Beyond directly making your character stronger through talents, equipment, enchants, etc, there are 2 more things you can use to improve your performance as a player: addons & macros. It cannot be understated how much of an impact they can have on your gameplay — increasing your DPS or healing by a large percentage, preventing you from dying, etc. You will need the best addons & macros to be the best Blood Death Knight Tank you can be!
Addons
Addons are direct quality-of-life improvements to the existing game features. They can range from User Interface modifications to simple tools such as a Damage Meter or Threat Meter. Addons can also be used to generate text notifications or even in-game vocal notifications to keep better track of your buffs and procs. They can also be used to display boss tactics and notify you of impending threats.
- DeadlyBossMods – Allows you to track boss abilities. A must-have for raiding.
- Details – Shows you how much damage, healing, etc everyone in your raid is doing. Flex on your friends!
- WeakAuras – Extremely versatile addon that can be used to track buffs, debuffs, or create audio notifications.
- Auctionator – A great tool for any interaction with the Auction House
Macros
Blood Death Knights don’t have many macros they must use, aside from general essential macros such as macros for cooldowns or for maintaining their auto-attacks.
Startattack Macro
It is optimal to have the /startattack command on all of your abilities as a melee character. Doing so allows your character to begin auto-attacking your target right away, even if you aren’t currently in range to attack them, that ability is on cooldown, etc.
#showtooltip
/startattack
/cast Icy Touch
Mouseover Macro
This macro can be used to cast an ability on any target by simply hovering your mouse over it. You can either hover your mouse over the target itself or over the UI raid or party frame in the case of a friendly target. For any beneficial spell, you will want to have “Help” in your macro, and for any damaging spell you will want to have “Harm”
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, help, nodead] Raise Ally
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover, harm, nodead] Icy Touch
Defensive Macro
This macro can be used to activate multiple defensive cooldowns at the simple press of one button. You can consider this your “panic button”.
#showtooltip
/cast Anti-Magic Shell
/cast Vampiric Blood
/cast Icebound Fortitude