All melee attacks deal additional Holy damage equal to 35% of normal weapon damage, but the Paladin loses health equal to 10% of the total damage inflicted.
Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy, instantly causing 295 to 325 Holy damage at the cost of health equal to 33% of the damage caused.
Melee attacks deal additional Holy damage at the cost of health.
Duration: 30 minutes
Seal of Blood is the Horde's equivalent to [Seal of the Martyr], allowing the Paladin to deal a large amount of Holy damage with every hit. However, in PvP, the backfire damage can be dangerous sometimes.
In numerous calculations from a retribution perspective, Seal of Blood has been proven to do significantly more damage than [Seal of Command] or [Seal of Vengeance]. The difference between Seal of Command and Seal of Blood is usually a margin of more than 15%.[citation needed]
This is NOT a good tanking seal. The main reason is that it depends on the damage-per-strike of the wielded weapon to be effective, which begs for the use of a 2-handed weapon, but tankadins need to wield a 1-handed weapon and a shield in order to be tough and effective. If a paladin stacks enough strength and attack power for the seal's damage to be effective even with a 1-handed weapon, his survivability will suffer. Synergy effect with [Spiritual Attunement] is not a valid reason to use this seal, as there are many proper ways to handle mana deficit situations for tankadins.
Notes[]
The Seal is based on the melee mechanics for hit and crit.
The seal only scales with weapon damage, not spell damage. It therefore heavily favors melee-geared Paladins (mostly Retribution Paladins), rather than spelldamage-geared Paladins. Note that the Judgement does scale with spell damage.
This seal is counted as a second melee strike in terms of game mechanics, meaning that the damage it deals can miss, be dodged, be blocked, and be parried. Since it deals non-physical damage, it can also be partially resisted when used against mobs that are higher level than the player. It will NOT activate [Judgement of Light] and [Judgement of Wisdom] nor any other weapon proc (fiery, mongoose, life steal procs, etc).
When using a fast 2-hander, this seal deals more DPS than [Seal of Command]. Also, the fact that it can crit makes it shine in a raid situation since [Vengeance] is similar to a fury warrior's Flurry (warrior talent) in terms of how it increases the paladin's DPS.
Seal of Blood's damage inflicted to the user is not capable of causing a [Reckoning] proc.
The Paladin Retribution talents [Sanctified Seals], [Vengeance], and [Crusade] all affect the damage dealt by this seal (prior to patch 2.1.2 there was a bug that would cause it to doubly affect the returned damage component of this seal, making the returned damage more than the 10% stated on this seal's tooltip).
In parses, the % crit may sometimes seem off. This is normally because of the backlash (self-damage), which cannot crit. Generally, in these cases you can double the posted crit rate to determine the actual crit rate.