Reviewing the San'layn Hero Talents: Enhancing Haste for Blood Death Knights

This past week, Blizzard revealed new Hero Talent Trees in a First Look at the new system coming with The War Within expansion. Our Blood DK guide writer, Mandl, offers an early review of the San'layn Hero Talents for Blood. While powerful, these talents do repurpose a major defensive ability, which could be a risky prospect for a tank spec. Hero Talents are an extension of the Talent system designed to explore class fantasy with a third talent tree, separate from your class and specialization. Blizzard has revealed an early preview of Hero Talents coming in the next expansion, The War Within.

San'layn Hero Talents for Blood Death Knight

Let's dive into the San'layn Hero Talents specifically for Blood Death Knights.

• Vampiric Strike

Your Death Coil and Death Strike have a 10% chance to make your next Heart Strike or Scourge Strike become Vampiric Strike. Vampiric Strike heals you for 3% of your maximum health and grants you Essence of the Blood Queen, increasing your Haste by 1.5%, up to 7.5%, for 20 seconds.

• Newly Turned

Raise Ally revives players at full health and grants you an absorption shield equal to 20% of your maximum health.

• Vampiric Speed

Death's Advance and Wraith Walk movement speed bonuses are increased by 10%. Activating Death's Advance or Wraith Walk increases the movement speed of 4 nearby allies by 20% for 5 seconds.

• Blood-Soaked Ground

While you are within your Death and Decay, your physical damage taken is reduced by 5%, and your chance to gain Vampiric Strike is increased by 5%.

• Vampiric Aura

Your Leech is increased by 3%. While Lichborne is active, the Leech amount is increased by 100% and affects 4 nearby allies.

• Bloody Fortitude

Icebound Fortitude reduces all damage you take by up to an additional 30% based on your missing health. Killing enemies that grant honor or experience reduces the cooldown of Icebound Fortitude by 3 seconds.

• Infliction of Sorrow

When Vampiric Strike damages an enemy affected by Blood Plague, it consumes the disease, dealing 200% of the remaining damage. While Gift of the San'layn is active, Vampiric Strike no longer consumes your diseases and instead extends the duration of your diseases by 3 seconds, dealing 20% of the remaining damage to the enemy.

• Frenzied Bloodthirst

Essence of the Blood Queen stacks 2 additional times and increases the damage of your Death Coil and Death Strike by 5%.

• The Blood is Life

Vampiric Strike has a chance to summon a Blood Beast to attack your enemy for 10 seconds. Each time the Blood Beast attacks, it stores a portion of the damage dealt. When the Blood Beast dies, it explodes, dealing 50% of the damage accumulated to nearby enemies and healing the Death Knight for the same amount.

• Visceral Regeneration

Your Heart Strike has a 3% chance per stack of Essence of the Blood Queen to refund a Rune. Vampiric Strike doubles the chance to refund a Rune.

• Incite Terror

Heart Strike extends the duration of Essence of the Blood Queen by 0.5s. Vampiric Strike increases the extension by 100%.

• Sanguine Scent

Your Death Coil and Death Strike have a 15% chance to trigger Vampiric Strike when damaging enemies below 35% health, and it is guaranteed to critically strike.

• Pact of the San'layn

You store 50% of all Shadow damage dealt into your Blood Beast to explode for additional damage when it expires.

• Gift of the San'layn

While Vampiric Blood is active, you gain Gift of the San'layn. Gift of the San'layn increases the effectiveness of your Essence of the Blood Queen by 100% and replaces your Heart Strike with Vampiric Strike for its duration.

San'layn Death Knight Hero Talent Tree

The San'layn Death Knight Hero talent tree revolves loosely around a core buff. This functions as a stacking haste buff and is granted whenever you use the entry ability of the tree. The duration of the haste buff itself is ambiguous, as some talents hint at it being a fixed duration on first application (i.e., no real way to extend it besides) similar to Festermight or Mongoose Bite, but the reveal interviews clearly stated they were not designing another Festermight. So... who knows?

It is not available at all times. It is only available under the following circumstances:

1. By default (at least we assume so), whenever you cast Death Strike, you have a 10% chance to replace your next Heart Strike with. This, at the root, grants you one stack of Essence of the Blood Queen, a stacking buff for 1.5% haste lasting 20 seconds, with a fixed duration. This also heals you for a trivial amount of health.
2. With the full tree unlocked and selected, whenever Vampiric Blood is active, your Heart Strike ability is permanently replaced with without the need to trigger a proc from Death Strike. This also doubles the amount of haste granted per stack to 3% per stack, up to a maximum of 21% with all talents selected. According to the reveal interviews, this also causes any existing stacks of to be refreshed back to their original 20-second duration.

A number of talents modify further:

• increases the cap on stacks to 7 along with buffing the damage of Death Strike by 5%
• increases the chance to replace Heart Strike with to 15% when casting Death Strike on targets below 35% in addition to guaranteeing that the resulting will crit
• grants you a 3% chance per stack of for Heart Strike to refill a rune. has a 6% chance to refill a rune as well.
• extends by 0.5s every time you cast Heart Strike and by 1s every time you cast
• adds yet another effect to Death and Decay, by reducing your physical damage taken by 5% while in it, and increasing the chance to replace Heart Strike with by another 5%
• causes to fully consume any Blood Plague on targets it hits, dealing 200% of their remaining damage to their target. While is active, this instead deals 20% of the remaining damage, and no longer consumes Blood Plague, extending it by 3 seconds instead.

There is also what looks like a half-developed concept of Blood Beasts, which are almost functionally identical to the Classic-era Bloodworms from and its subsequent optional talent, which causes them to detonate after 10 seconds for 50% of the shadow damage you dealt while it was up.

Finally, there are minor utility talents modifying existing abilities and granting a choice between party buffs or personal use:

• A bonus 3% leech on Lichborne and the possibility to give the entire group either 6% leech or 26% leech while Lichborne is active, or, a very intricate dynamic damage reduction effect on Icebound Fortitude along with a somewhat dubious cooldown reduction on it.
• A choice between a 20% max HP shield on yourself when you cast Raise Ally along with ressing them at full HP, or, a bonus 10% speed boost on Death's Advance that also gives 4 nearby allies 20% movement speed.

Gameplay Impact

Note: In this section, we will assume that the interviews were correct and that it does not extend or refresh the duration beyond what is mentioned. This is because the alternative reading makes it a non-talent.

If this wasn't obvious from the descriptions, this hero tree massively emphasizes hard-casting Vampiric Blood and picking talents that increase its uptime or reduce its cooldown until you can manage to keep a full 7-stack going until your next cast of Vampiric Blood. It is beyond unhealthy, and the gameplay implications are already dire just from basic napkin math. This effectively turns Vampiric Blood into an oppressively strong throughput cooldown yet again, with a perverse incentive to just slam it on cooldown during it as its combined effects trump anything else by an order of magnitude, along with allowing you to extend Essence just long enough to coast until the next Vampiric Blood.

The worst part of it all is that there is no real brake on this cart, due to the sheer amount of haste this buff provides. And it, in turn, feeds back into Vampiric Blood uptime via Red Thirst. There could have been a world where it made a difference and encouraged you to stay out of Vampiric Blood if the haste granted by it was not doubled during it, but unfortunately, this is not the concept on the tooltips.

Rotationally, this is also completely degenerate. This interpretation of the talent tree causes the following changes:

• Before pressing Vampiric Blood: Spend all your Blood Boil charges and as much of your RP as you can. If Death Strike is active, according to interviews, casting Vampiric Blood will effectively save you seven casts of it to rebuild Essence stacks. Make sure your very last GCD before Vampiric Blood is a Death Strike for Coagulopathy; in AoE, it should instead be Death Strike -> Death and Decay.
• During Vampiric Blood: you literally spam and send a singular Death Strike every 8 seconds to keep Coagulopathy rolling. Thanks to the haste provided by and the rune refunds from it, it is possible to sustain this for the entirety of Vampiric Blood and come out with ~30s remaining duration on it - just enough to coast us to the next Vampiric Blood! You are heavily de-incentivized from pressing anything else as the loss of extension on and sheer amount of damage from it trumps any GCD consideration - and having to cast Death Strike becomes a reverberating loss offensively and defensively.
• Outside of Vampiric Blood: You are extremely strongly de-incentivized from pressing Blood Boil outside of Vampiric Blood because any proc of it will consume Blood Plague. The ideal course of action when you get a proc is to cast Blood Boil -> Death Strike -> Blood Boil. This causes a full 30-second Blood Plague to be consumed by it, essentially for free. The rest of the rotation is simply about coasting until your next Vampiric Blood; the moment you have it, you send it if you have any pre-existing stacks, as these will be refreshed and save you seven casts of it.

The real kicker is the effect all of this has on cooldown planning. Imagine that you need Vampiric Blood for a mechanic in 50 seconds. Do you lose a whole cast of Vampiric Blood and all its associated massive player power, and pay the price in having to rebuild Essence stacks from scratch? Do you instead just send Vampiric Blood and try to wing it by squeezing your RP bar literally dry in order to eke out a bit more Red Thirst value and make it safely?

Missed Opportunities: Blood Beasts

Two sparse talents in the tree appear to be out of place in that they introduce the concept of Blood Beasts. Right now, their existence appears to be mostly flavor as they are passive, uncontrollable sources of additional damage and healing. Red Thirst grants a chance to summon a Blood Beast, and a very interesting talent, [Talent Name]. If the Blood Beast proc chance wasn't a proc on a proc, you would be able to predictably load it up to detonate after 10 seconds using all of our shadow damage abilities:

Tombstone (via Shattering Bone), Blood Boil, and Abomination Limb, to name a few.

Imagine an alternate world where instead of doubling the effect of casting Dancing Rune Weapon, it instead spawned two Blood Beasts. This would allow you to predictably use these as an additional, predictable source of damage once Dancing Rune Weapon expires, along with the healing they currently provide. This would couple these to a real throughput cooldown instead of bastardizing a defensive cooldown so oppressively that it encourages players to cast it on cooldown. It would also remove the random proc chance, and sidestep the problem of having [Problem] 's value be ruined by getting a proc 5s after enemies die.

Hey, we could even make them heal the party as well as ourselves - something the Classic variant of Bloodworms did. Imagine if you could send Dancing Rune Weapon 16 seconds early in order to snipe a large raid damage event with Blood Beasts spawned from this talent. Wouldn't that be cool?

Verdict and Final Thoughts

I am absolutely not a fan of bastardizing defensive cooldowns in such an oppressive manner, especially when they will be used to extend what will be yet another maintenance buff instead of building interesting gameplay loops. This one is even worse as it has a very strong chance of completely locking down the last remaining few talent choices we had by very strongly encouraging players to put two points in Red Thirst.

Red Thirst has two "modes": a "feast" loop during Vampiric Blood where it is available every GCD and always grants stacks of [Stack Name], whose value is directly doubled and provides additional benefits through other talents, and a "famine" loop outside of Vampiric Blood where it is only sparsely available, consumes your Blood Plague (thus forcing you to keep a charge of Blood Boil ready, just in case - or lose 5% bonus damage on targets it hit), and strongly incentivizes degenerate behavior while Vampiric Blood to be able to just get over the "famine" part as quickly as possible. The penalty for losing seven stacks of [Stack Name] just because you didn't get that proc is way too high, and the solution - simply blanketing Vampiric Blood uptime - is really unappealing.

This runs completely contrary to the Reveal interviews, which all stated that the goal was to not have another buff to manage and not to build another Festermight. This manages exactly the opposite for blood, and the worst part about it is that there aren't that many tuning points that are available while keeping the current talents functionally identical. Reducing the proc chance of [Ability] outside of Vampiric Blood increases the gambler's addiction and doubles down on the loss when players fail to play the buff duration management minigame during Vampiric Blood properly, which in turn will lock in adverse choices even more, while reducing the maximum number of stacks [Stack Name] can ramp to increases the value of each proc even further.

Possibly the worst part of this is balancing woes - do you balance and tune the spec assuming 0/2, 1/2, or 2/2 Red Thirst? What about Improved Vampiric Blood? The difference between the two roughly doubles Vampiric Blood's uptime, and as a result the uptime on the turbo-charged double-haste, essence-extending capstone, [Capstone Name].

One last thing worth reminding at this point is the effect of stacking haste multipliers and their effect on the global cooldown for strength classes, along with its effect on gearing priorities. Blood Death Knights, much like their plate-wearing brethren, can only benefit from GCD duration reduction up to 100% bonus haste - at which point resources and hasted damage effects still increase, but your ability to cast abilities stops matching that increase. Blood is already effectively GCD-locked in Dragonflight, and this promises to do two likely unintended things:

1. It will likely devalue haste because you will literally drown in it - 10.5%/21% from [Ability], 10% from Marrowrend, 5% from Unholy Ground combining to a total of 27.6% outside of Vampiric Blood and 39.7% during it, multiplicative. During lust - an effect that is typically anticipated, this balloons up to 81% bonus haste.
2. The combination of this massive influx of haste and egregious rate of rune refund from [Ability] and the additional damage from [Ability] during Vampiric Blood, using current values, completely offsets any rotational priority beyond making sure to cast one Death Strike every 8 seconds to maintain Coagulopathy.

All of these should be warning signs that something has not gone quite right in the design of this Hero talent tree - not just in concept, but also in the fact that attempts to tone it down will lead to a reinforcement of the famine part of this loop.

While players await the highly anticipated War Within expansion and its forthcoming game-changing additions, it's an ideal moment to level up your Death Knight and delve into the new Hero Talents featured in version 11.0. Explore these fresh abilities and talents to prepare for the upcoming content, ensuring you're ready to embrace the exciting challenges that lie ahead.