🩸 Overview Slowdog's BDK v7 is a Blood Death Knight tank macro for Mythic+ built around the Deathbringer hero talent tree and tuned for patch 12.1. It builds on v6, which pulled Soul Reaper out of the loop after it was moved off the Blood tree, leaving a dead cast sitting in the old rotation, and v7 is a rebalance of that loop based on real combat logs from three keys, not guesswork from patch notes. ⚙️ What it does The opener lands Death and Decay ahead of Reaper's Mark, then Raise Dead and Dancing Rune Weapon, and from there it runs a 13 action loop. Death and Decay now has a single slot because v6 had two, and they kept firing back-to-back, which burned a rune on a spell you were already standing in. Marrowrend dropped from three slots to two since 42% of its casts were landing with Bone Shield already at max stacks, and the freed-up rune went to Heart Strike, which now has four slots. In my logs, Heart Strike went from about 5.6 to 9.5 casts per minute while Bone Shield still sat at 10 to 12 stacks 72 to 78% of the time. Blood Boil keeps three slots as rune-free filler, and you'll occasionally see it land twice in a row, which is normal and appears in other players' logs at about the same rate. 🎮 Modifiers Shift is Death Strike on demand. Ctrl is Vampiric Blood; hold it when the damage is coming rather than after. Don't skip these. They do a lot of the survivability work in this build, and without Shift for Death Strike I had a hard time staying alive past about three minutes. 🚫 What's Excluded Death Grip, Gorefiend's Grasp, Anti-Magic Shell, Icebound Fortitude, and any grip utilities are all manual and should be bound separately. 📥 Setup Import the GRIP string via /gems import, load the talent string in the Talents panel, drag it to your bar, and bind it. Bind all your manual cooldowns before you pull anything. Press Shift before you need it, not after you're already in critical mode. Validation Tested on 12.1, Deathbringer M+ build, on three keys (+9 Den of Nalorakk, +9 Ruby Life Pools, +10 Murder Row) with zero deaths on any of them. Heart Strike went from about 5.6 to 9.5 casts per minute after I traded one Marrowrend slot for it, since 42% of Marrowrend casts were landing at max Bone Shield. Bone Shield still sat at 10-12 stacks about 72-78% of the time and was at 4 or under 2-7% of it. Death Strike and Vampiric Blood modifier overrides are unchanged from earlier testing. D&D runs about 3.9 casts per minute off a single slot, but about a quarter of those casts still refresh it early, so that is the open item. Anything above +10 is untested, so tell me how it holds up. 💬 Feedback Wanted Drop a comment with your ilvl and key level, and let me know how it's holding up. Warcraft Logs links are always useful.
Death Knight GRIP-EMS Sequences
🧪 This Is A Beta I'm calling V6 a beta because the change is new; it's only been through dummy pulls and one real key (a +6). V5 fixed the Death and Decay double-fire I saw in V4, but when I went through the logs, the Bone Shield uptime was poor because Marrowrend only had 2 slots in the loop and was barely cast. V6 is the fix for that and nothing else. I haven't run it through a high-key yet, so treat it as a test build I'm asking you to help me close out. 🩸 Overview This is a Blood Death Knight macro for the San'layn build, Mythic+ focused, Sequential step function. Three anchor steps run first outside the loop (Dancing Rune Weapon, Raise Dead, and Death and Decay), then a 19-action Priority loop handles Death Strike, Heart Strike, Blood Boil, Marrowrend, and Vampiric Blood. Spell names only, every step well under GRIP's 255-character limit, resets on Combat End and Target Change. ⚙️ What Changed From V5 The only change is Marrowrend. In V5 it sat in the Priority loop with 2 slots, and in a real +11 log of V5 that left Bone Shield up about 43% of the fight. I tried making it a single anchor step first, and that was worse, because a one-slot step in GRIP-EMS only fires on a small fraction of cycles, so Marrowrend got cast once in almost three minutes on the dummy. V6 gives Marrowrend 16 slots spread through the Priority loop instead, which means it comes up many times per cycle. The slots come from the Death Strike, Heart Strike, and Blood Boil pool, so the loop stays the same size. Everything else is identical to V5, including the Death and Decay anchor that replaced the V4 loop slots. 🎮 Modifiers Shift - Death Strike Ctrl - Anti-Magic Zone 🚫 What's Excluded Trinkets are situational, so bind those manually. Anti-Magic Zone lives on Ctrl so you control when it goes up rather than it firing on its own. Dancing Rune Weapon is a single anchor step and not a keybind, which is also its weakness (see below), so if you want it down the second it comes off cooldown, put it on its own key. Don't put it or any other on-cooldown spell into the KeyPress field, because a cast line that's on cooldown there stalls the whole sequence, and I know that because it happened to me in testing. 📥 Setup Import the GRIP string with /gems import, load the talent string in the Talents panel, drag the sequence to your bar, and bind it. Keep your emergency and utility kit on separate keybinds, same as always. 📊 Beta Test Results Here's what's actually been checked. On a +6 Ruby Life Pools (17:08, no deaths), Bone Shield was up 80.69% with 51 Marrowrend casts, and several target dummy pulls of an earlier 10-slot version of the same idea landed at about 79%. That's roughly double the V5 number, but a +6 takes far less damage than a +11, so don't read it as an apples-to-apples comparison. I'd expect the uptime to drop a bit on a high key. What's still wrong is the stuff: Bone Shield still falls off for stretches (I counted 10 gaps over 30 seconds between Marrowrend casts in that run), Dancing Rune Weapon can fire well after it comes off cooldown (gaps of 97 to 171 seconds in the same run), and Death and Decay only goes off occasionally because of how single-slot anchors work in this engine. I also haven't checked Runic Power's behavior under real dungeon conditions. I saw two Death and Decay casts about a second apart in one V5 key and haven't pinned down why, so that signature is still worth watching for. 💬 Feedback Wanted If you run this, post your Warcraft Logs link, your item level, and the key level. The higher the key, the more it helps me, since that's the gap in everything above. I especially want to know about Bone Shield uptime, whether any two Death and Decay casts can occur within a second of each other, and how late Dancing Rune Weapon fires. Deaths, stalls, anything that felt off is worth more to me than a rating. -- I can get this stuff off of the logs you send me --