Blood DK Sanlayn core issues and ideas

Classes Death Knight
1

I really like the idea of a Sanlayn Blood DK, the theme of stealing health from your enemies and getting faster and stronger as you go sits well with me. The core concept of sanlayn is sound, it’s a resource generating machine. You get more and more runes and therby Runic Power that you turn into haste through the queen buff, and it keeps increasing. But with Blood DK there are 2 issues:

  1. We have 1 runic power spender, Death Strike. And due to the recent changes to how it works, we only want to use that between every 5-8 seconds, so we get capped on Runic power very quickly

  2. Because we have such a long time between when we want to use our Death Strike, and the relatively low chance that Vampiric Strike will proc, we have a hard time keeping uptime.

Even with the upcoming change of moving guaranteed Vampiric Strikes from Vampiric Blood to DRW, we still get in a place where we are either wasting runic power, runes, or globals on anemic Death Strikes.

So, some ideas on how to fix this

  1. To fix the uptime issues, give Consumption or Blood Drinker to at least extend the current Essense of the Blood queen, or give a single proc of Vampiric Strike, or just give a stack of Essense. This will allow us to fill bad RNG and keep the ramp going.

  2. To fix the Resource capping issue, either give us another runic power dump, or, my preference, add a Runic Power burn to Essense that empowers our abilities and/or gives us some sort of Defensive aura that leeches life and weakens from those around us. This gives us the extra gameplay of riding that ramp, or holding back/manually deactivating it if we want more control. And with that you could also add an active ability that consumes the current stacks of Essense to do damage/heal a bit and give it a cool effect.

Sanlayn is so close, and could be a very cool spec that has a low floor to play but a high skill cap to maximize with just a few changes I think.

3 Likes
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I play Sanlayn BDK. The strength of it tbh is how much it actually interacts with our talents, it’s kinda crazy. It wants a very specific build and imo that build is Bloodied Blade with Umbilicus. The amount of bonus strength you get is insane.

You also do insane damage in your DRW window. If you pop Vamp Blood with DRW, you get an insane Umbilicus shield afterwards.

Sanlayn is bonkers to me how much self healing and mitigation it gives. If you get Leech on your gear? GG. We already have 17% baseline.

Also I don’t hold Death Strikes, I spam it. It does too much damage and gives Leech plus cools down my Vamp Blood, plus the Vamp Strike. It’s too valuable to not be spamming.

There’s also a super secret build that only takes Umbilicus and takes Runetap. You nerf your AOE damage, but you become invincible. Runetap covers for the psycho Death Strike spam, at least when you get to content that actually hits hard.

1 Like
3

Reimagining swarming mists from shadowlands could fill all of these requirements

1 Like
4

I think they should just make deathcoil not suck for blood. Give us a runic power surrender that can be used between death strikes.

Make it heal for X amount and double it during Blood Queen.