Blood Azerite trait questions

Classes Death Knight
1

Hello.

I am pretty casual with pug mythic plus being the primary content I participate in. Icy Veins and other guides are what I’ve been following thus far… I began looking at some of the top mythic plus DK tanks on Raider IO. I see some of them stacking multiple Bloody Runeblades, Bones of the Damned, and even a few with multiple Bone Spike Graveyard traits.

Can someone explain this to me please? It really seems like Blood doesn’t have any stand out spec specific traits like my prot warrior does making it kind of confusing/difficult to make choices.

Any help on this or discussion about azerite traits in general would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

2

Personally since I am an Engineer, two options: Graveyard or Deep cut. So I just stack Graveyard on all AZ armor. The damage and healing is pretty much the same as the Talent: Consumption with a 10- 15 cooldown.

3

Bloody Runeblade (my favorite) = Extra Haste. Allows me to drop my gear based Haste somewhere between 10-15% and focus on Versatility. You stack 2-3 of these and your haste will hover between 25-30+% during most fights. Allowing you to instead focus on stacking Versatility and Critical Strike!

Bones of the Damned = Armor + chance for extra bone shields. The extra bone shields can get tricky so the important part is the armor. I wouldn’t exactly call this a desirable trait.

Bonespike Graveyard = Extra damage+healing. Death and Decay causes physical damage and heals you for a slightly larger amount per enemy. First this implies that you have D&D down most of the time (which you should…). Second, you’ll want to take this trait when you are overgeared for the content (like me still stuck in normal BDA :tired_face:). Also note that only the healing portion of this trait stacks so unfortunately we won’t be doin big dps as a B DK.

Special Note: Eternal Rune Weapon = Dancing Rune Weapon grants more strength and gets an increased duration by 0.5sec up to a max of 5 seconds. This! This is the trait you’ll want to stack when you overgear content and want to do massive dps.

If at all possible, I recommend stacking x2 Bloody Runeblade and x1 Eternal Rune Weapon for survival & x2 Eternal Rune Weapon and x1 Blood Runeblade for moderate survivability and increased damage!

4

General rule of thumb for BDK azerite is:

Generic traits are better than BDK specific

Our traits don’t do much that’s noticeable. If you could stack 3x Bone or BSG or Bloody it would have a small benefit but won’t make or break you. Only take one ERW if at all and never pick a BDK trait on the ring that has a generic.

Unfortunately we have 0 scaling with our traits so without a buff to them we will scale worse and worse as the expansion goes on.