- Author: Nevermore
- Date: July 19, 2022
- Updated: September 15, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Beyond directly making your character stronger through talents, equipment, enchants, etc, there are 2 more things you can use in order 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 you can be!
Addons
General
Blood Death Knights do not require a whole lot of addons or macros, only having the need for a few essential tools that most classes and specializations will want to acquire as well.
- 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! As a tank, you also get to track threat with Details TinyThreat.
- WeakAuras– An addon that allows you to create custom notifications or to modify your U.I.
WeakAuras
WeakAuras is a versatile addon with almost limitless possibilities. It allows you to install mini-addons created by other players, which are confusingly also called “WeakAuras”, in order to perform specific tasks, such as tracking the cooldown of a spell, having a visual or audio notification when something procs, giving you a warning when a boss uses an ability, etc. You can find WeakAuras that suit your needs on wago.io. It’s strongly recommended that you use WeakAuras; they’re a huge quality of life boost.
As a Blood Death Knight, there are several things that you will want to keep track of. First and foremost, you will want to keep track of your diseases and runes. You can create separate notifications for each of them, having them displayed as customized bars on your screen showing you a clearer duration of both your diseases and the time left on each separate rune until it recovers. Secondly, you can create custom bars that allow you to better see the duration of your defensive cooldowns and their cooldowns, going as far as creating audio notifications when they become available or when their duration ends.
Secondly, it would be a good idea to individually create WeakAuras for effects such as trinkets, allowing you to properly time your cooldowns with your trinket procs.
Macros
Essential
Panic Macro
In general, you don’t want to use all of your defensive cooldowns at the same time, because you’ll likely waste them — 1 of them is usually enough. However, there are situation where things go south very quickly, and it helps to have a “panic” macro you can use as a tank, potentially saving your life in a sticky situation.
/#showtooltip Icebound Fortitude
/Cast Icebound Fortitude
/Cast Vampiric Blood
/Cast Rune TapRune Strike Macro
Death Knights have access to a special skill called Rune Strike, a very high damage spell with the limitation that it can only be used after the Death Knight dodges or parries an attack. For our DPS brothers, this means that it’s not a very useful ability, but for us as tanks, frequently dodging and parrying, it will be an absolute godsend.
To make things even better, Rune Strike is not on the global cooldown, which means the most efficient way is to simply add it in a macro with all of your other abilities, like Blood Strike in the example below. This way, you will automatically use Rune Strike every time it is available.
#Showtooltip Blood Strike
/Cast Blood Strike
/Cast Rune Strike
/startattackAttack Macro
Similar to the Rune Strike macro above, you will want to add the /startattack command on all of your abilities. This ensures that your character begins attacking as soon as possible, which can help you get the first hit on an enemy and thus build threat on it before others do.
#Showtooltip Icy Touch
/Cast Icy Touch
/Cast Rune Strike
/StartattackPet Sacrifice Macro
Death Knights have a powerful healing ability in Death Pact. However, it has a limitation: you must sacrifice an active pet in order to use this ability. This macro allows you to immediately summon a ghoul and then sacrifice it, so you can use Death Pact with just one button.
#showtooltip Death Pact
/cast [nopet] Raise Dead
/cast Death PactPestilence Macro
The following macro allows you to apply your diseases on the target and then spread them by using Pestilence, by repeatedly pressing 1 button.
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=3 Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Pestilence
/startattackÂ
About the Author
The pet sacrifice macro isn’t working correctly.
I have pressed it again and again, but all it did was summon the pet, but it didn’t sacrifice it.
I made sure I had enough runic power for that.
I tested a lot with the pet condition and for me it seems like the Blood DK Ghoul doesnt count as “Pet” so the condition part ist never working…
I tried with just
/cast [pet] Death Pact and nothing happened cause there is no “true”. Vice versa [nopet] is always true… so the makro get stuck in the summon ghoul line…
#showtooltip is casesensitiv if you start with an #S it only shows the Makrotitle on tooltip you need a #s
after i ranked up icy touch the macro just casts icy touch and nothing else even with the 3 press’ am i doing something wrong
Rune strike only goes off when your attacks are dodged or parried. Its a “free” attack when available, so you want it on a spammed ability.
I had a similar issue. I found the way to fix it was to remove the space after the commas between each spell.
So:
#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=3 Icy Touch,Plague Strike,Pestilence
/startattack
I think my comment is incorrect. Instead I think it’s caused when you learn the next rank of a spell included within the macro. I found that doing a /reload fixes it.