How are you supposed to play as Blood in PvP?

Classes Death Knight
1

Hi all! I’m starting to play as Blood in PvP but I’m having huge troubles. I play as Protection with my Warrior and I feel extremely durable, useful, and mobile, yet with Blood it’s more like a slow, weak blob that can’t really do much without Death Grip. And even then my enemies just zip away almost immediately, leaving me behind.

When trying to pick my abilities, I feel like there’s way too many. How I’m supposed to play as Blood in PvP? I have no issues in PvE, although I don’t do difficult content, just LFR and Heroics.

Thanks all for your tips!

2

You really aren’t tbh. You could try to get good at some cheesy nonsense like kidnapping healers in bgs but other than that…

2 Likes
3

You can. I think that it’s one of the better “tanks”.

Warrior is considerably less useful for everything other than outright brawling or manfighting people.

Blood is a slow blob that makes everybody else slower and less useful.

Live and spin a node or just make everybody useless by slowing rotations or taking a player (or multiple) out of the game. You can just drown a priest in silvershard or arathi basin.

Niche thing is just playing full dmg/output and being able to do most of the solo/teamfight stuff with reduced durability but actually being able to kill people quickly.

2 Likes
4

Thanks for the tips! But how do you actually become durable? I feel so squishy. Do you have to spam Death Strike? I get kited away so much I can barely strike my opponents. By the time I finally manage to reach them I’m already melted away.

5

I can definitely see this being the case in World PvP where you’re far more likely to be fighting 1v1 or 1v2. In BGs however, doing things like death gripping an enemy healer into your line is much more impactful. Tanks are incredibly good at holding points as well. If two people are defending a flag in AV and one of them is a blood DK, I know I’m not taking that flag without three or four other people. Play to your strengths!

6

Flarkness has a great video on blood pvp on YouTube, check him out!

4 Likes
7

Majority of your ”durability” comes from your self healing and using Death Strike at the right time. Death Strike is not spammable like it used to be. You will want to use it only after receiving a ton of damage. You also can’t use Death Strike preemptively, because the healing comes from damage already received in the past few seconds. (Sorry don’t remember the exact time window. Maybe 6-8 seconds).

And you will want to help sustain yourself with defensive cooldowns outside of those windows of Death Striking. In PvP it definitely takes some getting used to. It will take practice and getting better at understanding which cooldowns to rotate through.

#1 mistake I see, and I myself also make, is holding onto Vampiric Blood and not using it enough. With all the talents, this defensive has a quick cool down. So be sure to use it often. It will account for a ton of your survivability and healing. Get into the habit of pushing it. Like at least 20-30 times or more.

Your main defensives are Vampiric Blood, Rune Tap, AMS, Blood Shield (from Death Strike), and Tombstone (if talented). Use them often.

Generic but things to think about to help for surviving.

-Keep chains of ice up.
-Keep Bone Shield charges up.
-Save a grip for when enemy tries to kite, incase you need a guaranteed Death Strike to land. I usually will grip classes that can’t easily kite me such as Priests or Locks and sometimes pets if needed.
-If talented, your AMS will heal for 100% of its absorb value. So use it as damage mitigation + healing against casters. AMS can also be used to immune yourself against magic CC. Also if talented, AMS will have a short cool down.
-If talented, you can use AMZ against magic as well to mitigate magic damage.
-You can use chains of ice to slow melee and try to evade some of their burst.
-If talented, Death Strike will also provide reduced physical damage taken for 3 secs.
-Use Icebound Fortitude to break out of Stun and/or prevent incoming stun(s).
-Save your runic power for Death Strikes
-With all talents, Dancing Rune Weapon summons 2 weapons, generates 5 Bone Shield charges, helps quickly generate runic power from Heart Striking, and has a very short cooldown.
-Be sure to have Death and Decay down, so Heart Strike will hit multiple enemies and help generate more runic power.
-Blood Tap is a talent that is helpful as well allowing you to instantly restore runes. Has 2 charges.
-Dancing Rune Weapon and Blood Tap both gain cooldown reduction from Bone Shield charges being consumed.

-Disarm really hinders Blood DK. Having Death Pact talent or Sacrificial Pact (requires Ghoul pet) can be an emergency heal in these moments.

There’s more that can be said, but much of it is understanding the Blood DK class and its talents. There are additional talents that can be taken for more survivability. But hope this offers some additional clarity.

2 Likes
8

Just what I’ve been looking for, many thanks for all those awesome tips. I’ll keep practicing.

2 Likes
9

You are squishy, but heal for a lot.

No, timing is very important. IT’s kind of like pve where you need a target to do your rotation on, at least while under heavy fire because if you’re trying to stay on a mage or hunter then you’ll just die because it’s too many globals on non-generators.

2 Likes
10

Its pretty easy compared to most tanks and you can pull

12

How have you been fairing in pvp now? I know its only been a couple days. But are you finding any of the tips from other’s posts helpful with your pvp engagements?

13

You are simply not supposed to.

1 Like
14

What makes you say that

15

Tanks were never properly optimized for PvP. What you can do is being a flag carrier as Guardian or you can defend a base as any tank, but for other PvP game styles like arena they never properly optimized. People will just not focus them and your damage is much lower than it would be as a DPS spec.

1 Like
16

Blood is right now. :dracthyr_blob_dance_animated:

17

What makes you say that?

1 Like
18

Because it’s good, although mostly due to Death Strike modifiers.

19

idk that i would say blood is good so much as unholy and frost are bad. sangblood is usually a build of last resort when the dps builds are :poop:

even being more viable this season than usual it still needs buffs to damage and self healing and damage reduction. the DS only healing once nerf and blood spells in general not having at least a 25 yard range feels really bad to play, especially when its laggy. yes its very possible to hit someone for 1.5m with DS, but only after you have got through flight manual’s worth of conditionals and spent a while building up buffs and pooling resources and waiting for the very right moment. meanwhile a feral will faceroll his keyboard and hit you for 2m easy.

20

Just send first rune wep to build stacks into Bonestorm then prep for big second go.

All you really need is a target to touch 60-70% hp and/or have cc. MS also helps.

21

this does a lot of heavy lifting of the build though, if you don’t have a good partner hopefully with a MS and get into a match against a good healer or say disc where their HP stays high, now the build is a liability as you usually do less damage than a dps in that situation. in those matches unholy feels like its the better spec due to having more upfront damage.