Blood Rotation
There Will Be Blood
With the announcement that Blood would be the only tanking tree for Death Knights in Cataclysm I’ve decided to revise my tanking guide, the new version is much more detailed with extensive information and theorycrafting about Blood tanking, as well as a few more bells and whistles. Work is progressing, so well in fact that I thought I’d share a sneak peak with you guys. Enjoy!
THE BASICS OF THE BLOOD ROTATION
Sets – For the purposes of this conversation when I mention a set, I’m, refering to a complete set of six runes. It’s also important to note that here I am assuming a full 3 points in Death Rune Mastery, so each alternate set will have 2 Blood and 4 Death Runes.
» Set 1 ( IT – PS – HS – HS – DS )
» Set 2 ( IT – IT – HS – HS – IT – IT )
This rotation is for maximum threat, with the threat coefficient attached to Icy Touch you should be generating massive amounts of threat. The alternative would be a more DPS oriented rotation as shown below…
» Set 1 ( IT – PS – HS – HS – DS )
» Set 2 ( HS – HS – HS – HS – HS – HS )
A QUICK NOTE ON DEATH RUNES
In both of the rotations listed above you have a little wiggle room, specifically in each Set 2 where you have 2 BR and 4 DR available. The biggest reason to have these four abilities separately instead of in a castsequence macro is to offer versatility. Depending on your situation you may opt to use Death Runes to cast for survival abilities (Rune Tap, Death Strike, or Vampiric Blood, and in Cataclysm for Bone Shield). Knowing when and what to use in these situations can mean the difference between a wipe and loot, this will be covered in greater detail in the Survival Section of the guide later.
Remember always, healing yourself is absolutely not a waste of resources… live tanks are doing their jobs, dead tanks are not.
WHEN AND WHY?
When tanking bosses you’ll want to lead off with the threat rotation, this will establish an early threat lead (especially when combined with Misdirect and Tricks of the Trade), you can then switch to the DPS rotation. However, it is important to keep tabs on your threat relative to that of the other raiders, as well as allowing for fight mechanics – though rare threat resets during a fight are not unheard of.
RUNIC POWER AND YOUR ROTATION
As in life, when you are tanking… sometimes you just have to take a dump. Each of the abilities listed in the rotations above generates Runic Power. Some of your other abilities require this resource to function as well, so depending on the fight you will want to adjust the amount of RP you have on reserve. The general rule of thumb however is that if you have 60+ RP you should dump with Death Coil. The main consumer of RP however will be Rune Strike, and should be used anytime that it lights up. Both of these abilities will add threat as well as damage, but due to their nature they are not “technically” a part of your rotation.
TLDR VERSION: If left with the choice, use RS over DC. And you may want to keep enough RP around to cast Icebound Fortitude of Mind Freeze (depending on the situation).
*SPOILER ALERT* (Cataclysm Info): It should be noted that Rune Strike will be losing it’s “on next swing” nature and become simply an instant attack. Likewise it appears that Mind Freeze is moving to a Frost Rune to cast rather than 20 RP. In the future you may be less likely to want to waste a FR on an interrupt…
MANAGING COOLDOWNS
Both Blood Tap and Empowered Rune Weapon are powerful tools in your arsenal, here I will discus the practical application of each.
» Blood Tap (hereafter referred to as BT) – Supplies a quick Death Rune, this I consider mainly for use with Defensive abilities which we will cover in the next section. But the primary reason for this, is it keeps your rotation in tact while allowing you to use abilities like Vampiric Blood or Rune Tap.
» Empowered Rune Weapon (hereafter referred to as ERW) – This ability finishes the cooldown on all of your runes, it has a five minute cooldown itself though. Which may cause you to want to save it, myself I tend to blow it after set one at the beginning of the fight for a quick burst of early threat. Typically it’s available again before the boss is dead, and generally toward the end of the fight when I might want to blow everything to survive.
MACROS
I use four basic macros in my rotation, each is set up to que Rune Strike, turn on auto attack (in the event I don’t have any runes), and to clear any errors associated with mashing the macros. Likewise, I’ve added some modifiers to two of these macros to save me some action bar real estate.
Icy Touch + Death Coil
/cast [nomod] Icy Touch
/cast [mod:alt] Death Coil
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
Pressing the button will cast Icy Touch, and if conditions are right will que up Rune Strike for your next white swing. If you hold down Alt while pressing the key you will cast Death Coil instead of Icy Touch.
Plague Strike
/cast Plague Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
Very simply casts Plague Strike and ques up Rune Strike for your next white swing, assuming conditions are met.
Heart Strike + Blood Strike
/cast [nomod] Heart Strike
/cast [mod:alt] Blood Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
Pressing this key will cast Heart Strike, holding Alt while pressing the key will cast Blood Strike instead.
Death Strike
/cast Death Strike
/cast Rune Strike
/startattack
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
And finally Death Strike with the usual Rune Strike addition.
STATS
I will be covering this in greater detail in a later section, but I wanted to mention briefly my general rule for threat stats – when gearing I typically aim for a 220 hit (260 after food) and a 26 Expertise. With parry haste being a non issue I don’t recommend going beyond the Expertise soft cap.
That does it for this installment, I hope it was informative. And I hope that you enjoyed reading, expect the completely revised tanking guide in the next couple of weeks. And thanks for reading…
Great to see an update to your guide. The snippet looks great. I’ve only just recently started tanking heroics etc to start the gearing up process and have come across an issue that I struggle with. I seem to melt when faced with any serious trash pack, mostly because I’m using all my runes to establish AoE threat. DnD-IT-PS-Pest, what I have forgotten about is BT so I can pop VT/RT on the big trash pulls. I’ve had no real trouble with the boss fights so far, including H FoS/H PoS, just trash that I am squishy on. My armory is linked mostly due to the fact that I’d consider myself undergeared for dungeons that drop i232 gear (32-34kHP buffed)
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Saurfang&cn=Kopj%C3%AA
No guides I have found really talk about trash rotations other than blood boil vs HS for more than four adds. Gravity sort of addressed it in a post about tanking to be less squishy. Could you please address how you would handle a large trash pack when tanking in you guide; including establishing a good aoe threat base and what abilities you use to stay alive? Another area of difficulty is guantlets, CoS, tunnel in PoS are examples. Those are really situational, but I find it difficult to get threat on all the mobs due to the nature of runes. 3 to pop DnD or 2 bloodboils while picking up adds, 4 if you are lucky with death runes. Trying to keep resources available for survival cooldowns again is a problem. At leat I have identified an ability in BT that I can use to help cover myself in future.
Thank you for your time in making these guides. You, Gravity and Satorri have made an awesome contribution to DK knowledge. Thanks!
Wouldn’t a second Death Strike instead of 6 HSs be of more use? You gain more healing, and two Death Runes. Sure you’d have to drop 2 HSs off but in exchange for the Healing it’s worth it I think, maybe?
Bindura – I’m not the Blogger here but something I’ve found great for AoE Tanking is 2Piece T10 and Glyph of Death and Decay paired together (yes they stack) the extra 40% damage really covers the gap in your runes after you go DnD – IT – PS – Pest. Otherwise I’d recommend going Frost with GoHB, but you’d have to get used to playing a new tree.
@Bindura – I will be covering Multiple targets in it’s own smaller section immediately following the rotation section listed above. But Insolence does offer some solid advice.
@Insolence – I’d think the Deathstrike VS 2 Heartstrikes in set 2 would be situational, it really depends on where your health is at. And if your healers are tied up. If you DS and only heal yourself for 300 out of a possible 10K for example, it’s probably a better idea to do 2 Heart Strikes. I will definitely append that information in the final guide. Similarly if you’re in that kind of trouble you may want to use Vampiric Blood and Rune Tap. But this will be covered in more detail in the Survival section. Either way thanks for pointing that out. ^_^
Great to hear Khaas. I actually haven’t had too much trouble holding aggro on trash packs; its surviving the pack that I struggle with, due to the lack of survival options during the inital rune blackout. If there is a caster in the group I use AMS to help absorb some damage, I would prefer not to have to use IFort on trash, but I end up blowing it to save my squishy arse.
I also might not be positioning the mobs correctly; and letting them sneak to the sides into areas where I offer no avoidance.
Aside I know and respect Insolence’s (Vindictus) opinion a great deal. When flicking through the pwnwear forumns my ears always prick up a bit when I see one of his posts. When I finally get enough EoF I will be getting my two piece T10 but I will be selecting my gear based on the upgrade/frost emblem cost ratio; it looks like the 264 belt will come first.
Thanks for the replies
Hahaha I post too much, my fault though. Theorycrafting is probably the only interesting part thats left of WoW that I can do in large amounts, even Raiding has limits unfortunately D: