Blood DK GuideMidnight Overview
Midnight Changes for Blood Death Knight
The changes to the Blood talent tree in the first alpha build are an attempt at streamlining the core design of the spec, while providing much-needed options and choices. The biggest offender in previous trees - Insatiable Blade and the entire Bone Shield-based cooldown reduction it provided - is gone entirely. A number of returning spells and effects have in turn shown up to replace almost every Bone Shield talent on the tree.
As a short list of the returning spells and aspects of gameplay, you can look forward to these:
Swarming Mist is making a return as Blood Mist. Unlike the covenant ability it is themed after, it triggers off Dancing Rune Weapon and increases parry instead of dodge. The Unity covenant legendary effect is also in the tree as Sanguinary Burst
Abomination Limb has made its return and lost all its damage in the process, and now shares a choice node with Gorefiend's Grasp. The latter has also had both its silence effect and cooldown reduction from Tightening Grasp baked in.
All of the War Within season 2 and season 3 effects are in the tree. The Undermine tier set's cleave effect on Death Strike is in the spec tree, while both the Deathbringer and San'layn Season 3 tier sets form the new row of Hero Talent nodes. We'll get back to this later.
The steep cost of resurrecting somebody is heavily reduced thanks to a new class tree talent - Death Notes
Soul Reaper has been entirely removed
Asphyxiate and Death's Reach now share a very centrally-placed choice node in the middle of the class tree. It is now impossible to pick Osmosis or Suppression without picking either of the two.
The Apex talents' focus is clearly centered on Dancing Rune Weapon, and specifically randomly proccing short-lived Dancing Rune Weapon copies while spending runes. It is not without a miss there either. We'll cover this in a bit.
A whole host of talents have changed places in the tree, and new pathing choices have been added. A small number of filler/"feels bad" nodes were also pruned entirely to make space for new effects - overall, a very solid first pass, and there are actual choices on the tree now!
Thematic Streamlining
The removal of some of the more oppressive interactions around Bone Shield is welcome, but it further reinforces the image of Bone Shield as a pure maintenance tax on the spec. It needs new hooks - something I've been mentioning for a while - and while the previous gameplay was definitely not it, it would be worth reconsidering this. This goes hand in hand with the lack of clarity around the tooltip of Bone Shield - a lot of newcomers to the spec expect the armor and haste to apply per stack, especially since one other tank has a similar active mitigation mechanism.
The removal of effects that count Bone Shield charges or consume them are not gone entirely, with Ossuary and Foul Bulwark remaining in the tree and forcing a specific threshold on Bone Shield to be clearly noted in UI. Without add-ons, this becomes a slightly bigger problem, and would be another reason to remove charges entirely, as these two talents are the last holdovers on that front.
Beyond this, the spec appears to have been streamlined into three axes that sometimes clash with one another:
Plagues - with both Consumption and Infliction of Sorrow consuming 75% and 50% of remaining duration, leading to a clash for San'layn
Dancing Rune Weapon - where Echoing Fury, a new node for Deathbringer, grants you an Exterminate charge (it is two on Alpha, but this is very likely a bug - or rather, a direct copy of the tier set) when you press Dancing Rune Weapon. Due to Dancing Rune Weapon not copying Exterminate, you have a direct reason to hold this proc for 12 seconds. The opener also gets very messy with this if you decide not to play Reaper's Onslaught.
Basic build/spend - where Blood Mist specifically swamps the player in Runic Power in AoE, which is a slight clash as San'layn.
Overall, the direction is good, and the reduction in complexity from outright removing Bone Shield hooks was a very welcome change, but it feels like a second pass on the above points would be good. There is less to track, with Bone Shield being the last buff that requires active tracking in a way that the new UI restrictions may not make immediately clear, and an indication of outdated buff design or a mismatch in how to track stacks of a dynamic buff.
Defensive Shift
These changes are not without a loss, and this is where the first problematic choice in this design rears its head. The design intent was communicated in a blue post:
Blood historically (outside of the very strong Sepulcher of the First Ones tier set) has been great at low to mid-level keys but started to fall off at higher end keys where their Death Strike healing can’t overcome the damage they start to take. To alleviate some of this we’ve made a pass on Death Strike and all its modifiers to reduce its overall healing but at the same time we’ve re-distributed that power into their baseline defensives, talents, and Boneshield. The goal being to make their damage intake a little more predictable at higher keys and prevent them from “falling over” before they can start to get their other defensives rolling.
While some of these changes are evident in the tree (such as a reduction in the base healing window of Death Strike from 25% to 20% and a reduction of Voracious's healing amplification from 15% to 5%), some of the lost power can be re-acquired in a convoluted fashion if you make a lot of assumptions about damage profiles through Lifeblood. In practice, this will end up in overhealing almost consistently due to how Death Strike's direct healing and Mastery: Blood Shield are applied instantly after pressing Death Strike.
A number of nerfs and dubious choices also run counter to this by neutering Blood's active damage reduction choices:
Lichborne no longer provides damage reduction
Consumption has been redesigned as an empower spell and provides damage reduction while empowering, along with a very large amount of damage. You can parry and use defensive cooldowns during it, but it is no longer copied by Dancing Rune Weapon. Counterintuitively, the damage reduction is slightly higher if you empower for longer (up to 15%), but lasts significantly less time after channelling. The rank1/rank2 empower damage reduction is almost meaningless - 5% and 10% are barely noticeable, particularly when they cost you a GCD and two GCDs respectively - and this feels like a very convoluted way to bake a neutered damage reduction effect on an empower spell.
The good news is that the damage from consuming Blood Plague heals you, consumes plagues from your Death Strike and this can very quickly snowball to a huge amount from the apex talents. This also might justify Carnage defensively.
The original blue post mentions a Bone Shield armor increase by 25%. This is not the case yet. Bone Shield has been at 126% of Strength for the entirety of 11.2, and Alpha has it at 125%, making it an effective no-op until you include...
A 35% baseline buff to base armor from all sources at all times
The loss of the bonus Bone Shield armor from Reinforced Bones appears to be unaccounted for entirely.
The loss of variable cooldown reduction from the aforementioned Insatiable Blade has been replaced with a simple 30 seconds of cooldown reduction along with a reduction in duration to 12 seconds.
The additional parry granted by Dancing Rune Weapon has been reduced to 20%, down from 35%. You can increase this by an additional 5% for the first 8 seconds of Dancing Rune Weapon by talenting into Blood Mist
Rune Tap has been entirely removed. While this was a very niche talent, it did provide the solution to two end-bosses this expansion
A very significant buff is present in the class tree for non-cutting edge content, however - Gloom Ward was changed to a two-point node and now provides 30% more from all absorbs from you and others. This includes Mastery: Blood Shield, as it did in The War Within. The limits of this are the cap of Mastery: Blood Shield being 50% of maximum health, making this a very questionable change for cutting edge content where damage taken as a portion of maximum health is very large.
A Focus on Random Arms
The Apex talents for blood all focus on Dancing Rune Weapon, and this highlights the extreme inconsistency in design between all of the spells in the tree with respect to active casts of Dancing Rune Weapon.
The capstone apex talent, Dance of Midnight, has a very high chance to summon a temporary Dancing Rune Weapon every time you spend a rune. This selectively triggers only a handful of Dancing Rune Weapon-related talents:
Anything marked "When you cast" is typically out of bounds - no 5% bonus Parry from Blood Mist (or actual mist - but this one feels as expected. It seems weird to special-case the parry bonus to active casts, though), no Echoing Fury
Interestingly, Gift of the San'layn is active while a temporary Dancing Rune Weapon is active. This is very likely an oversight as feels wrong to have 60-70% in-amplification as San'layn
This apex talent is possibly a little too strong for Mythic+, and is very reminiscent of the Sepulcher tier set. Its biggest problem is its random nature, but unlike previously and luck aside, it is firmly in the hands of the player.
Final Thoughts
Honestly? After having played it, I like it. For the first time in a long time, it feels like there has been a very solid first attempt at fixing the Legion-era design issues that plagued Blood for a decade. While these changes do not massively change the core gameplay loop of the spec, the direction is clearer.
The most unusual change players will encounter is the change to Consumption. As of the last alpha build, its position on the tree has changed; in the first iteration, it was essentially a must-pick, while it is now a deliberate choice, and while it is strong offensively (particularly as Deathbringer) and effectively backfills what Rune Tap could do, it is now a choice. The empower window itself is short, and you can move while empowering it, which sweetens the deal by a fair bit.
Beyond this, my biggest wish list item would be to decouple Blood Mist from Dancing Rune Weapon. Blood possibly has too few active abilities now, and having this specific button would allow players to use it while gathering in Mythic+, allowing them to be able to have Runic Power on the move while doing so. Log review has conclusively proven that gathering a pull is one of the most dangerous parts for new Death Knights, and this would go a long way towards fixing this - something Abomination Limb did very capably until its sudden removal in 11.2. This would also alleviate the disparity in duration of effects tied to Dancing Rune Weapon.
