I’ve posted examples of Blood tanking builds in previous posts, now I’m going to go into more detail about each of the talents and why they’re in the build and why certain others are not. This is primarily for people who don’t like to just take a spec and copy/paste it onto their character but would rather like to know why they’re speccing the way someone is suggesting.

If you’re going to tank as a Death Knight then your first fifteen talent points are essentially already spent. Its a given that you’re going to go 5/5 in Blade Barrier, Toughness and Anticipation. Your other first tier alternatives are either for DPS or support for tanking in less direct ways.

Talents we skipped

I’ve highlighted all of the talents centered around survivability in this picture of my Blood spec below.

Of the fourteen highlighted talents note that I’m only taking eight. Certain talents are either too situational, ineffective or costly to pick up and that’s ok, you’ll be fine without them.

The ones we didn’t take include Rune Tap, Imp. Rune Tap, Spell Deflection, Mark of Blood, Bloodworms, and Imp. Blood Presence. Here’s why:

Rune Tap – Rune Tap alone is a drop in the bucket and has a long cooldown for such a minimal effect.

Improved Rune Tap – Imp. Rune Tap actually does do a decent job of making Rune Tap attractive but its a pretty heavy point investment. If you use this while Vampiric Blood is up it can be quite a respectable heal.

I used to have this in my build and I’d use it immediately following a large, predictable hit (for instance, Fusion Punch from Steelbreaker) but keep in mind, your healers are aware of large, predictable hits too and you may just be contributing to their overheal if you use it in those situations. Overall the talent isn’t horrible, its just expensive.

Spell Deflection – I had this in my spec for a while and although I’d see it proc a lot I couldn’t ever get any real data on how much damage and what kind of damage it was reducing. Until I have more data on it I can’t really recommend taking it. We need to do testing on this soon Soli!

Mark of Blood – The healing from Mark of Blood amounts to slightly more than nil against raid bosses that hit extremely hard. You could get more mileage from this in heroics but if you’re really needing this talent in that setting you’d have to wonder about the effectiveness of your healer.

Bloodworms – It takes three points to max this out and they’re not a significant source of healing. The amount they heal for is dependent on them attacking something so if they die quickly they’re a waste. They also have the potential to go chasing after targets you may not want them to chase after. For tanking, Bloodworms are just too unreliable and ineffective.

Improved Blood Presence – 4% of your damage out as a tank returned to you as healing. Let’s imagine this visually: you have a bowl of cereal and you’re going to pour milk on it. You take half of a single drop of milk and sprinkle it on top of your cereal. That faint trickle of milk molecules is like the healing you get from Improved Blood Presence. This is a terrible tanking talent.

Next post I’ll talk about the threat talents we picked up in our spec.