Death Knight Hero Talents — The War Within (11.0.5)

This page is specifically about Hero Talents in The War Within. If you want to learn more about the best regular talents for Blood Death Knight, check out our Talents page:

Deathbringer is the strongest hero talent for raiding, as it provides the most offensive and defensive benefits. However, the defensive benefits are all dependent on managing your runes well and playing optimally.

San'layn's core value is its lack of button bloat, as it brings no new ability. This is as far as the simplicity goes, however, as it is both more punishing, more complex, more reliant on constant melee uptime and lucky Vampiric Strike procs at the right time in order to be able to keep Essence of the Blood Queen stacks rolling.

Dancing Rune Weapon activates Gift of the San'layn, and provides a significant window of strength. When it ends, the race for the next Dancing Rune Weapon - and the period of scarcity - begins.

Deathbringer is the strongest hero talent for Mythic+ as it provides the most offensive and defensive benefits. However, the defensive benefits are all dependent on managing your runes well and playing optimally.

The core gameplay loop revolves around managing Reaper's Mark properly, along with all of its additional effects. Reaper's Mark deals a significant amount of upfront damage to its target on application, and to nearby targets through Wave of Souls, and grants you a free cast of Soul Reaper. While it is active, each instance of shadow damage grants it an additional stack, and each instance of Shadowfrost damage grants it 2 stacks (and multiplies those by 2 if it crit).

When Reaper's Mark reaches 40 stacks, expires or the enemy it was on reaches 35% once every 2 minutes, it detonates, dealing damage depending on how many stacks it expired on, causes all enemies near the detonation to deal 5% less physical damage to you for 10 seconds, and grants you two stacks of Exterminate, allowing you to cast two one-rune Marrowrends that each deal significant bonus single-target and AoE damage (almost as much as a 40-stack Reaper's Mark itself), and have a 30% chance to reapply Reaper's Mark to their primary target.

Deathbringer excels at priority damage, AoE damage and defensive value, and it does all three of these consistently.

San'layn swaps between two modes: a "high tide" during Dancing Rune Weapon with a massive haste buff, frequent availability of Vampiric Strike and relatively carefree nature - at least on the surface. When Dancing Rune Weapon ends, the troubles begin, and so does the frantic race to the next Dancing Rune Weapon - relying on scarce Vampiric Strike procs to stay afloat.

The changes to San'layn in 11.0.5 are overwhelmingly negative and disturbed a very precarious but optimizable mess, and turned it into something that is neither fulfilling nor fun, all while putting an emphasis on the randomness of it even more. While it excelled at single-target for a short period, it now excels at nothing while being extremely difficult to play optimally everywhere.

2.

Best Hero Talent Builds for Blood Death Knight

Deathbringer Raiding Build Deathbringer Mythic+ Build San'layn Raiding Build San'layn Mythic+ Build

Deathbringer adds Reaper's Mark to your toolkit. There are three methods in which Reaper's Mark can be applied to a target:

• Casting Reaper's Mark on the target.
• When a target affected with Reaper's Mark dies, the mark will seek the closest nearby target in combat and re-apply itself to them.
• Casting Marrowrend (with Exterminate stacks) has a 30% chance to apply Reaper's Mark to the target.

Your goal is to game Reaper's Mark and Exterminate in order to cause as many Reaper's Marks to detonate as possible during an encounter. On single-target, this is largely down to using all Exterminate procs. In AoE, this involves spending Exterminate stacks on targets not marked by Reaper's Mark while leaving a handful of Global Cooldowns between applications in order to be able to spend Exterminate stacks when the first one detonates.

Reaper's Mark will last on the target for 12 seconds before exploding and triggering Wave of Souls. However, you can detonate it early by dealing a total of 40 separate instances of Shadow damage, with Shadowfrost damage counting double (or quadruple if they crit). A very large number of abilities in our kit allow you to gain stacks on Reaper's Mark, with the main contributors being Blood Plague (which ticks every 1.5s before talents for Deathbringer players), Death and Decay (14 stacks per cast), Tombstone (11 stacks if cast immediately before or after Reaper's Mark, though we do not recommend syncing these up), Abomination Limb (13 stacks), and the free Soul Reaper granted by Reaper of Souls (4-8 stacks).

Effectively gaming re-applications of Reaper's Mark this causes you to gain a significant amount of offensive and defensive value:

• Every Exterminate cast is the most efficient bone generator in your kit in addition to being the highest damage button in your kit. The only better RP generator in your kit is Heart Strike in AoE (25 RP for 1 rune vs. 20 RP for 1 rune)
• Applying Reaper's Mark also causes Soul Rupture to be applied when it detonates, making you take less physical damage for 10 seconds.
• Reaper's Mark, Exterminate, Wave of Souls and all other related effects are some of the highest damaging effects in your kit in The War Within, particularly on single target.

It is worth noting that the number of stacks on Reaper's Mark are just damage, but reaching 40 stacks is done trivially by following your rotation as you normally would, with three simple changes:

1. If you are about to hard-cast Reaper's Mark, make sure Blood Plague is already ticking on the target.
2. While Reaper's Mark is on a target, make sure you have Death and Decay ticking under them. It is very often worth to just recast it when it fades if you have a Crimson Scourge proc or play Death's Echo.

Thanks to the talent rework in 11.0.5, it is not longer worthwhile to de-prioritize Death Strike while Reaper's Mark is active, as it now counts as Shadowfrost damage on the target. Instead, you should aim to specifically only cast Death Strike on a target marked with Reaper's Mark while at least one Reaper's Mark is active. And - it goes without saying - you should play as normal when no Reaper's Mark is present on any target.

Whilst the absence of a new ability might at first look like simplicity, San'layn's rotational changes could not be further from the truth. At various points in the back-and-forth loop that Gift of the San'layn introduces, San'layn arbitrarily causes you to ignore certain resources entirely. In order to explain the implications, let us first explain the basics of the hero talent tree.

When you cast Dancing Rune Weapon, for the duration of it, Heart Strike is permanently replaced with Vampiric Strike, a shadowy version of itself that deals more direct damage, extends Blood Plague by 3s (and allows you to bypass its pandemic cap), and grants you a stack of Essence of the Blood Queen, increasing your haste and the damage of Death Strike. This buff stacks up to 7, lasts 20 seconds and is refreshed to its original duration only when Vampiric Strike is cast.

Outside of Dancing Rune Weapon, casting Death Strike has a combined 30% chance to enable a cast of Vampiric Strike, allowing you to refresh Essence of the Blood Queen to its original 20 second duration outside of Dancing Rune Weapon and giving you a precarious time advantage while racing for the next Dancing Rune Weapon cast.

Because of this loop, you have a perverse incentive to ignore certain resources:

• Before casting Dancing Rune Weapon, you will want to burn off all of the resources that you will not need during it. In practice, this means every charge of Blood Boil and as much Runic Power as you can, since you have a very strong incentive not to cast Death Strike during Gift of the San'layn beyond the bare minimum needed to maintain Coagulopathy (every GCD during it could be a Vampiric Strike). Beyond the obvious reasons, this also implicitly guarantees that you enter Dancing Rune Weapon with enough runes to sustain pressing Vampiric Strike almost non-stop for 14 seconds.
• During Dancing Rune Weapon, you will cast Blood Boil once to apply plague copies, and Death Strike only to maintain Coagulopathy. You have a very strong incentive to hoard as much of the Runic Power generated from casting Vampiric Strike in order to fish for Vampiric Strike procs when Dancing Rune Weapon runs out.
• After Dancing Rune Weapon, you will predictably cast three GCDs in a row to consume Infliction of Sorrow efficiently: Heart Strike - Blood Boil - Death Strike. The goal from there is to fish for Vampiric Strike procs while using all of the tools you neglected during Dancing Rune Weapon.

As Dancing Rune Weapon's cooldown is variable and the proc chance on Vampiric Strike is slightly larger than it used to be (but still not large enough!), you need to cash in one proc every 20 seconds to keep Essence of the Blood Queen stacks rolling. Since even under optimal constraints, it is difficult to cast Death Strike more frequently than every 4 seconds, this gives you a ~75% chance to keep your stacks on a rolling 20 second chance. An implicit assumption the rotation page will make in this guide is that we will engineer everything to come out of Dancing Rune Weapon with nearly full Runic Power. In AoE, this loop goes on for 30-35 seconds (for a total of 50 seconds), increasing the moment you need to hold Dancing Rune Weapon. On single-target, this can go on for upwards of 50 seconds, requiring three timed procs to keep Essence of the Blood Queen stacks rolling.

Does this sound sketchy? It absolutely does! 11.0.5 has brought back the entire casino element that players despised on Beta, reduced the power of the Hero Talent. The rotation page of the guide goes into a lot more depth on how to optimize this beast, but the payoff is vanishingly small.