster meaning more stacks.
• Dark Talons - This causes your Marrowrend and Heart Strikes to have a 25% chance to grant 3 stacks of Icy Talons and increase its max stacks. It also causes your Runic Spending abilities to count as Shadowfrost damage whilst Icy Talons is active.

Reaper’s Mark.

If you have Reaper’s Mark on a target and the debuff detonates, or that target dies before the debuff can actually detonate OR if that target falls below 35% health, then your next 2 Marrowrend casts will come at a reduced cost of one rune and summon 2 scythes to strike your enemies.

So the good thing from this straight away is that for all your marrowrends now you will basically be always casting them at a reduced cost, which is amazing for our gameplay loop. When you cast your empowered marrowrend it will also trigger the capstone of the Deathbringer hero talent tree Exterminate, this causes thematically awesome Scythes to strike out at enemies around you, Exterminate also reaps a Bonestorm for 2 seconds after you use it, luckily this extends our active bonestorm and doesn’t conflict at all rotationally.

So When Do I Send Reaper’s Mark?

From a rotational aspect you want to be hitting Reaper’s Mark just before your Dancing Rune Weapon in your set up, but you also want to get the most out of your Wave of Souls as it deals a huge portion of your damage, as the cd is a short 45 seconds, it’s not worth holding for long periods if you can line it up with a large pack in M+ then it’s worth a few seconds, otherwise just send it on down the line.

The Deathbringer Hero Talents

• Wave of Souls - causes your application of Reaper’s Mark to send forth a large burst of damage by sending shadowfrost damage both ways (out and back) through enemies caught in its path. Wave of Souls is always a critical strike on the pathway back through enemies also, causing enemies to take 5% increased shadowfrost damage for 15 seconds. The reason you want to send this just prior to your Dancing Rune Weapon is to maximize stacks and damage, that doesn’t mean you want to overly delay in casting, but do use your brain around getting max value in a pack from it, rather than casting it into a single mob then moving into a pack etc.
• Soul Rupture when Reaper’s Mark detonates it explodes dealing 20% of the damage dealt to nearby enemies. There is also a defensive gain to this, in that enemies hit by this deal 5% reduced physical damage to you for 10 seconds.
• Grim Reaper, Reaper’s Mark initial strike grants 3 charges of Bone Shield. Reaper’s Mark explosion deals up to 30% increased damage based on your target's missing health.
• Reaper of Souls - When you apply your Reaper’s Mark the cooldown of Soul Reaper is reset. Your next Soul Reaper costs no runes, and it explodes on the target regardless of their health (instead of the 35%) Soul Reapers damage is also increased by 20%.
• Rune Carved Plates gives us extremely high uptime on 7.5% Physical and Magic DR. Rune Carved Plates create a really fine balance between your ability to spend runes and generate runes. Having a 5 stack of each (spent and earned) nets you 7.5% DR and this can refresh at 5 stacks; however, the window is very tight and rotational misplays will punish you in regard to this buff uptime. At higher haste values, it should become easier, but for the first season 1 of the TWW this is going to require some brain power in your rotation.
• Swift and Painful - If no enemy is struck by your soul rupture, you gain 10% strength for 8 seconds. Wave of Souls is 100% more effective on the main target of your Reaper’s Mark.

Your Deathbringer Talent setup will look like this.

At the moment the only real change that can happen from these choice nodes, is us swapping into ‘Reaper’s Onslaught’ from ‘Dark Talons’ upon obtaining the Season 3 Tier Set, this ensures that we get as many Exterminates as possible, since we will be reducing the cooldown on Reaper’s Mark, and always gaining two Exterminates when we press it.

What About Exterminate Procs? (The Big Scythes From My Marrowrends)

Exterminate does A LOT of damage, on Single Target if you have an Exterminate just send it, the most important things to avoid here are:

• A) Spend Exterminate charges before your Reaper’s Mark expires.
• B) Try to avoid casting Exterminate inside of Dancing Rune Weapon, they will only duplicate the Marrowrend cast, not Exterminate.

For AOE situations/M+ much like in Single Target, it’s a huge damage gain to send your Exterminate. The most important thing here is again, just to make sure that you spend your second charge (from the 2pc) before your Reaper’s Mark expires.

San’layn

Since the introduction of the Season 3 Tier Sets, San’layn has maintained a height in popularity among players, it is currently stronger in most cases than Deathbringer, and thematically has the potential to perfectly inhibit the essence of Blood DK.

San’layn revolves all around the use of Dancing Rune Weapon, and wanting to press it off cooldown. Luckily we should already be using talents like Bonestorm and Tombstone to accomplish this via Insatiable Blade.

We will also be pushed to be better at leveraging Consumption rotationally, which we’ll cover later.

The first talent on the talent tree is Vampiric Strike, this replaces your heart strike either when you get a proc of Essence of the Blood Queen via Death Strike or when Dancing Rune Weapon is active. You can proc a Vampiric Strike after a Death Strike but the chance is fairly low at 35% each cast but during Dancing Rune Weapon your heart strike will always be replaced for the duration with Vampiric Strike.

Vampiric Strike heals you for 1% of your max HP and grants you stacks of Essence of the Blood Queen, these stacks last for 25 seconds and refresh on application. Each stack grants you 1% haste, capping at 5 stacks or 5% haste. Thanks to the bottom capstone talent Gift of the San’layn your Essence of the Blood Queen effects are increased by 200% during Dancing Rune Weapon

From inception San’layn has been plagued with issues from a performance perspective when placed next to Deathbringer. The idea was to have this fast past ravager styled hero system, and when it was designed around Vampiric Blood (even with all its faults) you had that degen gameplay loop and you sort of got a sense of that frenzy styled play.

In the latest search for a fix it has been changed to active from Dancing Rune Weapon, which as mentioned is a better change. But honestly, it just feels really lackluster to play and boring (except for that one pack in the dungeon where you get Blood Beast RNG and do 4 million dps, that’s cool). There are positives for sure, we get Vampiric Blood back as a cooldown you can allocate to better use, but when you switch from DB to San’layn you really notice how empty it feels. The week after patch 11.0.5 dropped Blizzard hit another load of buffs to San’layn in the hopes it’ll push people towards it. I think this is a real shame on what this hero talent system could have been and what it’s ended up as sadly.

The San’layn Hero Talents

The hero talent tree for San’layn is built around building up stacks of Essence of the Blood Queen to increase your haste, leech and stack damage modifiers. Some of the key talents in the tree are

• Vampiric Strike Gives your death coil and death strike a 35% chance to make your next Heart Strike become a Vampiric Strike.
• Blood-Soaked Ground gives you a 5% Physical DR whilst standing in your Death and Decay and you also gain an extra 5% chance to proc a Vampiric Strike.
• Vampiric Aura gives you empowered leech when Lichborne is active and enables this to 4 allies within 12 yards.
• Frenzied Bloodthirst grants you 2 additional stacks of Essence of the Blood Queen (making this 7 stacks at 7% haste) and Increased the damage of your Death Strike by 6% per stack
• Infliction of Sorrow does insane damage, that also feeds into Vampiric Strike, as when Vampiric Strike damages an enemy with Blood Plague it extends the duration of the disease by 3 seconds and deals 10% of the remaining damage to the enemy. Your first Heart Strike after Dancing Rune Weapon ends will also *completely consume your Blood plague for 130% of remaining damage, This is further amplified by Consumption when played correctly.
• Visceral Strength: Upon consuming Crimson Scourge, gain 12% Strength for 12 seconds. When Blood Boil hits 2 or more targets, you will also gain 1 charge of Bone Shield.

Your talent setup for San’layn will look like this

The only realistic change you could make would be swapping Newly Turned for Vampiric Speed, though I recommend sticking with Newly Turned as somebody taking a Combat Res with full HP and an absorb can be a game-changer.

So How Do You play it?

As mentioned San’layn revolves around Dancing Rune Weapon and your ability to work with Bonestorm and Tombstone to set those windows up as frequently as possible for each rotation and then filling GCD’s with Vampiric Strike. It’s not all mindless spam though, you do need to set your Dancing Rune Weapon windows up to maximize throughput.

Before Dancing Rune Weapon

1. Death Strike just prior to pressing Dancing Rune Weapon this will ensure you have the coagulopathy buff, as this feeds into Blood Plague damage.
2. Blood Boil so that all targets have their Blood Plague refreshed to 30 seconds.
3. Drop Death and Decay for cleaving strikes and the extra haste, damage and healing.
4. Then cast Dancing Rune Weapon

During Dancing Rune Weapon

1. Cast Blood Boil so that you have 3 copies of Blood Plague on the target/s
2. Cast Bonestorm to start reducing your Dancing Rune Weapon cooldown (it also does alot of damage, assisted by Blood Beast)
3. Press Vampiric Strike below 75 RP, and Press Death Strike when above it.
4. When your Dancing Rune Weapon hits 4-5 seconds remaining, use Consumption as this will cause your Blood Plague to tick faster feeding further into Infliction of Sorrow.

When Dancing Rune Weapon has ended, you want to cast Heart Strike to consume your Blood Plague via Infliction of Sorrow, and then instantly Blood Boil to re-apply Blood Plague.

So Which Hero Talent Do You Choose?

As I mentioned at the start of the Hero Talent system, if you fit into 99% of the WoW population that isn’t on the bleeding edge of content you can pick whatever takes your fancy and lines up with your own sense of fantasy, we are after all, playing a game here. If however, you do want the best choice via numbers then here it is.

Mythic+ (San’layn)

Since Season 3 hit, the San’layn tier set bonus far outclasses that of the Deathbringer set, which actually turned out to be a damage loss compared to the previous season.

That being said, in patch 11.2.5 Deathbringer began to see a rise in popularity for M+ Specifically, and this stays true for patch 11.2.7, due to the majority of users dropping a lot of the talents that make San’layn so good, to the point where Deathbringer actually takes over. I’ve yet to see good reasoning to do this however, so I will recommend San’layn regardless. It has higher damage potential and the difference in survivability between the two hero talents is not staggering enough to swing the needle just yet.

Raiding (San’layn)

Hero talents for raiding remains a non-decision going into Season 3 and even through to patch 11.2.7, there was no real changes to the spec and San’layn simply left Deathbringer in the dust once again.