Talents Part III

Time to look at the final three tiers of Blood talents to get our tanking build setup.

Tier 5
We start tier 5 off with a strong talent, Rune Tap. Converting a single Blood (or Death) Rune into 10% of your health is nothing to sneeze at, even with a 30 second cooldown. Use that at every cooldown when you're not at max health; your healer will appreciate it too.

Next up is Will of the Necropolis, a three point talent. It's initial function, and what I use it for mostly, is to reset Rune Tap's cooldown, and make it a freebie for 8 seconds when you dip below 30% of your max health. In addition to that, it reduces damage taken by 25%, which slows your untimely demise. When this procs, hit Rune Tap immediately to boost your health. If your healer is struggling, use the next talent first to boost the heals from your healer and your Rune Tap.

Vampiric Blood is our equivalent of the Warrior's Last Stand. Except we only get 15% instead of 30%, however in return we receive 25% increased healing, allowing our healer to bring us back up with less heals. Extremely useful when things are going south. Hit this, then Rune Tap if it's off cooldown or if Will of the Necropolis has proc'd it. And maybe try and get a Death Strike in there for some healing with a nice Blood Shield.

Tier 6
Tier 6 starts off with Improved Death Strike. Death Strike is a staple of our rotation, especially with this talent increasing the damage output by 90%, and providing 45% more healing. (Note that the 45% more healing is only on the 20% of damage taken in the last 5 seconds. If that doesn't exceed 7% of your health, you still only heal for 7% of your health, and not 10%)

The other tier 6 talent is Crimson Scourge. I personally like the 40% damage increase for a bit of spot threat in the beginning of a trash pull on all the mobs. That helps especially if the DPS are targetting a different mob than you are. The 10% freebie chance only matters if you are using diseases (more on this in a future post), so you may not get as much use out of that. In a boss fight this may result in a few free Blood Boils. Needless to say this talent is optional. Most people choose it, but you may not find it beneficial for your play style.

Tier 7
Last in the Blood tree is Dancing Rune Weapon. This is a staple of Blood tanking; having a second blade do the same attacks we do, and gaining an additional 20% parry chance is a great dps boost or defensive cooldown. With the glyph, this is also a great fight-opener; you get the extra threat, and the additional parry allows your healer a few seconds to position before you get pounded.

That's the Blood tier. Next post we'll look into spending some of our extra points in Frost or Unholy for some extra goodies.