PvE Blood Death Knight Tank Rotation & Cooldowns

wotlk classic pve blood death knight tank rotation & cooldowns

When it comes to the abilities and possible rotations for a Death Knight, we have to take into consideration the fact that the class itself uses two special types of resources. With this in mind, there are two things that we have to talk about. First of all, it is unbelievably easy to mess up your rotation due to how our runes work. Secondly, we have to take into consideration that there is a major difference between a properly done rotation and a completely random button-mash. In this section of the guide, we will explain how to properly utilize both your Runes and Runic power and how to properly perform your rotation whether it might be on a Single-Target raid boss or an AoE situation in a dungeon filled with monsters.

Simple Rotation

Abilities Overview

  • Plague Strike is an ability that deals physical damage while also placing a disease on a target named Blood Plague. This can be considered one of your core abilities. When taking into consideration the glyphs that we are using, this ability will only be used at the beginning of the fight, as long as you properly upkeep your diseases.
  • Icy Touch is an ability that deals Frost Damage to the target, reducing its attack speed by 20% while also placing a disease named Frost Fever on the target. This will be the most important ability in your arsenal as a Blood Death Knight as it generates the highest amount of threat in the entire game when used in Frost Presence. You should aim to spam this ability as much as possible!
  • Pestilence is an ability that allows you to spread your diseases to all nearby targets within a 15-yard radius of your primary target. This ability is extremely powerful when using Glyph of Disease, as it can reset the duration of all the diseases you have previously placed on all the targets afflicted by them at the same time.
  • Rune Strike is an ability that has a special prerequisite in order to be used. This ability uses Runic Power while also having the special condition that you have to either dodge an attack or parry an attack in order to be able to utilize it. You will find yourself casting this ability constantly, dealing a lot of damage to your target, especially due to the fact that this ability is not affected by Global Cooldown. You can macro this ability to all of your other abilities in order to utilize it while also casting another ability.
  • Death Coil is an ability that uses runic power in order to either deal shadow damage to a target or heal a friendly undead target. As a Blood Death Knight, you will only want to utilize this ability if you choose to pick Lichborne!
  • Death and Decay is an area of effect ability that places a zone on the ground that deals high damage to all the targets present in the area. You will only want to utilize this ability after you spread your diseases to all present targets.
  • Blood Boil is an AoE ability that deals shadow damage to all targets in a 10-yard radius, dealing additional damage to targets afflicted by Blood Plague or Frost Fever. You will only want to utilize this ability after you make sure that every single target has been afflicted by one of your diseases, ideally using it after you placed Death and Decay on the ground.
  • Blood Strike is an ability that deals physical damage while also dealing increased damage for each of your diseases present on the target by 12.5%. This ability doesn’t deal a lot of damage, but it is important because it uses up your Blood Runes, which in turn activates your Blade Barrier talent!
  • Army of the Dead is an ability that allows you to summon multiple ghouls to aid you in battle. This ability should be considered one of your burst tools and should be cast right before the eve of battle, as it requires extensive channel time.
  • Empower Rune Weapon can be considered another burst ability, as it allows you to reset the cooldown of all your runes and gain 25 runic power. You will want to utilize this ability as fast as possible after the initial moment of the encounter, as it will allow you to consistently perform abilities without being hindered too much by downtime. Another reason why you will want to utilize this ability as fast as possible is its extensive cooldown.
  • Raise Dead is one of the Death Knight trademark abilities which allows you to utilize corpse dust in order to raise a terrifying ghoul to assail your enemies. However, this morbid creature can not last indefinitely, and will eventually rot away. You can utilize this ability in order to either quickly heal yourself with Death Pact or to deal additional damage during a boss fight.
  • Death Strike is an ability that deals physical damage while also healing you for 5% for each of your diseases present on the target. As a Blood Death Knight, Death Strike will be one of your most-used abilities, standing as a true testament to your endless self-heal properties. Death Strike also transforms the runes it uses into Death Runes, allowing you to utilize them in various ways!
  • Heart Strike is an ability that allows you to deal physical damage to two targets at the same time, enhanced by each disease present on the target. Heart Strike deals reduced damage on the second target. This ability is best used during dungeons, as it has little to no impact in raids.
  • Death Pact is a defensive ability that sacrifices a ghoul in order to restore health to the Death Knight. This ability can be utilized in conjunction with Army of the Dead, even while having the ghoul active from Raise Dead, thus resulting in consuming one of the ghouls from Army of the Dead instead of your main ghoul.
  • Icebound Fortitude is a defensive ability that reduces all incoming damage received by 30% while also granting a bonus damage reduction based on your defense rating. This ability also makes you immune to stun effects, however, it can not be used while you are stunned. You should always use this ability when you are about to take heavy damage from a raid or dungeon mechanic as it can prove to be a life-saver. However, you should never utilize this ability randomly!
  • Anti-Magic Shell is an ability that provides a magical absorption barrier, just like the name implies, that provides you with Runic Power as it absorbs more damage. This spell can be used to negate magical debuffs and effects placed on you, making it a great tool in order to cancel either raid or dungeon mechanics. You got two options when it comes to this ability, you can either save it for important raid or dungeon mechanics, or you can utilize it in order to gain more runic power, allowing you to effectively spam Rune Strike for a short duration.
  • Vampiric Blood is an ability that allows you to increase your health by 15% for a limited duration while also increasing the health generated by spells and effects by 35%. This ability is extremely potent and should always be used in conjunction with Rune Tap and Death Strike. This ability will also empower any other type of healing effect placed on you.
  • Rune Tap is an ability that allows you to directly convert one of your blood runes into 10% of your max health. This ability is extremely potent and should be used whenever available, especially if you utilize the glyph of Rune Tap.
  • Forceful Deflection is a passive effect that increases your parry rating by 25% of your total strength. This ability alone is one of the main reasons why Blood Death Knights stack as much strength as possible!
  • Horn of Winter is an ability that buffs all allies in your vicinity, offering 155 Strength and 155 Agility while also providing you with 10 runic power. This ability can be utilized during your rotation as it has a short cooldown, providing you with runic power, especially useful when your runes are on cooldown. Sadly, Horn of Winter does not stack with other effects that offer the same type of buff, making it entirely useless if there is a shaman utilizing the Strength of Earth Totem in your raid or group.
  • Raise Ally is one of the rare abilities that you can find in the game, allowing you to resurrect an ally during combat. However, unlike the druid’s ability, Raise Ally has a gimmick embedded into it. You can offer one of your allies the chance to come back to life and aid in the battle once again, however, they will be raised as a ghoul, having access to special abilities for a limited duration. Due to this gimmick, Raise Ally can not be considered a true combat resurrection ability but more of a Second Wind.
  • Chains of Ice is one of your strongest crowd control abilities, allowing you to severely dampen a foe’s movement speed, reducing it initially by 95%. The target of this ability will then recover 10% of their lost movement speed each second for a duration of 10 seconds. This ability is extremely powerful when dealing with extremely dangerous adds. You can utilize it to either save a healer that has grabbed aggro of a threatening mob or to impair a mob that can be blasted away by your ranged allies before it can reach squishy targets.
  • Blood Tap is an ability that allows you to change one of your blood runes to a death rune at the cost of health, the conversion itself lasting for 20 seconds. This ability can be utilized in your rotation to acquire more death runes which in turn you will want to utilize on more casts of Icy Touch!
  • Strangulate is an ability that can silence a target for up to 5 seconds. While this ability is mainly used in PvP content, it can be utilized in PvE scenarios as a long-range interrupt effect. Remember to use it against pesky caster mobs!
  • Mind Freeze is your main interrupt tool that can be cast without any cost whatsoever, having a mere 10-second cooldown. Remember to always bind this ability on your action bar, as many encounters will display abilities that require interrupts. You will often find yourself recognizing what abilities to interrupt after a short while but you will also often find yourself in situations where your raid leader will request an interrupt on a certain ability.
  • Death Grip is an ability that allows you to displace a target, effectively grabbing it from its location and placing it in front of you. This ability, while it mainly has PvP uses, will be one of the best tools that tanks can hope for, as you can directly pull a pesky ranged or caster mob directly in front of you while also taunting the target forcing it to attack you for 3 seconds.
  • Path of Frost is an ability that allows you and your allies to form icy patches under your feet while standing on water, effectively allowing you to walk on water. his ability is mainly used to help you during traveling and leveling but it can also be used as a gimmick to troll other players in encounters such as Anub’arak, providing them with a quick and sudden death. (Yes, I am teaching them how to troll people, let them have some fun :XO)
  • Dark Command is an ability that allows you to taunt a target, having only an 8-second cooldown, making it extremely potent. As a general rule of thumb, this will be your main taunting ability! Dark Command should never be used to initiate a fight, instead, it should be used to swap aggro with your off-tank or main-tank, to effectively perform most raid mechanics properly.
  • Unholy Frenzy is an ability that allows you to place a buff on a friendly target, increasing its physical damage by up to 20% for 30 seconds. While this effect is active, the target loses 1% health each second. This is one of the strongest utility cooldowns that you can provide for a raid group and should always be used on the highest damage dealer available in your raid group! Do not use this on a caster!

  • Blood Presence allows you to deal 10% increased damage while also healing yourself for 4% of all damage done. Even though the 4% healing might sound tempting, do not be fooled, we will never use Blood Presence!
  • Frost Presence allows you to gain 8% increased stamina, 60% armor value contribution from items and 8% reduced damage while also increasing the threat you generate. This will be the only presence that you will be using! The sheer armor value gained by this presence can be considered absolutely insane, not to mention that Icy Touch in combination with Frost Presence generates the highest threat in the entire game.
  • Unholy Presence increases your attack speed and movement speed by 15% while also reducing your overall global cooldown by 0.5 seconds. As a Blood Death Knight, the only times that you will want to use this presence is when you are moving between different locations inside a raid without any immediate danger to you or your raid.

Single-Target

When it comes to Single-Target, Blood Death Knights have one of the strongest threat generation tools in the entire game!

Rotations

There will be only one standard rotation for the entirety of the expansion, even with Tier set changes.

In Depth-Rotation

In-Depth Explanation

As a Blood Death Knight, you have to understand one thing clear right from the beginning of your journey, Icy Touch is your most powerful spell! Icy Touch generates the highest amount of threat in the entire game, you could even call it an absurd amount. Our whole rotation is designed in such a way that we maintain our survivability while we dish out as many Icy Touches as possible.

Another side of our rotation is disease upkeep, due to the fact that we do not benefit from Epidemic, we will have to refresh our diseases often. Luckily, with the number of Icy Touches spammed throughout a fight, you will only have to worry about Blood Plague. This can be easily solved by utilizing the Glyph of Disease, which allows us to both spread our diseases through Pestilence but also refresh them on all affected targets.

Empower Rune Weapon should always be used at the beginning of the fight due to two main reasons. First of all, it has an insanely high cooldown, allowing maybe one or two uses in an entire fight. Secondly, it enables you to properly grasp your target, making sure that you cast enough Icy Touches that it will never want to lose sight of you. However, do be careful of using Empower Rune Weapon right of the bat when you are dealing with an encounter that requires constant target swapping, as you might need to use it a bit later on to help your other tank.

An important aspect that you should understand right off the bat is your taunt mechanic, Dark Command. It is of utmost importance that you understand that you should NEVER use it as an initiation tool. You should only use Dark Command when there is a pesky mob that can not be grabbed by Death Grip and is threatening one of your squishy allies, or when you have to face some type of stacking mechanic from a boss and you and the other tank have to rotate aggro. Failing to do so will most likely result in a very fast wipe and a potential scolding from your team mates.

Blood Tap should always be used on cooldown due to the generation of Death Runes. At the same time, you can think of your Death Strike as an ability with two distinct mechanics. The first one is to generate Death Runes, just like Blood Tap, while the second mechanic is to offer you a very strong self-heal.

Death Runes will be one of the most important aspects of your rotation, due to the fact that it further enables your Icy Touch spam!

Death Strike, as mentioned above, should be used as much as possible when you reach 75% health, as it is an extremely potent ability. Once you are sure that you have generated enough threat on a target in such a way that it might never escape your evil grasp, you can entirely focus on spamming Death Strike.

Rune Strike is a unique Runic Power spender among the Death Knight specializations, mainly due to the fact that it is not affected by Global Cooldown. However, the ability has a prerequisite that we will be lucky enough to proc consistently. You can macro Rune Strike to all of your offensive cooldowns, resulting in a Rune Strike spam, especially when considering how reliant we are on parrying our opponent’s strikes. Rune Strike is by far one of your hardest-hitting abilities, making it one of the best runic spenders, unlike Death Coil. Speaking of which, you can choose to utilize Death Coil in a macro with Lichborne in order to heal yourself in sticky situations!

Lastly, defensive cooldowns can be used in a multitude of ways. You can choose to use them individually in certain moments of an encounter, which entirely depends on the type of encounter that you are facing or you can choose to use them all at the same type if you require a panic button.

Nonetheless, each defensive cooldown has its own strengths and weaknesses, many of the encounters require a combination of multiple defenses in order to be effective. For example, in some fights, you will want to preserve Anti-Magic Shell to entirely cancel a magic debuff mechanic, however, you may want to utilize both Icebound Fortitude and Vampiric Blood at the same time in the case of a Boss that has an enrage mechanic or simply hits hard during a certain mechanic.

You should never start the fight with your defensive cooldowns as it will severely dampen your ability to mitigate important raid mechanics! Always be mindful of your encounters and never randomly press them!

Area-of-Effect

Blood Death Knights have multiple tools in their arsenal when it comes to Area-of-Effect encounters, ranging from spreading your diseases to boiling the blood of your enemies or even desecrating the ground beneath their feet.

Rotation:

In-Depth Explanation

As mentioned earlier, the main way that you can spread your diseases is by using Pestilence. On top of that, you also have access to Death and Decay, a zone-based ability that allows you to devastate an area.

There are two main ways in which you can refresh your diseases, the first one is to manually reapply them to your main target and then cast Pestilence again, thus refreshing the disease duration to all the targets afflicted by the second Pestilence. The second way of refreshing your diseases in an AoE situation is to utilize the Glyph of Disease. By utilizing the Glyph of Disease, you will be able to refresh all diseases that are currently afflicting any mob in your vicinity by just simply casting Pestilence again, without the need to cast Icy Touch or Plague Strike on your main target first.

A fun tool that we have access to as Blood Death Knights is Blood Boil. Not only that it is befitting to the lore but it also deals high amounts of damage! The catch to Blood Boil is to always refresh your diseases properly, as it will deal increased damage to targets affected by your diseases.

Death Strike will be incorporated into your AoE rotation, not only for survivability but also because it will turn your runes into Death Runes, allowing you to spam Blood Boil consistently.

 

About the Author

Nevermore

Hey there folks, I am Nevermore and have been deeply passionate about WoW for more than a decade. Whether we talk about the hidden mysteries of Azeroth or the otherworldly Outland, my journey brought me here to share the things that I have experienced with you all.
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Totalnub
Totalnub
1 year ago

Your single target rotation doesnt really help with keeping blade barrier up. No mention of Bloodstrike.
On multi-target you can use Death and Decay while pulling before you plaguestrike or even before you use icy touch. it puts 3 runes on CD, so the sooner you use it the sooner they will be available again.

Pride
Pride(@pride)
Reply to  Totalnub
1 year ago

Hey, thank you for your comment! You’re right, the guide should have been more clear that you need to Blood Strike in order to use up your Blood Runes for Blade Barrier. We updated the guide to clarify that, and stressed the importance to using Death and Decay early as well. Thank you for your feedback!

daldalchoi
daldalchoi
8 months ago

can u add the rotation for the frost variance pls

Kain
Kain
1 year ago

There is no need to spam icy touch. This private server nonsense is not going to apply to classic. Threat is not as big an issue as people are acting like it is. Keeping blade barrier up and death striking more often is going to be more important than spamming icy touch.

Jamielolx
Jamielolx(@jamielolx)
Reply to  Kain
1 year ago

Its actually a bigger issue

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