Blood Death Knight Frequently Asked Questions — The War Within (11.0.5)

Blood has no "soft caps" or "minimum thresholds" (unless you're playing Deathbringer) with any Haste or any other secondary stat. Secondary stats for Blood are all close enough to each other in value that you should prioritize item level over secondary stat itemization for nearly any piece of gear except trinkets and rings.

In case you would like more details on stats and their interactions for Blood Death Knights, a more expansive stats page is available below:

For Horde players, we recommend Blood Elves. Arcane Torrent is a powerful ability, particularly in Mythic+ dungeons.

For Alliance players, we recommend Night Elves or Dwarves. The choice is between a complete purge of debuffs and an additional minor defensive cooldown ( Stoneform) or a way to drop yourself out of combat, along with being able to redirect or delay spells cast on you ( Shadowmeld).

This is the main question most people will ask with tanking. The basic answer is that, outside of cooldown usage, most of your toolkit does not have defense vs. offense trade-offs. Whether you play offensively or defensively, you will still maintain Bone Shield at 5+ stacks, you will still spend both Runes and Runic Power optimally, and you will still make sure not to cap Blood Boil charges.

The major difference lies in cooldown usage. In practice, we recommend people to go into a new encounter making sure to plan their cooldowns in order to not die. This can be easily done by checking logs of other players having progressed a fight (or just going blindly in by yourself!), and mapping out what cooldowns you will use for which mechanic.

The most common changes if more situational defensiveness is necessary are listed below:

1. If you can manage to drastically reduce the danger of an encounter by having 30-35 second cooldown on Vampiric Blood instead of the usual 45-55 seconds, and damage is not an issue, and you do not mind losing a bit of upfront healing on Death Strike, you can elect to drop Hemostasis and reallocate this point to Red Thirst. This is encounter-specific and has no current use-case, but it serves as a good theoretical example where cooldown planning helps figure out the right tools for the job
2. If your cooldown plan still necessitates more than you currently have, evaluate whether you can allocate a group external cooldown to it (something like Blessing of Sacrifice from a paladin). If you cannot, or if things hit too frequently or too hard for your current kit, you can consider a defensive trinket to fill a gap in you cooldown plan, or an external from a party member. Don't forget Anti-Magic Zone - most Blood Death Knights tend to forget that it is technically a 20% damage reduction effect against magic damage for you, not just for your group!
3. Replace one or both of your trinkets with pure DPS trinkets. This is often the easiest and most significant change you can make. Note that very few trinkets exist in The War Within that are tanking-specific; you should feel comfortable using a non-tanking trinket that provides advantageous stats without feeling like you are impairing your survivability.
4. If all else fails, review encounter mechanics you are struggling with, and decide whether a change of Phial is in order. If it is a tankbuster, Phial of Icy Preservation can situationally have massively more value. If a mechanic you struggle with is reduced by Avoidance, check if you can change Bracer and Cloak enchants to gain 5% more damage reduction on it.

The Blood Death Knight module for SimulationCraft is well-maintained and can generally be relied upon to help understand the effect to the damage output your gear, talent, and Conduit choices can have.

That having been said, SimulationCraft cannot be used to evaluate defensive choices. Do not consider simulations in a vacuum; a choice having the highest damage potential does not make it the best choice.