Blood Death Knights are two hand wielding tanks, using Death Strike has a way to mitigate damage by healing after taking damage, short cooldowns and a good tool to mitigate both physical and magical damage they are often the preferred off tanks along druids. However, Blood Death Knights are active tanks, the player plays a huge role on how much of a good tank the Death Knight is.

Rotation for Blood Death Knight Wotlk

Blood Death Knight Priorities

Diseases (Icy Touch/Plague Strike) > Death Strike after losing HP > refresh diseases with pestilence (if glyphed) > Blood Boil > pop CDs to mitigate damage

Tips

Never allow diseases to drop, Death Strike heals more with diseases, and the amount of threat will be higher as well.

Death Knight tanks don’t have block, however being an active tank they use Death Strike to heal and mitigate damage, if Death Strike is used at full health that mitigation is lost.

The Death Knights CDs are short, so use them as much as you can to absorb incoming damage, taken into account the damage spikes along the fight.

Frost presence needs to be always up, when losing threat other than taunting and using Death Grip chain casting Icy Touch can prove effective.

While main tanking you will have to build has much Aggro has possible, opening with two [Icy Touch], [Blood Tap] for a third one, [Plague Strike] to apply all diseases, and activate [Empower Rune Weapon] to use another three [Icy Touch] in a row can build high Aggro. Wether you need to activate [Empower Rune Weapon] or not will depend on how much Aggro your raid team generates.