General Information
On this page, we present the viable talent and glyph choices for
Blood Death Knights in World of Warcraft MoP 5.4. We detail what each of the talents and
glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.
The other pages of our Blood Death Knight guide can be accessed
from the table of contents on the right.
1. Talent Choices↑top
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- Performance-enhancing
- Survival
- Crowd Control
- Movement
- Utility
- Situational
There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are
now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to 
Dust of Disappearance
(and 
Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90).
You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between
encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics.
Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and
how they affect your play style.
2. Tier 1 Talents↑top
Tier 1 offers you a choice between 3 talents that interact with your
diseases.
Roiling Blood passively causes 
Blood Boil to trigger
Pestilence if it hits a diseased target.
Plague Leech is an active ability, with a 25-second cooldown,
which consumes your diseases on the target, activating two depleted runes as
Death runes. It can only be cast if both 
Frost Fever and
Blood Plague are on the target, and it activates the following two runes,
based on your specialization.
- Blood: 1 Frost and 1 Unholy.
- Frost: 1 Frost and 1 Unholy.
- Unholy: 1 Blood and 1 Frost.
Unholy Blight is an active ability with a 1.5-minute cooldown,
which causes you to spread your diseases to all enemy targets within 10 yards
of you, for 10 seconds.
All 3 talents in this tier are interesting, but currently, Plague Leech is the best choice in terms of single-target fights, providing a
substantial improvement to your tanking performance. In multiple-target
fights, as we will see, Roiling Blood may still be preferable.
Plague Leech allows you to gain a boost in the number of
Death Strikes you can use over the course of the fight, by using the
ability on cooldown, and then re-applying your diseases immediately with
Outbreak (which, if you are using the 
Glyph of Outbreak, has no
cooldown). You can read more about this technique in the relevant section of the rotation page).
Roiling Blood allows you to easily spread your diseases to targets
around your current target, simply by using Blood Boil. You will get many
procs of Crimson Scourge, which make your Blood Boil free, so you will
be spreading diseases to adds at virtually no cost. This talent is recommended
when adds continue to enter the fight at regular intervals, in which cases
you will see greater overall benefit from this than from Plague Leech.
Unholy Blight also allows you to seamlessly apply your diseases to
many targets, but it can only be used once every 90 seconds, so it is really
only useful in encounters where the adds enter the fight at longer
intervals.
3. Tier 2 Talents↑top
Tier 2 talents offer you a choice between 3 abilities that improve your
survivability (and, in the case of 
Anti-Magic Zone, your raids'
survivability as well).
Lichborne is an active ability with a 2-minute cooldown. It lasts
for 10 seconds, during which time casting 
Death Coil on yourself
heals you.- Anti-Magic Zone is a raid cooldown. The ability has a 2-minute
cooldown, and it allows you to place a bubble at a location on the ground.
The bubble reduces all damage taken by raid members inside it by 40%, and it
lasts 3 seconds.
Purgatory passively allows you to survive a killing blow, once
every 3 minutes. The attack that would otherwise kill you places a 3-second
healing absorption debuff on you instead. The debuff absorbs healing equal to
the amount of damage that the killing blow would have done to you. While the
debuff is active, you cannot be killed, and any damage taken is added to the
healing absorption effect. If the effect is still present when the 3 seconds
run out (meaning, if you haven't been healed for the entire amount by then),
you will die.
Your choice here will depend entirely on the requirements of the encounter
and on your own personal preference.
Anti-Magic Zone should be taken if there is use for it in the fight
(such as predictable raid-wide magic damage), since it benefits your entire
raid.
Lichborne provides a rather reliable, on-demand heal that can save
your life. We believe this alternative to be preferable to Purgatory,
excluding specific encounter mechanics.
Purgatory can save your life, it can allow you to overcome
mistakes from your own part or from your healers, and it can help you bypass
otherwise deadly encounter mechanics.
4. Tier 3 Talents↑top
Tier 3 talents offer you a choice between abilities that improve your
movement, kiting, and crowd-control.
Death's Advance passively increases your movement speed by 10%, and
actively (with a 30-second cooldown) grants you 30% movement speed increase for
6 seconds. The movement speed bonus offered by this ability stacks with other
movement speed increases (such as the one from 
Unholy Presence).
Chilblains causes the targets on which you cast Frost Fever
to be slowed by 50% for 10 seconds. Additionally, it causes your
Chains of Ice to immobilize the target for 3 seconds.
Asphyxiate is an improved version of 
Strangulate, which
it replaces. It has a 30-second cooldown, and it stuns the target for 5
seconds. In the event that the target is immune to stuns, it silences them
instead.
Death's Advance is by far the best choice here, in the majority of
situations. The other two talents could have some usefulness, although only
situationally.
5. Tier 4 Talents↑top
Tier 4 talents offer you a choice between 3 self-healing abilities.
Death Pact instantly drains 50% of your minion's maximum health,
healing you for 50% of your own maximum health. It has a 2-minute
cooldown.
Death Siphon costs 1 Death Rune, and instantly deals a small amount
of Shadowfrost damage to the target, healing you for 150% of the damage done.
It can be used from as much as 40 yards away.
Conversion is an ability that can be toggled on and off at will.
Toggling it on costs 5 runic power, and keeping it on costs 5 runic power per
second. For each second that it is active, Conversion restores 3% of your
maximum health. While Conversion is active, you can only gain runic power from
using runes. Note that having Conversion active does not prevent you from
performing any actions (i.e., it is not a channeled spell).
We believe that Death Pact is the best choice here, not only because
of its nice amount of healing, but also because it has no resource cost.
6. Tier 5 Talents↑top
Tier 5 talents offer you a choice between 3 means of improving your rune
regeneration rate.
Blood Tap passively causes each successful Death Coils,
Frost Strikes, and 
Rune Strikes to generate 2
Blood Charges, up to a maximum of 12 charges. Using Blood Tap consumes
5 charges, activating a random fully depleted rune as a Death Rune. Blood Tap
is not on the global cooldown, and it has no cooldown.
Runic Empowerment passively gives you a 45% chance, when you deal
damage with Death Coil, Frost Strike, and Rune Strike,
to activate a random fully depleted rune.
Runic Corruption passively gives you a 45% chance, when you deal
damage with Death Coil, Frost Strike, and Rune Strike,
to increase your rune regeneration rate by 100% for 3 seconds. Note that the
duration of the buff decreases the more haste you have.
Blood Tap and Runic Corruption are the top choices here, with
Runic Empowerment being considerably less valuable.
Blood Tap provides you with a lot of control over your rune situation, and
this is its main strength. It allows you to chain a number of Death Strikes
(by using up your Blood Tap charges), and this is of particular benefit if
you want to stack 
Mastery: Blood Shield on you before a damaging mechanic
strikes.
Runic Corruption is more stable, and will provide roughly the same
survivability as Blood Tap. It also has the benefit of boosting your DPS
somewhat.
Runic Empowerment is quite unreliable in the Death Strikes it provides,
since you are relying on a 45% chance of it proccing each time you use
Rune Strike. The result of this is that you risk often finding yourself
unable to get your extra Death Strikes when you need them, even if the number
of Death Strikes it provides over the entire course of the fight may be
comparable to the other two talents (although it lags slightly behind
here as well).
7. Tier 6 Talents↑top
Tier 6 talents offer you a choice between 3 crowd-control abilities.
Gorefiend's Grasp places a buff on an ally or enemy, which pulls
all enemy targets (enemies of the Death Knight, not the target itself) within
20 yards to the location of the target. It has a 1-minute cooldown.
Remorseless Winter causes all enemies within 8 yards of the Death
Knight to be slowed each second for 8 seconds. Each time they are slowed, their
movement speed is reduced by 15%. When they have been slowed 5 times, the
targets become stunned for 6 seconds. Remorseless Winter has a 1-minute
cooldown.
Desecrated Ground places a friendly void-zone under you, lasting
10 seconds. While you stand in this void zone, you are immune to effects that
cause loss of control of your character.
The choice here is absolutely preference-based. It is possible that some
specific encounter mechanics will cause one talent to be favoured over the
others. Only Remorseless Winter may have some usefulness in stunning
trash mobs so that they cease to deal damage for a few seconds.
8. Major Glyphs↑top
There are several Major Glyphs that can be beneficial to you as a Blood
Death Knight.
- Glyph of Festering Blood causes Blood Boil to damage all targets
as if they were infected with Blood Plague and Frost Fever. This
glyph is excellent if you need to do high burst threat (and damage) to targets
who are not alive long enough to justify applying diseases to them.
- Glyph of Outbreak removes the cooldown from Outbreak, but causes
it to have a 30 runic power cost instead. This glyph is practically mandatory,
since it enables a particularly beneficial interaction with
Plague Leech.
- Glyph of Icebound Fortitude reduces the cooldown of
Icebound Fortitude by 50%, but also reduces its duration by 75%. This
glyph is excellent when you need to use Icebound Fortitude more often, but for
very short periods of time. Unless you really need the reduced cooldown, you
should not use this glyph.
- Glyph of Vampiric Blood increases the bonus healing received while
Vampiric Blood is active by 15%, but Vampiric Blood no longer grants
you any health. Depending on the fight conditions, this glyph can sometimes
be beneficial. You should consult with your healers.
- Glyph of Regenerative Magic procs each time your
Anti-Magic Shell
expires from you without having been fully consumed by damage. When this
happens, the cooldown of Anti-Magic Shell is reduced by an amount based on
how much damage it had absorbed (the more damage absorbed, the smaller the
reduction), up to a maximum of 50%.
- Glyph of Anti-Magic Shell improves your Anti-Magic Shell, by
increasing the amount of incoming damage that it absorbs to as much as 100%,
up from 75%. Note that Anti-Magic Shell's absorption still remains limited by
50% of your maximum health. This glyph always has the potential of being
beneficial, so you should take it if you do not need to use another
glyph instead.
- Glyph of Death Coil causes Death Coil to place a damage
absorption effect, if cast on an ally. This will generally not be a worthwhile
thing to do, but it remains a possibility in some remote situations.
9. Minor Glyphs↑top
There are no interesting or relevant Minor Glyphs.
10. Changelog↑top
- 10 Sep. 2013: Patch 5.4 update.
- 28 Jul. 2013: Slightly reworded the evaluation of the Runic
Corruption talent.
- 20 May 2013: Patch 5.3 update: nothing to change.
- 03 Apr. 2013: Changed Desecrated Ground's category to be
situational, since it allows players to avoid certain effects that
cause loss of control of the character.
- 31 Mar. 2013: Performed three updates to the page.
- Updated the relative value of Tier 1 talents (now accurately states that
the benefits of Plague Leech are effectively minor, and that one of the
other two talents is a better choice).
- Updated the explanation of Tier 5 talents. Gave a higher priority to
Runic Corruption, more accurately explained the benefits of
Blood Tap, and more accurately explained the drawbacks of
Runic Empowerment.
- Added mention that Glyph of Icebound Fortitude should not be taken
unless you really need the cooldown reduction.
- 07 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
- Updated Asphyxiate explanation to reflect the new 30-second cooldown
of the ability.
- Updated Conversion explanation to reflect the new 5 runic power
cost (both initial and per second).
