Blood Death Knights in the release of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic were some of the most versatile tanks ever. There is a wide variety of builds that they can choose from as either the Main Tank or Off-Tank and by choosing to focus on Single-Target, Multi-Target, and how much mitigation they'll need.

Many of the talent builds for Blood DK's don't go all the way down the Blood talent tree and instead spread their points out into the Frost and Unholy talent trees. While a full Blood build can DPS, a Frost or Unholy DPS Build would be better for that purpose; in fact, they are Top-Tier DPS for the entire expansion.

Best Talent Builds For Blood Death Knight

The image below shows the most common build for main-tanking as a Blood Death Knight. It is a Single-Target build focusing primarily on damage mitigation.

Best Glyphs For Blood Death Knight
There are a lot of Glyphs that players can choose depending on the content they face when tanking as a Blood Death Knight. The three most common glyphs are Glyph of Disease to maintain disease uptime, Glyph of Dark Command to guarantee Dark Command will successfully taunt (this is crucial in early phases when lacking Hit Rating), and Glyph of Vampiric Blood to improve Vampiric Blood for times when more healing is needed, do not need too much WOTLK Classic Gold.

Stat Priority For Blood Death Knight
Death Knight Tanks have 2 main priorities when it comes to Tanking: Survivability, Threat Generation.

*Threat Generation
Generating Threat as a Blood Death Knight relies heavily on Hit Rating, as the majority of the damage comes from Spells. It is necessary to reach 263 Hit Rating for Special Attacks to always land. Early usage of the Glyph of Dark Command will guarantee that it will always land until more Hit Rating is obtained from better gear. Past this threshold lies the Spell Hit Cap at 446 Hit Rating. If there is a Balance Druid or Shadow Priest present they can provide an extra 3% chance to hit with Improved Faerie Fire and Misery and Draenei for an additional 1% with Heroic Presence.

*Blood Tank Survivability Stats
Defense Rating is the most important stat to reduce damage taken. The minimum threshold to guarantee that an enemy will not land a Critical Hit against you is 689 Defense Rating or 540 Defense. 400 Defense is obtained through the Defense Skill that is passively leveled up when taking hits, the remaining 140 comes from gear.

Stamina not only increases the total health pool but also increases the effectiveness of cooldowns such as Rune Tap, Death Pact, and Vampiric Blood. Armor is important due to the fact that Blood Death Knights cannot wield Shields to Block attacks. Dodge, and Parry are other ways to improve survivability too.