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Blood, the Death Knight tanking spec, while other spec’s have been viable, Blizzard recently decided that Blood will be the only Death Knight tanking tree in Cataclysm. While this does mean that you’ll probably be able to tank with frost and unholy for a little bit longer, why would you want to tank with a spec that is going to soon die out? There are plenty of advantages of blood that will surely convince you to join us. Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and play styles of blood.

Blood is a tree centered around physical damage, while other trees have spells based on magic attack, most of our attacks and damage is from heart strike, our 41 point talent. While we do throw out a couple death coils here and there, the bread and butter of blood is from Heart Strike. As a Blood Tank, we have a generally larger health pool than other Death Knight tanks due to Veteran of the Third War. Blood tanks are also one of  the highest single-target threat producers compared to other tanks. While Frost and Unholy generally have better AoE threat than Blood Tanks, the advantages of having higher single target threat, a higher health pool, and some nice cooldowns outweigh the small AoE threat issue.

Talents

The generic and standard build of blood tanking is a 53/8/10 talent build which picks up all the tanking blood talents while grabbing DPS talents to increase threat. This build does not take any “healing” talents such as Rune Tap and Mark of Blood which are not considered too great for tanking. While it would seem to make sense that a tank that could heal itself for that much would be considered good, the healing isn’t too great and the talent points are better spent elsewhere to do what a tank should be doing, tanking the boss.

Why don’t we pick up Rune Tap and Mark of Blood?

While these talents seem to be useful to provide a self heal, you won’t be able to use them much. Mark of Blood only heals when the enemy hits you and only for 4% of your max life. Most bosses have slow attack speeds which causes you to not even benefit from the full amount that it should heal. With Rune Tap, your healer should be worrying about your health, not you, to actually find the time to be able to use the heal to it’s maximum potential with no overheal is already hard, and having the runes to use the heal is even harder. You should be using your runes to hit the boss, not save them to heal yourself. It’s like a ret paladin helping out with raid heals. It doesn’t work.

Glyphs

Glyph of Rune Strike – Our highest threat producing ability, the more it crits, the more threat we generate. Now who wouldn’t want that?

Glyph of Vampiric Blood – Vampiric Blood increases our health by 15% and healing done to us by 35%, why wouldn’t you want this to last longer?

Glyph of Death Strike – Death Knight tanks don’t have a problem with generating runic power and the more you have the harder you’ll hit.

Rotation

As a blood tank, our general rotation includes of;

Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Death Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Death Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Heart Strike -> Death Coil Dump

You also want to Rune Strike whenever you dodge or parry an attack.

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